Many pilots wonder what it really takes to
set a world record. Some wonder what it's like to fly at a place like Zapata or
other world class sites. Cloudsuck answers these and other questions while
telling the story of how I set the current Distance World Record for Rigid
Wings. Over this winter, I am pleased to make the book available as a gift to my
readers in serialized form. Each Monday, another chapter will be available for
you to enjoy here on the Oz Report. The best read is the one in it's entirety,
and both the soft cover book and an ebook are available to purchase here:
http://ozreport.com/cloudsuck.php. You can find the Kindle version on
Amazon.

I hope you enjoy the book and this week's chapter as much as I enjoyed writing
it.

The Amazing Flying Belinda

Belinda and I were thermaling in rough air at six thousand feet over the
wheat fields just east of Farmer, a two-silo turnpoint seventeen miles southeast
of Chelan Butte. It was the middle of July, the day after the 1995 Chelan Cross
Country Classic. Belinda was working some ratty air a mile to my south, going up
a bit slower than I was. I was hoping that she would join me since I didn’t want
to lose her now. Hey, we had just passed over where she landed on her previous
longest cross country flight the day before.

The day had started off with a moderate northeast flow that kept
the thermals away from the south-facing Between-the-Rocks launch on top of
Chelan Butte. All week had been unstable, with the winning pilot at the Classic,
John Pitt, averaging over a hundred miles for his four winning flights. Sunday
was even hotter and the top of the Butte kept kicking off dust devils. We had to
stand in our control frames to keep our gliders from being tossed about. On the
previous day three pilots had not been able to keep their gliders on the ground.

Belinda and I lined up at the Ants-in-the-Pants launch, which is
steeper than Between-the-Rocks. We figured we had a better chance to get off
this launch in no wind conditions. It usually works, even when the thermals that
normally hug the south face are pushed away. I had taken off first to test the
conditions, and started climbing out to the south of the Butte. Belinda soon
followed and, as is her normal style, thermaled up through four other pilots to
ten thousand feet.

What amazed me was how she knew right where to go and how
effortlessly she climbed. There was one sad pilot who refused to leave the south
face of the Butte, continually circling right next to the rocks and never
getting up. Couldn’t he see that if he just went out a couple of hundred feet
there was a nice fat thermal? Doesn’t a northeast flow with no thermals coming
in at launch mean anything to him? None of this confused Belinda; she went
straight to the rising air and left those four pilots wondering what was their
problem.

As we topped out, we headed southeast across the Columbia River
gorge toward the power line junction, always a favorite spot for the first
thermal on the flats. These Bonneville power lines are no low voltage affairs,
and it’s real easy to see where they cross.

Working our way up in this first thermal we could hear the radio
chatter of various pilots struggling with the conditions and wondering where to
go. We slowly worked our way to the east toward Withrow, a triangle-shaped burg
marked by its grain elevators, following the dust devils.

Our driver, who was near Withrow, came back with a
wind-on-the-ground report of fifteen miles per hour straight out of the north.
We headed due south toward Farmer, getting lift every few miles and staying over
eight thousand feet above sea level.

The previous day I had unfortunately left Belinda near the power
lines when I wasn’t getting any lift and needed to find some fast. I had been
able to make a low save and have a long flight, but I lost Belinda. I couldn’t
provide her with any guidance on her first time out in this area of the flats.
She ended up landing about half an hour after I left her, just west of Farmer.
Not bad for her third cross country flight, and her longest to date. But today
we would stick together.

Topping out at nine thousand feet near Farmer, I asked Belinda if
she was ready to head southeast toward Moses Coulee. She hadn’t gotten quite as
high, but her thermal wasn’t working anymore either. She glided toward me from
my north as we headed out – her Wills Wing Super Sport just wasn’t going as well
as my Wills Wing XC.

Moses Coulee is a spectacularly desolate canyon with walls of
black basalt. It, like all the coulees in eastern Washington, was formed when
Montana Lake broke free of its ice dam at the end of the last ice age. The
roaring water scoured the basalt layers that underlie the plateau east of
Chelan. Black rocks are still scattered throughout the coulee, and only a
straggly farm at one end makes it a semi passable landing area if you get low.

As I pressed southeast I noticed two spindly dust devils just to
our north. I mentioned to Belinda that she might go back and check them out,
since she still wasn’t as high as me. This was a big mistake on my part. Belinda
didn’t find any lift near the dust devils, but now she was behind me and getting
low as I arrived at the coulee and found lift.

Belinda doesn’t give up, however, and was quickly gliding my way,
encouraged by my report of lift. I could see her screaming across the flats way
below me as I climbed out. Later she told me that she was at 2,500 feet — just
barely above the plowed fields on the plateau — just before she made it to the
coulee. She could see the farm over the lip in the coulee and was prepared to
land at any moment. As soon as she came in over the black rocks in the coulee
she hit a sidewinder of a thermal and put the Sport up on a tip. Within a few
minutes she was back over 7,500 feet above sea level.

Together we worked our way further southeast along the east side
of the coulee and into open farm lands. These brought fatter thermals that gave
both of us a chance to relax and enjoy the view. We were soon climbing in the
Beezley Hills west of Ephrata, a popular sailplane port, and the rising and open
terrain made for continued comfortable thermals. Belinda repeatedly outclimbed
me and I start following her to find the next thermal.

Heading off the south end of the Beezleys, we hooked our last big
thermal and went on what turned out to be a final glide for about twenty miles,
landing three hours into our flight, south of I-90 and east of the town of
George. Belinda had flown 52 miles on her fourth cross country flight.

A few weeks later, the day after the US Nationals (a week of not
so good weather), Belinda was at it again. This time she flew 35 miles, making
the turnpoint at Sims Corner and gliding back toward the Butte to a recently cut
wheat field just short of the Pothills. While other, more experienced pilots
(this now being her fifth cross country flight) were going down, she lead the
way east over no-man’s-land to Mansfield, found a hard-to-work bubble south of
Yeager Rock, and climbed out east of Sims. She then decided that it was time to
call it a day when she was still seven thousand feet over the ground.

So what makes all this so amazing, other than the pure joy of
flight itself? Well, for one thing Belinda was raised to be a girl, not a pilot.
No junior or high school athletics for her -- no soccer team or swimming
championships. She never learned to tough it out, suck it up, or deal with the
constant stream of low level fear punctuated by some high level stuff that is
the lot of hang glider pilots.

She never yearned to fly and didn’t have flying dreams. For years
I would go off flying, sometimes with Belinda driving but most often not. She
enjoyed coming to the fly-ins at Dog Mountain, but never went tandem (until much
later) and really didn’t want to.

She decided to try paragliding in the early nineties because it
seemed easy. It turned out that she liked the sensation of flying, but now she
wanted to stay up. At age 39 she turned to hang gliding and learned to fly on
the Oregon dunes at Cape Kiwanda. What got her through the first few months of
learning to fly a hang glider, in addition to her own grit, were the soft
conditions of the site, the fact that she had a small framed and light (42 lb.)
training glider, and that her husband carried the glider up the training hill to
give her as many practice flights as possible. I really appreciated the light
weight glider.

Because she had a glider that was built for her (a Moyes Mars 150,
originally designed by Steve Moyes for his wife and improved with 7075 aluminum
in Europe by Icaro 2000), she was able to avoid injury other than minor tweaks
on the training hill. Injuries cause the worst setbacks when you are first
starting.

Belinda tells other women that you don’t have to fit their image
of an athlete to be a hang glider pilot. Hang gliding is available to all who
are willing to make the effort.

Flying with Belinda was an incredible experience for me. It is so
much different than being out there for yourself, often on your own. I loved
watching and encouraging her. I marveled at her abilities and strength.

It’s a great opportunity to encourage a beginning pilot, to help
them overcome whatever feelings are in the way for them. I never gave up on
Belinda and always let her set her own pace. It’s been very rewarding.

A few years later Belinda quit flying in the prone position
because of problems with her neck. She switched to a paraglider harness slung
under her glider, which allowed her to fly seated. This position greatly
increased the drag that the pilot and glider experience when flying, thereby
reducing performance and her chances to go cross country.