Glider flying tips

Ok, so, I just finished watching the HoTT Fan episode.

Josh keeps saying he's bad a flying gliders. I've started with gliders, and I'm competing with hand launch gliders, and I love teaching others how to fly a glider. Here's my tips for gliding.

1. KEEP THE NOSE BELOW HORIZONTAL! A glider flies better with more speed than just barely above stalling speed. There's thousands of people who can explain the equations of why that's true. The simple way to understand this is: airfoils generate more lift with more air speed. With a glider you need to balance this nose-down attitude to keep speed with how much altitude you're losing. Ideally you find a thermal which keeps your altitude steady or climbing, but where the nose of the glider stays pointed downwards. That way when you're in a mass of climbing air, you can minimize your descent to be equal or less than the ascent of the air. Here's an image explaining how this works. Gravity (weight) in red. Wing lift in green. Ascending air speed in blue. Notice the lift is tilted, because you're moving forward. The green arrow doesn't counteract all of the vertical forces of the red - but added to the blue, the difference is 0 or positive. (Blue + Green - Red).
   

   
   
   

2. When turning, let the glider bank into the turn! Banking will let your glider generate less drag - the tails will have to move less overall, because you'll need less input on the rudder, and less input to counteract the banking on the ailerons. The tails' drag is usually not noticeable until you get to a certain skill level. But the aileron drag you should be able to notice very quickly how you're slowing down. When I'm circling a thermal - I almost only ever use rudder and elevator, and leave the ailerons alone! This is even more true when your plane has dihedral, and almost all gliders have a few degrees built in. Check out a hand-launch glider circling in this video: (DLGs fly lower and are easier to see, but bigger gliders should do the same!)
   
   
   (full video credits to the youtuber, this is not my video!)

3. Don't move the sticks unless you have to. The way to find a thermal is by finding a gentle line and let the plane follow it - when you see the plane getting bumped around (banking a wing, plane nosing down and accelerating, or simply climbing without nosing up), you're finding air currents. You need to read those. You can't read the air if you're the one bouncing the plane around - let the glider speak to you. It's like trying to hear a cat walking while talking - it won't work, unless the cat is walking on your piano. I'm not saying there aren't piano-like thermals, but they're very rare.
   
   
4. Trim the plane when the air is dead calm. You want the default trim on your glider to be completely neutral when just slightly nose down. It needs just enough nose down to maintain speed. The ideal nose-down is beyond the stalling angle. When you're trimming, find out the trim click when you're on the edge of stalling, and give it a couple or three clicks more. This strongly depends on the plane, but this really helps you. Gliders are pretty good about maintaining energy in flight, that means they don't normally slow down in turns, unless you're being very aggressive on the sticks. Be gentle, think of flying a glider as petting a kitten or puppy!
   
   
5. Keep the wing tips light. The lighter your wingtips, the easier it'll be for your glider to oscillate with turbulence because the tips will have very little momentum fighting against it. This will help you read the air currents. And keeping the glider tips and tail light means you lower the overall weight of the craft, because you'll need less weight in the shorter end of the momentum to balance it out. Josh Bixler explains this pretty well in one of the build videos (I think the FT Spitfire video, but probably in others, too). It's even more true for gliders, where having a lighter plane means you have a longer flight for a given height. Less weight means you can fly slower, which means you don't nose down as steep.

So these are just the first 5 tips to keep in mind when heading to the field with a glider. I'll post another article about reading the air to help you find and center the flight path in the thermal - it's a much longer explanation. These are just quick tips. Good thermal hunting, Josh!