Glider Pickup

The wind socks on Delaware's Du Pont airport hung limp and damp. The sun was pale through the heat haze. A plane flying less than 15 ft. off the ground churned through the air toward two uprights, like football goal posts, set up on the airport. Squatting under the plane's line of flight was a glider, tethered to a rope which looped in a big "U" over the two posts and back to the plane. The plane swooped in. hooked the rope. The glider shot aloft, trailing.

Thus tested and proved last week was the comparatively new scheme to launch trains of gliders on the fly. In a war which has been a Pandora's Box of surprises in air strategy and tactics, U.S. ingenuity was off & away on a fresh, imaginative tack.

The tactical possibilities in snatching gliders from the ground were enough to awe a Clausewitz: troops and material could be swiftly collected and swiftly delivered here & there in the heat of battle, in places impossible for airports. A mountain range could be filled with troops overnight. (A glider can land in a small clearing, stop almost instantly.) Since the gliders can be picked up again, commanders could accelerate emergency shipments to areas far distant from supply dumps. Mayhap tank-toting gliders will whoosh down to buttress surprise offensives.

Like troop parachuting and dive-bombing--ingeniously adapted to the Nazi war of movement--the glider pickup was distinctly a U.S. development, an outgrowth of a mail pickup service which has been pure routine for three years on the routes of a Wilmington company, All American Aviation, Inc.

The secret of the pickup's success is a reel which relieves the plane and glider of sudden starting shock, and smoothly eases the load into the air. Even the towrope is of stretchy nylon. One plane can accumulate a glider train by successive passes at the uprights. Each glider has its separate rope, snubbed individually at varying lengths, to the tow plane's tail.

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