Acme Professor Retired

It occurred to him…

From his office he sat with a fresh coffee in hand, looking out down the valley to the Mediterranean and he remembered years ago in his youth sitting about as usual for hours waiting to take up a “Glider” or as some call them a “Sailplane” in that beautiful scenery up in the area known as “Royal Deeside” in Scotland at the Deeside Gliding Club at Aboyne, but he was as usual hampered by safety protocols stopping them gliding, due to the wind and weather, etc.

Too Windy
So unsafe to take off and land, in these very lightweight airframes, with abnormally large wings.

Too Gusty
With unforeseeable changes in the wind direction and speed, again making things unsafe for such gliding aircraft.

No wind
To add insult to injury sometimes very calm conditions stopped flying, as not enough atmospheric energy, to enable the mechanisms of gaining height, thermals, or “wind wave ridge riding” to make the flying worthwhile, apart from straight up, then a few minutes mooching about not doing a lot, then time to land again. The price of a launch or a tow, made this just unpalatable.

Rain
Which made the field muddy in patches and dangerous, and obscured visibility, and the violent up-draughts of certain rain producing clouds, could be hazardous when aloft and then timing your landing to avoid the rain showers and squalls, can be very difficult, especially when you cannot just stay up there!

Altogether the inherent fragility of those gossamer like flying machines, by the virtue of their lightweight characteristics, made them oh so heavily dependant on the weather… to the extent, a lot more flying was cancelled, rather than was actually flown as planned.

“So”, he was thinking, – “what stops the flying”?

“Was it the weather?
Or was it the actual flying machine?
Or was it the mechanism of getting the aircraft airborne?”

As usual it was a combination of “all of the above”.
No pun intended,,,,,
“Above? Don’t you get it?”

Anyways…

What if the glider was NOT! so fragile, and susceptible to the weather?

What if it was made of metal, let’s say aircraft grade aluminium, like a commercial airliner?

The airframe and wings would be cheaper and easier to manufacture than complex carbon fibre, composite materials used in those beautiful present day gliders, that function beautifully, but only in certain conditions, which aren’t really prevalent in most gliding clubs locations, never mind the highlands of Scotland.

So now we have a “Heavy Glider”, an oxymoron of a machine, but he persisted in his train of thought…