Flying Sorcerer

Streamlined as they were, the 58 aircraft gathered outside the little Burgundy village of Saint-Yan (pop. 859) seemed remnants of an earlier era--a time when flying was still for the birds or for men who wished to emulate them. No stub-winged jets waited to scream aloft, riding the thrust of a man-made thunderclap. These were sleek sailplanes, slim-winged, frail, and built to soar on the least suspicion of a breeze. Their pilots had come from 25 countries for the fifth postwar international gliding championships.

Most of the pilots were scientists--chiefly meteorologists, electronics engineers, aerodynamicists--who devoted their spare time and their rainy hours to such pursuits as lectures by Geophysicist Joachim Kuettner on "A New Investigation of Stratospheric and Tropospheric Airflow in Powerful Mountain Waves," or "Research on the Transport of Freezing Nuclei and on Atmospheric Turbulence by Means of a Sailplane."

A Ruddy Machine. When it came to translating such complex matters into the precise science of soaring, no man at Saint-Yan could compare with a thin, grave U.S. meteorologist named Paul B. MacCready Jr. "He's a ruddy machine," complained one Englishmen. "He's a sorcerer," whispered a Frenchman. Said a more practical American: "He's a genius."

Too busy to do much soaring in between the international meets, Paul MacCready, 30, divides his time between meteorological research and running his own outfit, Meteorology, Inc., which specializes in cloud-seeding studies. He began soaring after training as a naval aviator during World War II, has kept it up to help work out his meteorological theories. "Rain, hail, lightning," says Paul, "all of them are byproducts of upcurrents. Soaring is a sport that teaches a scientist something."

Safer Than Driving. Right from the start of last week's meet, Paul MacCready rode the upcurrents as surely as Willie Hoppe playing the caroms on a billiard table. He finished second in the freeflight for distance, covering 241.7 miles, moved out in front in overall standings with a fifth in the 62-mile race south to St. Etienne, and in the next event, an Alpine flight, he practically flew off with the title.

The objective in the decisive event was to fly over the Dauphine Alps to Toulon, some 250 miles south, on the Mediterranean. Paul and his borrowed French Breguet-901 were towed aloft by a powered biplane, released at about 2,500 ft. With the rest of the pack he circled the field and eased gently toward the Alps. Mt. Ventoux (6,011 ft.) separated the men from the boys; many contestants turned back. To Paul, the problem seemed familiar--it was no tougher than soaring along the lee side of the Sierra Nevadas back home, where he had once reached a dramatic 30,000 ft. (the record: 43,000 ft). Patiently he tacked back and forth, working his way upward, riding air currents as buoyantly as a beach boy on a surfboard. Once over the crest, he slid easily downward to the French naval airfield at Hyeres, just eleven miles east of Toulon. No other glider got close.

When the competition ended last week, Paul MacCready had 4,891 points. Far back, in second place, came Spain's Luis Vicente Juez Gomez. Though his teammate, William Ivans of San Diego, lay in the hospital with a broken pelvis, the result of a storm-caused crash on a flight to Saint-Auban, newly crowned International Champion MacCready took a horrified look at French motorists buzzing about him on the ground and insisted: "Soaring is safer than driving. You feel you're part of the air."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.