Word: glider
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Since the glider program has been under way, a touch of Tom Swift and His Wonderful Airship has crept into the shoptalk of Army airmen. As of Jan. 1, Army glider pilots, like Army gliders, were rare as four-leaf clovers. Few air experts knew what gliders could do (except for what they had read about Crete). As far as the U.S. public was concerned, gliding was still a game for a few nutty newsreel daredevils around Elmira...
First School. Realizing that Hitler doesn't keep some 28,000 gliders just for fun, the Army opened the first of nine full-scale gliding schools at Twentynine Palms, Calif. last January. Chubby, 25-year-old West Point Captain Lester Cecil Hess is in command. Because there are not enough Army glider instructors to go round, civilian instructors have been brought in. Many officers have been graduated from the four-week course. Last week the second class of enlisted men were graduated, became staff sergeants with flying...
...July 1, the Army's 18 primary schools will begin to turn out men with pre-glider training. These men will become glider pilots after only two weeks at Twentynine Palms. So far, only men with previous flying experience have been trained, but the Army needs glider pilots badly, will soon inaugurate a ten-week course for greenhorns...
...Thermals. The school is in a mountain-surrounded piece of desert, hot enough to fry the traditional egg on a glider's duralumin fuselage. But the heated air rises, forming the welcome "thermals" which keep a glider aloft. The special glider dashboard instrument is a variometer, which shows a pilot whether he is in one of these upward thermals or in a downward air current...
...Gliders take the air at from 25 to 45 m.p.h. When one of the Army planes at the school starts out along the ground, towing three two-place glider trainers on graduated ropes, the little 300-lb. ships take off first, float about 50 ft. up, pointing their noses down to give the ropes some slack so that the plane can get off. Once in the air, like the yachtsman who watches the trembling sail lest it spill the wind, a glider pilot must keep his towline taut or suffer a jerk when it suddenly springs tight. Even...