Thousands of feet in the air, Tom Rent pulls the lever to detach his light-weight glider from a single-engine plane that’s towing it.
There’s no sudden plummet, no stomach-wrenching nosedive into the rural Goodhue County cornfields. Instead, the glider coasts for a moment or two, and then catches a thermal — a warm air current rising quickly from the ground.
“It’s almost like you’re halfway to heaven,” Rent said, describing the experience of gliding earlier that afternoon. “You can kind of block out the world.”
On Sunday, Rent, a Lakeville resident, was just one of many Minnesota Soaring Club members taking to the air from the club’s base of operations: Stanton Airfield, a vintage, World War II-era airport east of Northfield.
This summer the club is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and Rent, a certified flight instructor who has logged roughly 1,000 glider flights under the auspices of the club, couldn’t be more proud of the group’s longevity.
The club, Rent said, was started in 1959 by a group of World War II Air Force veterans who bought a TG-2 Glider, a large sailplane used in the war by the U.S. military to land troops and equipment. To support their passion for flying, the veterans pilots stripped the glider down and refinished it for recreational use, and then began launching glider flights from Stanton Airfield.
Now, 50 years in, the soaring club meets every weekend during the summer to send members and paying visitors up for a glider ride in sleek, modern sailplanes, which can weigh as little as 500 pounds. Rides can last for hours, and begin when the gliders detach from a motorized tow plane, which carries them up thousands of feet into the air.
For Northfielder Bob Hanson, one of the more than 100 members of the group, the soaring club has been an irreplaceable recreational and social platform — albeit one he can only occasionally participate in, due to his busy work schedule as a professor at St. Olaf College.
“For me, it’s been a very positive social experience, to get to know all these people who have this common interest in flight and the joy of being off the ground,” said Hanson. “It’s been a very good volunteering outlet.”
The club, airport manager Kent Johnson said, is also important to the continued vitality of Stanton Airfield, which is on the National Register for Historic Places. The group and the airfield, Johnson said, share a mutually beneficial relationship.
On one hand, the airport supports the club logistically, providing hangar space for the gliders and tow planes, not to mention a runway. The group, for its part, financially supports the airport through the rent it pays, and brings a large number of visitors and tourists it to the airfield each year.
Without the club members and their continued advocacy, Johnson believes, Stanton Airfield would be more vulnerable to encroaching development.
“When you get more people involved, the more people are concerned in seeing that it stays an airport,” said Johnson, who lives at Stanton Airfield. “The airport could probably survive without them, but it’d be tough, because they contribute a lot.”
“We’re all in it for the people and the camaraderie, and the gliding is kind of filler,” Rent said. “It’s a major cornerstone of our lives, to have this. If it were gone ... life would feel pretty empty.”
THE SCIENCE BEHIND GLIDING With hundreds of pounds worth of plane, equipment and passengers in the air, it seems impossible that gliders could stay aloft without any sort of powered propulsion. Instead, glider flight instructor Tom Rent said, the planes rely on powerful updrafts of warm air, called thermals, to keep them aloft. After being cut loose from their powered tow plane, glider pilots frequently search for nearby cumulus clouds — good indicators of thermals, over which the clouds frequently form. Once the glider pilot finds a thermal, he or she spirals upwards, propelled on the air current, eventually disembarking from the thermal before reaching the cloud layer. Without thermals, Rent said, the planes would slowly coast to the ground. According to Rent, the longest ride any of the Minnesota Soaring Club members has undertaken was an eight and a half-hour trip from Stanton Airfield to St. Louis.
ABOUT THE SOARING CLUB The Minnesota Soaring Club, based out of Stanton Airfield, east of Northfield, boasts more than 120 members. Members of the club share ownership of the club and its two tow planes and three non-motorized gliders. To become a full member of the club, individuals must pay a one-time fee of $2,000. Yearly dues are $348. For more information about the club, or to become a member of the group, visit mnsoaringclub.com.
— David Henke covers city, business and youth issues. He can be reached at dhenke@northfieldnews.com or 645-1100.
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