Sport: The Birds’ Apprentices

In a sport once reserved for insects, a few preposterous fish, some webby mammals and the birds, some 60 glider experts from 19 countries last week silently swooped out over the dusty yellow airfield of Madrid’s Real Aéreo Club. The two-week International Soaring contest, the biggest postwar meet, was coming to a flying finish. Each day at noon ranks of brightly colored sailplanes, eight abreast, were towed to a 1,650-ft. altitude by Spanish Air Force training planes. There, their long tow cables released, the motorless pilots sought out the thermals—rising warm air currents—on which they might ride up to soar highest, farthest or fastest.

To get up in the air, stay there and come down in one piece, the gliding enthusiast must know his sailplane, air, clouds, and the terrain below as well as he knows his own cockpit. Given a steady wind blowing up from sharp-rising, sunbaked ridges, a good glider pilot can soar for hours, executing elongated figure-eights above the ridge’s windward slope. He can travel for hundreds of miles, using the character of clouds and of the ground below as his guide to finding the hot radiated updrafts and avoiding the cool downdrafts (see chart). In the great mountain-lifted waves of air that oscillate in the lee of California’s High Sierra (TIME, Oct. 1) U.S. pilots in pressurized gliders have climbed to 42,100 ft.; over California’s Coast Range they have stayed aloft 12 hrs. 3 min.—both world records.

As the international competition wound up in Spain, the U.S. broke another record. Dick Johnson, a Mississippi State graduate student who already holds the world distance record (535.1 miles from Odessa, Texas to Salina, Kans., set last August), sailed along over an 80-mile course at a 66.8 m.p.h. clip, for a new speed record.

The five U.S. teams, flying single-seater, all-metal Schweizer sailplanes, might have done even better in the air, had they not been so fouled up on the ground. Glider pilots from Britain and France, who were backed by government ” funds, came equipped with their own weathermen and radio crews that promptly dispatched retrieving trailers to landing points. But the U.S. team, forced to pay its own way, had no radios and had to rely on the strictly unilingual Spanish telephone system to trace its pilots. Some of them, down in isolated spots, waited hours before getting back to Madrid.

The final results seemed to prove that experience helps. Britain’s eagle-faced Philip Wills, the oldest (52) pilot in the meet, soared off with the overall combined championship in a British-built Sky. Runner-Up Gerard Pierre of France, the meet’s youngest (22) contestant, broke down and wept. Slowly knocking the ashes from his pipe, Soarer Wills peered down through his spectacles and said: “My boy, you have plenty of time ahead of you to become champion.”