Finding Thermals for a Glider Flight

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Gene; I'm glider flight instructor on behalf of Expert Village. So now when the thermal dies out and we don't have lift anymore, we move on to the next opportunity to climb the thermal wherever we can find one. Typically, going in between thermals, I've increased my air speed up to about 60 miles an hour from 45, which is the speed we were thermaling in. If we don't find anymore thermal, we'll be back on the ground in 18 minutes. If we find another thermal, we can stay up as long as the lift is there. If we don't find a thermal here, we can make a turn, choose another direction and continue to search. Is that a thermal? That felt like a bump there, yeah. So when we feel that bump, we turn to see if it's going to go above 0 on the instruments. If it goes above 0, we got a rising air. If it doesn't, we're in stable air and going down 200 feet a minute. Do you turn towards the bump or away from the bump? Try to turn towards it. And it's a 50/50 chance whether you turn the right way or not, because you can't see the thermal. If you turn and it goes down instead of up, you turned the wrong way. So now I think the thermal is on my left. I turn to the left. If it goes up above 0, we're in a thermal; if it goes below, we're not. We guessed wrong. We're going down 400 feet a minute, so we didn't find a thermal on that turn. "