From Nevada to Kansas by Glider

Not the OP, but I'd say both are yes. You will be flying in close proximity to mountains, no way you can do this without actually seeing the mountain.

My understanding is that (1) there is, as you say, a very nonzero risk of landing in a field and good visibility of what is _in_ that field is critical; (2) when riding thermals it is traditionally the case that many gliders soar in close proximity close to the core rising air mass, circling at quite a high bank angle – and collisions need to be avoided (many glider pilots wear parachutes for that reason…) and having visual references, particularly to mountains, really helps; and finally (3) it is common to be flying visually as one typically staircases in an altitude profile, as seen here, and go in and out of controlled airsapce (or deliberately avoid bumping into it, as I have done at 10 kft in UK airspace a long time ago).

In contrast, general aviation aircraft:

a) Have bright lights b) Will fly in a straight line at a well defined altitude, meaning that vertical separation is sufficient to deconflict aircraft c) Do not typically land in fields and do instead land on runways which often _also_ have bright lights.

Yup! A lot of folks forget about mechanical lift and only think of thermic lift.

Well, I am not sure if it's easier in a glider but the approach and landing of an aircraft under various conditions is about 50% of PPL training.

(For the non pilots here, getting the private pilot license is equivalent to learning your first programming language/shipping your first app). All other accreditations and ratings are gated behind it.

As a glider it's probably easier with ATC to stay under 29,000 (RVSM), yeah?

Interesting. Do they also use condom catheter?

I have friends who fly in paragliding competitions.

Look up "male external catheter".

> That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.

Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)

When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.

NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.

(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)

This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.

The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.

Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.

So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.

People flying in aeroclubs here in Czech Republic AFAIK not pay for flight time (they pay fowlr tow of course) - they pay some yearly membership fee & slave for the club during the year doing maintenance and repairs or running information service on the aeroclub airport tower.

Avid flight simmer here and PPL holder, curious to hear what types of bad habits you’re referring to. I had a similar experience at the start of my training—looking too much at the instruments—but it was pretty easy for me to get over it

My instructor and I were launched using a powered winch launch. As we were ascending, another glider passed over us and barely missed us. They later claimed they didn't see us, though they were later found to be at fault.