Cruising in the clouds: Glider pilots visit Perry for annual competition
Apr. 22—PERRY — Buzzards, hawks and eagles have some unusual neighbors this week in eastern Aiken County, with dozens of afternoon visitors heading aloft for a Soaring Society of America competition — the biggest annual event held at Perry International Airport, where owners Allison and Rhonda Tyler have high-flying guests from as far afield as Florida, New York and Alaska. This year's fun, involving gliders being pulled aloft by motorized planes and then set free for three or four hours at a stretch, runs from April 20-25, and columns of rising air — thermals — are at the heart of the matter, providing enough of a boost for pilots to travel hundreds of miles without any fuel or internal combustion.
Among those keeping their eyes on the clouds — and sometimes traveling above them — is Greenville resident Scott Fletcher, a retired mechanical engineer on board for the competition. The self-described "hobbyist meteorologist" noted that this week's highlights included a Monday flight that reached 10,800 feet. Flights normally begin around noon, with 65 gliders going up one after another, looking to reach 6,000 feet above the ground.
"We're trying to maximize the weather to get us as far and fast as we can go... and it's really weather-dependent, and the weather is different every single day," he said. "We're trying to find elevators that you can't see," he said, referring to thermals.
"We have instruments in the airplane that tell us you're in it, but you have to kind of guess at where it's going to be, and fly over it and hope you hit it. " Several counties are part of the package, with a route normally in the range of 200-350 miles. "Our general task area is from Edgefield over to Lake Murray and then down to Orangeburg and then over to Barnwell, and then back towards Edgefield — that kind of a box," Fletcher said.
Gliders, being small and white against a blue background, are "really hard to see" unless riding a thermal fairly close to the ground, he added. Easier to spot are license plates from coast to coast. "We have one guy from Alaska, several people from California, several people from Florida and several people from the northeast here.