Anyone ever take a glider (sailplane) ride?

[courtjester123]

Trying to decide between a 10-min nighttime chopper ride in Vegas and a 30-min sailplane ride.

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: courtjester123
Trying to decide between a 10-min nighttime chopper ride in Vegas and a 30-min sailplane ride.

Does that include take-off and landing? 10 minutes sounds kinda short to me

 

[JulesMaximus]

My Mom has. She said it was great fun.

I saw the video but you couldn't really get a feel for how cool it would be.

BTW-It is quite noisy just from all the air rushing past the canopy. Just no engine noise.

 

[courtjester123]

The nighttime Vegas chopper rides are all pitched as 1.5 hours but that includes ground transportation for hotel pickup/dropoff and everything else. If you read the fine print they are about 10min of actual flight time...basically a quick tour around the strip to see all the neon and the hotels. You can get much longer daytime rides that include hoover dam & the grand canyon but they are considerably more expensive. The glider ride is a happy medium for me price-wise.

 

[Foxery]

I was in a glider once... it's pretty neat to realize how far you can go without a motor, but once I accepted that, I thought, "Now what?"

Personally, the idea of darting through a colorful city in a heli sounds more entertaining. 10 minutes is pretty weak, though

 

[rivan]

It must be all the icanhascheezburger and ATOT getting to me... I read your title as:

Anyone ever take a glider (failplane) ride?

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: rivan
It must be all the icanhascheezburger and ATOT getting to me... I read your title as:

Anyone ever take a glider (failplane) ride?

Did someone say failplane?

 

[klod]

I've done both, I would pick sailplane again over helicopter. Once we were towed up and loose from the tow plane, he radioed down to see if there were more people in line. There wasn't anyone else waiting, and we had great thermals, so we stayed up for 45 minutes. Got to fly around for a few minutes with the canopy open too. Just amazing.

 

[IGBT]

..I recall seeing them in the Calistoga, Calif. area years ago. Amazing to watch them catch a thermal and zoom all around.

 

[Nyati13]

I would go with the sailplane... great fun, and you might get to take the controls for a bit.

I've done fully enclosed canopy sailplanes which are slick, but I've also gotten to go in an open cockpit, high-wing glider, which was just frikken awesome... felt like a WW1 fighter, just with no engine.

The takeoffs were powered by a big ass winch on the ground with about a mile of cable... like getting launched off an aircraft carrier.... so much fun...

 

[courtjester123]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I shall let you know how it ends up.