Six. Mayday instead of cartoons.Fourteen. Solo.

Aeroklub Rybnickiego Okręgu Węglowego — EPRG Gotartowice — since 2021

The user at fourteen, in the cockpit, on first solo. Awkward, ungroomed, before any of the credentials. — 2021First solo. Fourteen.

02·No engine

There is no engine.

Powered aircraft fly because they push air backward. Gliders fly because the air around them is going up faster than the aircraft is going down.

The only instrument that matters is the variometer — a needle that says how fast the air is moving relative to you. When the needle pulls upward, you found a thermal. When it doesn't, you have minutes. There is no second engine.

The discipline this produces isn't bravery. It's the opposite. Every flight is a one-sided negotiation with whatever the weather decided that morning.

Through-the-canopy mid-flight, what the user saw — the variometer's needle on the dash, the horizon ahead. — 2024SZD-9 Bocian · canopy

03·The team

Solo is the wrong word.

The tow pilot ahead of you releases the rope at six hundred meters; the ground crew on the radio called the wind direction before takeoff; the instructor who watched your first thirty solo flights is the reason there was a thirty-first.

My first flight under my own decisions was in 2021, at fourteen, on an SZD-9 Bocian, at Aeroklub ROW in Gotartowice. The instructor was Grzegorz Smołka. The second flight was twenty minutes later. By the end of the day, I had three. Five years and 110 flights later, I still don't have the license — the years I would have used to finish the SPL were the years I started building the things on the desk.

SZD Junior cockpit interior — instrument panel, legs forward, raindrops on the canopy. — 2024SZD Junior · cockpit, before takeoff

04·The unphotographable

Some sunrises don't photograph.

The cockpit is quiet enough that the air against the canopy is the loudest thing in the aircraft. The sun comes up through cloud you're flying above.

Once, from 1 500 meters, our house was identifiable by its roof; the school I had walked to for nine years was a dot; the cemetery was a dot.

Whatever you point a camera at flattens it. The aircraft is the camera. The image is the flight.

Dusk on the EPRG strip — a glider parked on the tarmac, low sun, the kind of light that doesn't survive in a photo. — 2024the photo of an unphotographable hour

05·What it taught

What it taught shows up in places that have nothing to do with airfields.

On a hackathon, hour 22.The venue's internet was buckling under fifteen hundred people uploading at once. Half of what we had built was unreachable from our own machines. Whatever the weather decided that morning, the negotiation is one-sided. You don't get a second engine. You fly the day you have. We won.

On the second morning of finals in Warsaw.The night before: through eliminations, into the final round. Also the night before: the NYU waitlist. Conditions don't ask whether you slept. I pitched in front of the jury anyway.

On a meeting with Cezary.Thirty-eight years older. He had been doing the work since before I was born. The right move was the same one as on the airfield — trust the more experienced pilot's call about a thermal you can't yet see.

2021

first solo · EPRG

110

flights logged

~1 600 m

highest altitude

~2 h

longest single flight

years on the airfield

The aircraft has no engine. Once you start descending, you are landing. The only question is which field.

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