....you have tried ridge soaring in a glider, I hope!
'Fraid not, my glider flying consists of a single circuit. I was however vaguely aware of the concept and extremely sceptical about a 206 doing it!
Very interesting it was too, my one circuit, but I'm afraid it confirmed my prejudice about gliding - you spend hours hanging around on the ground for a single ten minute flight.
At least the instructor wasn't trying to teach me to fly, he was only telling the differences from power flying - this was an evening at the gliding club for members of the power flying club.
(Anyway, if we had landed on the lava there's at least a possibility that most of the energy would have gone into tearing the floats to shreds rather than into tearing the people to shreds.)
I got my seaplane rating at Jack Brown's in Florida
I had a bunch of lessons in BC, in a Super Cub, but I didn't quite get good enough to be allowed out solo (I'm sure that I could manage it these days, but back then I'd only just regained my PPL after several years of spending all my money on child care rather than aeroplanes).
One of the things I was told there was that if we ran out of engine over land we'd land on a road rather than the trees, and he didn't expect that putting it down on mud would do much damage to the floats.
And I got to do the flying in a chartered Beaver in BC (
not the one on the left - got to protect the guilty, I didn't ask as to the legality of the guy chucking the control column over to me -
not dual controls, this was a "either pilot can fly, but only one at a time" aircraft).