Students take to the skies with the BU Gliding and Soaring club
For many travelers, the act of flying has become almost routine. Once ensconced in the long metal tube that is a commercial jetliner, you might gaze out the window (if you get the window) while the plane takes flight and the landscape drops away and starts to look like an elaborate model railroad set. Then you’re in the clouds, and after a moment, you settle in to watch the in-flight flick.
It’s easy to imagine that this experience would be a bit more exciting if you were in a two-seat propeller plane. In the smaller craft, you might feel more exposed, a speck in the welkin. You’d feel the sensation of flying as a kind of rush through your body.
Now what if, upon reaching those heights, you could turn the engine off? Suddenly, the only sound is of the wind whistling across the wings—which have been designed to keep the plane aloft without power. You catch an updraft and circle silently through the air with the birds.
Once a week (when the weather allows), members of the Boston University Gliding and Soaring (BUGS) student club get the rare opportunity to do just that, sailing the skies in a Stemme S6 motor glider. The Stemme’s powered propeller gives it the freedom to just take off. (No tedious wait for a towing plane.) Once at the desired altitude—say, 1,000 feet—the pilot cuts the power and coasts on air currents, the way birds do.
“In a plane with a motor, you’re generally trying to get from Point A to Point B,” says BUGS member Kit Ng (ENG’26). “In a glider, you’re almost never doing that. It’s more for fun, and kind of a test of your pilot skills, just to stay in the air.”
“When I go up in the Stemme, it’s very serene,” says Sophia Becken (ENG’12), the club’s outgoing president. “Very, very serene.” With the Stemme’s expansive cockpit window, “you can see all the way around,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”