Word: gliderfuls
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...week, as on every morning of the 16-day meet, the race committee mulled over what contests the winds would permit-speed or distance contests, round trips, one-way flights or triangular-course races. The committee decided on a 62-mile triangular route. Into his French-built Air 102 glider stepped a foreign contestant, France's youngish (25) Gerard Pierre. As he checked his instrument panel, ground crewmen raised his single-wheeled craft's grounded wingtip and clamped a tow cable to its fuselage. Nearly a half-mile downwind, a 115 h.p. winch roared up and began...
...climbed hundreds of feet above the field. Skillfully flitting from updraft to updraft, he zigzagged and roller-coastered around the triangle. He sewed up the grand championship for himself by whooshing the distance at an average speed of 35.8 m.p.h., a French record for his class of glider. Unable to speak German, Pierre grinned his gratitude on being awarded the top trophy. "Pierre is an excellent and very clever flyer," said Germany's Runner-Up Ernst Haase. Then he added thoughtfully: "And we are a little out of practice...
...sport once reserved for insects, a few preposterous fish, some webby mammals and the birds, some 60 glider experts from 19 countries last week silently swooped out over the dusty yellow airfield of Madrid's Real Aéreo Club. The two-week International Soaring contest, the biggest postwar meet, was coming to a flying finish. Each day at noon ranks of brightly colored sailplanes, eight abreast, were towed to a 1,650-ft. altitude by Spanish Air Force training planes. There, their long tow cables released, the motorless pilots sought out the thermals-rising warm air currents...
...stay there and come down in one piece, the gliding enthusiast must know his sailplane, air, clouds, and the terrain below as well as he knows his own cockpit. Given a steady wind blowing up from sharp-rising, sunbaked ridges, a good glider pilot can soar for hours, executing elongated figure-eights above the ridge's windward slope. He can travel for hundreds of miles, using the character of clouds and of the ground below as his guide to finding the hot radiated updrafts and avoiding the cool downdrafts (see chart). In the great mountain-lifted waves...
...five U.S. teams, flying single-seater, all-metal Schweizer sailplanes, might have done even better in the air, had they not been so fouled up on the ground. Glider pilots from Britain and France, who were backed by government " funds, came equipped with their own weathermen and radio crews that promptly dispatched retrieving trailers to landing points. But the U.S. team, forced to pay its own way, had no radios and had to rely on the strictly unilingual Spanish telephone system to trace its pilots. Some of them, down in isolated spots, waited hours before getting back to Madrid...