New Book - Competing In Gliders

This review is on the SSA web site. Knauff & Grove Soaring Supplies is the
USA distributor and books have been shipped to us. Price to be announced
soon.

Competing in Gliders: winning with your mind, by Leo and Ricky Brigliodori,
translated by Angela Elinor Sheard.

This handsome volume, by two of Italy's foremost competition pilots, is must
reading for pilots who want to improve their competition skills and
cross-country performance.

Even pilots who cut their teeth on Reichmann and Moffat and have been honing
their skills for many seasons will find ideas here to ponder and discuss and
can gain from the experience of authors who have flown all over the world
and often mounted the winners' podium.

The subtitle, "winning with your mind," indicates the authors are as
interested in the psychology of competing as they are with flying technique
and strategy, and they take pains to examine the outcomes of different
decisions - often by quoting examples from contests going back many decades.

The photos are spectacular, and one only wishes the format of the book had
been large enough to print them entire on each page, rather than having the
book's gutter slice them in half.

There are also many tables and graphs to illustrate the issues discussed.

The book has five sections: Technique; Strategy; Tactics; Human Factors; and
Organization. The earlier sections deal with familiar issues: when to
deviate and when not, for instance.

But the Human Factors section breaks new ground, discussing mental and
physical preparation in detail, including nutrition and the ideal contest
breakfast!
Chapter 1 begins by dividing "the process of technical evolution" into four
historical periods: the epoch of centering the thermal, which ended in the
mid-fifties; the McCready Epoch in the 50s and 60s which focused on
speed-to-fly; the dolphining epoch in the seventies which resulted from
superior performance and higher wing loadings; and today's long glide epoch,
which focuses on "following the energy" and circling as little as possible.
This then, is the book of our Long Glide Epoch, about how contests are won
today.

Comparing the techniques described here with those presented in my little
Introduction to Cross-country Soaring and other gliding manuals, I was made
aware again that the explanations given by even the world's leading experts
of how they manage their winning flights are probably far from the
complexities of human decision-making.

The diagram in a manual shows a thermal outlined and a glider entering and
turning, but in reality we never see a thermal outlined.

What we actually experience is a sequence of perceptions, a change in vario
reading, a twitch of wing and a surge in the seat of the pants, and we turn
and begin centering.

We are forever dealing with uncertainty and making decisions based on
perceptions and experience, an experience that includes our own flying and
the books and articles we've read. I'm sure there are all kinds of books on
musical composition, but only Mozart could write a Mozart symphony, and when
another, later composer studies Mozart in detail and tries his hand at it,
what he produces is either Schubert - a unique personal style - or the bland
and boring imitations that lack the genius of the master and leave us cold.
How to be a Genius is unpublishable.

This is not to say, of course, that advanced soaring techniques and
strategies can't be taught; they can. But the reasoning or divine revelation
that looks at the sky and the ground and says "That's where to go!" and is
right more often than not (and more often than the rest of us), will never
be written in a book or analyzed in a computer.

This book arrived in the mail with no publisher's slip inside saying when it
is to be published. It has no price imprinted. However, it does have an
ISBN: 88-7511-058-1, and an Italian copyright notice listing A.G. Bellavite
sri, Missaglia (LC). The distributors of gliding books may have more
information. It's a good read, and soon my copy will be sent to one of our
own top pilots in the U.S. for a more thorough review..

--
Thomas Knauff
Knauff & Grove Soaring Supplies
Ridge Soaring Gliderport

www.eglider.org
(814) 355 2483
fax (814) 355 2633