Planes without engines soar under the cerulean expanse and o’er the rocky desert of Moriarty.
It’s not magic, or so says Rick Kohler, a glider pilot with over 7,500 hours in the cockpit. Kohler owns Sundance Aviation Inc., a company that offers glider rides as well as training for those looking to become pilots.
“The allure of flying without an engine and being able to harness mother nature’s energy and use those different types of updrafts to stay aloft and actually fly cross country and that sort of thing always appealed to me,” he said. “There’s a certain purist element to flying gliders that you maybe don’t get with flying powered airplanes.”
Gliders work by utilizing lift found naturally in the environment. While there are three types of lift, the predominant form found in the Southwest, which is used most often by glider pilots, is thermal lift.
The sun heats the surface of the ground, certain areas absorb more sunlight and retain more heat, and heat the air above those patches more rapidly than surrounding areas, creating thermal updrafts. Gliders seek thermal updrafts to rise faster than the glider sinks. This lift is best found in the afternoon because of the sun’s heating patterns.
Kohler said thermals are present year round, but they are the strongest during the summer.
“The primo days are … when you see a grid mark of cumulus clouds high with the flat bottoms and not a lot of vertical development on them, what we call fair-weather cumulus clouds,” he said. “You know it’s going to be great soaring that day because every one of those clouds is marking a thermal. That’s when all the glider pilots converge in Moriarty because they want to go and jump into that stuff.”
Another type of lift is a wind current, which one should be cautious of. Elevation limits soaring controls and countless geological factors have to be kept in mind while gliding, Kohler said. Susan Gregory, a recent graduate of Kohler’s school, said flying in a glider requires constant attention.
“Being in a glider you have to be much more in tune with your environment,” Gregory said. “It’s all about being in harmony … with the environment. There’s no such thing as autopilot. You are flying every single second in a glider.”
Kohler said most people can learn how to fly and that college-age students without flying experience could probably get their gliding license with about 35 flights and 12 hours in the cockpit. Less than 1 percent of people are incapable of learning to fly, he said.
“There are certain individuals who just can’t put it together,” he said. “It may have something to do with depth perception or spatial orientation. They may not just be real good that way … One in thousands that I have met couldn’t learn to do it.”
Kohler said the biggest deterrent to would-be flyers is the cost and time commitment rather than the skill requirement. A new flyer can expect to spend about $3,000 to $5,000 to become licensed. He said it’s worth it in the end.
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“Every spare penny I had went into the kitty for the glider rating,” he said. “You can do it, and unless you’re made out of money, you’re going to have to sacrifice something to do it. Time and money — that’s what it takes.”
For those without those resources, Kohler said people are welcome to watch the gliders in action. Gregory said the gliding community was instrumental in helping her learn how to fly.
“It feels like quite an accomplishment, but as someone said to me yesterday, ‘Now you have a license to learn,’” she said. “It really is just the beginning because now I am going to start learning what I need to do to do really long cross-country flights. I need to learn a lot more about weather, and I need to learn a lot more about thermaling. This really is just the beginning.”
