Morten W. Haugen, a RMIT student, is a young photographer who took an AEI flight with the Geelong Gliding Club a few months ago.  Below you can read his account from his visit to Bacchus Marsh and the AEI flight .

Click on the thumbnail to see the full size picture in the gallery.  To see the entire gallery, please follow this link. 

You can view Morten's professional Gallery via this link . 

It is early Saturday morning. Too early, in fact, but I need to get up and catch the 8.08am train for Bacchus  Marsh, a small town outside the city of Melbourne. Bacchus Marsh is by some of my class mates characterised as ”where the beautiful Australian outback keeps its trash”. I’ve been told by a Mr.Buchanan at the Geelong Gliding Club that they will be flying today, and that I’m more than welcome to pay them a visit. Hungry for visually intriguing adventure, I can’t do anything but humbly accept his offer.

After an one hour train ride, I find myself at Bacchus Marsh station. With nothing but my camera and a poorly printed Google map in my hands, I find myself a taxi and a nice Indian who tells me he knows where to go. The scenery of the Marsh is just like I’ve always pictured Australia to be, with long red dirt roads, a bright blue sky and a low haze hiding the horizon. A nice day for flying, I think to myself, and decide to use that phrase as my icebreaker for the day. It’s always a bit frightening when meeting people you have never met before, so such an opening line is good to have in your back pocket. A quick and pleasant introduction is beneficial when you got only so many hours to photograph someone’s story. To my embarrassment I’m soon to find out that my opening line give me away as somewhat of a dilettante, as it is not a good day for gliding. Quite the opposite, in its mere absence the wind is being highly uncooperative.  

Despite the poor gliding conditions, the day is beautiful none the less and a dedicated group of people have found their way to the Bacchus Marsh Aerodrome this morning. I would soon discover that the suspicious and hostile attitude I often meet when walking around with my camera in the city, is far from the case at the aerodrome. People are very welcoming, and no one obstruct against my camera what so ever. At the club house shared by the three gliding clubs located in the Marsh, I’m introduced to Wayne, one of the old enthusiasts of the Geelong Gliding Club. He tells me that the club has a range of different people as members, but, as I could see this day, most members are grown men of a respectable age. Grown up boys with a deeply rooted joy of flying, to be precise.

 Gliding is theoretically as simple as the mechanical princip behind the glider, but as sophisticated and demanding as the gliders construction and the know-how of its pilot. The aircraft is built to very high standards and low weight, and it flies on the simple concept that its name implies. It is ”tugged” up by a motorised aeroplane, winched up or even some times projected out from great heights, and then glides on the wind, impeded by a good portion of gravity.The gliders used on this Saturday has a factor of 40:1, which means that it can fly 40 meters with a latitude drop of 1 meter. In order to ascent again, the pilot locates and utilises winds or areas of warm rising air, and can in that way extend his flight time. The world record for distance covered in a glider is more than 2000 km.

As my day at the Bacchus Marsh Aerodrome progresses, I am so lucky to meet a lot of nice people, either there just to watch or to fly themselves. This day they use motorised aircrafts, which tugs and releases glider after glider. And as time passes, and gliders ”swooshes” down, I feel that I get remarkably more and more worried. Not because the harsh sunlight in the open surroundings of the runway is frying my winter pale skin, but because my name is moving up on the flight plan.

Anxious and excited, I am given a short ”walk through” of the aircraft, before Wayne, my pilot for the day, tells me to get in and fasten my seatbelt. As the ”tugger” in front of us is accelerating down the runway I can feel a great amount of adrenalin pumping through my young and innocent veins. A few minutes later and many feet higher, Wayne tells me to pull the yellow lever in front of me. Hesitantly I abide and gasp as the line between us and the ”tugger” disconnects from the glider. Wayne, who sits behind me, tells me to lift my hands from the controls, and shows me that he does the same. Now we just glide.