learned to fly in the Schweizer 2-33 glider, an ungainly looking contraption from the outside but a virtuous trainer, strict but fair, rewarding but not indulgent-lots of thises but not thats. I flew it for years, usually from the back seat, giving rides to the curious.

During the several months I flew the 2-33 as a student, first with my patient instructors and then by myself, I did so with somewhat divided loyalties. I loved old Tubby the Trainer, but I itched to leave her behind. I wanted to fly a single-place plane, the kind no instructor could nurse me through: just me in the tiny cockpit, alone with whatever skills I had managed to acquire.

All the really hot gliders are single seaters. The one I had my eye on was luke-warm at best: the Schweizer 1-26. When I was about to graduate to it from the 1-26, an older pilot told me: “You’ll love it. It’s like going from a Volkswagen to a sports car.” Another pilot snorted and said: “More like going from a Volkswagen Bus to a Volkswagen Beetle.”

The sarcasm was wasted on me; I was in love. I had fallen for the 1-26 the first time I saw it on the flight line, and I love it still. Some people find this hard to understand, because it’s such a homely little plane. Never mind; love is blind to the point of perversity. It’s not just that I love it, warts and all. I love it in spite of the fact that it’s more wart than face.

Comparatively speaking, that is. Please remember that you usually see a glider at a gliderport, and most of the gliders there are likely to be breathtaking sculptures of fiberglass, gleaming and seamless, without a gram of needless matter anywhere. Their wings are long and thin as swordblades. You could convince a child that they come from another, wiser world.

Set among these bone-white beauties are the 1-26s, any color or several colors at once, riffraff mingling with the quality. Their wings are shorter by 10 or 15 feet than the glass birds, and stubbier, wider, too. No high-tech T-tails, either: just a big rounded stabilizer with its rudder attached by very visible hinges, like a door on a shed. Rivets studding the wing surfaces like hobnails on a boot! Ribs showing like a birdcage through the fabric of its skin! Why, these things are made of cloth!

Yes, and aluminum, and steel, and even some fiberglass for the nose cone. They really do look a little like home projects, garage jobs, compared to the high-performance machines.

But take another look. Seen by itself, it isn’t all that bad. The lines, in fact, are classic airplane lines with perfectly respectable pedigrees. There are fighter planes in its ancestry, and not too many ancestors ago. Look at it from the properly wrong angle in poor enough light and you’ll see an F-80.

Or so I thought when I first saw it, stricken sick with love as I was there on the flight line. That one, I told myself. I want to fly that one.

That first day, I watched some wizards work wonders with the 1-26. The Texas Soaring Association has some of the best 1-26 pilots in the world, as it happens. David Mockler, many times national champion in the class, could probably skywrite with it. I saw him fly that day in his dark-green bird The Pickle, the ship Neil Armstrong owned in pre-lunar days. I watched David land it by skimming the length of the runway in ground effect, a handspan off the surface.

All that Summer, as I plodded through the sky in the trainer, I watched the 1-26 pilots playing all around me. I watched Dave Mockler nose up, kick rudder, and drop a thousand feet in a spin and fly away dead level on his original course, just his way of getting down to landing pattern altitude. As a newly soloed student, I turned slowly in my 2-33 in a thermal at 5,000 feet and watched Arjen Hensens leave the same thermal just below me, streak half a mile away, and pull up and over in a perfect loop. I watched the ordinary weekend pilots take the club’s shabby 1-26s upward past me in the thermals, turning tighter and slower than I dared in the trainer. I watched them fly out of sight on cross-country trips that seemed as daring as Magellan’s voyage. I watched them and learned what is meant by the expression “a personal airplane”: they took that little ship and wrote poems with it. I was in love with it before I ever sat in its tiny cockpit.

Finally, I convinced an instructor that I was ready to fly it. As is customary on such occasions, a small crowd assembled to give me the benefit of their advice. No two agreed, but I resolved to follow the last instruction, no matter what it was, to avoid confusion. Somebody helped me sort out the seat and shoulder belts, somebody else lifted the tail while another advisor leveled the wings and a fourth one assured me that this was what the proper landing attitude would look like. I nodded every time anyone said anything. The last thing anyone told me was to remember that the ship was more pitch-sensitive than I was used to. The rope went tight. I wagged the rudder and punched up my stopwatch.

The glider was airborne before we had rolled 50 feet. The 1-26 weighs maybe half as much as the trainer, and its stalling speed is very slow. It begins to fly at about 28 MPH; we already had half of that in headwind.

The towplane needs about 55 MPH before it will fly, so I had what seemed like a pretty long wait before it joined me in the air. That gave me time to find out what the fellow meant about pitch sensitivity. That means that any back or forward movement on the control stick translated into up or down movement of the nose very promptly. It also means that a novice 1-26 pilot has a hell of a time avoiding a series of vertical swoops along the runway just getting out of the airport. They call it porpoising, or P.I.O., for Pilot Induced Oscillation. I forget what I called it at the time.

I do remember saying, as the towplane finally broke ground and climbed out: “This thing’s a rocket!” This was partly because that particular tow pilot has a habit of steep takeoffs; I suspect he has aircraft carrier fantasies. But mostly it’s just that the 1-26 is a very lively piece of machinery compared to the trainer.

Within a very few minutes I decided that the sports car comparison was apt. Not some road rocket like a Ferrari, mind you; more like the classic British sports cars, MG or Austin-Healy perhaps. There is an important difference, however. The Schweizer 1-26 is a perfectly serviceable airplane. The classic British roadsters were by any rational standards dreadful pieces of junk, fragile deathtraps prone to maladjustment and decay.

But those old ragtops handled beautifully, didn’t they? And so does the 1-26; you could almost say it corners well. In appearance, too, there’s some of the same charm of the miniature, the appeal of the runt, the mutt with the Thoroughbred’s heart. It would drive a perfectionist nuts.

The old sports cars were poor man’s racers, no top speed but very competitive among themselves. So’s the 1-26. In fact, it was designed as a racer. Ever since the 1930s, sailplane pilots have been trying to get their sport into the Olympics. To do so, they would have to agree on a single design that could be made cheaply anywhere in the world. They are still looking. The 1-26 is about as close as anyone has come.

Introduced in 1954 and offered either as a kit or a finished airplane, it was made in various models for more than 20 years. Nearly 800 of them were built and most of them are still flying. The oldest of them can race successfully against the newest. Every one of them has the same performance rating: a glide ratio of 23 to 1. Depending on your attitude, this is either laughably bad or an exhilarating challenge; the high-performance ships have glide rations of 35 to 1 or better. In any case, it’s the same for all 1-26 jockeys.

This is the same idea as in sailboat racing, where all the boats of one design are so similar in performance that only the wiles of the skippers ought to influence the outcome. I’m no sailor, but I’m told this is largely hogwash; all boats differ enormously even before the cheating starts. Not so with the 1-26. They’re all turkeys.

“You’re never fat in a 1-26,” says one of my fellow 1-26 drivers, and so say all of us. Unless you are within gliding distance of the airport, you are never more than five minutes from an off-field landing unless you find some lift. A thermal, an upward whiff of wind over a ridge-you’d better find something pretty often if you hope to make it around a racecourse in a 1-26.

This makes it a “pilot’s airplane,” meaning that pilot skill is nearly all the difference in performance. Every good glider pilot is a good airman, of course, but the 1-26 gives you an extra incentive to learn to read the sky.

It’s a character builder for sure. While to rich folks zip around in their glass gliders at 110 knots, pausing only at the strongest thermals to replenish their altitude, the poor but honest 1-26 pilot pokes along at half that speed, liberally basted in sweat and grateful for anything that will keep him aloft. Zero sink-lift so weak it only balances out the glider’s natural loss of altitude-can feel like heaven’s own blessing, and you soon learn to nurse it thriftily, playing delicately with airspeed and bank angle to find the best possible attitude as you search for altitude. The air is never quite still, and zero sink may improve just enough to lift your ship a few feet per circle and let you limp along in search of something better.

Actually, this is where the little bird shines. The 1-26 will climb about as well as any glider. Its light weight -less than 400 pounds empty- may be less than half that of a big fiberglass racer, and the rising air has less work to do in lifting it. Just as importantly, it can fly very slowly. Straight ahead, it can crawl along at about 28 MPH without stalling, and even in a medium bank you can keep it down to 32 or so. That means a careful pilot can keep the 1-26 in a very small circle, riding a weak and tiny thermal, where a faster glider will have to fly a bigger circle and fall out of the area of lifting air.

But flying tight circles at the ragged edge of stalling is the classic way to kill yourself in an airplane. The problem is that a turning stall is the beginning of a spin. Now, a spin is no big deal, assuming you know how to recover from it and have enough air under you to do so. But if you’re down to 500 feet, trying to work a failing thermal, and the last time you saw a spin was from the grandstand at an air show…well, it could spoil your day.

I don’t mean to imply that the 1-26 tempts you to take stupid chances. Actually, it’s a friendly airplane. It doesn’t mind flying close to its limits, and it tells you plainly what the limits are: not a sneaky bone in its body. It talks to you with a good audible whoosh when you’re up to cruising speeds, and when its voice dies away, it’s whispering to remind you to push the nose down a bit to prevent a stall. It even rattles before it strikes: the control stick vibrates a bit before the stall. Finally, all you need to do to break a stall is relax, let the stick go forward a little, and you’re flying again.

It’s pretty agile, too. Gliders don’t make good stunt planes. Their wings are too long to let them roll fast, for one thing. The relatively short wings of the 1-26 make it a lot more responsive in a turn than many more elaborate ships. In fact, the handbook on it describes the 1-26 as “fully aerobatic.” My conscience demands that I tell you not to take this very seriously. Most fancy maneuvers make the plane speed up. The red-line speed of the 1-26 is only about 100 MPH, and it wouldn’t take much messing around to exceed it. This tends to make the wings fall off. That’s why they paint the line red.

But within any sensible limits, it’s a sweet plane to handle. Every touch on the controls produces a predictable result, with no lag between input and response. You don’t have to horse it around the sky; it likes to fly.

It keeps you busy, though. A lot of airplanes will more or less keep doing what they’re doing without much attention. A light and touch-sensitive airplane like the 1-26 keeps you aware of the logic of flight. If you do this, then that will happen every time under the same conditions. But the sky is never still, and we fly from one set of givens to another in our own length. You are never not flying the 1-26. It will obey, but you must keep instructing it. It weighs too little to have the memory of much momentum, each new gust can slap it out of line.

There are much worse planes to handle I recall one glider we had at our club for a while, a huge British two-seater called the Slingsby T-53. It took intense, unremitting concentration to fly the damn thing in a straight line. It would wear you out.

Not so the 1-26. Little touches on the stick, little love-pats really, plus gentle pressure on the rudder pedals; you needn’t try to overpower it or “show it who’s boss.” It only asks to be guided, to have its attention focused. It’s not hard work; it’s just that you’re always busy.

So, you may have noticed, is a bird. He’s not doing hard, exhausting labor, but he’s busy all the time he’s flying. I’ve watched a bird in a thermal, he was doing the same dance I was doing, twisting his tail to keep his turn coordinated as the playful air kept changing his bank by a feather or two. The tail twitched up, down and sideways, now rudder, now elevator, usually both together. As well as I could, I did the same things to my airplane’s tail. Even acting through the long linkage of stick and pedals, you learn to feel the air in a little ship like the 1-26. That’s what we mean by calling it a personal airplane: it extends you into the air and enables you to fly.

There is one control on the 1-26 that never works. Nevertheless, I have found a use for it, and I offer it here as my own modest contribution to the art of 1-26 aviation. It concerns the trim handle.

Most airplanes have some kind of doohickey to keep them flying in the same direction at the same speed when you let go of the controls to do something else, like eat or drink or try in vain to fold your map neatly. This device is called the trim. On most airplanes it works. On the 1-26 it has no effect whatever. None. You may take my word for this. I would not lie.

The trim control on the 1-26 is a simple T-handle protruding from the right lower edge of the instrument panel. You are supposed to pull it out and turn it, and this is supposed to apply pressure to the control stick and keep it in the same position, either forward or back, and thus keep the speed constant. Forget it. Instead, use the trim handle to compensate for the fact that there is no storage space in the tiny cockpit. Hang something from it. Hang your camera, your sunglasses, your lunch-whatever would otherwise fall down under the panel and be lost beyond retrieval behind the rudder pedals. There. A sue for the 1-26 trim handle. Don’t thank me. It’s my pleasure to serve you.

For all its built-in limits, the 1-26 has done some mighty deeds. The world’s glider endurance record, 36 hours, was posted in a 1-26 by a relentlessly determined gentleman named Geza Vass. He trained for his feat by sitting in a chair for 13, then 21, and finally 27 hours without getting up or falling asleep. He also switched his diet to low-bulk foods. Ahem.

Mr. Vass, who lived in Hawaii, stocked his glider with cigarettes, coffee, fruit, sandwiches, chocolate bars-I bet he hung most of it on the trim handle-and took off at 5:40 AM on July 9, 1961. He returned 36 hours later, having soared by sunlight, moonlight and starlight along the windward ridges of the Koolau Mountain Range, back and forth on a 40-mile track. There were stretches of real fear; just after sunset, the wind died away and with it the lifting effect of the ridge, and he flew for an hour in zero sink and light rain.

There were also moments of pure delight. Mr. Vass told of one sight that perhaps no other glider pilot has ever seen: sunrise over the Pacific from the cockpit.

“The whole scene had the atmosphere of a fresco in some Italian chapel,” he wrote in the 1-26 Association magazine. “Cloud edges spraying sunbeams in every direction, the sky aquamarine blue close to the horizon, blending into deeper blue above me. Below, the water dark and silent and limitless.

“The wings of my faithful ’26 bathed in two tomes of floating gold. Smooth and dark where the airflow was laminar, and brighter behind the spar where the airflow switched to turbulent.”

Mr. Vass also reported a detail that says a lot to me about the ability of the 1-26 to interact with its pilot: “Sometimes I let the controls go and the sailplane flew by herself. By sliding a little fore and aft, I managed to keep her flying for as long as six minutes without touching the controls.”

So far as I know, nobody has tried to better Mr. Vass’s record; he took it with him when he soared off to where good glider pilots go hereafter. I am willing to bet that someone else is flying his 1-26, though. They may not improve with age, but they don’t seem to deteriorate much either.

Some years ago, there was a polka that contained the tender sentiment: “She’s not very much good for pretty, but she’s pretty much good for strong.” It’s not a compliment you’d give a lady to her face, and I wouldn’t stand upwind of a 1-26 when I said it, but it can be said affectionately, even to an airplane.

And we really do love our funny looking airplanes, we 1-26 pilots, make no mistake about that. And they love us back.

They really do, you know. And do you know why?

Because we take them dancing.

© Paul J. Sampson