Catching Thermals at Pearlblossom

I always wanted to be a pilot. From the time I was a young boy, I dreamed about flying fighter jets.  I got a rude awakening one day as a teenager, when a routine test revealed that I had a genetic anomaly known as red-green color blindness.  I also had to have corrective lenses in order to have 20/20 vision. So much for going beyond the speed of sound in an F-16. 

Some years later, when I was living in Southern California,  I went up to the high desert to a remote airstrip in a place called Pearblossom and trained as a glider pilot. Kind of cool, really. I'm in this gloder with no engine. We're attached by rope to an airplane that pulls us aloft and tows us to about 3,000 feet AGL (above ground level). Then we drop the tow line and we're free. No engine noise. Just the muffled rush of air flowing over the fuselage. 

Gravity sets the tone for the glider experience. As you move along, slowly, most of the time, because of gravity, you're losing altitude. As I recall, we generally got about fifteen minutes of flying in as we slowly descended to the point where we had to set up to land. When you're flying without power, you only get one chance to get the landing right. Fortunately, it's pretty easy most of the time. 

Under tow in the Blanik

Gliders aren't just about floating inevitably back to Earth. Sometimes, the opposite happens. True real joy comes when you catch something called a thermal.  In the high desert on a hot day, it happens a lot.  A thermal is a column of air that is rising upward, Usually this happens when air warmed by heat from the ground starts to rise.  This effect is especially strong over things like black asphalt parking lots.

Me in the Blanik

After finding a thermal, the idea is to circle in it and ride it like an elevator as high as you can go.  An instrument in the glider's cockpit tells you when you were in a thermal, or the opposite, in a column of sinking air. The atmosphere doesn't just float along placidly. On high thermal days, the sky can be a bouncing burble of turbulence.  The bumpy ride can be lots of fun. It can also make you airsick. 

There are times when  glider flying is awesome. I remember dropping the tow, finding a thermal, and quickly climbing up to  nearly13,000 feet  in altitude. That's pretty much as high as we went.  Any higher, and we would have needed supplimental oxygen. 

I got my license to fly gliders at Pearblossom.  It was great fun, but also expensive, and it was more than an hour's drive each way from home in the San Fernando Valley to the glider base. My flying ambition was hardly quenched. I lived only fifteen minutes from Van Nuys Airport. At that time, it was  the busiest, non-commercial airport in the world.  I figured if I could make it there as a pilot, I could make it anywhere.  I'll save my experience flying out of Van Nuys for another blog entry.