LIKE THAT GUY

One morning near the end of my rookie season I noticed a tow pilot kneeled beside the cockpit of our single seat glider. Until then I'd never seen him fly anything but the tow plane and supposed that, like most tow pilots sadly, he had little interest in soaring. Walking closer, I found him disconnecting the instruments and asked why. "First chance to go soaring weeks," he said,"and I fly better when I'm not tempted to look inside." The idea of soaring without instruments was foreign to me as a beginner, but intriguing. I watched his flight with interest while waiting my turn for launch. He hopped off tow below others in a thermal, promptly outclimbed them all and was first to leave the area – for the whole day as it turned out. I wanted to discuss his bare bones concept with others, but assumed it involved a technical violation of one kind or another so stayed mum. (The statute of limitations kicked in more than thirty years ago and I forgot his name soon after, sorry to say, so this is hardly tales out of school.)My flight? Forty minutes of mostly coming down. There was a lot of that that day and well before five o'clock the whole fleet had returned – except you know who, whom nobody'd seen for hours. Someone expressed worry, but the tow pilot filling in for him shrugged it off while securing his bird for the night. "He'll be back when he gets hungry. Lunatic did call for a fifty-mile retrieve last year just before sundown, but he won't make that mistake twice."I was hungry already and decided to head for home. Before climbing into my pickup though, I stared up into the empty sky and vowed I'd someday learn to fly like that guy! Then twenty minutes up the road I glimpsed a flash in the air, identified the missing sailpane and pulled over to watch. He was low, and it being so late the climb was slow, but eventually he rolled out on final glide. Hungry at last. So that's how I got this way. Witnessing his example that one time imparted a unique trajectory to my own soaring career. Now forty years later I fly bare bones routinely, relying on sight and sound and feel in favor of expensive, complex and distracting gizmos. Honestly, other than checking the altimeter every minute or so, I'm usually too busy scanning actual information out there in the real world to look inside. When I do check the instruments against perception it's seldom more than confirmation of the obvious. (Audio? What a useless annoyance! If a phone refused to stop ringing I'd either unplug the thing or stuff it in a sock.)While most folks deplore such heresy, occasionally I persuade someone to participate in a demonstration. We leave the panel intact to be legal of course, but no regulation says we can't tuck a dark rag over it and go fly with our feathers out like the Almighty intended. It's a return to roots thing, like swimming in the buff or... well, you know.  My companions on such flights always find it easier than expected, and (shh, keep this secret) far more pleasant as well. YOU however, can never learn to fly with such freedom – unless you try...