What Soaring Is To Me

A friend asked for a short story on what soaring was to me, to help secure funding to make gliding accessible to others. Thought I'd share it here:

Soaring To Me

Circling With Another Glider

Imagine that you are free as a bird. You are a mile high, silently circling on a beautiful clear spring day, gaining altitude every turn. Slightly below you there is another sleek engineless aircraft taking advantage of the same thermal (a pocket of rising air). You gently move the joystick left and right, banking the aircraft to try to hit the centre of the rising air. You glance at the instruments being mindful of airspeed, rate of climb, and the other glider. The more altitude we gain the longer we stay up! Your instructor, a friend in the back seat, is getting great photos of the other glider that is piloted by another club member. You see and fly with birds, and climb to the base of puffy cotton-ball clouds. You notice tiny dinky-toy cars creeping along a highway, and little towns a mile below. You constantly remain aware of your location, so you can always make it home. Two hours later, you finally give in and head toward the airfield. You steer around the traffic pattern, your instructor making the radio calls and operating the spoilers to lose altitude. You watch your speed, adjusting it by raising and lowering the nose. You line up on the runway, gently pull back on the stick to round out as the field nears, and grease the landing! What a perfect day!

Soon you are confined to your cumbersome electric wheelchair. You are no longer a pilot. You are once again a quadriplegic, dependent on help from others. But you have tasted two hours of total freedom, soaring with birds and other pilots, silently sailing the sky from cloud to cloud a mile above those poor earth-bound creatures that know not that experience. Nothing can wipe the grin off your face or erase the memory.

That is soaring to me.

Kary Wright

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Fly Like You're In The Cockpit!

Stylish Goggles Hey?

Okay, I have to award my wife another goody point (not sure what she's going to do with them all, but looking forward to finding out!). For my birthday, she got me a set of goggles. Now these aren’t ordinary goggles, they don’t just keep the wind off your eyes, make you look stylish, keep the water out of your eyes etc. etc. etc. These goggles allow you to experience flight as if you are inside your quad copter!

In The Zone LOL

She really knocked one out of the park when she bought me the quad copter, and now the goggles to allow you to experience flying from inside of it! It only took minutes to set up, it linked immediately to the quad copter.

I did a couple of flights the other day of combines harvesting in the field, it is the video in the previous post, and after the flights when I flipped the goggles up and was back in the real world, I was actually dizzy for a few seconds as if I had been in the air! I had been inside the copter zooming, spinning, flying low/high/slow/fast with full instrumentation ... all from my electric wheelchair hundreds of yards away! What a rush!

This is one way that nearly anybody can safely experience flight firsthand, it is so real that you are there in the pilot seat including altimeter, speed, distance, heading etc. What a great thing for people with disabilities!

Harvest From A Quadcopter

Noticing that combines pulling to the field the other day, I sensed a perfect opportunity to play with the drone, and proceeded to chase, circle, buzz and generally harass the folks working so hard to get the last of the crop off. On reviewing the video, I did notice some sign language from one of the drivers, which I edited out as us editors can do, and later learned it was even a relative of mine… LOL! I will have to return the favor one day, as my cousins and I often do. Here's the video edited and put to music, congratulations to the Weins family and friends for finishing the harvest of 2015!