Word: gliderfuls
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...good instability today," a lean fellow with the quick eyes of a race-car driver says with satisfaction. He's an American hang-glider pilot named Jim Lee, and he is talking about air masses, not temperament. Instability, good to violent, is what the high desert of California's Owens Valley, near Bishop, is known for. Very hot, light air, cooking on the valley floor and over the canyons, rises at great speed in columnar thermal currents; and from upper altitudes, cold, heavy air sinks fast in compensation. You can "peg" your variometer here with no trouble...
...send pilots not experienced enough to handle the valley's big air. As things turned out, two expert members of the top-ranked British team were tumbled upside down in separate incidents. When this happens, the pilot, who in normal flight dangles below the wing, can fall into the glider's underside and break the delicate structure of tubing and wires. The magical flying contraption instantly becomes wreckage, and the pilot has to deploy his emergency parachute. So it went for the two Brits, each of whom survived with minor injuries...
...first raised enthusiasm for his work -- than almost anything that has been put on view in the past quarter-century. In his later years (he died in 1976) Calder seemed dull and overexposed. Nobody could love and only a hurricane could budge the red mobile that hangs, like a glider beefed up to the size of a DC-3, from the roof of the East Building of Washington's National Gallery of Art. Calder's genius in the '20s and '30s was for making extraordinarily delicate and literally "wiry" sculptures that danced at a breath. However close...
...flying lessons and soloing at 16. He studied mechanical engineering at Yale, enrolled in the Navy during World War II and took fighter-pilot training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Returning to Yale, he switched his major to physics and with a few friends bought an Army surplus glider. Soon he was totally absorbed in soaring, which he continued while earning his master's & degree in physics and a doctorate in aeronautics at California Institute of Technology...
...range to a then record 29,500-ft. altitude. After graduation, he went on to become the first American to win the International Soaring Championship, at St. Yan, France in 1956. While soaring, and daydreaming, he also conceived the MacCready speed ring, a simple indicator now universally used by glider pilots to determine the optimum speed they should use in flying between thermals, or updrafts...