AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2012 - 62

When conditions are right, otherworldly lens-shaped lenticular clouds—sometimes stacked atop one another—form over the Omarama valley. They signal the presence of mountain waves that lift gliders above 20,000 feet with regularity, and there’s potential to go far higher. Adventurer Steve Fossett was a regular here for several years before he was killed in a 2007 aviation accident in California. Although he didn’t succeed in setting an absolute altitude world record for gliders at Omarama, he did reach 38,000 feet there and set a series of glider speed records over a variety of distances. (Fossett set the current glider altitude record of 50,699 feet in Argentina.) In an effort to attract more young people to flying, GlideOmarama has founded a youth soaring program, and participants as young as 13 have soloed here. Unlike the United States, where the minimum age for soloing a glider is 14, New Zealand has no lower limit. “I’m sure it was an oversight and the regulators simply forgot to put an age limit on glider flying here,” Wills said. “That’s just fine with us.” Our release point is on the southwest side of a craggy and unremarkable peak glider pilots here call “Mount Horrible” (so named for an accident that banged up Wills’ father but didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the sport). We climb steadily, traversing the ridges. When the Ewe Range becomes visible to the southeast, we fly to the steep, snowtopped hills and are rewarded with a quick surge in altitude that raises the German-designed Discus all the way to the cumulus cloud bases at about 7,500 feet. A mountain wave is forming above the clouds, and the wispy tops curl to the east, showing the direction of the freshening winds. We try several times to top the clouds, but the wave somehow passes us by, and turbulent rotors flex the Discus’ 21-meter wings roughly. We listen for the variometer to chirp and the choppy “rotor dance” to smooth out in the wave. But instead the variometer moans, signaling an altitude loss. Mountain waves on the lee side of tall ranges were discovered in 1933 by a pair of German glider pioneers. The U.S. Air Force studied the phenomenon in detail in the 1950s and glider pilots

began a series of extreme high-altitude flights that began over the Sierra Nevada range in California and ended hundreds of miles downwind to the east. New Zealand’s wave-riding pilots don’t have the option of flying long distances downwind because doing so would push them far out to sea. So they were among the first to fly perpendicular to the wave, much as a surfer riding along a beach, in an ongoing series of long-distance, high-altitude, highspeed flights. We’ve been airborne for nearly two hours and, despite my semi-reclined seating position, the parachute I’m wearing is starting to make me squirm. The mountain wave, for today at least, has eluded us. The Discus’ 44:1 glide ratio makes returning to the Omarama airport quick and easy. The east/west turf runway is clearly identifiable from more than 20 miles away, and I let the nose drop and fly straight there at a relatively speedy 100 knots. Entering the right downwind for Runway 27, we set the glider down on a broad grass strip among a half-dozen others preparing to launch. A steady rain is falling in the mountain valleys about 20 miles west, but Omarama, as usual, remains dry. It’s in a rain shadow that gets very little precipitation while the mountains create rain forests on the coast 50 miles away. The approaching autumn season is the end of the busy part of the year for gliding at Omarama, and many of the guests and instructors are preparing to leave. They come from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and United States. Some of the instructors alternate gliding seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres, an endless summer of soaring. But wherever they go for work, and wherever they call home, they usually seek to return to this scenic valley and the community of kindred spirits drawn here. “We have our own miniclimate here at Omarama that makes it a paradise for flying gliders,” Wills said. “People come here from all over the world, and they have for years, because the flying opportunities here are unique. It’s unlike any other place on the planet.” Email the author at dave.hirschman@ aopa.org.

AOPA PILOT •

62 • MAY 2012

AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2012

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