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In Cumbrian dialect the sailplane pilots known as the "rock polishers" who fly over the Lake District might be termed as "leet as a fedder (feather)". They are the pilots of Edensoaring club, and the large white gliders they fly give every appearance of being weightless. But it is the rock polishers themselves, the pilots at the controls, who might be called into question by venturing where no sane mortal would ever dare. Hence the light-in-the-head reference down-to-earth Cumbrians could very well make. Not for the rock polishers the simple goal of flying high once the winch, inside a Land Rover-drawn horse box, that tows their graceful-looking gliders 300ft into the sky from the top of Latrigg has finally released them to wander the heavens at will. Instead their goal is to pass over as many hilltops as possible during each flight, picking up thermals and ridge lift along the way that will carry them on to farther chunks of craggy, elevated land masses. En route they will parry the equally unpredictable down-draughts and may venture inadvertently into ghylls, only to ameliorate their predicament by birdlike soaring. Crag faces like Pillar Rock, Esk Buttress, Cam Spout Crag and Napes Needle could well pass within metres of the rock polishers' wingtips as they soar by a world where only climbers and their ropes normally venture.
Yesterday a 1960s Olympia 463 sailplane landed as light as that proverbial feather in Grasmere, albeit skimming a drystone wall at 50mph to slide along the grass after 100 yards and just before another wall loomed ominously ahead. A doctor from Cambridge, the pilot had flown from Skiddaw across the valley to the Helvellyn range, traversed this, then sailed out over the Howgills to Kirkby Lonsdale and was making his return when rain blobs on the Perspex canopy forced him low, so making for his precipitate landing because of reduced visibility.
