Easy Glider : Enthusiasts Captivated by the Simplicity and the Serenity of Soaring Find Passports to Adventure With a Joy Ride in the Skies

There is a moment of fear.

An airplane tows the glider 3,000 feet into the desert sky and the moment comes just before the towline is cut. With that link severed, the glider is left to fly on its own, at the mercy of invisible forces--winds and air currents.

Gliders have been flying safely since the 1880s. But with these powerless aircraft there is no hum of an engine to reassure, nothing the eye can see that promises to save the plane from plummeting.

“That fear is a normal reaction,” said John Stevenson, an experienced glider pilot from the desert community of Llano. “I’ve taken hundreds of people for rides and they all start out nervous.”

The line falls away. The glider does not plummet. It soars whistling through the air, gently rising and falling, pushed and pulled by forces that to the knowledgeable aren’t mysterious at all. It’s aerodynamics, physics and meteorology, they say.

Still, even for experienced pilots, there is that moment.

“You’re on your own up there,” said Jim Kolber, 62, of Van Nuys, a pilot of 14 years. “There’s a little apprehension and that just adds to the adventure of it.”

Gliding, or “soaring” as enthusiasts prefer to call it, is an esoteric pursuit. There are only about two dozen San Fernando Valley members on the rosters of Los Angeles-based gliding clubs. These pilots pursue their hobby at a handful of glider-ports in Los Angeles and its environs.

The closest and one of the best known glider-ports in Southern California lies just over the Santa Susana Mountains from the Valley, about 40 miles from downtown L.A., along the edge of the Mojave Desert. Crystal Soaring is really no more than a barren ranch carved out of rock and scrub brush and Joshua trees. Two Army surplus planes haul gliders into the air from a narrow asphalt airstrip, and a couple of trailers and an outhouse form the hub of otherwise austere surroundings.

On a typical weekend at Crystal Soaring, some 60 to 100 sailplanes will be lifted into the sky. The planes line up, waiting their turn, at the start of the runway. They begin going up at 9:30 a.m. and continue until sunset.

Stevenson, who owns the glider-port just east of Pearblossom and Palmdale, estimates that 90% of these pilots come from the Valley and other parts of Los Angeles.

Not all are dedicated pilots. Sailplanes, like hot-air balloons, attract the curious and mildly adventurous. Crystal Soaring offers 20-minute rides for $43.

“To be towed up and cut loose and fly like a bird, like a bird!” said Michael Oschin, an Encino building developer who frequents Crystal Soaring for such rides. “You fly up against the mountains and see spots you can’t reach by foot.”

On a recent Saturday, Oschin brought along his daughter, Sheryl. The 23-year-old woman wasn’t wholly enthusiastic.

“My dad has assured me I won’t die unless the wings fall off,” Sheryl Oschin said.

Meanwhile, a white limousine motored down the dirt road leading to Crystal Soaring and pulled to a stop beside the trailer that is the port’s office and control tower. A family unloaded into the midday desert heat; for a present, the children had arranged a flight for their grandparents, with the added benefits of elegant transportation and wine.

John Graybill, who conducts a tutoring center in Torrance, was oblivious to all this. Standing at the edge of the airfield, he meticulously washed his high-performance Glasflugel sailplane. He recently had purchased the German aircraft and on that day hoped to fly all the way to Nevada, or maybe Idaho, depending on the types of winds and weather conditions he encountered along the way.

Sailplanes are simply slender, sleek aircraft designed to glide efficiently through the air. They can fly 30 feet while descending only a single foot. Thus, a sailplane towed to an altitude of 5,000 feet could glide for some 60 miles before hitting land.

At one time, gliders could do no more than this--fly downward from the point at which they were let loose. Today’s planes, though, actually can climb and maintain flight over hundreds of miles. They ride the winds that deflect off mountain faces or, more commonly, they climb through warm-air thermals.

Thermals are towers of air that rise upward from points where the ground has been heated by the sun. Sailplanes are so aerodynamically sensitive that they can circle within these thermals and climb to altitudes of 25,000 feet. They move from thermal to thermal: climbing, gliding downward to the next one and climbing again.

“It’s like a going across a river of ice floes” Graybill explained. “You’re thinking, ‘Can I jump from this piece to that one?’ ”

Using thermals and deflected winds, gliders have flown to altitudes of 49,000 feet and over distances of 900 miles. They can reach speeds up to 140 miles per hour.

The planes--which can weigh from 500 to 2,000 pounds--are sensitive in flight. It takes a light touch on the stick to maintain a smooth path. Pilots must also learn to look for signs of thermals, such as cumulus clouds that often form over the hot-air funnels.

“You go by every clue you can get,” said Bud Zellmer, an instructor at Crystal Soaring. “You look for clouds. You’ll be flying along and all of a sudden the wing will bob up and you’ll know you’ve hit a thermal on that side. There are never enough clues.”

Because of its hot weather, the Mojave is a perfect setting for thermals and soaring. Besides Crystal Soaring, there are popular soaring airports in Tehachapi and Lake Elsinore.

On a warm Saturday morning, Graybill was hoping the weather would carry him at least across the state line.

Fariba Allison, a friend, was there to follow on the ground in a van towing the sailplane’s trailer. When Graybill landed, she would be there to pick him up and drive him back to Los Angeles. With an hour to go before takeoff, she helped him inspect the plane.

Also waiting to fly, Chris Maehara of Tarzana sat in a plane on the runway as the craft was being hooked to a tow plane. Maehara, a 35-year-old engineer for Hughes Aircraft Co., had been taking soaring lessons for almost a year.

“It was something I kept saying ‘I have to do this,’ ” Maehara said.

“It was exhilarating,” he recalled of his first flight. “But about midway through the flight, I realized there was no motor on the thing.”

Learning to fly a sailplane is relatively simple, said Jack Norris, accident prevention coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administrations’s Western Region. There is no engine and little mechanical equipment to master, and the planes fly much slower than propeller or jet aircraft. Most glider pilots can solo after just 30 to 35 flights, according to the Soaring Society of America.

Like Kolber, of Van Nuys, many of those who take up soaring are experienced power pilots.

Statistics for glider accidents are commonly included with those for powered aircraft, so it is difficult to determine how frequently sailplanes crash, Norris said. He said he considers gliding a safe means of flying.

“All they have to do is get in the glider and start lessons. It is simpler than powered aircraft because there is less to learn,” Norris said. “The nature of their flights is such that they are flying in noncongested areas, in more remote parts of the country, so that in itself is a plus.”

Gliding is not cheap. At Crystal Soaring, where instruction costs $20 an hour, it takes about $2,000 worth of flying to solo.

Sailplane rentals at the glider-port run $70 an hour, plus $30 to have the plane towed into the air. By comparison, local aircraft rentals offer single-engine planes for as low as $40 an hour, including fuel.

And soaring remains an uncommon recreation. There are only 20,000 licensed pilots in the United States and little more than 300 glider clubs and commercial glider-ports.

“It’s been around a long time, it just hasn’t been publicized,” said Paul Sengebusch, editor of Soaring magazine, the soaring society’s publication.

Stevenson sees gliding as more than just recreation. There are, he points out, distance and speed competitions for gliders year-round throughout the country.

“It really is a sport. The sky is the playing field,” Stevenson said. “Everyone takes their equipment up and tries to do their best. It’s the challenge of perfecting precision.”

Maehara, back from a lesson on takeoffs and landings, said this kind of flying can be tiring.

“it requires a great deal of concentration,” he said. “Your mind’s constantly going. Your hands and feet are constantly going.”

He was then off to visit a church bazaar near his Tarzana home and maybe work on his truck.

“just normal things a person does on a Saturday,” he said.

Soon, Sheryl Oschin would return safely to the ground, the wings on her glider having remained firmly attached.