You don’t see the cold air rushing over the wings, there are no tyre tracks or a foaming trail to show you you are in fact travelling through something “solid”, but somehow this bulk of a machine manages to stay up there, seemingly not dropping a single foot.
After the engine falls silent, and the spinning magician which brought us up there stops turning, I’m not scared.
It’s strange, but somehow you feel and trust that you’re safer here than in your car on the speedway.
A fear of descending speedily, and suddenly being halted in a mushroom of smoke and amber, never comes up. (It sounds graphic I admit, but it really never comes up during the flight).
Luckily, I have been taken under the wing of many an Airbus or Boeing in my life, and I’ve never had a fear of flying.
On the contrary, I was excited to break my small-aircraft virginity in order to experience – closer than ever – what flight is about.
And so, I went to Springs Airfield in (you guessed it) Springs.
It is home to, among others, the East Rand Gliding Club.
The motor glider that carried me and instructor Trevor Perkel up, is called a Motor Falke – a craft of German design.
The plane hearkens back to the days of the world wars, with the first featuring wooden frames covered in cloth.
Mike Nel, one of the club’s members and a Lakefield resident (we had to bring the Benoni connection in somehow), pointed out that one of the fastest and most successful aircraft of the Second World War was the de Havilland Mosquito, a British fighter-bomber built from wood.
He admits modern materials and composites offer better physical performance, but wood and cloth work just fine for this baby (the Falke).
The idea behind adding an engine to a gilder craft, is multi-pronged.
While standing in the scarce sun drops on the cold Saturday morning, Nel told me a glider (no engine) is a completely different exercise.
“It takes about five people to get it into the air because you need a safety officer, someone to operate the tow or fly the towing plane, someone to taxi it to the take-off strip, and so on,” he said.
“With a motor on it, you just need an instructor to check the safety precautions, and the pilot to fly, that’s it.”
The plane has a longer wing span than a normal aircraft because it needs more surface area in order to glide.
The club members said the average motor glider has a gliding ratio of 1 to 20, meaning it will glide 20 times farther than it is high – on a good day.
In comparison, some lightweight aeroplanes have a gliding ratio of 1 to 6, which Nel claims is also the glide ratio of an outhouse shot from a canon. (In other words, bad).
Anyway, back to the flight.
Everything is different up there.
You see the houses, cars, mines, hills and people as if you were looking at the scale model city your wife told you to get rid of because your son can’t afford his own apartment anymore.
With the engine on, it is noisy, but that’s what the headset and radio are for.
I even flew for a moment… Nothing to it! You just have to know how aerodynamics work and which way you’re going without a GPS. Just control the fear that you might tip the plane in panic, and listen to the instructor intently.
It’s complicated but so much fun.
The club members tell me success all depends on the person and how fast he or she learns.
“Some can go solo after 20 hours’ flight time, others a bit longer,” Nel said.
The one drawback to the experience was that I felt ever so slightly nauseated while flying, but kept it down, besides, they say that disappears after a few flights anyway.
While sipping my coffee with the guys of the club, I ended up staying later than I thought I would because they divulged story after story of their adventures as a club.
They are a really ‘lekker’ bunch of ‘okes’ (to give another Benoni connection).
I’m definitely in for my first lesson soon.
I wonder what a girl would think if I asked her on a flight for a date…
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