Ramsey's Gliding Page

I learned to fly gliders in the Boston area when I was in high school, more than 25 years ago. My father had been into airplanes since his childhood in Brooklyn, NY, and passed that interest on to me. Strangely, he himself didn't learn to fly until after I did. We then started building a BJ-1B Duster sailplane, in the garage from plans and a pile of wood. We didn't get very far. My father started a new career, I went off to college, we both gradually gave up flying. About 10 years ago, after relocating to California, I started flying again.

I now own a DG-303 Elan Acro single-seat fiberglass racing and aerobatic glider. It was built in Slovenia (once a part of Yugoslavia) by the same company that makes Elan skis. It has a 15 meter (49 ft.) wingspan. The glider is kept in an enclosed 30 ft. trailer, with the wings removed. Assembling it for a day of flying takes myself and a helper roughly half an hour. I am towed aloft by a single engine airplane, normally to about 2000 ft. above ground level. From there, I circle in rising thermal air currents to climb higher and hopefully head out cross-country. The glide ratio is around 44 to 1, which means I can usually fly 40 miles or more between thermals, losing only about 5000 feet in altitude.

During the summer, I normally fly from Soar Truckee, in Truckee, CA, which is at the north end of the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. This area has some of the best conditions in the world for making long distance glider flights. This past summer I spent a few days in Tonopah, Nevada, where I had my best flight ever (though not the longest distance), a distance of 325 miles around a closed course at an average of 78 mph, with altitudes up to 18,000 ft. My friend Kempton Izuno made a flight of over 620 miles there two days later, you can read his story here,

This is my previous glider, a Glaser-Dirks DG-101, an earlier model by the same designer. This photo was taken in 1994. That afternoon I would be flying my very first contest task, a 90 mile course around the Sacramento Valley in California. The day ended up being better then it looks in the photo, though the clouds were less than 4000 feet above the ground, so most of the flying was at pretty low altitudes. My flight ended after 3 1/2 hours and 78 miles, when I made my first off-airport landing on an 8 foot wide levee between two rice fields. It took 4 people to get the glider off the levee and back into the trailer.

Gliding Resources

Soaring Society of America

The national soaring organization here in the US.

Pacific Soaring Council (PASCO)

Northern California and Nevada regional soaring association. I maintain their page.

Silverado Soaring, Inc.

The gliding club I belong to.

Soaring Links

Now maintained as part of the PASCO pages

Regional Weather

Also part of the PASCO pages

6 November 1998 -- Marc Ramsey -- marc@ranlog.com