I feel a bit like I'm producing a serial television show, feeding everyone the story a little bit at a time. This is the last installment in the story of my ASW-15B before we get down to the details of what is happening and to photos of the work in progress. I would have never thought that I would one day own a German fiberglass sailplane. The extent of what I know about gliders comes from my experience with free-flight kit-built and scratch-built gliders back when I was a teenager some five decades ago. My friends and I would build them and then crash them and build them again -- you can learn a lot about soaring just by watching a model find its own way through the air. I recently celebrated 50 years of friendship with my closest friend. Our lives have run a sort of parallel course for most of that time and what one of us does, the other is likely to do more or less the same. He has always been a big fan of soaring and got his add-on license many years ago. We are both retired now; he lives in Florida with his Cherokee 180 and I live in Georgia with my Piper PA-12. About the middle of last year, he called me and suggested that I fly over to a little strip in South Carolina and meet him there to see his new (to him) Nimbus sailplane and maybe help get it back into the trailer and ready to haul back to Florida. The weather was agreeable on the appointed day, so I saddled up my trusty PA-12 and motored sedately across the megalopolis that is Atlanta, Georgia, then across most of the rest of the state of Georgia, and finally across a small chunk of South Carolina before finding the airfield in question. I don't think he actually thought I'd make such a long trip in such a slow airplane, but I did because that is what old friends do. This was the first time I'd ever seen a high performance sailplane up close and the Nimbus was impressive indeed. The fit and finish were more BMW than Cessna or Piper and the enormity of its wing span boggled my mind. As I ran my hand along the flawless surface of its wing, I was, in a word, jealous. I have no idea what my friend paid for the Nimbus, but I knew with certainty that I could not afford one on my pitiful military pension. By the time my Cub and I had chased the sun all the way back to Rome, I'd put the whole thing out of my mind.
The Civil Air Patrol hosts a regional glider encampment for young CAP cadets every summer at my home airport. Blaniks and trailers are parked here and there and no one gives them a second thought. I fact, I taxiied by one particular glider trailer so many times in five years that I ceased to realize it was there. Not long after my friend towed his Nimbus from Carolina down to the Sunshine State, he sent me an email complaining that he had to park the trailer outside in the hot Florida sun and that it had no ventilation at all. I remembered the bedraggled trailer near my hangar and that it had louvered vents in the side and offered to take photos of them for him. He thought that would be grand. On close inspection, the trailer was a disaster, rusted throughout and sinking into the red Georgia clay. Having taken several photos of the vents from the outside, I thought it might be wise to see if it was unlocked so that I could get a look at the vents from the inside. It was either unlocked or the locks had long since given up, because the tailgate dropped down with no complaint. Imagine my surprise when I found that the trailer was not empty but held a complete, fully grown sailplane slumbering quietly in the gloom.
I didn't give the glider a second thought until the middle of that night when I woke up with gliders on the brain. I had no idea what kind it was or why it was just sitting there, but I knew for certain that it was not getting the attention it required because everything was well past shoddy and it was filthy from one end to the other. I take a very dim view of any airplane being allowed to slowly return to dust; this one was no exception. "Hmmmm," I said to myself in a reflective sort of way and went back to sleep. My wife and I left for Belgium not long after to visit my son who was working for NATO at the time, so I put gliders out of my mind until we got back.
Once back in the States from a grand time in Europe (Please note that I am an American through and through and will be until the day I die, but I do envy you Europeans your european-ness and have not had a better time overseas in a very long time, if ever. My son and daughter in law will soon return to the States for their next assignment and are very concerned that they will have a hard time adjusting to life away from the European class and culture they have become so used to.), I realized I had the beginnings of glider envy and went straightaway to see the man about his glider. It turned out that the maintenance tech at whose hangar it was parked had had it since 1990 or so. A very good customer of his brought it to him to return to airworthy status but the technician, being a Beechcraft specialist, has no knowledge of gliders or how to address the ASW spar AD, so the airplane sat, all but forgotten, for all those years in a trailer with flat tires. Would the owner sell it, I wondered. The maintenance guy said he beleived he might and gave me the man's email address. I first did my research then I emailed him an offer that was so low it embarassed even me. He took my offer so quickly that I wondered if perhaps I should have bid less. Money and paperwork exchanged hands with arrangements to get the logbooks, parachute and some other odds and ends at some point to be determined. In just a few weeks, I found myself the happy owner of this particular ASW-15B without having seen it and with no idea whatsoever of how to fly the thing. The important thing was that now my friend with the Nimbus was not the only one of us with a respectable sailplane. When I told him what I'd done, he made me swear that I would do nothing until he could make the trip four hundred miles north to help me pull it out of the trailer into the light of day for the first time in more than twenty years. Of course, I agreed. That part of the story is for the next chapter, but I will tell you now that we were like two kids on Christmas morning and that my sailplane was very, very happy to be out in the fresh air again.
Until next time, cheers.
OBG
