A young glider pilot has just revealed the unusual measures he’s forced to take when it starts to rain.
Dorian Bury, who goes by Wingit_Cloud on TikTok, was flying above Staffordshire in England when he noticed how heavily it was raining over the airfield.
The next thing we see is Bury standing in front of his glider in the middle of a cornfield.
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Yep, apparently if it’s raining too heavily, glider pilots have to find a safe place to land to avoid the aircraft getting wet.
And often that’s in a random farmer’s field.
Now stranded in the middle of the cornfield, Bury said he needed to find the farmer and update him about the state of his field.
Thankfully, he said the farmer was “really cool about it”, but we’re not sure that would always be the case.
Next, he called some friends with a trailer large enough to transport the glider back to the airfield.
But first, he needed to entirely disassemble the glider so it could fit in the trailer.
Bury said it took about an hour to pull the glider apart and carry it piece by piece out of the field.
The young glider pilot told supercarblondie.com why it was so important to avoid flying and landing in the rain.
“Rain covers the whole wing in little raindrop bumps which really reduces the performance of the glider,” he said.
“It may just be rain, but it disrupts the airflow over the wings.
“You also run into visibility problems and traction issues once on the ground.”
You can watch his full vid here!
Despite the difficulties wet weather sometimes created, Bury defended gliding, especially when it came to costs.
He said it was “orders of magnitudes cheaper” than what it costs to fly and maintain a powered aircraft.
“In gliding you don’t need to pay for fuel, aircraft maintenance is cheap and the instructors are usually volunteers,” he said.
