Spirits of Sailplane Pilots Soar as They Share the Lonely Sky With Eagles

WARNER SPRINGS —  Polly Ridgway has what she calls a very serious habit.

She developed it about 7 1/2 years ago and now has to get a “fix” for her habit at least five times a day. For Ridgway, 27, her addiction is experiencing something usually reserved for eagles and hawks: soaring.

Birds do it with wings. Ridgway uses a sailplane to glide through the sky with nothing more than the wind and rising air to propel her above the Warner Springs Valley, where she teaches other people how to soar.

At the Warner Springs Soaring Center--about 30 miles northeast of Escondido, off Highway 79--Ridgway takes up an average of 25 people a week in a sailplane or glider, which the craft are also called.

“My friend took me for a ride in a sailplane and that was the end of it,” said Ridgway, who lives with her husband, Paul, in Julian. “It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d have to get a job in the flying field.

“You see, I developed a very serious flying habit,” said Ridgway, who has a commercial glider pilot’s license, but not a conventional pilot’s permit.

There are glider ports in the Otay Lakes area of San Diego and at Torrey Pines, but the Warner Springs port is the only spot in the county where the general public can pay for a ride in a sailplane. It’s $20 for a 20-minute ride about 6,000 feet above the gentle pastures and rocky terrain of the valley.

The valley, with Lake Henshaw and Palomar Mountain to the west and Hot Springs Peak to the east, is an ideal spot for gliding because of the constant pockets of heat rising from the pastures, according to gliding enthusiasts who frequent the park.

The rising columns of heat--known as thermals--allow the sailplane, once it is towed by a single-engine plane about 3,000 feet above the ground, to glide for up to two hours at speeds of about 60 m.p.h. and to ascend as fast as 400 feet per minute.

At Warner Springs they use a converted crop dusting plane to tow gliders into the air.

The sleek aluminum and fiberglass craft, which weigh only about 600 pounds and have a 50-foot wing span, appear to blend into the horizon from a distance. They are so aerodynamic that a sailplane has a glide ratio of 22-to-1, which means that for every foot the plane descends it is capable of gliding forward 22 feet. In comparison, a modern jet has a glide ratio of about 4-to-1.

As the glider descends, the pilot usually maneuvers the craft toward the 1,000-foot asphalt runway and, hopefully, a gentle landing. But if the plane begins to descend rapidly and the runway is too far away, that’s OK because a glider can land in any number of pastures below without much danger, Ridgway said.

There are other addicts.

Take Dewey Hill, a 67-year-old retired tool-and-die maker from Michigan who spends his winters at the Salton Sea. He’s been flying small airplanes since 1942, but says that it wasn’t until three years ago when he first tried soaring that he knew what it felt like to be a bird.

“This is getting back to real flying,” said Hill as he climbed aboard a sailplane. “It’s the real thing. No qualms about a forced landing in this thing because every landing is forced in a sailplane.”

Although Ridgway took her first soaring ride 7 1/2 years ago, it wasn’t until the summer of 1980, when she was working as a computer operator in San Diego, that she got her first opportunity to soar every day.

“A friend called me at work after I had been there only five months and said he needed someone to help with a soaring port in the Owens Valley for the summer,” she said. “I told him I’d have to think about it . . .. I called him back five minutes after I hung up.

“That’s the last time I had a straight job.”

After the summer teaching soaring in the Owens Valley, Ridgway returned to San Diego and hooked up with Jim McDonald, who was then operating a glider port in Otay Lakes and who later took over operation of the Warner Spring Soaring Center. Ridgway has been working for McDonald since then.

For Ridgway, it is the free feeling of floating through the sky in a winged craft without an engine that fuels her addiction. Red-tailed hawks can be seen from the valley floor catching thermals and spiraling upward. This is what Ridgway and other gliders attempt to imitate.

To catch the smooth upswing of a strong thermal and watch the altimeter (an instrument that monitors height) “tick like the second hand on a clock” is the ideal situation. The highest Ridgway has soared is 18,000 feet. Oxygen masks are required at heights above 12,000 feet.

“A few months ago I got up to about 9,000 feet and saw this bird in a thermal,” she said. “I maneuvered over to the thermal and saw that it was a golden eagle. We were right next to him and he just turned his head around and looked at us.

“I was wishing I had a camera.”