David's World

I've completed a 100k task in roughly one hour, starting at Bolzano, which is somewhere in the Italian part of the Tyrol region. Of course, it wasn't the real thing: I fired up a PC-based flight simulator dedicated to gliding. Such a thing exists, and the advantage is that you don't need "piss bottles" along with any contraptions that allow you to fill them while seated.

Let's start from the beginning. It was a competition between Andrew (r.) and me, 100 kilometers, a typical task. In the sport of gliding, flying a competition basically means that you're trying to get from A to D via B and C, often covering a few hundred kilometers on the way. And of course you're trying to do it as quickly as possible, without having to annoy a farmer by landing on his crops, a couple of miles before you get back home, because you've run out of lift.

Thanks to Condor, a flight sim software dedicated to soaring, I got to fly the latest hot ship, which will glide along efficiently and get you pretty far for each foot of height that you're going down, 42 to 1. Remember: we've got no engine. We're counting on the magic of rising air and the mystery of a strong stomach.

The tow plane drops me a couple of flight minutes before the start zone, where we officially begin the race. Before getting there, I find a strong thermal, yank the stick to the left and, with a bit of concentration, manage to stay and gain a couple of thousand feet, up to cloud base. (A thermal is a column of rising air.)

After crossing the start line, it's a breeze. The trick was to pull up and slow down when I was in rising air, speed up early enough so we could pass through sink, and only stop and circle in the strongest thermals. Glider pilots tend to have quite sophisticated equipment to tell you where and how fast to fly, GPS navigation systems connected to standard-issue PDA board computers connected to loggers, electronic variometers and battery packs. GPS is the kind of stuff used nowadays to guide the big planes to their destinations around the globe, and I'm not kidding when I say that their dedicated, certified equipment is faster, but not much more functional, and 10 times as expensive.

After some circling and navigating around beautiful ridges under the watch of my instructor Gareth, I start the final glide, zooming along at 80 knots into the valley. 40k to go, coming down from 8,000 feet. Competition finish, going low and very fast, pulling up near the club house on the airfield - not fast enough though, so the final turns back on the runway were less than elegant.

The good news of the day is that my competitor next door broke his glider on the way there by going too fast, out of boredom he says. What an excuse!