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" Popular Mechanics contributing editor Jeff Wise, a private pilot and long-time aviation writer, takes on his biggest challenge yet: Flying without an engine. No matter how experienced the pilot, getting a glider license is no easy sail. For the last week, clouds of uncertainty have been roiling metaphorically over my head. My instructor, Jeff, has signed me off to take my check ride with an FAA examiner. But am I ready? The process is anything but a rubber-stamp procedure: The last club member who tried failed twice before he finally got his license. Maybe, I think, I should spend some solo time in a glider first, to polish my skills. Or maybe I should jump in as soon as I can, while Jeff&amp;#039;s lessons are still fresh. It&amp;#039;s a nail-biter: This is not Apollo 13, and failure is definitely an option. I decide to plunge forward. I email Wally Moran, the designated FAA examiner (and an active Nutmeg member), and arrange to meet with him at 9am Saturday morning. Wally gives me some open-book questions to work on beforehand, and I make a package of the FAA paperwork I need to fill out, the test questions, and my notes to review. Now all there is to do is wait\u2014and obsessively check the weather. The picture doesn&amp;#039;t look good. This spring&amp;#039;s pattern of relentlessly soppy weather looks set to continue this weekend, with two fronts passing through one after another. The second&amp;#039;s supposed to just sit in place for a day and a half, wringing itself out on our heads. Between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning I call Wally a half-dozen times, making and revising contingency plans. All I&amp;#039;m seeing on the internet weather sites are little cartoon rainclouds. Good weather for making a bookshelf. By noon on Saturday, contrary to all predictions, the rain stops and the cloud bases start to lift. I call Wally. We&amp;#039;re on.  I drive to the airfield filled with dread. I try to tell myself that Jeff has prepared me well, and that anyway it doesn&amp;#039;t really matter if I fail\u2014I can just try again in a couple of weeks. But my stomach is knotted and I feel so uncomfortable that I wish I was doing just about anything else. There&amp;#039;s just something fundamentally awful about taking a test. Wally greets me warmly on the porch of the club&amp;#039;s administration building and we sit down to start the oral part of the exam, going through the background theory and practical knowledge of gliding. Already I feel better, now that I&amp;#039;m finally able to focus my mental energies on specific tasks. The hour goes quickly, with the questions leading to discussions of general principles that wander off into related reminiscences and cautionary tales.  &amp;quot;Okay, let&amp;#039;s go flying,&amp;quot; Wally says. We help the tow pilot refuel the Pawnee, and then he helps me untie one of the Schweitzer 2-33 gliders. Today we&amp;#039;ll be flying 24H, the somewhat heavier and hence even more sluggish twin of 12S, the 2-33 that I&amp;#039;ve been flying with Jeff. Because it&amp;#039;s less popular, 24H has been sitting longer under its tarp, but I&amp;#039;m not particularly concerned. I hold the wing as Wally pulls it to the approach end of the grass runway. We climb in and buckle up. Tom Albrecht, who got his license last year and has been one of the club&amp;#039;s most active members ever since, waves the tow plane over and hooks us up to the tow rope. I run a pre-flight check list and give Tom the thumbs up. He lifts the wing and signals the tow pilot to take up the slack. It&amp;#039;s show time. I waggle the rudder, signaling the tow plane to take off. As we start to roll, bumping over the grassy field, I finally feel relaxed: at last, I&amp;#039;m in control. We built speed and the glider floats into the air, hovering behind the tow plane, which takes longer to reach takeoff speed. And now we&amp;#039;re climbing up over the green forests and fields of the Hudson Valley, the air as smooth as cream cheese. Perfect. I do a maneuver called &amp;quot;boxing the wake&amp;quot;, in which I take the glider to the various high and low tow positions. At 3000 feet, I pull the release knob and bank to the right. We&amp;#039;re free. But there&amp;#039;s trouble. For the first time I notice that the airspeed indicator is stuck at 20 mph. I&amp;#039;d been so focused on following the tow plane that I hadn&amp;#039;t even glanced at my instrument panel, and this revelation comes as quite a shock. Airspeed is an extremely important number for a pilot to know, especially when trying to perform precision maneuvers. Getting by without it is going to be a challenge. And the fact that I missed this significant mechanical problem during my preflight suggests a certain lack of diligence. Certain primitive Anglo-Saxon epithets stream through my mind. But the show must go on. Wally doesn&amp;#039;t seem too concerned about the airspeed indicator, and asks me to do some steep turns, and then a forward stall. I&amp;#039;m flying by the seat of my pants, gauging my speed by the sound of the wind and the angle between the instrument panel and the horizon. It&amp;#039;s not very precise, but I&amp;#039;m getting the job done. More importantly, I&amp;#039;m avoiding all the mistakes that I&amp;#039;ve been lying awake worrying about for the last few days. Wally, thank god, is actively encouraging, telling me that I&amp;#039;m doing the maneuvers well. I&amp;#039;m actually starting to enjoy this. As I set up for landing I come in deliberately &amp;quot;hot,&amp;quot; figuring that it&amp;#039;s better to come in a little too fast and land long than come in a little too slow, stall, and fall out of the sky. After all my troubles doing landings with Jeff, today&amp;#039;s goes surprisingly well, and I touch down just where Wally asks me do. &amp;quot;Very nice,&amp;quot; he says, as I pop open the canopy. Sweet.  Wally checks the pitot tube, a bent metal protrusion that stick out into the air stream and channels the flow back to the airspeed indicator. I&amp;#039;d looked at it during the preflight, but not closely enough to notice that it had no hole. What the heck?? I look closer still and see that it&amp;#039;s plugged up with mud. &amp;quot;Mud daubers,&amp;quot; Wally says. These, I learn, are wasps, and they build their homes out of mud. One of them evidently thought our pitot tube would be a good place to start building. Ah, nature! Wally pries the plug loose with a pen knife. Now the airspeed indicator should work. We&amp;#039;ve got one more flight to do, and as I walk the glider back to the takeoff area I&amp;#039;m starting to allow myself to think I might come through this all okay. As I pass other club members, they flash me smiles and thumbs up. I know enough about the check-ride procedure to strongly suspect that the next flight is going to be a rope-break, in which the examiner pulls the release knob at a few hundred feet of altitude. The one supremely important thing to know about rope-breaks is that you have to put the nose down right away, in order to keep the glider flying with enough airspeed. Everything else, like turning back to the field so you can safely land, comes second to that. Rope break: nose down. My suspicions are strengthened when one of the veteran members, passing by on the lawn mower, grabs his nose and points down. Got it. &amp;quot;Tell the tow pilot we&amp;#039;re just doing a pattern tow,&amp;quot; Wally says, as we strap in. I call Dave in the Pawnee and tell him we&amp;#039;re just going to a thousand feet. As we roll, I&amp;#039;m zoomed in on the Pawnee. If he rocks his wings, it&amp;#039;s a signal meaning I have to release immediately\u2014in essence, another form of rope-break. But we climb out without incident. Upward, upward\u2014maybe this isn&amp;#039;t going to be a rope break after all. A dark green pine forest rolls below us as we bank southward toward the Catskills. Clang! The tow rope folds itself into a zig-zig as it springs away toward the tow plane. &amp;quot;Nose down!&amp;quot; I call out, and push the stick forward. We&amp;#039;re pointing down into the pines as I skew the plane around, banking back towards the field. Within seconds we&amp;#039;re back over the departure end of the field, a little high and hot. I put in full dive brakes and slip downward, letting the glider straighten out a few feet above the ground as it settles into its flare. Bump, whoosh, bump, whoosh. We slide to a stop in the freshly mown grass. &amp;quot;Congratulations,&amp;quot; Wally says. &amp;quot;You performed well in excess of standards.&amp;quot; Wow. It&amp;#039;s over.  Jeff Driscoll drives over in a golf cart and shakes my hand, and then helps me and Wally tow the glider back to its tie down. We all have a beer and talk about the day. I&amp;#039;m more relieved than euphoric\u2014wrung out, really. It&amp;#039;s going to take me a while to get used to not worrying about my check ride. But I&amp;#039;m feeling good.  Tonight I&amp;#039;m going to go home, take a shower, and take my girlfriend to the dinner at the best restaurant in Columbia County. For a couple of hours, I&amp;#039;m going to try not to think about gliding. And then later, after we&amp;#039;ve had a bottle of wine and a nice long meal, I&amp;#039;ll be ready for the inevitable: trying to talk her into coming up for a ride. \u2014Jeff Wise WANT TO LEARN HOW TO GLIDE?Visit the Soaring Society of America and the Nutmeg Soaring Association. Earlier: Cramming for the Check Ride. The pre-check-flight pre-flight check. Wally clears debris from the pitot tube. The author (left) with instructor Jeff and Wally. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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