Silent Wings

"Pardon me," said an uninitiated Argentine housewife, pointing up at the slender, long-winged aircraft that swooped like hawks over her home on the pampas 160 miles west of Buenos Aires. "Couldn't they stay up longer if they had engines?'' They could indeed. But to the 63 competitors from 23 nations who gathered in Junin, Argentina, for last week's world soaring championships, engines are just excess weight, and flying a conventional airplane is about as exciting as riding a subway to work. To the sailplaner, the good things in life are a cramped cockpit, a buoyant wing, the song of the wind, and unending miles of sky.

Up the Chutes. As every student of World War II knows, sailplaning as a sport grew up in Germany. The Treaty of Versailles forbade Germans to build a powered air force, so future Luftwaffe pilots had to learn to fly in engineless craft. At first, they hedgehopped for short distances along the hillsides, depending on air currents deflected upward by the slopes to keep them aloft. But in 1921, gliding down a slope in the Rhon Mountains, a German airman noticed a flock of storks suddenly shooting upward more than 1,200 ft. without so much as flapping a wing. He turned toward the birds--and found himself wafted higher in a thermal updraft, a chute of warm air that rises in an invisible column from the earth's surface.

Armed with this discovery, other Germans perfected soaring techniques and wing designs that have influenced sailplaning all over the world. Today's gliders look and act like birds: slim of fuselage, with wings so disproportionately long that the best craft have glide ratios of 40 to 1, or 40 miles of reach for each mile of altitude.

Towed to about 1,000 ft. by powered aircraft, sailplaners strap on their oxygen masks and search the skies for "streets"--chains of puffy cumulus clouds marking the presence of thermals that may rise straight up from 5,000 ft. to 30,000 ft.. and can propel a lightweight glider upward at better than 1,000 ft. a minute.

In the "standing waves'' of fast-rising air that are found on the lee side of mountain ranges, sailplanes can soar even higher: up to 45,000 ft. Sailplanes are generally safer than powered planes--there is no risk of fire, and landing speeds are lower--but soaring is no sport for the fainthearted. In full view of 1,000 onlookers at Junin, veteran Dutch Pilot Arie Breunissen dived into a ther mal too quickly and watched in horror as the left wing of his fragile, British-built Skylark disintegrated under the strain. Swooping into a tight spin, the stricken craft plummeted earthward. Just 500 ft. above the ground, Breunissen bailed out. Shaken, and his face cut by his shattered Plexiglass canopy, he parachuted to the ground--arriving just behind his gaudy yellow glider, which crashed only 50 ft. away.

Out of Air. For the rest of the competitors, last week's open-class competition developed into a two-nation duel between tautly trained teams from Poland and the U.S. The Poles put their faith in two pencil-thin Zefirs--slimly streamlined machines, designed in 1959, in which the pilot sprawls on his back and peers forward between his feet. Not to be outdone, veteran U.S. Pilots Dick Schreder and Dick Johnson turned up with spanking new butterfly-tailed sailplanes that boast gliding speeds up to 200 m.p.h.

Throughout two grueling weeks of competition that included both speed tests and distance flights, the U.S. sailplanes performed magnificently--but not quite as magnificently as the Polish aircraft. Johnson took third in a straightforward race from Junin to Mercedes, 88 miles away, while the Poles finished far down the list. But on a roundtrip. 200-mile flight from Junin to the town of Pergamino and back again, Johnson lost precious points when his white Sisu ran out of air and fluttered to earth ten miles from the finish line. Polish Engineer Edward Makula, 32, won points by placing first in a 66-mile race over a triangular course. The big event was the freeflight competition in any direction--and it could hardly have been tighter. By keeping his Zefir airborne for 445 miles, Makula edged Johnson by a scant four miles, sewed up the open-class championship for himself--and the meet for Poland.

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