Word: motorless
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that no man would ever get his feet far off the ground until he had thorough knowledge of air and its currents. The invention of engines provided aviation with a shortcut, proved Leonardo partly wrong. But at the same time man did study the air, developed four types of motorless flying: gliding (coasting downward on still air); slope soaring (on rising air currents along the shoulder of a hill); cold front soaring (on the brow of a thunderhead); and thermal soaring (on rising currents of air in the open). So specialized are these techniques that a skillful soarer looks upon...
...thunderheads with eager eyes, then took off in his big, sleek sailplane after an automobile tow. Up, up, up he circled on rising air currents, while hundreds of faces turned up at him from the ground. Pilots of motored planes swing far off their courses to avoid thunderheads but motorless Pilot du Pont had just the opposite idea in mind. Up 4,500 ft., directly over Harris Hill, he guided his ship directly into a thunderhead, rode along inside it for an hour during which he was lost to view. Coming out several miles away, he turned back...
Armament limitations forced young Germans to develop motorless flying after the War. Product of one ill wind, gliding failed to profit from another. Depression curtailed plane companies' interest in the sport. U. S. manufacture of gliders soon ceased. Some enthusiasts bought their planes from Germany, others built them at home. Groups pooled their resources, formed more clubs, mainly because there were not enough ships to go around. Not 1,000,000 pilots but a bare 70, cream of the total U. S. crop of some 2,500, were at Elmira, N. Y. last week for the seventh annual meet...
Gliding-the pastime of coasting downhill just above the ground in a motorless plane supported by the air current that moves up the hill-is today merely an introduction to the infinitely more exciting sport of soaring. Soaring is three-dimensional sailing whereby, to achieve altitude and distance, an expert has his choice of four types of air current: 1) hill-deflected winds, 2) thermal currents from warm spots on the ground, 3) upcurrents under cumulus clouds, 4) explosive updrafts preceding a thunderstorm. At Elmira, long ago selected as the best soaring spot in the U. S. because its prevailing...
Sirs: . . . Finally TIME has performed the neatest bit of magic to date-it has converted gliding and soaring into Transport, of all things [TIME, Oct. 8]. Poor impractical me, I had always had the benighted notion that motorless flying was just pure useless sport. I'm glad TIME put me right, though. Now I won't have to wait any longer for the $700 airplane; I'll just get myself a sailplane and soar out to see the world. . . . ROBERT B. RENFRO...