TRUE FLIGHT : A Tycoon, His Foreign Friends and the Breadless Art of Soaring

Money isn’t everything, but it does tend to keep the children in touch.

--Plaque by the fireplace at Barron Hilton’s Flying M Ranch

Ever since Barron Hilton got into the act, all these Germans have been lifting their glasses to his name.

“These Germans” are a dozen world-class glider pilots, here at the hotel magnate’s invitation for a late-summer “soaring camp” at his ranch in the desert foothills of Yerington, Nev. At least most of them are German. The guest list includes an American, an Austrian and an Englishman, but Germans dominate the sport, and by midweek the ground crews have begun to lump all the pilots under one flag. “Try to figure these Germans” is a typical remark.

So far that’s been the only sign of international awkwardness. Mainly the guests and the wives and the workers are busy agreeing that for Hilton or anyone to reward the amateur sport of soaring with a yearly incentive--top applicants in a field of about 4,000 worldwide win entry to this week of sport and high leisure--ranks as a welcome departure from their common experience. “Aviation is a Brotlose Kuenst-- a breadless art,” says Hannes Linke, the 46-year-old U.S. competition director. Probably because it’s such a visual bust for the spectator: Aside from a few theatrics at the finish line, the most you’ll see from the ground is an occasional glint of the wing of a glider in the sun, while the initiates in their lawn chairs trade jokes about how the pilot is making out. To the pilot it may mean “courting Mother Nature in a silent arena,” to quote a script by Chris Woods, a cinematographer who has the run of the ranch. For the observer, Linke says, it’s a lot like “watching submarine races.” In either case you don’t run into any ticket scalpers, and it’s a measure of soaring’s position in current events that last year’s Barron Hilton Cup took place during the same week as the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and neither the general public nor the gliders saw a conflict.

Hilton, 58, second-eldest son of the late hotelier Conrad, counts himself with the gliders. “If I could,” he says, “hell, I’d be up there all the time.” He stands in the shade of an aluminum hangar alongside the 5,400-foot runway, wearing a peculiar, gasping expression and holding his cigar well to the side in conversation, as if this helps him to see you better. This is his first trip to the ranch after nine hectic months that have left him, according to his publicist, dazed but “back in the saddle.” In April he sold an Atlantic City hotel when the New Jersey Casino Control Commission denied him a gambling license. In May he survived a full-blown corporate takeover attempt by Stephen Wynn of the Golden Nugget when Hilton shareholders voted some 11th-hour shark repellents.

By contrast, the soaring camp has always brought a sparkle to his corporate karma. “For example, we’re about to open our first hotel in Australia,” Hilton explains. “And as it happens, the current world champion of soaring is an Australian--Ingo Renner.” A shrug. “The expenses have been minor,” he continues--half a million, by one estimate, to supply the “superships” and the food and the workers, and TWA took care of transporting the Europeans to Las Vegas, where Hilton entertained them before depositing them at the ranch. “Of course, we needed to have hotel rooms in Vegas,” he says. “I have 3,174 of them.”

In truth, almost everything between Barron Hilton and the sport of soaring has been blessed by coincidence. When German aviator Hanna Reitsch sold him on the joys of soaring in the early ‘70s, he didn’t even know that his Flying M Ranch sat on one of the two or three best sites in the world for gliding. He’s ceased to question this sort of thing. “It’s all in the brochure,” he says, and steps forward to look at the sky.

Absolutely everyone who isn’t in the sky looks up at it, called by it, while the sun beats down, heating the rocks that heat the air that lifts the planes, in such a vast seclusion--the ranch covers 780 square miles--that you can hear feet trudge in the sand at a hundred yards, half-consciously hear the curses and coughs and tool-kit noises of the pilots checking out their crafts. The weather is “flyable,” 90 degrees-plus, but not record-chasing like it was in ‘84, when 21 national and international records fell. Superficially the group has been waiting for this to change, ever since Sunday, three days back, when the American, Steve Koerner, declared the week’s only record attempt--in soaring, as in billiards, you call your shots--and fell eight miles per hour short. But there is the conviction that what happens here ought not to be newsworthy. Last year some European TV crews had only made a mess of things, “stealing our women and running the show,” according to one organizer. This year they have not been invited.

Most of the pilots have been up for hours now. Hannes Linke is playing in a new plane, trying to clear Mt. Grant, the local landmark. Others are ridge-soaring along shelves of hot air, as far away as the White Mountains, 80 miles to the south. Helmut Reichmann, 44, a three-time world champion, is about to fly inverted for the sole purpose of a snapshot of the land forms and hues, because the view from up there is like the beginning of time. “It’s not necessary,” he says, checking the shutter. “We do this because none of it is necessary.”

“Like the beginning of time!” Barron Hilton has nearly dropped his hors d’oeuvre at the phrase, he so admires it. The rich, of course, are different from the rest of us, although somewhat closer to the poor in that they tend to know what they like. Hilton’s likes on this Wednesday night are a hodgepodge: a pale blue Members Only jacket, a Hunting-Fishing Club cap and a Charles Bronson movie called “The Evil That Men Do”--Hilton flipped for it on the flight in from New York and is now watching it again on his VCR. He drifts from the screen long enough to grab some fried frogs’ legs, then returns to announce the gory scenes. “Now it starts to get, uh, a little more action ,” he says.

A din rises behind him as the ace pilots stumble in for the nightly cocktail hour, comparing notes on today’s trials and errors. “ Phantastich !” is a word you hear a lot--it leaps now and then above the struggling English, which for no great reason has established itself as the official language here. Several of the Germans seem to trade in one-liners. Like Bruno Gantenbrink, 36, a stout, bearded West German who looks like a count and sways side to side as he banters, sipping a Coors. “With the weather, we’re unlucky,” he says, “but the scenery is beautiful. The beer, it’s also beautiful!” He shifts left. “But yellow.”

In comes Steve Koerner, 34, the American from Inyo-Kern, who speaks hardly at all and with an elaborate athletic modesty when he does. A definite contrast in jock ethic when you look at it: Koerner is closer in style to the chivalrous Englishman, George Lee, than to the “Germans,” who resemble to the American mind a panel of academics. Like Gregor Stogner, a storkish Austrian who carries his eyeglasses in his shirt pocket, and Helmut Reichmann, a tousled professor who has published three books and a thesis on the physics of the sport and who helped launch this event. Hardy Baer is the exception. He wears shades and could conceivably pass for an aviator.

Almost everyone is back now, crowding the bar. Robert Gansow, a florid West German pilot in his 70s, has flown along the White Mountains today as a passenger in a two-seater. “This is what I am,” he chuckles. “I am here as a ballast .”

“How were the White Mountains?” someone calls.

Gansow straightens up--he is glad to be asked. “Good, only zey are not white!” he shouts.

“It’s ‘advertising,’ ” says the publicist.

Grinning nearby but following none of this is Gansow’s teammate on that flight, Gerd-Uwe Staubach, a teen-age student who has given up on the language barrier. When confronted with questions in English, he excuses himself and runs over to tap the shoulder of the legend, Hans-Werner Grosse, who turns around as if to see who has just offered to buy him a drink. The master to the aid of the student. Staubach is young enough to idolize Grosse--a 62-year-old balding superstar who once flew one of these engineless crosses 907.7 miles in a straight line--and the elders adore him for it, both for his youth and for proving their argument that, demographically, soaring isn’t the palace of privilege it’s accused of being. Disproportionately German, sure--native talent had no place else to shine under the Versailles Treaty, which prohibited most power-plane R & D. And for the moment largely male--92.3%, according to a 1984 Soaring Society of America membership survey. But the social economics run surprisingly wide. More SSA members fall below the $40,000-a-year mark than above it. The faithful here in Yerington like to point out that Hilton, through a liberal handicapping system, enables “students like Gerd-Uwe here” (who quickly smiles again) to qualify even in primitive rental aircraft, and that Reichmann won two world crowns before owning his own glider.

In fact these guys are never so animated--at the bar, at the airstrip, all week long--as when defending their sport against some unseen detractor. “Most people,” Grosse says, “think that you get up in a glider and you never know where you go--you find out by asking the nearest farmer, ‘ Where am I ?’ This sort of thing.” What publicity there is about competition soaring tends to glamorize the dangers, which theoretically include, in addition to outright nose dives, hypothermia (extravagantly low body temperature), hypoxia (oxygen deprivation), cyanosis (turning blue) and other stages of high-altitude crib death best avoided by dressing right and bringing oxygen. This infuriates the rental operator, by hurting business, and slanders Grosse, here, by equating him with a human cannonball.

It honors the pilots to prefer the aesthetic rewards, and in this respect they may be snobs: Someone is always missing their point. Soaring, they love to recite, is about “finding air that goes up faster than you are going down.” It is “true flight.” Hawks and buzzards do it. In fact the pilots look for these birds to lead them to thermal airlifts. Or else they fly toward cumulus clouds, another sign, then corkscrew to the top of the column of air until, by their calculations, it is efficient to spend some of the altitude for some straightaway distance. Which brings in science, the lift-drive ratio, or number of miles you can count on flying for each mile of altitude (about 60 if you’re in a top-notch glider, about 1.8 if you’re in the Space Shuttle--it pays to know). Filling the wings with water can help the craft “penetrate” on the straightaway but may hamper the climb; the pilots must continually decide which card to play. And on they go toward the next thermal, until they feel the lift again, the click and groan of the craft, and turn in toward the source, now gaining a thousand feet per minute, now losing it altogether, in 4- or 6- or 11-hour stretches of this patient aerial solitaire that they insist is its own reward.

These are the terms of the sport, and of whatever camaraderie the pilots are sharing at this bar. Never would a “good” pilot overextend his skills, or chase records when he doesn’t know the terrain, or when the weather doesn’t justify it, and run the risk of an outlanding. Suddenly Grosse is almost frantic to get this out. “It’s very unsafe , you know, just to ‘fly into the blue yonder’! And what if you become lost? And you have to land somewhere? And maybe the temperature is over a hundred degrees?”

His own thought astonishes him. “What if there is nobody around to help you?”

The next day ends in outlandings.

The morning begins with Grosse’s five-mile jog at dawn, before the pilots’ briefing. Except for a photographer who joins him, everyone is still asleep, either in the bungalow rooms adjoining the ranch house or in the motor homes that Hilton has brought in for the overflow. Beside these are a tennis court and a neglected eight-foot basketball hoop. The valley itself sits between three lakes--Tahoe on the west, Mono to the south and Walker to the east--and is shaded at this hour into crushed pastels by the 11,000-foot rim of Mt. Grant, 75 miles southeast of Reno.

There’s a surprising snap to the air. The overnight lows, usually in the 40s, are what make for exceptional soaring conditions if the days heat up fast enough--because hot air at the ground lifts urgently against the cool air above it--and the failure of this to occur has begun to discolor all the activities. Even Grosse’s jogging. Once, he says, at a five-day world championship, he psyched out the other pilots by telling them that jogging was the secret to his stamina. By week’s end he had all of them rising with the dawn to run. There is a sense that the pilots grow closer under such competitive pressures--for all their mannered mystery toward one another--than in functions like this camp, the purpose of which is to “bring them together.”

Perhaps for that reason, it is decided at the morning briefing that the time has come to declare a task, any task. When the breakfast plates are cleared, Helmut Reichmann and Carl Herold, a former president of the Soaring Society of America, stand by the aeronautical map and lay out the options to the group. “You ought to be able to fly, or attempt to fly, a 500-kilometer triangle,” Herold says. “I’d do something like Lone Pine and return.”

“Or the White Mountains?” Reichmann asks.

Sounds OK. “Do that,” Herold nods. “That, or something like here, to Bridgeport, then down to Bishop, and back.”

“That’s not too short?” someone wants to know.

“Well,” Herold says, “Lone Pine is pretty far if we’re gonna have a hard time getting out.”

A guffaw from Hilton, who knows what Herold means. It has become practically a subplot to the week that Hilton has been unable to get over Mt. Grant, a prerequisite for cross-country travel. The pilots suppress any laughter about it--an unnecessary courtesy, since Hilton takes himself pretty lightly. “It doesn’t do any good to go up before 2, does it?” he asks.

Reichmann shrugs. “Well, right--people who start this early yesterday, they have a hard time getting up,” he says. “Uh, including yourself.”

Hilton lights up. “Yeah, well, if a guy wants to lose some weight, I recommend he fill up that Janus with water and take off around 11 o’clock. . . .” Howls of laughter now. “And you’ll work around this valley, I wanna tell you. I mean, you’re gonna work like a dog .”

They do. Ten hours later at this same table there are doubts that the task was such a great idea, given the ungracious weather. Formally the original triangle was called off in midair. One pilot had to touch down at a speck on the map called Minor. Steve Koerner had to land at a small airport in Hawthorne, Nev. Even Grosse ran into trouble, almost hanging it up in the middle of nowhere--the White Mountains, as it happened. With a gloomy irony in his voice, Hilton stands at the head of the table and says, “It’s good to have everyone back.” The pilots look up from their desserts and wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t.

For the first time this week, the mood turns nostalgic. Hilton gestures out the window, toward the swimming pool. “Remember how last year someone was always being thrown in the pool?” he says. All those records had been broken, and the dunkings had caught on as the pilots’ version of an awards ceremony. John Denver, a guest aviator, had been thrown in the pool, too.

Everybody knows the stories, so they refrain from retelling them. Which leaves them only calling up the name of a story, then reminiscing silently to themselves, then calling up another one--at intervals, like it’s a slide presentation. There was the time that George Moffatt, an American, dumped the water from his wings at a critical moment onto Hans-Werner Grosse, to hold him off. Grosse still rages about it. “The object is not to kill!” he’d exploded at the officials, while Moffatt asked innocently why a participant should want to see his rival win. “Moffatt came up through sailing,” Grosse says. “The attitude is different.”

So are the countries. In Germany, pilots routinely share information by radio during a race; in the United States it’s forbidden. Whether this suggests a cultural difference is an old topic at the dinner table, a sort of cross-cultural pin-swap, but it beats the blues, and it wins the pilots’ attention back from the swimming pool. Now Hilton gets in on it. “Maybe for Americans,” he muses, “it comes from their idea, that famous saying that goes . . . .”

The pilots lean forward in their chairs, but Hilton is having trouble recalling the wording. He looks aside. “Big lips sink ships’?” he asks himself. Nobody corrects him. He’ll go with it. “Big lips sink ships!” He gives the new phrase to his guests.

They like it. They don’t look too sure at first--but then one of them nods approval, and another, as “Big lips sink ships” makes its way around the table in German.

Steve Koerner is the first to say goodby. Otherwise he’d have to drive all night to get to California City in time to fly in the last U.S. competition of the season. “I’ve got to win something this year,” he says. The others have no such commitments. In fact, had their deal with TWA been more flexible, some of them might have stayed longer, because the weekend weather has abruptly turned good. Saturday’s temperatures hit 15 degrees above normal, with cumulus clouds popping at 11 a.m., which made for fine flying and a showy finish--a grand swoop over the edge of a 9,500-foot mesa to the ranch at 50 knots.

The big news is that Hilton has finally cleared Mt. Grant, and continued out over the Sierras with Carl Herold. His best flight ever. On the final return the Germans futzed around a little, letting Hilton beat them across the finish line. He was tickled, but not fooled. At supper he thanked them for their “gracious gesture,” said a few words about “international good will” and lifted one last glass to his foreign guests.

They do it because none of it is necessary, and materially there’s nothing to show for it. There is, however, a new trophy by the fireplace: The Hardy Baer Memorial Trophy is a mutilated aluminum wing cuff (or flugelshearer --the German is better) that Baer has managed to run over in a Jeep on the runway. Twice. Someone has inscribed it with felt marker, misspelling “prestigious,” and left it here.

At the airstrip, meanwhile, the last days have been like the first. A few tow pilots, lingering at the hangar, talk about a rattlesnake that somebody shot last night. Just outside, feet trudge--volunteers push the gliders one by one to the runway, a procedure that has come to be called “Suckers’ Walk.”

But in the distance, someone spots a little fit of dust, reeling like a top across the plain, growing taller. It’s a bona fide dust devil now, the spirit and image of a thermal--which rarely takes an earthly form and when it does becomes a whirlwind like this. Bruno Gantenbrink, a hundred yards down the strip, has his back to it, doesn’t see it coming, until the others applaud, calling out, “Bruno!” They laugh. “Bruno--true flight! Put your arms out!” And for a moment he does, flapping them, bounding after the twister that slips across the desert and is gone, like the shadow of a hawk.