![Sylvia Grandstaff prepares to launch in a Rolladen-Schneider LS4. [Credit: Sam Weigel]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/IMG_7376-Large.jpeg?width=1280&height=960)
It’s a beautiful afternoon in late July, and the smell of freshly cut grass wafts across the airfield. White puffy clouds scud across the sky, sending shadows racing across rolling fields of corn and wheat. Hawks thermal far above, and a faint whoosh and flash of white wings signals that their human counterparts have taken notice.
A Rotax engine roars, and a smart little LSA accelerates down the grass strip, sleek glider in tow. Another tow plane lands in the opposite direction and comes to a stop near a gaggle of high-performance sailplanes at the runway’s end. This little slice of aviation heaven is Zbraslavice, Czech Republic, and this is the first practice day of the 13th FAI Women’s World Gliding Championships (WWGC).
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My wife, Dawn, and I are here to crew for our longtime friend Sylvia Grandstaff, a former Army test pilot who I have written about before. She’s been racing gliders competitively for many years, and this is her third WWGC. Grandstaff also competed in the overall World Gliding Championships earlier this year.
While I do have my glider rating, I’ve never raced or flown them cross-country—neither have I crewed or even observed a glider contest. In fact, despite my long friendship with Sylvia, I had only a vague familiarity with competitive soaring. My chief qualification, near as I can tell, is that I was available and willing to devote three weeks of our summer to the cause.
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Fortunately, I have excellent teachers to get me up to speed. Both Sylvia and team captain Tim Taylor—himself a former U.S. national champion—are unfailingly patient in explaining the basics.
Glider contests typically last one to two weeks, with racing on every day with adequate weather for cross-country soaring. There are a number of different classes. Here, Sylvia is competing in the handicapped Club Class in a rented Rolladen-Schneider LS4.
Each day the race organizers assign a different “task,” a cross-country course of between 100 and 500 kilometers or more, depending on conditions. The pilot with the fastest average speed wins, and all others are scored based on their percentage of the winner’s speed. In case of a “land out,” which is surprisingly common, reduced points are awarded on distance achieved.
The competitors form a grid at the end of the runway and then are launched en masse, typically sometime around noon. The racers loiter in thermals (“lift”) near the start line until their class start time, at which point they can begin the task whenever they wish, based on how they expect the day’s soaring weather to develop.
Once underway, the best course between turn points is seldom the most direct but rather that which hopscotches between the strongest thermals for quick climbs—extended thermalling drastically reduces average speed. The fastest pilots climb no more often than necessary, convert lift into forward speed as often as possible, and keep enough energy in their back pocket to prevent landing out if conditions weaken. Particularly in Europe, it’s common to collaborate with teammates or even informal allies to find the best lift, and classes tend to coalesce into “gaggles” that resemble the peloton of bicycle racing.
Our duties as crew include prepping the glider each morning, towing it to the grid, hooking up the tow rope and running the wing during launch, and helping Taylor keep tabs on Sylvia and other racers via tracking software. Tim communicates weather updates and suggested strategy over team radio.
When Sylvia lands back in Zbraslavice, we tow the glider from the runway, scrub the bugs off, remove equipment, and reinstall covers. Back at the team apartment, Dawn and I shop for provisions, prepare meals, wash dishes, and do laundry. Ideally, we take care of the mundane tasks so that Sylvia and Tim can stay focused on racing.
On the first practice day, Sylvia flew with her “unofficial teammate,” Christina Solberg Hansen of Denmark (both the U.S. and Danish teams have a single racer, so they collaborate). Sylvia noticed that Hansen’s LS1, an older version of her LS4, was significantly outgliding her. We put the fuselage on its cradle, retracted the landing gear, and discovered the gear doors were misaligned and sagging into the slipstream. Competition director Martin Hřivna came to the rescue, calling out a very sharp mechanic at 5 p.m. who worked on the glider until nightfall.
The next day Tim, Sylvia, and I chased down another potential gremlin—the left wing was 2 kilograms heavier than the right. It turned out that there was an unused water ballast bag in the wing, which we fished out through a very small opening with considerable effort. Getting in a good test flight on the third and final practice day, Sylvia was happy to report that roll force was neutral and glide performance much improved.
Sadly, this would prove to be the last good-weather flying day for the next week plus. A low-pressure system parked itself over the Baltic Sea and flung band after band of thick clouds and precipitation across central Europe. We fell into an infuriating pattern—beautiful sunrise, overcast by midmorning, rain in the afternoon, and clearing skies at night. Temperatures seldom rose above 70 degrees Fahrenheit. There simply wasn’t enough sunlight reaching the earth to create enough soaring weather to fly a task.
Several days were canceled outright. Other times we did the “grid squat” at the end of the runway as launch time was progressively postponed before finally being scrubbed. The first day of racing was the fifth day of competition, and despite a late launch, conditions were marginal at best. Only 25 km into the task, Sylvia and Christina were struggling. Sylvia broke off to search for lift and stranded herself in an area with very weak thermals. She scrabbled around for 10 minutes before bowing to the inevitable and landing out in a field of freshly sprouted peas.
Dawn and I hooked up the glider trailer and drove a half hour southwest on winding country roads. Fortunately the field had decent access and wasn’t too soft, and our first retrieve went fairly smoothly. Sylvia was gutted to have “lawn-darted” for minimal points on the first flying day, especially since conditions improved later in the afternoon and most of the women made it home. Christina caught up with the gaggle at very low altitude and rode its strong thermal back into contention. She placed fourth in class.
Two days later, conditions were stronger but inconsistent, with the threat of overdevelopment as well as an approaching line of rain forecast to arrive by 4 p.m. The organizers assigned an “area task,” which in lieu of turn points has various cylinders the racers must touch but can otherwise choose how much distance to fly. Sylvia and Christina were among the first across the start, and they beat a rapidly developing storm cell to the first area. We expected they would just brush the cylinder and turn tail, but instead they found a strong and unusually low line of convergence lift that they rode deep into the area and back.
Turning east, the teammates had to scratch and hunt for lift, but conditions improved as they worked 12 km into the second area. The weather clock was ticking, though, and they soon turned around, climbed, and headed into the last cylinder. Unfortunately, blow-off from the storm had spread and completely shut down lift production, and gliders started landing out in droves. Only four of the 25 Club Class racers made it home.
Sylvia wasn’t nearly as dissatisfied with this land out as it affected most everyone; her ride on the convergence line netted her 140 km total distance, and she finished mid pack. Dawn and I immensely enjoyed the 45-minute drive up the beautiful Sázava River valley. The land out field Sylvia had picked was fantastic—a dry, firm, freshly cut hayfield on a beautiful ridgetop, with a good road leading directly onto it. We are getting the disassembly routine down well now, and were one of the first teams to return to base. Yesterday we reassembled the glider, grid-squatted, got rained on, and were canceled.
As of the ninth day of competition, Club Class has only flown these two times (Standard and 18m classes flew one additional task). Despite the profoundly frustrating weather, both Dawn and I have really enjoyed crewing the contest thus far. We’ve learned a ton and, together with Sylvia and Tim, are working well as a team.
We’ve made the most of the downtime to explore Prague and the lovely villages of central Bohemia. The good news is today the ever-present low lifts into Norway, and a high-pressure ridge squeezes in from Germany. For the last four days of the WWGC, we should have better soaring weather and nonstop racing.
This column first appeared in the November Issue 964 of the FLYING print edition.
