Benefits from gliding.
Hi thing,
I learned to glide before I learned to fly power and believe I benefited from it in precisely the ways described, especially in regard to forced landings.
I certainly feel that low hours instructors, who have no gliding experience, also lack sensitivity to how the air-mass, in which they are flying, is moving. I well remember, when I first returned to powered flying after a break of many years, being told off for allowing the Pa28 in which I was being instructed to drift up or down. The instructor put this down purely to my failing to position the control column appropriately to remain level while I was able, by reading the clouds and the landscape, to see that we were in fact flying through rising or sinking air-masses. But he wouldn't listen - oh no, he was the instructor!
Having to dead-stick a powered aeroplane now would be something I now feel I would probably be able to take in my stride - should it ever happen. However so far it hasn't happened, so the 'proof of the pudding' remains to be tested.
To be sure, when I first started learning to fly a powered aeroplane my instructor had to de-gliderise me. At first, I was kicking the Auster's rudder pedals all over the shop and the Auster had an extremely sensitive rudder. But apart from that the overall experience of flying power was not too dissimilar to gliding so I learned power more quickly than someone new to flying ab-initio.
The gliders I flew at Dunstable were the Slingsby T21, (known to the ATC, I believe, by the name Sedbergh,) and the Kirby Prefect. Both of these were primary gliders of a fairly early vintage. As such they had an angle of descent that would hardly be acceptable today. The average flight, unless you were lucky enough to catch a thermal straight off the winch, was about 6 minutes. So during the course of a week's course you did quite a few take-offs and landings. You could obtain the most important advantages of gliding to subsequent power flying within the space of a week's course.
But that was in the sixties. The present day newcomer to gliding, I believe, gets to fly aircraft that have a vastly better angle of glide, so that more instruction in things other than circuits and landing can be squeezed into each flight. This means fewer take-offs and landings. So I imagine today you would possibly need to glide for perhaps much of a summer season to gain the same number of landings and hence the same amount of 'forced landing' experience.
Regards,
BP.