An Evening Thermal

An Evening Thermal
by Chris Coles

During my summer holiday I set out to get myself back in single seater gliders. Once upon a time long ago, back in 1982, I had been the proud owner of a Lasham Blue Card with everything; cleared to Cloud Fly, Aerobatics and Cross Country and, and two FAI diamonds to boot. Having been out of flying for most of the time since means that you do not get any flying card at all, White, Red, Yellow or Blue. You simply have to keep flying with any of the instructors in two seater gliders, doing any exercise they can think of, until they decide you can move forward. They all keep a careful eye on me and pull me up for the slightest bit of, well, not good flying. As one of them said, you are as visible as the bollocks on a bloodhound at Lasham. If you make the slightest mistake, everyone sees it. The upside is that if you then set out to show that you heard what they said and put on a show of absolutely correct flying, they all stand at the launch point and cheer. Very good fun too!

So the next thing is I have to take a specific exercise on demonstrating my ability to pick suitable fields for Field Landings flying in a motor glider with the Chief Flying Instructor Graham, which goes fairly well and after that I am cleared to do several long flights, (of at least an hour and a half each), in a glass two seater. So, after several weeks of this I at last get to fly in the lowest denominator Surrey and Hants single seater glider available to me, a Grob. So my aiming point that day is to have five flights in it before I am permitted, by the rules, to go cross country the next day.

So, here I am having had four flights during the day two of which were over an hour each and it was just coming up to six in the evening and the evening course were about to take over the launch point and as a last flight of the day I told them all I would hanger fly to put the glider away, (the sky being clear with no visible lift). Clouds yes, but not clouds I expected to find any lift under. There was nothing to show that I would stay in the air for more than a few minutes longer. Off I go on a winch launch to 1,800 ft and lo and behold, as I come off the cable, I fly into an evening thermal. At that time of day on a poor day anyway, it is very unusual to find any lift at all. So I scratch away at this thermal, half a knot climb, not smooth, just a part thermal where I fly into and out of it as I circle in the glider, half here, none there, a little down and then a bit more up. Over about half an hour I climb to 4,200 ft and turn North towards Basingstoke, which is about seven miles away and as I fly towards the town I carry on climbing as the thermal wafts towards me in the still evening air. Having got to Basingstoke I am at 4,600 ft and I fly around the sky in zero sink. In these rare circumstances, the whole sky can be a mass of slowly rising air such that you can stay at the same height and fly very quietly around. After about an hour I am slowly descending and by now I am making tiny climbs on the thermals produced by allotment owners burning rubbish on bonfires. Also by now the Evening group are giving a series of Air Experience flights to people that have not flown before, so below me I have several gliders, all with instructors in them flying but they cannot stay up like I can.

This went on for some time and I slowly came down to their level, (never more than 2,000 ft on an aero tow). Soon after that I was nearly at the height where I should have to give up and set myself into the downwind leg to start my circuit to land and just then I noticed that there were sunset shadows all over the ground underneath me so I turned to see the most brilliant sunset had come below the level of the clouds but had not quite reached the horizon and as I turned towards the sunset a tug towing one of these flights passed between me and the sun, climbing through the centre of the sun orb with the glider in tow. Times like that bring tears to your eyes and I have to admit I gave out a loud Yippee!!, or was it a Yahoo!!?

By the time I had landed, soon after that, I had been in the air for one hour and forty-nine minutes. Something like an evening walk along a ridge in Albuquerque, quite unforgettable. Oh! And that first cross country the next day? I got hit on the head with a leading edge at the launchpoint and spent most of it in the outpatients in Basingstoke!!