30 Minutes in the Sky: Memories to Last a Lifetime.

By Ben Crosbie, photos by Tessa Moran

High in the Sky

Spinning, spinning, spinning higher and higher into the air, sometimes gaining a few hundred feet of altitude in a second, the glider climbs towards the atmosphere in a dizzying ascent. The small engine-less glider is like a toy airplane, jolting left and then right at the whim of the wind, pitching up and down without any care to the precious cargo it holds inside its hull. The blue sky is a glider’s playground. The craft strives to escape the confines of a patchwork quilt of multicolored fields and hills below.

Today I went gliding with Uzi, and the experience was far less picturesque. All I could think about was 1) how to get some good aerial shots through the canopy of the glider, and 2) how to not get vomit on our expensive XH A1 if I hurled.

Pre-Takeoff

Uzi drove us to the end of the tarmac, where a gathering of men 50 years of age and older (the gliding club) sat beneath a tent. We briefly interviewed Uzi and his fellow pilots, but I was preoccupied with the gliders that were taking flight off the nearby runway.

Shooting down the strip of asphalt while towed behind a small prop plane, the glider swayed back and forth, lifting a bit off the tarmac but then hitting the ground again. “The pilot has to maintain the glider as an extension of the plane until it is airborne, otherwise it could crash,” one of the experienced pilots says to me as I watch the plane and glider take off into the air. Just what I needed to hear before I stepped into my soon to be winged coffin.

As Uzi strapped me into the back seat of the glider, he started to explain to me how to use the different controls in the cockpit (both seats have controls). “If the flight goes well, maybe you can fly” he tells me. Uh… wtf? Then another pilot says something to Uzi in Hebrew that I don’t understand, and they close the canopy and start to roll the glider down the runway to its takeoff position. At this point I am totally feeling 100% confident in my glider flying abilities, and the safety of the venture I am about to take part in. Right…

Takeoff

Sitting in the tiny cockpit sweating, I fiddled with the camera controls and tried to find the best way to position it so that I could get some good aerial shots. I’m glad I had something to occupy my mind, because shortly thereafter, the glider started to roll down the runway. We were strapped to the plane and it was pulling us down the runway towards take-off. I was filming the back of Uzi’s head and the ground rolling by the glider as we picked up speed.

The second we were airborne I felt it in my gut. Sort of like that feeling you get when an elevator goes up quickly. Looking through the viewfinder of the camera, I could see the little prop plane in front of us sway back and forth as the crosswind hit it. The glider shook pretty violently up and down, and I had to be careful not to hit the camera on the canopy.

As we ascended higher, Uzi looked back and asked how I was feeling. I felt fine — a feeling that would be short lived.

The First 10 Minutes

In my limited gliding experience, it seems to me that the flight is pretty simple. The prop plane takes you up, then you spiral around in a thermal to gain altitude (more detail on gliding here) and then you glide down, looking for another thermal to go up again, or head back to land. The first 10 minutes of the flight went pretty much exactly like that.

I tried my best to film out of the small open slot in the canopy that let the wind in, but decided shooting through the dome of the canopy to be my best option. The glider was banked to the opposite side of the slot, so I couldn’t really get any good shots out of it. Nevertheless I think I caught a few good aerial shots of northern Israel. We couldn’t fly over the kibbutz because it was too far north for the weather conditions to take us there, but what I shot is still the same general area (about 30 minutes away by car).

The Last 20 Minutes

About half way through the flight, I started to feel a bit queasy. Uzi again asked me how I was doing. I told him I still felt fine, because I figured I was just having a little difficulty with the sharp banks and sudden jumps in altitude. He continued to spiral upwards through a thermal until we reached its apex, and then we started to descend. At this point I was feeling more and more nauseous, and was just trying to focus on my breathing and allowing the cool wind coming through the slot to hit my face.

Uzi asked me one more time how I was feeling, and this time I told him I felt a little dizzy. He said something, but his words were swallowed by the wind. I returned to my rhythmic breathing, and began praying that the ride would soon be over. I had stopped filming (I shot about 15 minutes of aerial footage) and was just trying to calm myself down and enjoy the rest of the ride.

The Landing

As we descended further, I asked Uzi if we were landing, noting that I was beginning to feel sick. He said we were landing soon, and so I began to focus on the gray cross of the airfield etched into the earth. I kept breathing deeply as we approached the ground, but my nausea wasn’t subsiding. I didn’t want to disturb Uzi with my fears of vomiting — one of the pilots had earlier told me how landing the glider was the most difficult part. I just started to think about what to do when I actually did vomit. Uzi had given me an old cap to wear in the glider, and so I figured that was the closest thing to a sick bag I would find. I still had hope that I wouldn’t vomit before we landed.

Maybe only 100 feet above the ground, my stomach churned in a way that let me know it was too late. In one fluid motion, I pulled my cap off, lifted my precious XH A1 high above my head, and puked my guts out into my borrowed piece of head wear.

By the time the glider came to a stop, Uzi had figured out what was going on behind him, and he quickly opened the canopy and got out. I must have been a sad sight to behold. I jumped out of the glider and finished my business on the runway.

The Aftermath

After getting back into Uzi’s pickup truck to head back down the runway, he told me not to worry. “My daughter’s husband, also named Ben, threw up when he flew… it even happens to pilots” he claimed. I apologized for what had happened, but he didn’t seem to be that surprised.

Uzi later told me that it was an unusually rough ride, and that even he had some trouble during the flight. Apparently people puke all the time while gliding — they even had a puke bag near the seat, but Uzi forgot to tell me before getting in. None of the other pilots seemed to really care about what had happened. Uzi and another pilot deftly cleaned out the cockpit and swapped the seat padding, and the glider was already shooting down the runway again before I had even finished rinsing off my t-shirt.

Was the whole experience worth it? I got a few cool aerial shots and some nice footage of gliders taking off and landing, so I think so. It was a once in a lifetime experience, and aside from getting sick it was pretty awesome. Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to get a certain shot. Hopefully that effort shows through in the final product. How many other low budget docs have aerial footage in them!