Who Invented Soaring?

Fred Hermanspann

The SSA just celebrated the 100 year anniversary of Orville Wright’s history making gliding flights at Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina, seen by many as the beginning of true soaring flight (as opposed to gliding flight).  Orville Wright spent a whole week in October 1911 there with his Glider No 5 and after a lot of trial and error – mostly in trying to establish the best CG location – succeeded in staying aloft for almost 10 minutes in ridge lift on Oct. 24.  And on several flights he actually landed higher up on the hill than his starting point.  While this went largely unnoticed by the aviation community that was more enamored by powered flying and is regularly omitted by reviews of the achievements of the Wright brothers, it was a major step for the development of soaring.

So what is soaring?  Unless you are talking about the national debt or your spirits after surviving an examination by Neal Karman it means the ability of a glider (with the right pilot) to stay aloft, to gain altitude and to go places. With this definition, soaring had been practiced already for millions of years by birds, and before them, by pteranodons and pterosaurs.  As a matter of amazing fact, some of the earliest soaring creatures like the Quetzalcoatlus northropi were considerably larger than the largest known birds and came close to the size of modern gliders.  Their bone and membrane wings were also a lot closer to the design of early gliders and power planes than the feathered wing designs of birds.  In hindsight Otto Lilienthal’s  famous book “Birdflight as the Basis of Flying” might have been titled “Pteranodonflight as the Basis of Flying”.

As for human soaring, there was not too much development after 1911 until the early 20’s and the early days of the Wasserkuppe gliding camps.  While flight duration and altitude gains were gradually increased, getting away from the ridges was a slow process.  In 1929 Robert Kronfeld made the first 100 km flight along the “Teuto”, a long ridge in Northern Germany.  While it was ostensibly a ridge flight, the description of his flight indicates, that he also used quite a bit of thermal lift and this flight can be taken as the beginning of modern XC soaring.

Soaring has come a long way since.  With the introduction of Out-and Return records in the 30’s, the introduction of speed records over closed courses in 1948 and the exploration of wave flying for distance flying (Kuettner 1954) soaring has expanded in ways impossible to foresee for Orville Wright.  And 100 years from now - does anybody want to make a guess?