Wingnut

Anyone who knows me will wonder how a life-long lover of all forms of flight ended up so immersed in the world of sailing.

To me, it all makes sense. I've noticed two recurring themes in my life; the enjoyment of playful motion enabled by the harnessing of natural forces (sailplanes, hang gliding, whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, sailing) and savoring being comfortable amidst potentially hostile environments (all forms of flight, whitewater kayaking, scuba diving, high altitude mountaineering, and now open ocean sailing).

First and foremost, as long as I can recall I've always been captivated by the concept of flight. While other boys made drawings of cars and tanks, I drew airplanes. I initially learned to fly in sailplanes as a teenager, then a few years later soloed in a powered aircraft. As an adult I even took up falconry, arising from both a desire to witness close up the flight of large birds and also from the experiences of my youth when I would fly alone in a sailplane wingtip to wingtip with red-tailed hawks, even though I was still too young to have a driver's license.

Following this collection of fairly recent photographs of my natural force/unwelcoming environment activities, you'll find three pictures of me in the cockpits of sailplanes during college and high school. I've just recently rediscovered them while rummaging through my storage unit in Florida a few weeks ago for things I wanted to take back to England with me.

The first was taken during the spring break of my junior year at college, when I was 20. The one further below was taken during the previous year's spring break.

I went to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, an hour or so south of the Wyoming border. During spring break each year I'd drive down to Colorado Springs to the Black Forest Gliderport (which doesn't exist any more) to take part in a Wave Camp; seven days of intense flying where the entire staff and resources of the airport were focused exclusively on trying to get pilots into the standing wave of air created by Pikes Peak when the conditions were right. Before me, a few pilots had taken a ride on this wave to just above 40,000 ft (the world sailplane altitude record stood at 46,261 ft at the time from a wave off the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California). I never got over 20,000. Even so, before those wave camps I'd never been above 6000 ft so I was delighted with this. Also, cruising for hours on end above Pikes Peak with an oxygen mask clamped to my face with the full range of the Colorado Rockies spread out in front and below me was one great way to spend my spring break.

A flight lasting 3:17 in my junior year at college remains the longest flight I've ever had in a glider.

The picture at the very end of this text was taken a few months after my 16th birthday, once I already had both my pilot's and driver's license. I started to learn to fly when I was 14 and soon soloed. Though one must be 16 to solo a powered aircraft, as the engine adds so many more options and therefore responsibility, you can solo a glider at 14 since it's much simpler. Not long after I soloed the low performance two place trainer, the flying club I was a member of bought a high performance single place sailplane. Eagerly I asked about flying it, only to be informed that the officers of the club had decided that only fully licensed pilots could fly it, something I wouldn't be able to attain until my 16th birthday.

Being 14 or 15 and wanting to fly at an airport 40 miles away posed a few limitations. On weekends I could go with my father and on weekdays during the summer, I could sometimes get my brother to drive me out and patiently wait while I flew a few times (he was far more interested in cars than sailplanes).

I wanted a better sense of independence, however, so on one occasion I borrowed a friend's bike and left my house at 6:00 a.m., arriving at the airport exhausted and soaked in sweat at 10:00 a.m. I swam in the pond to cool off, then had myself towed by the airport's owner (an airline pilot and soaring enthusiast) for a few flights beneath the growing cover of cumulus clouds. I'd ride the lift up to cloud base, push the nose down to increase speed and sink rate to the balance point where the rising air beneath the cloud matched my sink rate. In this state I wouldn't be sucked up into the cloud and could spend an hour or so scooting around a hundred feet beneath the floor of the cool and shadowing cloud, hearing nothing but the soft hiss of air.

It's hard not to be content with life when you are 14 or 15 and learning that this is what being alive is about. Wanting something of the same sense of self-joy for my daughter, I took her to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to learn how to hang glide when she was nine years old. Of the six students in her initial class (five adults and my nine year old daughter) she was judged the only one capable enough to fly off the top of the 100 foot dune at the end of the class. Such is the adaptability of youth...and such is the capability of an open mind (her youth prevented her from over-analyzing the process of controlling the hang glider, as did all of her adult classmates). These were the opportunities and good fortune I had as well as I grew up, learning how good life was.

The bike ride home, however, was not as joyful, though certainly as much of a character building experience as the joy of being a 15 year old pilot might have been. In my adult years I've become an avid biker and routinely take off on rides of 60-90 miles with friends. At that point in my life, however, the second 40 mile ride home amidst the heat of July in northern Virginia was the pinnacle of my athletic achievement and sense of perseverance until I ran my first marathon ten years later.

A few months after this biking/flying adventure, I had arranged for a FAA inspector to be at our club's airfield on my 16th birthday (getting a driver's license would wait until a week later). Once I passed the test, I turned to the club president and handed him my handwritten temporary certificate. "NOW I get to fly it," I said. He laughed, having expected no less, and started talking me through the aircraft's unique properties and procedures as we walked over to where it was tied down.

Even now, so many years later, I think of this moment as a pivotal one in my life, one seemingly so essentially a part of the whys and wherefores that have created my personality and self-concept. It's a rather heady thing for a 16 year old to strapping himself into a single place glider, knowing that this was essentially an intellectual exercise in survivability. Since I would not experience the unique feel of this high performance aircraft until it was already committed to flight, it was up to me and my training, skill, and most of all my brain to adapt in time. Unlike a car, where one can just pull over and stop if things don't feel right, an aircraft of any type always demands more planning, foresight, and anticipation.

It all seemed very doable and I wasn't so much concerned as I was eager to get on with the experience of being in a tightly wrapped cockpit with a slender white wing at each shoulder instead of a stepping into the big bathtub that our training aircraft was, its wings seemingly as wide as mattresses.

I was climbing out of the family station wagon and into a Corvette, so to speak.

My 16th birthday was the culmination of a remarkable period in my life, something that certainly has much to do with the joy and contentment I've found all through my life. Imagine being a 14 year old, alone in a sailplane three thousand feet in the air, and seeing below you a school bus unloading a group of kids who, as likely or not, included many your own age. What were their interests, I remember wondering when this happened. What would they do if they knew that they, too, could be where I was? Because of the club I was a member of, the expense of flying was nothing that any weekend job couldn't cover. And yet here I was, feeling so unique, so enviable, so happy with life as it was.


Below, I'm seated in that high performance single in the picture below, taken a few months after my 16th birthday when I was out at the airport to give rides to some friends in the two place trainer.