My friend John and I went sailplaning with the Fault Line Flyers in Briggs, Texas for a 2nd time. This time I flew in what is known as the Grob (pronounced grobe), pictured above. This is a high performance sailplane. It has perhaps a 30/1 glide ratio, which means for every 30 feet of forward movement it only looses 1 foot of elevation compared to the 233 which I flew the first time has 24/1 glide ratio. In the pictures below, I’m sitting in the cockpit, and Vince is preparing his seat in front of me.
![Gene sitting in the cockpit of an airplane](https://genosplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mebuckled-2.jpg)
![A man standing next to a plane](https://genosplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/starboardbow.jpg)
The Grob was not near as comfortable as the 233. I had to recline a lot in the Grob and barely fit under the canopy. The Grob was built better than the 233. It had a solid canopy which formed a tight seal with the fuselage. It took away any sense of “risk”. The 233 had a flimsy canopy and a poor seal. The wind came whipping in the canopy and kept me cool. More importantly, sitting in the front of the 233 I really had a sense of flying.
![plane in a field](https://genosplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hookup.jpg)
![A small plane sitting on top of a grass covered field](https://genosplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/launchready.jpg)
![Two planes take off in the sky](https://genosplace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/takeoff.jpg)
I wore my Adventure Cam II from Viosport to film our flight. The Viosport camera and my other equipment worked well to capture our experience. I will, however, need more footage from different angles to put together a good video to showcase sailplaning.
A web page on sailplaning wouldn’t be complete without a science lesson. If you ask just about any pilot how a plane can fly, they will most likely tell you, incorrectly, that it is the Bernoulli principle. The truth is it has more to do with Newton’s laws of motion. For a complete authoritative explanation please see A Physical Description of Flight. Just an FYI, the Bernoulli principle can’t explain how a plane can fly upside down.
It is no surprise that many sailplane pilots also enjoy sailboating. After all, the same theory of fluid dynamics is applicable to both sports. A sail is simply an airplane wing turned on its side. For a more concrete example see my Inventure page. For diagrams explaining how a sail works, please see Sailing: From Work To Fun. It is interesting to note that theoretically, a sailboat can actually sail faster than the wind. In reality, this is only demonstrated in ice sailboats. Friction on sailboats often prevent speeds approaching or surpassing that of the wind.