By ERWIN CHLANDA
Check the thermometer and smile, if you are a glider pilot, that is: Central Australia in summer is the world’s best place for flying without an engine.
It’s Alice where world distance and speed records have been set for decades.
A launch via a tow plane takes you to 3000 feet above the local airport and from there you’re off to Uluru, Marla Bore in SA and back to Alice, for example.
No motor, no noise, except rushing air.
For the uninitiated, this is how it works: You’re always looking for thermals. That’s a mass of hot air rising, sometimes at a rate of 1000 feet per minute.
You listen out for the rate-of-climb whistle, the higher the pitch the faster you’re going up. Or you can follow follow a friendly hawk or eagle, circling in the same “lift”.
You aircraft has a glide ratio of 36-to-one: For every kilometre in altitude you can fly a distance of 36 kilometres.
Competition gliders are equipped with oxygen and you can go up to 20,000 feet, that’s 6000 metres which gives you credit for a horizontal distance of more than 200 kilometres.
Regrettably, these phenomenal opportunities, during what is normally the dead season in The Centre, are not taken advantage of.
Sport aviation is in a nosedive, according to gliding club president Sam McKay.
The club operates only one day a week, Saturdays, from 10am.
The group has two dual seater training aircraft but only one fully qualified instructor, plus three with limited qualifications.
The Alice Springs Aero Club, which operates from the main airport as well as Bond Springs, currently offers no training.
Recreational power aircraft training by Ken Watts, son of the awe-inspiring instructor Ossie Watts, is not available at the moment.
And yet flying conditions could not be more ideal.
The weather is usually perfect. The commercial air traffic is sparse. There are a few hundred kilometres of emergency landing places – the sealed highways north, south and west. (The author has landed on all three.)
The Bond Springs airstrip itself is just 20 kilometres north of town. It has 1.6 kilometres of main runway and about 600m of cross strip.
There would be ample space for a hotel, pool, restaurant and so on – a tourist village attracting flying nuts from around the world.
In its hay day Bond Springs was used for gliding, skydiving, ultralights and light aircraft, helicopters.
It could even be a terminal for cheap flights to Adelaide, Brisbane and Darwin, using commuter-style turboprop aircraft, avoiding airport charges and the main airlines’ extortionate fares.
The distance from town to either airport is pretty well the same.
Any doubts about the opportunities of Bond Springs are quickly dispelled by a look at the records of international gliding ace Hans-Werner Grosse.
Hans-Werner-Grosse and his wife Karin.
The German set his 24th world gliding record near Alice Springs, during one of his several visits.
In 1982 Grosse averaged 144 kph over a 750 kilometre triangular course to beat the previous record of 141 kph.
Grosse at times was doing better than 200 kph in his 19-meter wingspan single seater German ASW17.
In December 1980 he set a triangle distance world record of 1272 km in Alice Springs.
He took me up for a flight.
“Have you always been flying,” I asked him.
“Yes. Gliding. And before that we were also doing a different kind of flying,” he answered.
In WW2 Mr Grosse was a German Luftwaffe bomber pilot.
On February 18, 2021 he passed away at the age of 98.