10 • THURSDAY, July 19, 2012
www.merrittherald.com
NICOLA VALLEY NEWS
Pilots bring gliders to Merritt for flight safari By Phillip Woolgar THE HERALD
reporter@merrittherald.com
Merritt residents could see up to a dozen Vancouver Soaring Association glider planes roaming overhead this week. Pilots are bringing their planes to the Merritt Airport today (Thursday) for a flying safari, and anyone is welcome to visit and observe. After being towed by an airplane to an elevation of approximately 2,000 to 4,000 feet, a device in each aircraft detects when the air is at the optimal gliding temperature, before the glider is released from the engine plane. “Then we just go and look for thermals, which is air that’s rising because of heating down below,� said Doug Smith, a VSA member who flies an ASW 19. “We look for areas that the sun’s going to be heating the ground, so then it will heat the air next to it.� Most of the gliders don’t have an engine, so they rely on the heat to maintain their flight, soaring hundreds of kilometres from thermal pocket to thermal pocket. The pilots glide mainly in the Nicola Valley, but they could
fly to Cache Creek, Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Penticton, Princeton and Hope, keeping flight for the duration before returning to Merritt. “There are lots of different directions we can go from Merritt,� Smith said. “On one flight, one of our members did go up beyond Cache Creek and north of Kamloops and over to Salmon Arm and down south towards Penticton, but not that far south, and then came back to Merritt.� As long as there is enough thermal activity, the gliders can continue their journey — but the aircraft is occasionally grounded before reaching its destination. “You either turn around and come back or you end up landing out where you can find a field somewhere,� he said. “You always need to keep in mind that if you did run out of lift and didn’t have the height to get back to where you took off from, you might have to land out somewhere.� The gliders choose routes that have natural or airport emergency landing spots. In case of an emer-
See Soaring Page 15
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