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Sick of Studying? Try Gliding
Mariana Marin
Gliding can be practiced by young and old alike but for students between 16 and 22, there is an added incentive - it can be completely free of charges if the pilot-to-be has some rudimentary knowledge of physics.
When it’s vacation time, Romanian students head for the mountains or the beach or just kick back with their friends and family. But a small number make straight for the airfield to indulge in their passion for gliding. The Romanian Air Club and the other clubs all over the country provide free courses for students the first three months of each year followed by tests after which the pilot is good to go.
Gliders are airships without engine that reach an altitude of over 900 feet. They are pulled into the air by regular, engine-driven planes but once aloft, are free to float in the wind. Romanian Air Club director Constantin Voicu said glider pilots try to model themselves on professional pilots, staying calm at all times, ready to handle whatever situation may present itself.
Many of Romania’s top gliders, including some who have won national and international competitions, base themselves out of the aerodrome at Deva in Transylvania. It attracts students from all over the country, like Laurenţiu Codorean, 22, a fourth year physics major who studies in Timişoara. He has been practicing gliding since 2001 and during the summer he is almost always at the aerodrome when conditions are right to fly. “Even though I don’t get to fly always, I love to come and watch the gliders up in the sky,” he said.
Not all the gliders started so young. Sandu Gruian, 35, a journalist from Deva, took up the hobby only a few years ago and now flies solo. Said Codorean: “Every flight is special in its own way. … Flying in a glider is the most pure form of flight and the satisfaction that you get is definitely apart.” Once, he found himself gliding in the middle of a flock of storks.
Some might consider the idea of drifting around in an engineless plane risky. But University of Bucharest journalism student Anca Tînc said the sport was not dangerous. “I have never felt in seven years of practicing it, that my life is endangered,” she said.
Nucuţa Corina, a geography student from Cluj-Napoca recalled her first solo flight. “I was ready theoretically but deep down inside I had some doubts that I can do it by myself. My hand was shaking on the glider’s stick and that moment only, I have considered gliding as an extreme sport. I passed through the moment though, and after my first flight alone my colleagues baptized me’ by pushing me into a thorn bush.”
Adrian Bordea, an engineering student in the third year at the University of Hunedoara, sees gliding as, “the perfect combination between free time, a time to relax and let’s just say, a way to live to the extreme.” Codorean concurred: “They say nowhere is like home. For me, the air-club is a second home, the gliders are my second family.”
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