At 3,000 feet without an engine humming, the world is eerily quiet. No headphones are required, and none are needed—you’re not protecting your eardrums against the persistent drone of a 180-horsepower engine.
You are flying without an engine—soaring, to be precise. You and an instructor are high above the Virginia countryside in an ASK-21 glider whose lightweight composite frame and 55-foot wingspan search the air currents like a calf seeks its mama. When you near rising air, your instructor urges, “Turn left! Turn into it! Just like those buzzards over there!” You were towed to this altitude by a sturdy Piper Pawnee, but the umbilical tow rope has been released, and now it’s up to you to remain aloft. Unless you find columns of rising air that you can use to gain altitude, you’re destined to return to Earth. And when you reach the pattern, you’ll only get one shot at a greaser—no go-arounds in a glider.
A good pilot is always learning, and that is particularly true once you earn your private pilot certificate. To keep your flying fresh and exciting after the checkride, there’s a sky full of opportunities waiting for you. You can start small with a checkout in a different aircraft—low wing to high wing, or a different make and model altogether. You can dive into a new certificate or rating (see “What Else Can You Do?” p. 21). Or, consider trying a completely new aircraft category, such as glider, balloon, or rotorcraft.
Learning to fly a glider, in which every landing is an engine-out, is guaranteed to bring a new level of precision to your flying. What’s more, you’ll take these improved skills back to your powered flying, and build confidence in the cockpit.
What kind of skills? Stick-and-rudder skills, for starters. If you learned to fly flat-footed in a Cessna Skyhawk, a glider will teach you what your feet are for. “If you don’t use the rudder you will never master soaring,” says Jim Kellett, a flight instructor with the Skyline Soaring Club, based at Front Royal-Warren County Airport in Front Royal, Virginia. Learning to defeat adverse yaw is a key part of soaring. Flying the glider out of yaw means you’re robbing the structure of precious lift. And there’s no engine to compensate for the drag you create.
You’ll also become a sharper judge of heights and distances as you learn to fly a pattern and land without the benefit of a throttle to tweak for extra power as you cover that last few hundred feet of glidepath. The prospect of landing an airplane without an engine won’t be quite as fearsome as it might have been when you were a student pilot, because as a glider pilot you actually will have landed without an engine—many, many times. The add-on rating requires three hours of dual instruction, which includes at least 10 flights, and 10 solo flights. That’s a minimum; to be proficient and safe, you’ll most likely want more.
A team effort
Unless you’re taking a passenger, flying can be a somewhat solitary activity. You perform the preflight, start up the airplane, and taxi out to the runway, and if you’re flying out of a nontowered airport you don’t have to talk to another soul if you don’t want to (although most of us do communicate with other pilots, for safety reasons).
You’d find it difficult to launch in a glider all by yourself. You need a team of folks whose jobs are to position your glider on the runway behind the towplane, attach the glider to the towplane, show you the condition of the tow rope for your approval, and help signal to the towplane pilot that you’re ready to go. When you get back to the airport and land, this same group is waiting to help you move the glider off the runway and walk it back to the ramp, where the process starts all over again.
The tandem-cockpit ASK-21’s panel is relatively simple compared to that of a powered aircraft: airspeed indicator, altimeter, and variometer, an instrument that informs the pilot of rising or sinking air. There’s no reason to keep your eyes glued to the panel with the kind of systems management you might do in a powered aircraft. In fact, you’ll want to be looking outside as much as possible, because this is all attitude flying, Kellett says. The most important instrument for this ship isn’t even located on the panel—it’s a yaw string, attached to the front of the glass canopy above the panel. This piece of yarn acts as a ball-and-skid indicator, showing you via the slipstream whether the glider is being flown in a coordinated fashion. Its position enables you to glance at it without having to look down. New glider students may find themselves spending a lot of time chasing the yaw string, Kellett says.
With five-point harnesses buckled, Kellett explains that we’ll be conducting three flights: one to get the feel of the glider aloft, one in which I’ll perform the takeoff and landing (with help), and a final, very brief launch in which he’ll demonstrate what happens during a simulated towrope break. A pilot seeking to add the rating to his or her certificate would typically learn these phases over 10 to 15 flights.
What else can you do?
The question ought to be, “What can’t you do?” There are so many ratings, certificates, endorsements, and different aircraft to try that boredom is out of the question. The toughest decision you make may well be which one to try first.
| Instrument Rating: Knowledge test? Yes Checkride? Yes Approximate cost: Varies. Fulfills the requirements of a flight review? Yes |
Instrument rating. Many pilots plunge into this right after the private, and with good reason. You’re already in a learning mode, so you’re mentally prepared to tackle the challenges of learning to fly in instrument meteorological conditions. And make no mistake, it is a challenge, but the safety and utility the instrument rating will bring to your flying is unmatched. The requirements for the instrument rating are laid out in FAR 61.65. Expect to spend several months (unless you do an accelerated course) and several more thousand dollars, but be prepared to reap the benefits immediately.
| Tailwheel Endorsement: Knowledge test? No Checkride? No Approximate cost: Five to 10 hours of aircraft rental plus cost of dual instruction. Fulfills the requirements of a flight review? No, but most CFIs will customize the training to include the elements required for a flight review. |
Tailwheel endorsement. Those of us who trained in tricycle-gear aircraft (and that’s most of us these days) need this logbook endorsement to fly taildraggers, unless we logged pilot-in-command time in a taildragger before 1991. Why would you do it, particularly if there’s not a taildragger available for you to rent, or you’re not planning to buy one? For the challenge. As with a glider, transitioning to tailwheel aircraft will teach you what your feet are for. Bonus: An opportunity to fly a retro, imminently cool, back-to-basics airplane like a Piper J-3 Cub or an Aeronca Champ, or the more contemporary Citabria or Decathlon. Expect to devote five to 10 hours of dual for the logbook endorsement from a flight instructor. Downside: There might not be a taildragger available for you to rent. Solution: Buy your own.
| Seaplane rating: Knowledge test? No Checkride? Yes Approximate cost: Expect to spend $1,000 or more plus lodging for an accelerated course. Fulfills the requirements of a flight review? Yes |
Seaplane rating. Given the fact that few if any FBOs will rent seaplanes for solo use, this may qualify as the least useful of all ratings—but legions of pilots proclaim the seaplane rating the most fun of them all. Numerous flight schools offer accelerated single-engine sea courses that can be conducted in two or three days. The Seaplane Pilots Association is your starting point to find a school and/or an instructor.
High performance/complex checkout. Several hours of dual instruction and a CFI’s logbook signature are all that’s required to get you into the left seat of a 200-hp-plus aircraft (high performance). If it has retractable gear, it counts as complex time. In addition to learning a new make or model, the high-performance checkout will teach you how to operate a variable-speed propeller.
| Rotary add-on: Knowledge test? No Checkride? Yes Approximate cost: Varies, depending on cost of helicopter rental and hourly instructional fee. Helicopters are more expensive to rent than fixed-wing aircraft. Fulfills the requirements of a flight review? Yes |
Rotary add-on. Adding the rotary-wing rating to a single-engine certificate seems straightforward: 30 hours of flight time in helicopters, including at least 20 hours of dual, three hours of cross-country time, three hours of solo time, and three hours of night flight. But few of the skills you learned as a private pilot of fixed-wing aircraft will transition neatly to helicopters, so you can expect a learning curve. Still, many fixed-wing pilots who’ve made the leap are thrilled by the challenge.
Aerobatic, spin, or upset-recovery training. Like to see the world upside down? Want to learn how to recover from an unintentional spin? While you can’t earn a rating or certificate in these areas, you’ll get plenty of benefits from the training.
How long?
How quickly do powered pilots “get” the rating? While they come to the table with a knowledge of aerodynamics, weather, and aircraft systems, they still must become accustomed to the glider’s handling characteristics. Kellett uses two rules of thumb: Nonpilots will generally require the same number of flights as they are years old to solo; for powered pilots, it’s about half that rate. Pilots with tailwheel time may find it easier to fly coordinated right from the start.
Being towed into the air 200 feet from another aircraft usually is a powered pilot’s first exposure to formation flight, and it can be unnerving. As we signal our tow pilot by waggling the rudder, he applies throttle. We reach ground effect in what seems like five seconds, and with Kellett handling the takeoff the transition from ground to flight is seamless. When it’s my turn, Kellett urges me to forget the tow rope is there and pretend that I’m piloting a bomber in a Microsoft Flight Simulator game. “Stay right on him,” he says, indicating the Pawnee. “Don’t go higher or lower” than the aircraft. That proves an elusive goal.
When the tow rope is released using the yellow handle on the left side of the cockpit, the glider turns to the right, free to chase any updrafts near the ridgeline that borders Front Royal, while the Pawnee turns left to return to the airport. The serene quiet, coupled with the amazing near-360-degree visibility through the ASK-21’s canopy, proves distracting. Soaring is a skill in which the mission is not about the destination—going from airport A to airport B. Once aloft, your job is to stay there as long as you can. Some glider pilots can ply the air currents for hours. Skyline and other soaring clubs employ a time limit to allow everyone a chance to enjoy themselves.
One shot to land
All too soon, it’s time to return to the airport. Glider pilots at Winchester typically fly a right pattern on Runway 27 to remain clear of faster-moving traffic, and they tend to fly a tighter pattern, Kellett says. Setting up for the approach and landing, Kellett demonstrates how deploying spoilers on the ASK-21’s wings will create drag and reduce the glide ratio. Landing the glider is an exercise in energy management and judgment.
On the final takeoff of the day, at 300 feet the towrope is released, and Kellett demonstrates a recovery from a simulated tow-rope break, which would constitute an emergency. Here again, the contrasts between flying a powered airplane and a glider come into play. What’s the first thing you were taught if you lose an engine at a low altitude? Never turn back to the airport. In a glider, there’s so little drag that a return to the airport after a rope break is possible as low as 200 feet.
Three instructional flights in one day? This is a typical training strategy because the flights themselves aren’t very long, ranging from 15 to 20 minutes, or, in the case of our simulated rope break, as short as three minutes.
Shorter flights also translate to lower training fees, by the way. In fact, soaring is a less expensive way to fly. Most clubs don’t charge members for flight instruction; instead, members pay for tows and use of the glider, on top of a yearly membership fee and/or monthly dues. If you’d prefer to add the rating in a shorter amount of time, there are soaring operations in New Mexico, New York, and Texas, among other locations, that specialize in accelerated training. Start your search for a club or school at the Soaring Society of America’s Web site. SSA offers an introduction to soaring known as a FAST package for $99, which includes a half-hour introductory lesson, a copy of the FAA’s Glider Flying Handbook, a logbook, and a three-month membership.
Jill W. Tallman is associate editor of AOPA Flight Training and AOPA Pilot magazines. An instrument-rated private pilot, she has approximately 500 hours.
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