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If you ever get the chance to fly
a Primary, take it, particularly if it is a winch or car tow. It’s
a wonderful feeling to be looking down the wire at the ground. Up to the
time I flew one, I had never felt any feelings of height when flying.
But looking down at the ground below your feet is a new feeling and the
brick-like glide of about 10;1 is also a novelty after flying a modern
machine.
Fifty years ago, I was involved in a scheme to give Primary gliders to
our secondary and grammar schools (state) and even the public schools
(private to you in the USA). This was for their RAF Section Cadets to
bungy (shock cord) launch across their playing fields. The Army sections
of the Combined Cadet Corps had their guns, the Naval section had canoes
and boats and so what could be better than to give the RAF section a real
aircraft!
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The Slingsby T-38 Grasshopper.
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For my sins, I had to train the schoolmasters to teach their boys
on these things. So I ran weekly courses for the schoolteachers.
They had to learn how to rig and de-rig them, how to use them mounted
on a clever stand so that facing into a wind the boys could learn
to use all three controls, plus enough about flying to be able to
supervise their boys attempting first ground slides and then hops.
I think the scheme must have been thought out by a schoolmaster
as a means of ensuring a quiet afternoon. The beauty of using the
primary was it involved so much work for a team of about ten boys.
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The rigging involved connecting up all the flying and landing
wires and the flying controls. Moving it by hand could occupy the
whole team pulling it out to the field and launching it by bungy
meant eight boys pulling on the bungy rope, a wingtip holder and
pilot. It was really hard work!
Little did the schoolmasters realise when they arrived on the course
that they would be the one's doing the pulling, and that they would be
busy launching each other all day for several of the days just to get
a few slides and hops each.
I learned one important lesson from the Primary which I have remembered
and discussed with many glider pilots since those days. Having only recently
moved on to gliding after years as a power instructor, wind gradients,
although important, were scarcely a matter of life or death to me then.
I will never forget taking a winch launch to demonstrate amongst other
things that a Primary will fly completely hands off. In fact, the makers
of the British version of the SG-38 used to tell me that they had winch
launched one with a sack of ballast and that it flew and landed safely
with no pilot at all |
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