Gordo and Bruce are pioneers in the gliding world. One of their coolest flights that shows their creative flight planning shows up in their 3000km flight in the Sierra Nevada's, and the build up to it.
Some basics: The major challenge in flying gliders is the inherent stochasticity in the weather system. Think of it as a contextual bandit problem with high variance w.r.t local weather (i.e. Even the best planning cannot help if the weather doesn't comply). We have some observability due to forecasting tools (skysight.io) and any policy must have affordances for pilot skill and a margin of safety. A good pilot (or 'policy') starts with multiple plans, quickly modifies to plans to suit the environment, and can seamlessly switch between plans. The primary "reward signals" are duration of flight, distance covered, and (in competitions) hitting certain waypoints.
Previous WR's for longest flight were mostly in the Andes or Alps. You want to be in a mountain range to utilize either the [ridge lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orographic_lift) of a mountain face or [mountain wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_wave), ideally in a polar region during the summer to maximize the daylight hours so you can fly under VFR for longer.
However, while the Sierra Nevada's have great mountain wave and ridge lift, the number of daylight hours is not ``competitive''. Their main innovation was in acclimatizing themselves with using night vision goggles for long duration in a glider. There's an article on this [here](https://magazine.weglide.org/gliding-at-night-breaking-the-3...) which describes the acclimatizing flights and the 3k km flight in great detail. It doesn't get official recognition because the FAI requires the flight to be done in daylight, but still an extremely cool flight!
Can you speak more on why glider pilots need night vision googles to fly at night but single-engine pilots don’t? Is it the risk of landing out? Or are they flying closer to the terrain?
My understanding is that (1) there is, as you say, a very nonzero risk of landing in a field and good visibility of what is _in_ that field is critical; (2) when riding thermals it is traditionally the case that many gliders soar in close proximity close to the core rising air mass, circling at quite a high bank angle – and collisions need to be avoided (many glider pilots wear parachutes for that reason…) and having visual references, particularly to mountains, really helps; and finally (3) it is common to be flying visually as one typically staircases in an altitude profile, as seen here, and go in and out of controlled airsapce (or deliberately avoid bumping into it, as I have done at 10 kft in UK airspace a long time ago).
In contrast, general aviation aircraft:
a) Have bright lights
b) Will fly in a straight line at a well defined altitude, meaning that vertical separation is sufficient to deconflict aircraft
c) Do not typically land in fields and do instead land on runways which often _also_ have bright lights.
"it’s very important to be patient." I was a tow pilot in the Rockies for a ski season and got a whopping 3.5 hours of glider time. The spinning in circles to gain altitude was enough for me to stick with powered flight (patience indeed!) This is an amazing accomplishment, way to go!
Well, I am not sure if it's easier in a glider but the approach and landing of an aircraft under various conditions is about 50% of PPL training.
(For the non pilots here, getting the private pilot license is equivalent to learning your first programming language/shipping your first app). All other accreditations and ratings are gated behind it.
Wow they were flying at 27,000 feet for a lot of that. I was wondering how they'd get over the Rockies but had no idea they'd go all the way up there. Obviously they need oxygen and the plane has to be designed to fly in that thin of air, but just how hard is that?
Not hard and the glider needn't be special; most already have a stunning glide ratio. I've been up in lesser wave in a clunky old trainer. You do need to coordinate with ATC to keep separation from jets. And the oxygen rig does has to be more serious than a nasal cannula above 18000 ft.
A few years ago I met a guy at the Smith Creek hot springs out in the middle of the Nevada desert towing a glider. He told me about glider flights from Truckee CA or Minden, NV to Utah and I was amazed then.
Another impressive journey was Truckee CA to Nephi, UT and then back again against the prevailing winds.
If any of this looks like fun (it is so very much fun), dropping by your friendly local soaring club on a weekend is a good place to start! The Soaring Society of America has a club map here: https://www.ssa.org/where-to-fly-map-2/
Kansas was the end of the line because no more.... 'thermals' to ride higher? If that's the correct term.
What's the difference between doing this in the summer vs the winter? I think I would be freaked out (probably an understatement) in an unpowered vehicle way up in the air if it were dark.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but after looking at the (incredible) photos, I couldn't help but think - how the heck did they go to the bathroom? Guessing it was a strictly number 1 24h. Even still...
I used to fly gliders although I never did any long flights, but there used to be a tube that you would wear and urinate into and it would travel out the bottom of the glider.
I love gliding but had a near-miss experience and am scared to fly a glider plane ever since. Statistically it's about 40x times more dangerous than driving.
Same here. I had lots of experience playing flight sims, but in reality I taught myself a load of bad habits... I had two scary situations where I didn't realise I was about to stall relatively low to the ground. Also, combined with all of the egos at the airfield, that was enough for me to find a safer hobby.
I'm curious why he chose Minden as a starting point. I'm assuming it's because it's at the foot of the Sierras and as a result there's a lot of updrafts?
Minden is a very popular place for gliders; with the right conditions the Sierras trigger serious mountain wave that you can ride for a long, long way.
Super affordable for an aviation thing. I'll often fly 4-5 hours from a $50 tow. My previous club charged about $500/yr with no hourly fees for glider use. I bought my own mid-performance glider for $15k and a $200 annual inspection. Occasionally you do land out in a field and need to buy dinner for the club-members that come pick you up!
It's some of the cheapest flying you can do, especially at a club. You pay for the tow and the ship time but there's no fuel and no engine to overhaul.
People flying in aeroclubs here in Czech Republic AFAIK not pay for flight time (they pay fowlr tow of course) - they pay some yearly membership fee & slave for the club during the year doing maintenance and repairs or running information service on the aeroclub airport tower.
I met a guy in a gas station parking lot in southern New Hampshire who was towing a long trailer with a beat up Subaru Forester. A question of "what the heck is in the trailer?" led to him telling me about his glider and thermals and various techniques for gaining speed / altitude and turning it into distance.
Easily one of the best conversations I've ever had. There was nothing about his set-up that screamed what I imagine would be considered "well-off" in this crowd.
That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
> That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
> Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
They take more calendar time, but do they take more instruction? Because if they make the same progress per session, I don't see why you would think it inferior to spread it out over several years.
If you don't go often enough you definitely won't make the same progress per session. You'll spend most of each session trying to remaster what you lost from the last one.
For powered flying, one a week is already on the low end... most instructors would recommend 2-3x/week.
Flying skills are very perishable, especially when first learning. This is why there are several different rules about recency of experience before you can do things like carry passengers, recurrent training requirements, etc.
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
Thanks for sharing this detail. I've been interested in taking some form of flight training for a long time and finally have the financial means to do it, but I haven't decided whether to go with glider or powered flight. Your comments makes me realize that the time commitment might be larger than I can manage at this stage (two kids 1 and 5) and so may need to wait until a little later in life.
I want so badly to try and talk you into flying gliders, because it's amazing: way, way more fun (IMO) than the overwhelming majority of the power flying you can do as a civilian. And there are people who make it work! But ... probably this is wise, and better to make thoughtful decision.
It seems like this gets easier as the kids get older; I've seen parents of teenagers make it work. For some folks it's a family affair---several kids & one or both parents learning to fly. These families have been uniformly super fun to have at the field! For others I think it's a matter of the kids being old enough to have some independence, + I'm sure a very supportive partner.
So don't give up on gliders forever! I'm expecting times in my life when I can't get out to the field enough to stay proficient & safe, and I'll have to quit flying for a little---but a dearly hope not forever. It's just that, likewise, now's maybe not the right time for you.
Gordo and Bruce are pioneers in the gliding world. One of their coolest flights that shows their creative flight planning shows up in their 3000km flight in the Sierra Nevada's, and the build up to it.
Some basics: The major challenge in flying gliders is the inherent stochasticity in the weather system. Think of it as a contextual bandit problem with high variance w.r.t local weather (i.e. Even the best planning cannot help if the weather doesn't comply). We have some observability due to forecasting tools (skysight.io) and any policy must have affordances for pilot skill and a margin of safety. A good pilot (or 'policy') starts with multiple plans, quickly modifies to plans to suit the environment, and can seamlessly switch between plans. The primary "reward signals" are duration of flight, distance covered, and (in competitions) hitting certain waypoints.
Previous WR's for longest flight were mostly in the Andes or Alps. You want to be in a mountain range to utilize either the [ridge lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orographic_lift) of a mountain face or [mountain wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_wave), ideally in a polar region during the summer to maximize the daylight hours so you can fly under VFR for longer.
However, while the Sierra Nevada's have great mountain wave and ridge lift, the number of daylight hours is not ``competitive''. Their main innovation was in acclimatizing themselves with using night vision goggles for long duration in a glider. There's an article on this [here](https://magazine.weglide.org/gliding-at-night-breaking-the-3...) which describes the acclimatizing flights and the 3k km flight in great detail. It doesn't get official recognition because the FAI requires the flight to be done in daylight, but still an extremely cool flight!
Can you speak more on why glider pilots need night vision googles to fly at night but single-engine pilots don’t? Is it the risk of landing out? Or are they flying closer to the terrain?
Not the OP, but I'd say both are yes. You will be flying in close proximity to mountains, no way you can do this without actually seeing the mountain.
My understanding is that (1) there is, as you say, a very nonzero risk of landing in a field and good visibility of what is _in_ that field is critical; (2) when riding thermals it is traditionally the case that many gliders soar in close proximity close to the core rising air mass, circling at quite a high bank angle – and collisions need to be avoided (many glider pilots wear parachutes for that reason…) and having visual references, particularly to mountains, really helps; and finally (3) it is common to be flying visually as one typically staircases in an altitude profile, as seen here, and go in and out of controlled airsapce (or deliberately avoid bumping into it, as I have done at 10 kft in UK airspace a long time ago).
In contrast, general aviation aircraft:
a) Have bright lights b) Will fly in a straight line at a well defined altitude, meaning that vertical separation is sufficient to deconflict aircraft c) Do not typically land in fields and do instead land on runways which often _also_ have bright lights.
"it’s very important to be patient." I was a tow pilot in the Rockies for a ski season and got a whopping 3.5 hours of glider time. The spinning in circles to gain altitude was enough for me to stick with powered flight (patience indeed!) This is an amazing accomplishment, way to go!
I feel like most powered flight I see is just flying in circles around the runway, with a touch-and-go at each pass.
Well, I am not sure if it's easier in a glider but the approach and landing of an aircraft under various conditions is about 50% of PPL training.
(For the non pilots here, getting the private pilot license is equivalent to learning your first programming language/shipping your first app). All other accreditations and ratings are gated behind it.
It's not all thermals! There's also ridge and wave.
Yup! A lot of folks forget about mechanical lift and only think of thermic lift.
Atmospheric waves are quite fascinating. Crazy to see a glider utilize this over such a distance:
https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/Miscell...
Wow they were flying at 27,000 feet for a lot of that. I was wondering how they'd get over the Rockies but had no idea they'd go all the way up there. Obviously they need oxygen and the plane has to be designed to fly in that thin of air, but just how hard is that?
Not hard and the glider needn't be special; most already have a stunning glide ratio. I've been up in lesser wave in a clunky old trainer. You do need to coordinate with ATC to keep separation from jets. And the oxygen rig does has to be more serious than a nasal cannula above 18000 ft.
Of course then there's these guys going to 90000 ft ... https://perlanproject.org/
As a glider it's probably easier with ATC to stay under 29,000 (RVSM), yeah?
Yea, I was wondering about the Rockies, too, but it looks like they just got themselves high at the start and then kept high all the way.
A few years ago I met a guy at the Smith Creek hot springs out in the middle of the Nevada desert towing a glider. He told me about glider flights from Truckee CA or Minden, NV to Utah and I was amazed then.
Another impressive journey was Truckee CA to Nephi, UT and then back again against the prevailing winds.
https://youtu.be/4xb-CKa-FPI
https://www.weglide.org/flight/407896
If any of this looks like fun (it is so very much fun), dropping by your friendly local soaring club on a weekend is a good place to start! The Soaring Society of America has a club map here: https://www.ssa.org/where-to-fly-map-2/
Is there some kinda "here's what gliding is all about" article I can read to so I can understand this website / this accomplishment?
The tricky part is you don't have a motor. It's an unpowered vehicle.
(Caveat is the start, you will be pulled up with a rope, another powered plane or have starter motor to get up once)
You can go thousands of miles without propulsion! IF the weather and wind plays nice.
So you go up with thermals (warm air) or lift from hill sides and go forward by gliding. Repeat with skill and luck.
Kansas was the end of the line because no more.... 'thermals' to ride higher? If that's the correct term.
What's the difference between doing this in the summer vs the winter? I think I would be freaked out (probably an understatement) in an unpowered vehicle way up in the air if it were dark.
or pilot(s) were just tired
Maybe this is a stupid question, but after looking at the (incredible) photos, I couldn't help but think - how the heck did they go to the bathroom? Guessing it was a strictly number 1 24h. Even still...
I used to fly gliders although I never did any long flights, but there used to be a tube that you would wear and urinate into and it would travel out the bottom of the glider.
Look up "piddle packs".
I have friends who fly in paragliding competitions.
Look up "male external catheter".
Interesting. Do they also use condom catheter?
I love gliding but had a near-miss experience and am scared to fly a glider plane ever since. Statistically it's about 40x times more dangerous than driving.
Same here. I had lots of experience playing flight sims, but in reality I taught myself a load of bad habits... I had two scary situations where I didn't realise I was about to stall relatively low to the ground. Also, combined with all of the egos at the airfield, that was enough for me to find a safer hobby.
I'm curious why he chose Minden as a starting point. I'm assuming it's because it's at the foot of the Sierras and as a result there's a lot of updrafts?
Minden is a very popular place for gliders; with the right conditions the Sierras trigger serious mountain wave that you can ride for a long, long way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_wave
I love seeing highly niche little social networks like this one.
Thanks, took us some years to build. Respectful and friendly community all around.
Super cool. Hope to be well enough off one day to do stuff like this.
Super affordable for an aviation thing. I'll often fly 4-5 hours from a $50 tow. My previous club charged about $500/yr with no hourly fees for glider use. I bought my own mid-performance glider for $15k and a $200 annual inspection. Occasionally you do land out in a field and need to buy dinner for the club-members that come pick you up!
It's some of the cheapest flying you can do, especially at a club. You pay for the tow and the ship time but there's no fuel and no engine to overhaul.
People flying in aeroclubs here in Czech Republic AFAIK not pay for flight time (they pay fowlr tow of course) - they pay some yearly membership fee & slave for the club during the year doing maintenance and repairs or running information service on the aeroclub airport tower.
Ooh, Czech soaring... Blanik much?
Mostly Super Blanik now - and still a lot of Zlin tow planes. :)
I met a guy in a gas station parking lot in southern New Hampshire who was towing a long trailer with a beat up Subaru Forester. A question of "what the heck is in the trailer?" led to him telling me about his glider and thermals and various techniques for gaining speed / altitude and turning it into distance.
Easily one of the best conversations I've ever had. There was nothing about his set-up that screamed what I imagine would be considered "well-off" in this crowd.
That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
I found the website to their glider club: http://www.franconiasoaring.org/glider-rides.php
A ride costs less than a full day lift ticket at most American ski resorts.
> That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
> Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
They take more calendar time, but do they take more instruction? Because if they make the same progress per session, I don't see why you would think it inferior to spread it out over several years.
If you don't go often enough you definitely won't make the same progress per session. You'll spend most of each session trying to remaster what you lost from the last one.
For powered flying, one a week is already on the low end... most instructors would recommend 2-3x/week.
Flying skills are very perishable, especially when first learning. This is why there are several different rules about recency of experience before you can do things like carry passengers, recurrent training requirements, etc.
You need to keep your nose on the grindstone for years to progress to glider cross country flying. Then you end up as an instructor and have to finagle time in your own glider. There's a bunch of time upgrading and updating flight instruments. You need a viable glider club to have enough people to get you in the air between working on club aircraft, equipment and airfield issues.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
Thanks for sharing this detail. I've been interested in taking some form of flight training for a long time and finally have the financial means to do it, but I haven't decided whether to go with glider or powered flight. Your comments makes me realize that the time commitment might be larger than I can manage at this stage (two kids 1 and 5) and so may need to wait until a little later in life.
I want so badly to try and talk you into flying gliders, because it's amazing: way, way more fun (IMO) than the overwhelming majority of the power flying you can do as a civilian. And there are people who make it work! But ... probably this is wise, and better to make thoughtful decision.
It seems like this gets easier as the kids get older; I've seen parents of teenagers make it work. For some folks it's a family affair---several kids & one or both parents learning to fly. These families have been uniformly super fun to have at the field! For others I think it's a matter of the kids being old enough to have some independence, + I'm sure a very supportive partner.
So don't give up on gliders forever! I'm expecting times in my life when I can't get out to the field enough to stay proficient & safe, and I'll have to quit flying for a little---but a dearly hope not forever. It's just that, likewise, now's maybe not the right time for you.
A video with Gordon Boettger about it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8p95a4JRcw
Almost 1200nm!! Damn! What a flight! That’s got to be a new record.