Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Northwest Soaring Club of Frankfort is the age of many of its intrepid glider pilots who dare the skies and gusts off Lake Michigan day after day. Club founder Stollie Larson is 78, Dave Harden, 74, Hal Bruning, 79 and Cal Stevens, 82. Yet, they soar with the same sense of zest as the aging astronauts in Clint Eastwood's film, "Space Cowboys," and appear many years younger than they claim. Perhaps it's the soaring that keeps them young. "Don't you ever get scared doing this?" we ask glider pilot Jack Kelly, 74, as the tow plane jerks the rope on our glider and starts bumping along the grass runway. "Not at all," Kelly says. "It's not scary because it's so much fun!" In a matter of minutes we're pulled to 1,300 feet above the bluffs of Frankfort, overlooking the long slough of Crystal Lake, the Platte lakes, and the dunes running for miles to the horizon along Lake Michigan. Kelly, who divides his time between a home in San Diego and one in Benzie County, says he's been soaring for 6-7 years. "I have a cottage on the lake and I saw these guys flying one day," he recalls. "I took a ride and was hooked. It's not hard to learn how to fly -- it's kind of like riding a bike -- once you know how anyone can do it." Like many of the other glider pilots in the club, Kelly has no license to fly a powered aircraft. You'd think that it would be more hazardous flying an unpowered glider, and would require more training, yet he's flown hundreds of times and some members have made thousands of flights.
NEW GENERATION "The great thing about this club is that you can learn to fly without having to go to a lot of time and expense getting a regular pilot's license," notes Pete Brancheau, a relative newcomer to his club in his early 30s. Brancheau and tow pilot Mike Stimac are part of a new, younger generation of soaring enthusiasts who are continuing a tradition in Frankfort that goes back to the 1920s. Brancheau says the club offers rides to the public every weekend at Frankfort Airport and often throughout the week as well, weather permitting. Planes tow gliders to altitudes of several thousand feet and then cast loose the line for a serene glide back to the airport. "The minimum tow is to 3,000 feet and a flight lasts 20-25 minutes," Brancheau says. He adds that most people opt for a $95 option that features a plane tow to 4,000 feet, adding an extra five minutes of flight time. For $135, you can go nearly a mile up to 5,000 feet. If soaring gets in your blood, you can join the club for $500 and take lessons, even if you've never flown a plane. "For $1,000 you can have a license to do this," says Brancheau, who already has his powered-aircraft license; he just got his glider wings last week. By comparison, it costs $5,000-$6,000 to get a powered aircraft license, and of course, it's expensive and near-impossible to rent a plane. Buying a 50-year-old plane can set you back $30,000, while a new one can run 10 times that.
LOOKING BACK Soaring in gliders dates back to the 1920s, and Frankfort with its windblown bluffs was one of the first gliding centers in the world. "Gliding started back in Germany after World War I," Brancheau says. "Germany was banned from having powered aircraft after they lost the war, so they started training with gliders. A lot of the Hitler Youth learned to fly gliders." By the time Adolf Hitler was fully in power, a generation of German glider pilots were ready to take to the skies in the Luftwaffe -- then the world's most formidable air force. Ironically, part of America and Britain's war effort against the Nazis involved a D-Day attack by hundreds of gliders on northern France in 1944. Many of the pilots were trained by instructors from Frankfort. Imagine hundreds of gliders swooping over the English Channel in the wee hours of June 6, 1944, their passenger-soldiers unaware if they'll make it out alive after crashing into the hedgerow-filled fields of Normandy in the dark under anti-aircraft fire, with nothing but a paper-thin fuselage for protection. There's history in these craft -- blood, daring, and courage. The American home of gliding was Elmira, New York, but a group of flyers migrated west to Frankfort with Johnny Nowak in 1927, who flew from the Crystal Downs area. Back then, gliders were towed off the bluffs along Lake Michigan using a winch attached to a truck. In 1938-'39, Frankfort hosted the midwestern national soaring championships, and gliders were even built in the town by Stanley Corcoran, who offered the Cinema model at his Frankfort Sailplane Company. The company built the U.S. Army's first military training glider, the TG-1. Those were the glory days of soaring in Frankfort. In 1939, Ted Bellak thrilled crowds by completing a 54-mile flight from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to Frankfort at 13,000 feet above Lake Michigan in his Dove of Peace glider.
HIGH FLYING Elaine Larson, 74, remembers those exciting days and decades of flying fun and adventures that followed. She became a powered-aircraft pilot herself during the 1940s at a time when women pilots were almost unheard of, paying for her license and training by waiting tables. She went on to a career as an art teacher, and still instructs in both Frankfort and at Arizona Western College. Her father, Zada Price, single-handedly revived the sport of soaring in Frankfort after the war, launching a new club that Elaine's husband Stollie joined. "We met at the airport," Elaine says of Stollie. "He was working there after the war and I was into horses then. One day I rode down to the airport and we met." Sadly, Elaine's father died in a glider accident in 1960 at the age of 54. He was in Midland, helping with a soaring meet, and his glider hit some power lines. Without his leadership, the club fell apart. In 1972, Stollie and Elaine decided to relaunch the club. Their efforts produced a hit, with a National Soaring and Glider Festival the very next year in 1973 that drew thousands of visitors. The Larsons also started a soaring business to cater to tourists. Initially, they used a tow truck and a winch to get their glider up, eventually switching to a 1950s vintage Schweitzer 233 tow plane. "Stollie completed over 5,000 tows since 1984, and we didn't even count how many before that," Elaine says. "It was nothing for him to get in 400 or 500 tows per season. We've pretty much spent our lives out here at the airport."
TODAY'S CLUB "We've got about 30 club members now," Elaine adds. "We've lost a lot of good people to cancer or heart disease, and the membership was going down. Then all of a sudden, a new wave of younger persons started coming in." What about accidents? "This club has been here 30 years and we've never had a bad accident," Stollie says. He started flying in 1945 and was an aviation mechanic in the Navy. Although there have been no fatalities or serious injuries, some pilots get into trouble from time to time. "We had one guy joined the dunkers club," Stollie notes, referring to a crash into Lake Michigan. "I think we've had two or three who joined the dunker's club," Elaine corrects. "But it was in shallow water, so they recovered their gliders." Then too, some pilots have been forced to land in trees. Brancheau says he got into a bit of trouble while riding the thermals (updrafts) several miles from the airport. He was having such a good time that he didn't notice that his altimeter had dropped to 1,000 feet, barely enough altitude to make it home safely.
AIR HARDWARE A med tech at Paul Oliver Memorial Hospital, Brancheau has a poet's gift for describing the glories of flight as well as the mysteries of aeronautical engineering. His words capture the roar of takeoff and the towplane's engine and then the sudden silence as you hover with the clouds and the wind over Frankfort. He can describe in detail the delicate balance of the glider's aluminum armature, wooden framework and canvas skin and how it is perfectly poised to exploit the thermals billowing in unexpected moments towards the sky. "If you get into a thermal, your gut instinct is to hang with it and see how high you can go," he says. Currently, the club has five gliders in its fleet. Members are considering a move to Thompsonville's airport where thermal currents are better; the winds around Frankfort aren't what they used to be. Members are also considering changing their rules on long-distance flights. "We've hamstrung ourselves somewhat with some rules on no cross-country flying with the club gliders," Brancheau says. "You can ride thermals for hundreds of miles."
LONG DISTANCE Hal Bruning is one pilot who has gone the distance. "I flew 165 miles one time, which isn't that far," he says. "I ended up down in Coldwater, but was trying to go farther. Flights of 1,000 kilometers are not that unusual. They're usually done in mountainous country where the air flows in waves through the mountains in thermals, ridge lifts and standing lee waves." If those sound like nautical terms, that's just what they are, Bruning agrees, only the waves and lee currents are within an ocean of air. What about acrobatics? "The club prohibits acrobatics, but we've had members do them with their own gliders," says Dave Harden. "One did seven loops in a row, one right after another." On our own flight, we are thankful that no loop-de-loops or barrel rolls are in store. A failure to eat breakfast means that an already queasy stomach is getting a bit flippy by flight's end. Pilot Jack says that kids love to get the roller coaster treatment when they go up, with a sudden plunge. "No need for that," says the chicken writer. But, anyone would agree that a flight up is high adventure and that the lake vistas are glorious beyond description -- it all goes by in a dream. Jack banks into a steep turn and we go soaring down towards the runway at 60mph, hitting the turf with a rolling tumble of bumps. It seems a miracle that this fragile, eggshell craft doesn't explode like a puff of dandelion seedlings, but it rambles down the field as nimble as a bird to a stop with smiles all around. Definitely a rush.
The Northwestern Soaring Club of Frankfort, Inc. offers glider flights every weekend, weather permitting, at Frankfort Airport just east of town through mid October. Show up and look for the sign at the far end of the field, or call 231-352-9160.
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