Gliders

I met a pastor at a Lutheran Convocation whose church was called New Ulm in Arkansas.  I’d never heard of Ulm.  “It’s in Germany,” he said, “You’ve never heard of it, because nothing happened there.” I now beg to disagree.

            Nobody is very sure who the first person was who attempted to fly.  Romans had a myth about Iscarus.  A monk, Eilmer of Marmesbury, was reported to have taken a dive off his abbey roof about 1010 AD and broke both legs.  Other accounts sound fanciful. But in the Alpine foothills near Ulm, Germany a certain Hans Babblinger made artificial limbs.   One day, Hans got an idea.  Instead of affixing arms to a person, why not wings?  And being astute, he realized that feathers weren’t crucial.  Bats flew without them.  So he fashioned wings made with cloth on a frame. The day came for him to test his wings in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps where up-currents were common. On that memorable day with his friends standing by as eyewitnesses, Hans jumped from an embankment, and glided safely down. He had experienced glider flight. The year was 1594 and it was well-documented.

            Had this happened in America, he’d have been a celebrity and roundly praised for following his dream.  God puts His guidance in our heads and often this takes the form of a dream. Abraham had ‘em.  So did Jacob, Moses, Hannah, Mary and Joseph, Peter, and Paul.  Luther and Locke talked about how no one should dare stand in the way of someone’s dreams.  You might be standing in the way of God!

            But that’s not the way it worked out.  The King was coming to town.  The Bishop of Ulm and town fathers wanted to put on a show. Hans obliged to demonstrate his “flying” by jumping a cliff above the Danube River.  Tragically, he sank like a stone and plunged into the river. With egg all over their faces, the mayor and bishop began to decry this Babblinger fool who was trying to fly.  The Bishop’s sermon the next week was about how pride leads to a downfall and he mentioned poor Hans as an example.  In shame Hans hung up his wings and never tried to fly again.

            Now here is the interesting thing.  We have no pictures of what Babblinger’s wings looked like but based on descriptions, he had some kind of wooden framework and had bowed the cloth over the frame like a bird does its wings when it lands.  He was not that far away from a hang glider, aircraft engineers think.  The bowed upward shape gives a frizbee its gliding ability.  A glider is somewhat like a parachute with horizontal motion.  So what happened above the Danube River that day? When air is heated on a cliff face, it produces lift.  The cold water of the river did the opposite and the downdraft plus no controls made Hans plunge. But had he continued experimenting, we don’t think he was that far away from a successful glider —259 years ahead of time.  The first glider was invented by Sir George Cayley of Britain in 1853.  A German, Otto Lilienthal perfected controlled glider flight in the years after that.  The Wright Brothers installed an engine on their successful glider that became the first powered flight.  In 1905, Daniel Maloney, an American, demonstrated the first controlled high altitude glider flight by detaching his glider from a balloon at 4000 feet.  Pilots continue to learn about airplane dynamics by flying gliders.  The Air Force Academy trains young pilots extensively with gliders with the intent that they could save themselves should their craft lose power. Hans wasn’t the last guy who plunged into a river.  Among those who did was a former AF Academy Glider Instructor, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who is probably best known as the guy who piloted “Miracle on the Hudson” by glide-landing a US Airways airliner on the Hudson River January 15, 2009. His picture hangs in Doolittle Hall of the Air Force Academy.

            And as Robert Fulgram wrote, “Ulm is mostly a tourist destination today.  And how do people get there?  They fly.”  Follow your dreams and entrust them to God.