It’s a warm spring day in Arizona, 92 degrees Fahrenheit on the ground and not much cooler under the plexiglass canopy at 3,000 feet agl. The northwest wind has picked up, making for some rough tows and brisk crosswind landings. The shear is also breaking up the thermals, making it challenging to keep this 45-year-old training glider in the air. My previous glider experience is in sleek fiberglass ships with a glide ratio of 34:1 or better. This boxy, blunt-nosed Schweizer SGS 2-33—with its tube-and-fabric fuselage and strut-braced aluminum wings—gets 22:1 on a good day.
We’re flying over a prominent ridge that’s not quite perpendicular to the wind. I think strong lift should be here somewhere, but so far it’s been inconsistent. My wife, Dawn, seated in the back, spots a turkey vulture soaring a few hundred feet to windward. I turn that way and soon there’s a deep whump! as a gust slaps the fabric like a drum and the wings load up with a metallic shudder. There’s no electronic vario to chirp a happy song of lift, but you can feel it in your bones and in the stick. This is old-school soaring, and though it’s not terribly sexy, it has a simplicity that is hugely appealing to me. Over the last decade, I’ve done a lot to channel both my life and my recreational flying in this direction. It’s appropriate, then, that I should spend the weekend of my 41st birthday enjoying simple communion with the sky in three different ways.
