Gliding in the Patchwork of my Life!
by Allan Armistead
At 9,000 feet with a steady beep from the vario, the late afternoon sun low in the sky, and nary a ripple in the air.
I feel sorry for people who don't fly. You see them all the time walking along the street, eyes fixed firmly on the footpath. Oblivious to the ever changing sky.
Aeroplanes have always been a part of my life, though I seldom articulate my deepest thoughts on flying. On the first day of winter, I managed to get out of the tug late in the afternoon and take GAS into the wave. The flight was one of those therapeutic experiences, marvellous for cleansing the soul. Kind of like a stint on the wave ski in an uncrowded, not too boisterous winter surf, or a cruise through the trees on fresh powder snow, or a run up Clyde Mountain in the Porsche very early in the morning with no other traffic on the road.
I don't understand all the fuss about Sydney and flight paths. I grew up right under the east-west runway approaches and used to watch in fascination as the DC3s and 4s and 6s flew low overhead. Then came the Electras and the 707s. If I climbed to the top of the Hills Hoist I could watch them almost to the runway threshold. My reading was The Dam Busters and Reach For The Sky and anything else to do with the war in the air. Sundays were control line models in Centennial Park. After school it was on the bike and down to Mascot, to get a friendly ANA mechanic to show me through a DC3 in the hangar. Even when I took up surf board riding my crystal set was invaluable in deciding whether to get up at the crack of dawn to get the light offshore breezes that made for the glassy waves, or pull the covers back over - I listened to the ATIS!
It was inevitable that I would be a pilot. Then one day a guy came to our high school doing vocational guidance tests, and showed me a book with pages of coloured dots which made numbers. Or at least, he said they did, I couldn't find them! Quite dispassionately he told me that I had a red-green colour problem and would never be a pilot, but the tests indicated that I would be a good bank clerk. Banking didn't appeal and I became a Civil Engineer.
When I finished at university, the (then) DMR sent me to Wentworth (near Mildura) where the opening greeting from the Works Engineer was "welcome - what are you doing on the weekend?". He was president of the Sunraysia Gliding Club. So in December 1965 I found myself in a Kookaburra on the end of a winch cable and thinking as the slack was taken up "what on earth am I doing here?", then the ground fell away and I was hooked.
I soloed at Mildura and moved into the Kingfisher, but never quite made it to the Ka6, which was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I remember one memorable flight in the Kookaburra when I winched straight into a thermal that was still taking me up at 10,000', complete with barograph, and I thought 10,000 was a good round number and as others were waiting I would go back down and give them a turn. Only later did I realise that gold height was in my reach - others got it that day. I still haven't.
I left Wentworth for Yass in early 1967, and remember going out to Gundaroo one day to visit the Canberra club but for reasons that now escape me I never joined. Then on to Sydney for a couple of years - a newborn son and getting to Camden made it all too difficult - and I was lost to gliding until December 1969 when I moved to Nowra and one of the local surveyors introduced me to RANGA where I flew as an "applicant member" for some time until a vacancy came up in the (strictly limited) civilian membership quota.
I was at Nowra for 16 years, and went through many changes in my life. One child became four, all of whom were introduced into gliding at an early age. My first marriage fell apart, and a new relationship formed and I married again. Though my beloved Margaret enjoyed the odd flight with me, her real love was quilting, and to my eternal gratitude she merged the two. I obtained my PPL, converted to the Super Cub and towing, which led to a rapid decline in my time in gliders. But I at last managed to fly a Ka6, convert to both aerotow and truck launching, get off on a few camps and do some cross country flying.
I took myself off to Narromine in the days when the Jantar was just about the newest and hottest standard class glider around and did my 300 and 500ks in one - IZV. There had always been those special times in the air when I found the sky to be peaceful, the clouds soft and gentle, and my soul let free, but the 500k was an experience like no other. After seeming doomed to outland under an overcast sky when almost in reach of Narromine, a weak thermal appeared and took me to 4000' and home. Such was the exhilaration that for the first time I shed tears in the cockpit - it was not to be the last. Though my 500k was "BM" (before Margaret), on the wall in my office hangs a quilt which she made commemorating that moment, the silhouette of the Jantar on the landscape with the faintest of cu quilted above it. My most precious personal possession is a small solid gold glider on a gold chain that she had hand made for my 40th, complete with "Jantar Standard 2" and "VH-IZV" engraved on it.
When Margaret and I came to Canberra in 1986, I fairly promptly joined the CGC and got myself sorted out into the Pawnee, and apart from an absence from the scene through much of 1994 when Margaret was in the hardest part of her fight with cancer, I have been in the air at Bunyan fairly regularly - more so in the Pawnee than the gliders. I have had many memorable days there (and some best forgotten). When I lost her in that October, gliding became one of the cornerstones holding my life together.
As a tuggie, I enjoy most of all those days of gentle breezes and a lowish, scattered cloudbase with the tows going above and the descents between the clouds. Without sacrificing "situational awareness", there are some moments to just enjoy the beauty of it all away from the earthly cares, with the shadow of the tug in a rainbow thrown on the cloud.
As a glider pilot, it is the peace of the wave, which takes me back where this story began. At 9,000 feet with a steady beep from the vario, the late afternoon sun low in the sky, and nary a ripple in the air. A moment to reflect on the meaning of life, to be close to my soul mate and to shed another tear in the cockpit.
