The Climb

During a flight there are two main components that influence your speed, the Climb and the Glide.

So we all know that aeroplanes fly by moving through the air at speed and creating airflow over their wings which is a "Lift" force, but what about gliders? Well we dont have engines onboard but we have a much bigger enigine, Gravity. So we get towed by a tow plane and once released we point the nose down and let gravity pull us, resulting in accelaration and the speed required to generate the airflow which results in lift. Basically gliders are large paper aeroplanes...

This means that gliders are always on a decending path, normally at about 100-200 feet per minute, so how do we stay up? Well the answer is we find air that's going up faster than our decent rate.

There are many ways but the most common one is to use Thermals. In short, the sun heat the ground, the ground heat the bubble of air above it which then given a suitalbe trigger, pops up and rises up because it's warmer than the air around it. As it is going up it is cooling down until its temperature is equal to the air around it at which point it stops rising.

Gliders find thermalls (Climbs) then circle in them (they are sort of column or bubble shape). Some thermalls go up as fast as 1000 feet per minute or more. The faster we climb the faster we can glide forward, and in fact the climb rate is probably the most important factor in the average speed.

So the idea is to find the best Climbs, center in them (the thermal will do its best to throw you off its centre), turn tight (sometimes up to 60 deg of bank), then when the climb rate drops off (normally at the top) you leave and glide forward to the next climb. To win a competition you have to only take the very best climbs and reject weak ones. However, this is a trade off because if you are quite low you might have to compromise and take a weak climb otherwise you will be forced to land.