A sailplane or glider is an airworthy vehicle that flies without an engine, manned by a pilot. To make that possible, the secret is in the takeoff. If you’re flying a kite, and you have a tight string and pull on it, (the kite) goes up. If you pull on that line really quickly, it will go up really quickly. It’s the same thing for the gliders. Without an engine, the flight of a sailplane is silent. A glider has no motor, so it’s always falling. If you have wind that’s going up, you can keep flying. Good pilots know where to find that. To someone who doesn’t know, it looks like magic, but if you know, as long as you can find that current, you stay up. Most days in San Diego, we have the ocean next to us, which remains cool, cooling the air above it, while the desert to the east is heating the air. That combination creates a sea breeze from 1 to 4 p.m. almost every afternoon traveling west to east. When it hits the tall and almost perpendicular Torrey Pines cliffs, it has to go up and then goes over the cliff, and that upward current extends very high over the cliffs, and further than you might think. Source: ‚lajollalight.com‚.