How do gliders stay up ?
Gliders can stay aloft by a number of means. By far the most common is called thermalling. When the ground is heated by the sun, periodically a parcel of heated air ascends, often to many thousands of feet, as the temperature of the air close to the ground becomes higher that its surroundings. If a glider is flown to stay in that column of rising air, by circling, the glider will also be swept aloft.After the pilot reaches the top of the thermal, he flies off, gradually losing height, until he reaches the next one. top…
Gliders soar in the same way as the birds, by finding rising warm air created by the sun heating the ground. These columns of warm air are marked by the fluffy white cumulus cloud you see on a summer’s day. Watch one for a while and you will the cloud grow as is it fed by the rising warm air and then slowly disappear as it is heated from above by the sun. Glider pilots use this warm air to climb higher before gliding across country then “top -up” again when required. Our pilots regularly stay up for more than 5 hours in a day and cover many hundreds of miles.
