They Fly Through The Air

An ex-Navy pilot from Toledo and a beautiful little butterfly-tailed sailplane which he built with his own hands won the 27th annual U.S. National Soaring championships last week at Odessa, Texas. To do it, they defeated the finest group of glider pilots ever assembled in America—among them A. J. Smith (above), shown soaring over Odessa. In seven days of varied types of competition—flying to certain specific goals, flying to a goal and returning, flying a triangular course, flying for distance—Dick Schreder and his HP-8 won five first places, tied for another first and tied for a third. This was about what the 5,000 soaring addicts who live in scattered parts of the U.S. expected when Schreder, his sailplane and the storied thermals of west Texas all got together at the same time (a thermal is a rising current of air that is, in effect, a sailplane's motor).

Schreder (he pronounces it Skreeder) is 44 years old, and the HP-8 (the HP is for high performance) is only little more than two, yet they have more or less grown up in soaring together. In the early days of World War II, flying a PBM on patrol out of Bermuda, Schreder was credited with the first Nazi sub sunk by an American pilot. He maintained an active interest in aviation after the war, but it wasn't until 1955 that he discovered soaring.

In 1958 he built his HP-8, which is heavier than most sailplanes, and after only one test flight took it to Bishop, Calif. and won his first national championship. In 1959, at Elmira, N.Y., where soaring conditions are not so favorable as in California or Texas, Schreder finished second to Dick Johnson, a five-time national champion who was flying a much lighter plane. This year, in the Internationals at Cologne, Germany, the HP-8 was outclassed by a horde of European sailplanes built to fly the light-lift thermals and ridge waves of Europe. All that Schreder accomplished was to come down in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain; for 24 hours he was an international incident.

"What worried me were the farmers," he says now. "I landed in a potato field and really tore up the potatoes. But eventually I realized that this was a collective farm and they didn't care about the potatoes. They thought I was a spy."

There are no potatoes around Odessa, Texas. There are horned toads and jack rabbits and mesquite trees, rattlesnakes, oil wells and cactus—and those lovely thermals. Odessa, a booming oil town marked by wide, clean streets and friendly people wearing ten-gallon hats, is located about halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso; it is also located at the southern tip of a great fairway of hot wind which sweeps up across the Texas panhandle, through Oklahoma and into Kansas. Along this course, on hot days—and there are few other kinds in west Texas in August—there occurs the constant production of rising bubbles of hot air which become puffy clumps of cumulus clouds upon reaching the condensation point, dotting the blue Texas sky like exploding popcorn.

These thermals furnish lift to the slender, delicate wings of the sailplane, pushing the remarkably tough little craft up to altitudes from which it can glide for miles and miles until it reaches the ground—or finds another thermal. Most topflight competitive sailplanes weigh around 500 pounds; Schreder's weighs 600. The lighter planes have a slight soaring edge under weak lift conditions. But once aloft, the heavier HP-8 goes like a homesick hornet, cruising at about 110 mph (and sometimes hitting 140), compared to the 80- or 90-mile speed of its rivals.

On the first day of the contest, cut loose by the tow plane at 2,000 feet, Schreder found all the hot air he needed to get the HP-8 up high, and, once there, no one could catch him. He completed the 134-mile triangular course at an average speed of 52.6 mph, losing time only when he had to stop and search for another thermal in which to climb, as a motorist on a long trip must occasionally sweat out a gas station.

On the second day, in a competition which involved going out to a goal, returning and then continuing along the line of flight as far as the pilot could go, Schreder went farther than anyone else, picking his way over 330 miles with that strange sixth sense of thermal-detection which only the best sailplane pilots seem to have. "Anyone," said Beaumont Cooley, the contest director, "can hang around an airport and stay aloft in familiar thermals all day. But to head out across country, you've got to be good. Guys like Schreder are pilots and meteorologists, and they're sort of geniuses, too."

They have to be. They face some odd problems. On that second day, while at an altitude of 11,000 feet, John Ryan of Scottsdale, Ariz. felt something sting him in the seat like a white-hot poker. Frantically scraping his hand between pants and parachute, he pulled out a murderous-looking Texas stinging scorpion. "How the hell do I know what he was doing up there?" he said when he was back on the ground. "I guess he just wanted a ride."

Schreder and Smith