Wormingford Airfield, Fordham Road, Wormingford, Colchester, Essex CO6 3AQ Tel: (01206) 242596 glide[at]esgc.co.uk  "essexandsuffolkglidingclub"
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"Five Minutes"

by Richard Walker

When you first come across gliding you hear about something they call soaring flight. Apparently, you just fire the gliding machine up into the air, and then you can fly and fly for hours on end. The air itself lifts you up, they say.

That's what I fancied doing. But as I learned to glide I began to suspect that maybe there were complications. "Quite bumpy", I might say to the instructor behind me. "Well", he would reply, "that's because you are in lift. Quite strong, actually." "Oh, right ..." And I would start to haul hopefully on the controls. "No, never mind, you've gone right through it."

Then there would be those times -- quite frequent times -- when the instructor announced for no good reason that I could see that he had control, and we were banking, now hard over, now straightening up, now over again, the controls making many sudden movements I could not understand. The only thing that made any sense at all was the reading on the altimeter showing that for some reason we were indeed going up.

I began to think that my problem was that the instructors were confusing me, probably deliberately. I knew how to fly in lift. You waited until you were in the lift and then you went round in a circle. I just needed to do it on my own.

My logbook says I flew my first solo on 16th June 2000. That flight lasted five minutes, although I must admit that to me it seemed longer. Half an hour later I flew my second solo. That flight lasted five minutes too. And with commendable dedication I followed that up with my third solo. Flight time: five minutes.

Okay, the 16th June was not a soaring day. In fact it was nearly dead calm, and smoothly overcast. A Friday afternoon too, so there was hardly anyone about. In short it was a perfect day for a first solo, as I could see from the very straight face that Mervyn Gooch was wearing as we climbed in for the first check flight. Then the second check flight, Mervyn pretending that it was just a normal day with nothing in particular to talk about, me pretending that a simulated cable break at 350 feet was the last thing in the world I expected. Finally Mervyn buckled up the straps in the back seat, gave me a grin and said "Okay you're on your own. And if you get a slow launch, pull off."

I didn't get a slow launch, although I did get a heart-stoppingly noisy one. It was only after I'd released from the cable that I realised I'd left the visibility panel open, causing the air to roar through the cockpit and causing me to think that the glider was about to disintegrate. After that it was all plain sailing, if not soaring. Five minutes.

Five minutes. Five minutes, it turned out, was to become the theme of my early solo flying -- five minutes, and several close cousins to five minutes, such as four minutes, six minutes, and of course three minutes. The second of August: eight minutes. The fourth of August: eight minutes. Followed by my old pal five minutes. Followed by a new addition to the repertoire: seven minutes. Obviously conditions weren't right.

And another thing: what if conditions were right? What would I do then? For me the effect of a solo launch on Wormingford's fierce cable winch was to concentrate every last remaining part of my 43-year old consciousness on the single question how do I get this glider back on the ground in one piece? There didn't seem to be a whole lot of mental room left over for doing anything else. The only thing that was soaring was my heart rate.

Now here was the 7th August -- and conditions were right. Conditions were perfect, with neat cumulus tumbleweeds rolling across the blue, and the number of gliders still on the ground getting smaller and smaller. I heard somebody say to somebody else, "On a day like today there's absolutely no excuse." Right then.

Seven minutes. But that's just the first flight. On the first flight you are just getting your hand in, getting a feel for the day, building a little confidence. The first flight doesn't count.

Five minutes. Five minutes! There was lift, but just tell me how you find it, how you know you have found it, how you stay in it? I believed in lift, when I was on the ground. Coming off the top of the launch I wasn't so sure I did believe in lift. Gravity, yes. My faith in gravity was never stronger. Lift, not sure.

And here comes Steve Cocks, pulling out the K6 single-seater. Now when I started gliding in the winter Steve wasn't even solo, so he can't have that much more experience than me. Here's at least one other person who might have his own doubts about the existence of this so-called lift.

I watched Steve pull off at the top of a decent launch, take one decisive-looking turn to the right and then cruise fast up the north side of the airfield until he disappeared behind a cloud. Okay. Okay. If it works for him, it can work for me. Black link please ...

Seven minutes.

It just so happened that the 11th August was an exact duplicate of those perfect conditions. Maybe even a touch nicer. Trouble was that the perfect conditions had brought everyone out with their own gliders, and it looked to me as if there wasn't going to be a single instructor left on the ground to give me a check flight. But I hauled the K13 into the queue anyway, just in case, and just behind that traitor Steve Cocks who had got his hands on the second 13.

"Hey, you seemed to get away pretty smart the other day, Steve." Steve agreed. "Easy day. No excuse."

No excuse. Right. And then Steve gave me a piece of advice. "If you are having trouble I reckon there is only one important rule in soaring," he said. "What you do is this -- the moment you feel anything, anything, doesn't matter what the vario says, you don't wait, you just put the glider in the most almighty turn and you stick with it."

The last instructor left on the ground was the head man Paul Rice, and I could see that he was not in a mood to hang around for my check flight. Then I saw someone pulling my K13 off the launch point. "Don't think anyone will be wanting this today ..." they were saying.

"No, wait, no," I said -- and then more loudly, "I'll fly it -- if I can just get a check." Paul looked at the windsock, and then at me. Long pause. "Go on. You'll be okay today without a check."

Good soaring days don't necessarily mean good winch launches. I came off the cable at only a little over 1,000 feet. In the K13 that gives at best a three minute window of opportunity to find some rising air. I resolved to ignore the beating of my heart and turned upwind, heading a little faster than usual for the one bit of cloud that looked as if it might just be contactable. One minute. Two minutes. Flying against very little headwind I was leaving the airfield behind, and on the wrong side for a circuit home. I tried to crane around to see how far I'd gone. Answer: quite a lot further than ever before. And now I could see I wasn't going to contact the area under that cloud either, which seemed to be dissolving anyway. I gave it a few seconds more. And then I did feel something. Not a bump, nothing you'd call real turbulence -- more like driving cautiously over gravel. So I put the glider into the most almighty turn, and I stuck with it. Although what I was thinking was: is this lift -- or am I getting in real trouble?

Is this lift? The vario is not much help, reading down when it feels like up, but I try to follow it anyway, tightening up every time it shows more than half a knot up. The electronic averager can't make up its mind either. But it feels as if we might be going up. And I'd better be, out here a long way from where I should be. For an agonising two minutes the altimeter stays unmoving on 900 feet. Then it creeps up fifty, a hundred, two hundred feet, a little more … and sticks again. At least I really am higher than when I came off the launch. That's a first. That's something to tell them at home, if I ever get home. But now I realise that I'm beginning to drift across the middle of the airfield at 1,200 feet. Even I know this could make me unpopular. I also know that if I leave the lift I won't find it again. I see that there is only one glider left waiting to launch, so I decide to sentence him to an extra five minute wait, and carry on. Actually, I don't dare do anything else.

But it's not until I am well downwind of the site with the altimeter showing 1,700 feet that I really believe it. The glider is going up. For the first time I relax, just for a moment, and suddenly I realise how very nervous I had been, how tense my muscles were. In fact my flying has been seriously uncoordinated, and even as I realise this fact I manage to tip the glider over into an incipient spin. Now I tell myself to relax and concentrate, and work on the lift. I make a policy decision to stop watching the ASI so closely and fly by attitude, something I'd never been confident enough to do. And it works. I've got a smoother turn. Meanwhile the lift is getting stronger, knocking the glider about a little as I fly in and out of six knots up. Impossible for me to keep it consistently in the strongest lift, but never mind, I'm still going up fast. It's getting darker too, as I get close to cloudbase.

And then I'm there, just underneath the cloud at - can I believe this? -- 4,000 feet. Flying straight I can see beyond Colchester to the coast where the sun is catching the waves, and north, far into Suffolk. The site below looks very small, satisfyingly small, and terrifyingly small too -- I have no idea how far I can risk going. But who cares? It's a beautiful day, with sunshine and cloud shadow sweeping across the fields below, and I'm in a glider that I've just flown up to 4,000 feet. Six months ago I couldn't fly at all. Hey, take it easy. I wish they served drinks aboard these things.

After that I worked my way in a grand circle around the site, sometimes getting down to 2,500', sometimes up at cloudbase again, sometimes flying wings level under a cloud street for minutes at a time on zero sink or better. On the west side I got out close to the neighbouring airfield at Earls Colne, although I didn't know it was that at the time. I was just wondering whether I really had gone too far when I saw the other K13 in front me and at least 1,000 feet lower, so I thought what the hell, I'll be okay. Although later, when I told that to Steve Cocks who was flying it, he pointed out that following him was not necessarily the best of ideas.

Down at 1,300 feet and close to the circuit I was wondering whether to do it all again, when the lift disappeared. I searched, but briefly: nothing doing. Gravity was back in business. Five minutes later I was making a final turn. But with my height judgement seriously impaired by the afternoon's flying I came in way too high, landing more than half way down the field with a roundout that was as bad as any I'd ever done. But the glider wasn't broken. And I wasn't broken. Amazed. Exhausted. But not broken.

And another thing: I'd flown longer than five minutes. Precisely ninety-nine minutes longer. All right?

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