he dark green glider with 007 painted on the tail once belonged to Neil Armstrong. Now it belongs to a young man who flies it on weekends near Midlothian, Texas. I would have thought the little plane would be one of aviation's sacred relics, like a yacht that once belonged to Columbus, but the members of the Texas Soaring Association who fly with its current pilot treat it pretty casually. They call it The Pickle, after its color.

I was impressed, though, and I asked if the aircraft's log was still around, with the moonwalker's signature. "Naw," a veteran member said. "Before I could snatch it for myself, thieves got their hands on it."

The plane itself isn't all that showy compared to other gliders at the airport: sort of a sparrow among skylarks, really, with its old-fashioned fabric-covered fuselage looking downright dumpy next to the seamless fiberglass ships around it. It's a Schweizer 1-26, the most widely used American-made sailplane, common as Coca-Cola. So why would the astronaut with the rightest stuff of all want to fly it?

For the same reason I want to fly it, I'm sure: delight in the purest kind of aviation, the best blend yet of high technology and the ancient dream of flight, the form of flying most intimate with the air itself: soaring.

Until a friend told me about the Texas Soaring Association, the glider club at Midlothian, I was all set to enter aviation by the usual door, buzzing along behind a propeller in a Cessna. I'd done a bit of that, and now I do a lot of it and always will, but first and last I'm committed to flying gliders. Curiously, the people who talked me into learning to fly in gliders first were all accomplished power pilots. "You won't have to unlearn anything to go on to power," one said. "And you'll learn more airmanship than most power pilots ever do." Three of them used that same word: airmanship.

The word intrigued me. It seemed to imply a mastery not only of technical skills but of a philosophy of flight, a body of knowledge and a set of attitudes beyond what could be programmed into a flight simulator. It seemed to promise that we could learn to be true airmen: at home in the air. And who, setting out to learn to fly, would wish for less?

(Gliders are also a bit cheaper to learn to fly, and this is a very sensible reason to choose them over power planes. But the difference isn't all that dramatic, alas. The correct answer to "How much does it cost to learn to fly?" is: "How much have you got?")

My first lesson in airmanship was a demonstration of the consequences of inattention and overoptimism: I helped one of the members retrieve his glider from a muddy field many miles from TSA's airport. He had been carried away, literally and figuratively, by a string of briskly rising air currents that lofted him higher and higher—and farther and farther from home, against a brisk prevailing wind. The lift grew less and less, and so did his altitude, and finally he picked a flat field with no cattle in it and landed as near to a fence as he could.

These unscheduled landings aren't real emergencies, usually, in the sense we associate with planes coming down where they shouldn't. Landing out, as it's called, is pretty common. Part of airmanship for a glider pilot is being able to spot a safe place to do it. The Judge—he really is a State Judge—had chosen well, though we all wished he had found a drier field. We only had to carry the wings a few hundred yards to the trailer. and we were able to slide the fuselage over the fence on an old door from a nearby scrap heap. As we toiled, the Judge began my education in a proper airman's attitude. He never actually complained, but only said, "I have reached the age when I find it hard to identify this part of the day's activities as fun."

So I already knew how to take an airplane apart and put it on a trailer; lots of students never learn that at all, I'll bet. Pretty good for the first day. Actually, I was encouraged. If you can land one of these things in a farmer's field without damaging yourself or the plane, landing it at the airport ought to be easy enough.

My education proper began the following day. The Judge gave me a handsome reward for helping with the rescue: my first ride in a glider. Technically, this wasn't a lesson, since the Judge is not a certified instructor, so the ride does not appear in my logbook. But my notebook reminds me that he showed me how to perform the most basic flight maneuvers: controlling the speed, turning and recovering from turns, then flying straight and level. This is not to say that I learned any of these things, however.

It was clear from the outset that the first thing I would learn would be humility.

A little scene-setting wouldn't hurt. The TSA gliderport is a broad grass strip nearly a mile long. There's an A-frame clubhouse, some low hangers, a couple of windsocks, and on any warm weekend afternoon, as many as two dozen of the most beautiful airplanes in the world, the various forms of modern gliders. These are far and away the most efficient airplanes conceivable. The best of them sink so slowly, climb so readily,and glide so far that they can actually be difficult to coax down from the sky when there are strong updrafts. Their wings are long and slender, sometimes to the point of flexing visibly as they gather speed at takeoff. Their fuselages are as sleek as minnows. In the right conditions they can fly four or five hundred miles before landing. Powered only by gravity, some of them can zip along at 150 miles per hour. More remarkably, they can fly at agonizingly slow speeds without stalling, and they can do it while flying circles as small as those described by a soaring bird. They are commonly called sailplanes, a nicely evocative name.

My first ride was in one of the prettiest of these birds, a Grob 103, a German-made two-place fiberglass high-performance sailplane. The Judge installed me in the front seat; it can be flown from front or back. Another flier, waiting his turn at the flight line, connected our tow rope to the sturdy towplane and lifted our wingtip level with the ground. The Judge waggled his rudder to tell the tow pilot he was ready; the tow pilot waggled back, and we could hear the deep, throaty sound of the engine, 200 feet ahead. I could see blades of grass dancing in the prop wash as we started to move. We slewed around just slightly as we lined up straight behind the towplane.

The glider flew first; we were airborne in 10 seconds. The Judge held us just off the ground. A few seconds later, the towplane leaped into the air, climbing steeply, and off we flew in a series of gentle turns to 2,000 feet. "All right, let 'er go," the Judge said, and I pulled a knob on the panel in front of me. The rope fell away as we turned right and up, free.

We banked more steeply than I had ever done in an airplane; impressive, but not alarming. We leveled off and I sat back, delighted at the smooth, near-silent ride. Visibility from these planes is superb: big, clear canopies, no little windows to peep through. I could see Dallas, 35 miles North. After much searching, I could also see our airport, right under our nose. Before I could get over the embarrassment of getting lost in plain sight of home, the Judge said, "All right then—take the stick in your right hand, feet on the rudder pedals. There—you're flying the airplane." And so, after a fashion, I was.

The sailplane seemed the most self-willed machine I had ever encountered, worse than the worst car or boat or motorcycle I had ever dealt with. Nothing could coax it into flying a straight line or at a constant speed; each turn involved snatching the plane back from ever-steepening banks that grew more hair-raising long after I had stopped moving the stick to the side. Worse, each turn seemed to start us into a dive, and pulling us out of the dive sent us wallowing into a near stall. I felt sweat bead up and run down my ribs. Finally, the Judge ruled that I had suffered enough, and he resumed control and brought us home. I would start my formal lessons knowing something important: that very little about flying is intuitive. Every movement would have to be learned. I was in a properly humble frame of mind to begin.

Now, this was hard for me. It meant entering a new adolescence, right in the middle of my middle age. I would once again be that half-formed creature, that embryo, a student. I didn't like it.

Two things made it bearable. One was the attitude of the fliers in the club. To the last man and woman, they welcomed and encouraged student pilots. The instructors teach literally for the love of it, by the way; they are not paid. Student members of the club pay only for towing and plane rentals. This means that the club instructors tend to have a missionary zeal and embrace the students as converts rather than as customers.

The other factor was the individual teacher who became my primary instructor. Charlie Dobkins, who agreed to try to make a pilot out of me, was 66 and has flown since his teens. He has been flying literally as long as I have been breathing. (I was 49 when I became his student.) If I had to submit myself to a new apprenticeship at my age, better with Charlie than with someone half my age. The grizzled old novice would not have to learn from a downy-cheeked veteran, at least.

In our first lesson, Charlie showed me enough to make me realize what a long way I had to go. All students make mistakes, I had been told, and I did not disappoint the traditionalists. There are five separate bad things that can happen every time you turn an airplane, and every single one of them afflicted me.

Now, this is not a flight manual, but here I need to give you a sample of the mechanics of flying to show you why it is difficult to learn. For the most part, though, I'll skim over the physics in favor of the metaphysics. Still, the language of flying has its grammar, and here is a little of it:

An airplane turns because it banks. Every time you tilt an airplane to the side, it will turn in that direction. The trouble is that it will do so in a ragged, staggering, uncoordinated fashion. Five separate demons cast wicked spells on the plane and the pilot must drive each one of them out. (I am trying to avoid excessively technical language.)

The first evil is adverse yaw. As you begin a turn by moving the control stick to the desired side, the airplane obediently dips the wing on that side and begins to turn—by dragging itself sideways through the resisting air. The nose is still pointed in the original direction. This is adverse yaw, and you correct it by stepping on the rudder pedal on the same side. The rudder swings the nose around in the proper direction, which is exactly tangent to the curve of the turn. This is called a coordinated turn, and it is the most basic skill in flying, after flying straight and level.

The second evil is much scarier. As you turn, the plane tends to dive, because part of the wing's lift is being sacrificed to provide the turning force. Less lift means the glider sinks, and it does so promptly and alarmingly. The cure is to pull back on the stick, pulling the nose back out of the dive. Eventually the student learns to keep a little back pressure on the stick as he turns, but not before he has scared himself silly be entering dive after unplanned dive.

Pulling the nose up to counteract these dives introduces the student to the curse of the third devil: increased stalling speed. I will spare you the physics, but a turning wing will lose its lift, its ability to support the plane—it will stall, in other words—at a higher speed than the same wing does in level flight. Raising the nose to counteract the dive reduces the speed. Pull back a shade too far and you stall, which drops the nose sharply again, which starts the whole ugly process anew.

Overbanking is far and away the most alarming undesired effect of turning. It is more pronounced in gliders than in power planes, because of the glider's long wings. As the plane turns, the higher, outer wingtip is travelling a good deal faster than the lower one, being at the outer edge of the circle. The amount of lift generated by a wing is proportional to the square of its speed; the upper wing is going faster, so it lifts more, which means it rises relative to the other wing. It keeps right on banking, in other words. The student pilot naturally stops the stick when he reaches the angle of bank he wants, and he is sickened to notice that the airplane keeps right on rolling. The cure is to push the stick right back to the center position where it started, and even past it, to the point where you fell it must pull you out of the turn altogether. But it doesn't. This is the first of many times that you learn that in flying the intuitive solution, the most natural seeming action, can be wrong.

The last bad thing that always happens when you turn is that once you enter and establish a turn, and drive out the demons of adverse yaw, diving, stalling, and overbanking, the plane will again attempt to yaw around, pointing its nose to the outside of the circle. This means more playing footsie with the rudder until the plane is flying around the turn, not being dragged sideways through it.

Sailplanes use the same flight instruments as power planes, but get by with fewer of them. Most of the little clocks on a power plane's panel have to do with the engine or engines or with navigation. Gliders don't need any of the former and fewer of the latter. Still, they give us all the information we need to correct the five evil tricks the plane tries to pull in a turn, and much more besides. The airspeed indicator tells us whether we're diving (and picking up speed) or climbing (and slowing toward a stall). The slip-and-skid ball rolls from side to side in a little curved track to tell us whether our turn is coordinated, and the vertical speed indicator tells us whether we're going up or down and how rapidly. The altimeter tells us our height above the ground. But there are three more instruments that are much simpler and often more useful: the yaw string, the horizon, and the wind.

The yaw string is a foot or so of yarn fastened somewhere on the nose or the outside of the canopy right in front of the pilot. It blows back toward us in the oncoming air, and as we turn, we use the rudder to keep the string pointing directly at us. If it does, it means we are flying coordinated. If it points to either side we are not. This penny'sworth of yarn is as precise as any other instrument aboard, and it's easier to read than most.

But it won't tell you much about your speed, which is a function of pitch—that is, whether the nose is pointed up or down. Point the nose down and you gain speed as you lose altitude. Point it up and you slow down as you flatten the glide path. "You don't need to keep looking at the airspeed indicator," Charlie told me. "Two of your best instruments are the horizon and the wind noise. If the horizon stays the same distance above the nose, you're flying a steady speed. If you keep seeing more of it, you're speeding up, and vice versa. And if the wind noise dies away, you're too slow—about to stall." Airmanship: intimacy with the air.

That, by the way, is a pretty long-winded speech for Charlie, who prefers deeds to words. Some flight instructors do a good deal of lecturing; Charlie is of the "Follow me on the controls" school, teaching by his fluent movements. Another man I flew with several times is more inclined to the "Learn from your mistakes" method, snatching the controls back at the last moment before impending doom, then telling you what you nearly died of. Another, a superb pilot, has a hard time letting the students do anything at all, and I had the feeling I would have to hijack the plane to get to fly it. I like Charlie's method best, though sometimes I could have done with more vocal coaching. That's not his style, though. If they ever make a movie of the life of Gary Cooper, Charlie should play Coop. Yup.

That's enough of the bare mechanical bones of flying these wonderful machines. The whole point of the exercise is to soar, literally and metaphorically. Sailplanes climb by riding rising warm air currents, called thermals, or updrafts caused by wind deflected by a ridge, or whatever else will make the wind blow upward, so to speak. Here on the Texas prairie, that means riding, like the falcon in the wonderful poem The Windhover, "The rolling level underneath him steady air."

Gliders make people nervous because they think the engine keeps an airplane up. It doesn't. The air does, the rolling level underneath us steady air. Otto Lilienthal, one of the inventors of gliding (and one of its martyrs; killed in a crash in 1896) said: "No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once."

It does, and once you have climbed a few thousand feet in a tightly turning glider you will never doubt that power. A good strong summer thermal, boiling off the prairie, can lift a sailplane at a thousand feet a minute or more, easily twice the rate of climb of a power plane in ordinary flight.

The trick, of course, is finding the thermals. Each is an invisible column of rising air, and between them are oceans of sinking air, which will bring the gliders back to Earth unless we can swim out of them and into a thermal.

Finding these pathways in the invisible air: now we're talking airmanship. We look for traces of the thermals, and the first thing we look for is clouds.

If Eskimos have a hundred words for different kinds of snow, soaring pilots ought to have at least as many for clouds, but we don't. The kind we like best, cumulus clouds, we shorten familiarly to cue, but there are many kinds of cues and it would be handy to have names for them. Each has a different message for us. Many of these messages, alas, are cryptic to the point of uselessness. Ideally, the puffy white clouds each mark the top of a thermal, and we fly eagerly toward their ice-cream architecture when we see it. Practically, though, each may only mark the spot where a thermal recently petered out.

The areas between clouds we call "blue holes," and they are often, but not always, devoid of lift. When we find lift between the clouds, we call it a "blue thermal" and hardly know whether to trust it. We'd rather head for a nice active cue, if there's one within reach.

On the hottest days, we're glad to circle under the shade of a fine, fat cue. Sailplanes can be stuffy. Their extreme streamlining ensures that they'll be cramped, of course (you wear these planes), but it also means that there will be poor ventilation. An air vent, from an aerodynamic point of view, is an ugly pockmark in the ship's smooth skin. Its effect even has an ugly name: parasitic drag. So the vents tend to be an inadequate afterthought. We carry water bottles like road-racing bicyclists, sucking them to replace the sweat.

Sometimes the clouds line up along the sky, with lift beneath each one; we call them cloudstreets and we love to cruise along them. At their best, they provide nearly continuous lift. We don't have to circle, just soar serenely along. The only problem is that they may be one-way streets that tempt a pilot far from home where he has to fight his way back and may not make it; that's what happened to the Judge.

When a cloud starts building height, we start to watch it warily; this "vertical overdevelopment" is a thunderstorm in embryo. The same hot, breezy days that make soaring a delight breed storms seemingly from nowhere. These "air mass" thunderstorms are not part of a front, and they may not last very long, but as any prairie dweller knows, they are hellacious killers, full of lightning, hail, and wind.

Such storms are perfectly capable of grabbing a small airplane and shaking it to death, shredding it as it is sucked up thousands of feet in a few minutes. There have been survivors of such incidents, but the odds are a long way from sporting.

Storms, of course, are a fairly rare hazard, easy to see and avoid. Wind we have always with us, sometimes helping us, sometimes thwarting us, but always part of us in a way you can never know while standing firm upon the ground. This is because unlike a sailboat, a sailplane is part of its medium. We sail not on, but in our ocean. The air does more than bear us up; it bathes us coolly, constantly, over all our surfaces.

We have no contact with an adjacent element, as a boat does constantly, with the brief, dramatic exceptions of takeoffs and landings. Even then, in contact with the ground, we fly: our only controls carve our path from air, not earth: we steer with wings, not wheels.

A boat is of the sea, the stubborn surface. We are of the air. Aloft in a plane, we are part of the wind, one with its motion. We notice it no more that a fish notices the movement of the water in his river. The only "wind" we pay attention to in flying is the relative wind, the motion of the air over our wings. That stays the same whichever way we turn, so long as we keep the plane's nose at the same attitude.

Our motion over the ground, however, is intimately related to the wind. If we wish to fly from A to B, we may have to aim upwind at C to get there, and the wind at the surface affects our takeoff and landing. We can and do fly directly into the wind. A sailplane's ability to do so is called penetration, and the best of them penetrate like needles. Even so, reading the wind is at the heart of airmanship, because it will determine how quickly we move over the ground.

All this takes quite a bit of attention while we're busy climbing up a thermal. The art of soaring is largely the art of thermaling, flying a constant series of continuous circles, a spiral upward through the sky. We do this by locating the thermal —finding the invisible—by using the variometer, a very sensitive version of the rate-of-climb or vertical speed indicator found in any airplane. The behavior of this instrument's needle tells us the behavior of the invisible air, and it varies constantly as we spiral. We tend to glue our eyes to the vario, glancing up and out and around, searching for traffic and clouds, and only incidentally looking down. Meanwhile, the wind is moving the whole air mass—hell, the wind is the air mass—and us, serenely across the landscape. In a plane with poor penetration, like our rather slab-sided trainer, this could easily sweep us out of range of home. Still, it's surprising how little time we spend looking down.

Thermaling demonstrates one of the central paradoxes of unpowered, soaring flight. In gliding, we are always descending, however gently, even as we gain altitude. We rise with the rising mass of air, through which we are always gliding downward. The air, and we, rise faster than our glide rate, and so the altimeter turns merrily clockwise as we soar farther and farther from the surface. We store the Sun's energy, borrowed from the heated air, in the form of altitude, and pay it out in time aloft. I like the physics of it: all our forward motion is the grim pull of gravity, smoothed and put to use by our wings.

This intimacy with the air is the first half of airmanship. The other is our relation to the aircraft. Pilots are a practical lot, but they have moments of poetic insight, too. Very early in my training several of them told me that at some sweet moment I would "feel that I was part of the plane" or that "the plane would feel like part of me." The metaphor will work either way, of course. And one sweet day it came true:

We were thermaling, Charlie and I, and I was working a hot summer thermal that showed as much as 1000 feet per minute climb: a boomer. Then, as thermals will do sometimes, it kicked me out: whooshed up so fast it leveled my wings and steered me straight out to the surrounding still air. I thought, "Damn! It lifted my wing!" And even as I thought this, the meaning seized me: it lifted my wing, my literal wing. And acting on behalf of the plane of which I was a part, or which was part of me, I dipped my wing back into that invisible fountain of airy energy and resumed our climb. From that instant I began to be a pilot.

Not long thereafter, reading one of the dozens of books on flying I carted home from the bookstores and the library, I found this quotation from Wilbur Wright, describing how it feels to fly: "More than anything else, the sensation is one of perfect peace, mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you conceive of such a combination."

But oh, what a long road to that serenity. First I had to learn to take off in a glider and ride it on tow into the sky. My friends, let me tell you that learning to fly behind a towplane is the single most hair-raising thing I have ever done. I will not bore you with the things that were almost as bad. I heard one of the tow pilots complain of another student, "He was all over the sky like a horsefly on a string." I cringed; he could have been talking about one of my better rides. I was hopeless, and Charlie must have been near to giving up on me many times, though he is of the never-a-discouraging-word school of pedagogy. It takes about four minutes to pull (in my case, drag) a glider to 2000 feet. I got so I would rather have hung on a hook for four minutes than try to follow that towplane one more time. I was afraid that all I was doing was learning to repeat my errors. And not to be overly dramatic about it, mistakes during towing can get everyone in both planes killed.

One blessed day the curse was lifted. From being a rodeo ride, the tow flight settled into a fast but manageable dance, with a logic and rhythm that were merely difficult and no longer impossible. I have no idea why the change took place. I could give you some Californiate claptrap about Zen in the Art of Aviation and claim that I had achieved satori, but I really don't believe in Enlightenment on the cheap. I can tell you I was grateful for it, though, whatever it was.

From then on, little by little, I made enough progress that Charlie, that old windbag, once said: "I think you're starting to get the hang of it." I took that to mean that I was turning into a hell of an aviator, if only a little at a time.

Finally, one cloudy fall day, ceiling 2500 feet, visibility five miles in haze, wind five knots out of the South, we flew a pattern tow: just up to 800 feet, enough altitude to put us in the landing pattern. I brought the ship down nicely, stopping right in position for another takeoff. Charlie got out and started fiddling with the seat belts in the rear seat. The towplane rolled up and swung its tail around for us. I swivelled around in my seat; Charlie had stowed the rear seat belts out of the way. He wasn't going with me.

He cleared his throat and said, "You go ahead and take it by yourself this time. Just land the same way as you just did and you'll be all right. Remember you won't go quite as fast with less weight, so add a little extra airspeed in the pattern if it looks like you'll need it." I nodded and mumbled something that included "thank you," and he walked off to gather up the tow rope. He hitched me up and leveled my wing for me, running the first few steps with it as the towplane snatched me off for my first solo flight.

I would no more describe my thoughts and feelings during my solo than you would describe your wedding night, and for the same reasons involving modesty and privacy. But I will tell you that I reflected on what flying had come to mean to me: what it had carried me toward, and what it had enabled me to leave behind.

And I will tell you that as I prepared to enter the landing pattern, I recalled what another pilot had told me: Your first solo landing will probably be the best one you'll ever make. Truth to tell, it wasn't bad. I stopped smoothly with the wings level right about where we're supposed to stop, an easy pull to the starting point for another flight. Charlie strolled out smiling. I popped the canopy open and called, "Hey, Mister, is this where you wanted your airplane?" He grinned and said, "I guess that will do." I looked at my stopwatch: 14 minutes 51 seconds.

So now I was a pilot, albeit a very new one. Each time I fly, I learn new things about the air and my relationship with it and my aircraft, and my love for it grows the more I learn.

Airmanship: that word again. All pilots learn it, but I suspect that sailplane pilots really do learn it more deeply. Many years ago I read Thor Heyerdahl's book Kon-Tiki, and I remember vividly his descriptions of the immediacy with which he saw the living things of the ocean from his raft. "A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen," he wrote. "Another may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the sea, too. We usually plow across it with roaring engines and piston strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on the ocean."

And so with soaring. We float silently along, a part of the air, a part of the fauna of the sky, watching the patchwork land that lies beneath us like a rumpled quilt. If we are patient and alert, we may see much else. Once while thermaling, I looked at our inside wingtip. Just beyond it, precisely across our circle from us, traveling in the same direction at the same speed, was a buzzard, sharing our thermal companionably. "Look, Charlie," I said. We watched him together as we made several more turns in the thermal; he stayed with us, his wings banked at the same angle as ours, rising at the same rate of climb. Finally he leveled off and sailed away. "That's really something," Charlie said. The old chatterbox.

© Paul J. Sampson