At Twentynine Palms

Since the glider program has been under way, a touch of Tom Swift and His Wonderful Airship has crept into the shoptalk of Army airmen. As of Jan. 1, Army glider pilots, like Army gliders, were rare as four-leaf clovers. Few air experts knew what gliders could do (except for what they had read about Crete). As far as the U.S. public was concerned, gliding was still a game for a few nutty newsreel daredevils around Elmira, N.Y.

First School. Realizing that Hitler doesn't keep some 28,000 gliders just for fun, the Army opened the first of nine full-scale gliding schools at Twentynine Palms, Calif. last January. Chubby, 25-year-old West Point Captain Lester Cecil Hess is in command. Because there are not enough Army glider instructors to go round, civilian instructors have been brought in. Many officers have been graduated from the four-week course. Last week the second class of enlisted men were graduated, became staff sergeants with flying pay.

By July 1, the Army's 18 primary schools will begin to turn out men with pre-glider training. These men will become glider pilots after only two weeks at Twentynine Palms. So far, only men with previous flying experience have been trained, but the Army needs glider pilots badly, will soon inaugurate a ten-week course for greenhorns.

Up Thermals. The school is in a mountain-surrounded piece of desert, hot enough to fry the traditional egg on a glider's duralumin fuselage. But the heated air rises, forming the welcome "thermals" which keep a glider aloft. The special glider dashboard instrument is a variometer, which shows a pilot whether he is in one of these upward thermals or in a downward air current.

Gliders take the air at from 25 to 45 m.p.h. When one of the Army planes at the school starts out along the ground, towing three two-place glider trainers on graduated ropes, the little 300-lb. ships take off first, float about 50 ft. up, pointing their noses down to give the ropes some slack so that the plane can get off. Once in the air, like the yachtsman who watches the trembling sail lest it spill the wind, a glider pilot must keep his towline taut or suffer a jerk when it suddenly springs tight. Even in the air, an instructor makes a student keep his ship about 50 feet higher than the towplane to avoid its slipstream.

Silent Flight. Somewhere above 1,000 ft., gliders are turned loose to soar, dropping a wing to lose altitude quickly, gliding downward to gain speed (which may reach 90 m.p.h.), or "picking up a thermal" to rise. Sometimes they even fly in formation. Another man-made addition to flight skill is the complete loop-the-loop, as exciting in a glider as in the oldtime barnstormers' crates. (Two pilots practicing a dog fight at Twentynine Palms --not a usual glider function --crashed and were killed when their wings touched.) A glider pilot, landing, keeps his plane balancing on its single wheel for about 500 ft.

Advanced practice includes an hour of night flying and a little instrument flying. But there can be no practice in what glider pilots dread, even the most experienced --bad weather. For there is no substitute for a motor in escaping a storm. A student's last week of practice is devoted to troop carriers.

Rumors spread in Washington last week that gliders of great size and in huge numbers are on order, even being delivered. Certainly the Army is starting a big campaign for glider recruits.* But the most that Colonel David M. Schlatter, the top Army glider man, would say: the Army is buying nine-seat gliders for transition training between the three-seaters and the larger troop carriers.

Hot Talk. The really fantastic talk is on what gliders can do. Glider tows can at least double, sometimes triple the carrying capacity of towing planes. And a plane need not necessarily land to pick them up. By a new secret device, pickup can be made from the air without a destructive jerk.

A plane could drop gliders at Cleveland, St. Louis and Omaha, and still arrive in Los Angeles with gliders in tow, picked up at Amarillo and Salt Lake City. Troop carriers could be dropped off behind the front lines with full equipment, including tanks, could be picked up and reloaded at home base without the tow plane's ever touching ground at all.

When they consider the prospect of 10,000-mile planes in the next year or two and the obvious reduction in transoceanic travel and freight costs if gliders were used along with them, glider prognosticators feel more than ever like Tom Swift.

* The Army will take men with 20-100 vision correctible with glasses to 20-20, a lower requirement than the 20-20 without glasses demanded for regular flying cadets.

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