Originally Posted by
Krystal n chips
But, it was thoughtful of you to mention the selection procedure. You see, once upon a time, and the demise has been justifiably well covered on here, the UK had an excellent organisation doing exactly the same thing....called the ATC ( ok, no aerotows, just winch launching, so it took a bit longer) and no selection boards / interviews etc, you just turned up when a place was allocated at your local Gliding School, got briefed and strapped in, resulting in many being launched, solo, into the sky age 16 ish....many of whom subsequently went on to not only fly professionally, but to become career involved in aviation and flying for pleasure.
But that was in the days of wooden gliders with the time aloft lasting between 3 and 5 minutes and as you will know, you needed the practice in landing the glider safely at the end of your flight; obviously you could only do one landing per flight. From reports on Pprune, they often went solo in about 20 launches if on a weeks course; it took me 30 odd launches flying weekends only and getting between nil (if the weather was grotty) and maybe 5 launches per day.
Nowadays time aloft from even a winch launch is over 10 min and I presume the USAFA 'students' have already had some flying experience before doing their 12 launches.