A good glider pilot can maximize flying fun for the dollar like no other. When I instructed at the Black Forest Soaring Society (BFSS) at Kelly Air Park in Colorado, the pilots with personal racing gliders would launch every Saturday or Sunday around noon. They’d immediately head west and start catching thermals before spending the rest of the day galavanting around the Rocky Mountains. We wouldn’t see them again until just before sunset after the thermals had all died out. They got all that flying for the reasonable cost of a monthly membership fee, and a $40 launch behind the club’s towplane.
The BFSS pilots knew they could safely reach home at the end of the day because they were able to calculate what glider pilots call “final glide.”
