For my birthday this year, Noa arranged for my first glider flight in israel. i haven’t flown in 3 years, and haven’t really flown in about 6. i would go on one flight ever christmas with my dad or an instructor, but that would be it. Since i graduated university i have not been very serious about flying.
Anyways, we left early on friday morning to drive to Be’er Sheva in the south, where one of israel’s glider clubs is.
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It was about an hour and a half drive from tel aviv. when we got there there was a little confusion about where we should go, so we walked around the airport some. apparently this airfield is a large centre for sky diving, and just as we were walking by, this big thing passed us by.
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eventually we figured out we were supposed to go the one end of the runway, and we found the gliders.
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everyone was really nice, asking how long i have been flying, and what we are doing here. there was only one instructor, and he had some check flights to do. so we sat around in the sun with a nice breeze for about an hour and a half after we got there at 11. we were hoping that the sun would warm the ground more, so that we would get some thermals. we would know around 1 if this was likely at all. so i took pictures
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luckily there was a glider field puppy to play with too.
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and there were a ton of hawks flying around. they were catching some small thermals, but were not getting very high either.
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all kinds of interesting things happening
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eventually we decided it was never going to be great gliding weather today, and so we would take one of the more high performance gliders up. thanks to Noa for all the following photographs while i was flying.
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it was a pretty rough take off. i am really rusty. but once i got in the air things settled down a bit and i got a handle on flying again. we ended up flying for about 20 min or so towards be’er sheva, and then back around and landing. the landing was a little sketchy, because as we were coming around to go on downwind, we hit sink and lost 3oom. the instructor took over and radioed in that he was taking emergency actions, which means instead of landing on the end were they usually land, he was landing on the closer part of the runway to us.
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Noa got a picture as we were just turning from base to final.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience, and it made me really want to get my butt in gear again once we are a little more settled to start flying again. the instructor was confident that i could solo again in about 10 flights, which was encouraging.
so im hoping for more glider flying adventures in the future.