#233 A Monster day in the Owens with Gordon Boettger

A little over a year ago I interviewed Gordon Boettger after his record-breaking 3000+ km wave flight in the Sierras flying an Arcus jet-equipped glider with night vision goggles (NVG’s), a flight that lasted 17 hours and started at 0230 in the morning. Four months later Gordon and his co-pilot Bruce Campbell beat their own record again, this time flying 18.5 hours and getting beyond 3100 km. And he says they are just getting started. What he’s doing is way, way, way out there and is blowing minds in the sailplane community. And it has been blowing mine. A week ago I got the call I’d been hoping for. Gordon rang up and wanted to know what I was doing in 6 days. My response was “don’t worry about it, I’ll be there!” He watches the forecasts and upper level models like a hawk and was seeing a solid window for strong wave setting up. It wouldn’t be a record-breaking day as heavy moisture would be on the back side of the storm and shut us down, but Gordon thought we’d be able to get at least 1,000 km of wave flying in, and we’d be able to launch at night with the NVG’s. “Tell me when to be there and what to bring!”Gordon picked me up in Reno on Sunday afternoon, we had a lovely dinner with his wife Melissa and were at the hanger in Minden just after midnight. He fired up the jet engine just after 0300 and in the black of night we launched into one of the craziest adventures I’ve ever had. I brought all my audio gear to try to capture how it all went down, from the rock and roll rotor getting up into the wave, to flying with NVG’s, a ridiculous sunrise, getting the beat-down in a waterfall at one point, and then flying in the home stretch where we hit 256 knot ground speed (nearly 300 miles per hour) and were still climbing at nearly 10m/s. In the end we flew almost 1200km in 7.5 hours, reached just under 24,500′ (holy cold!), the winds at the peaks were over 85 mph…it was ridiculous. It was Jaws triple overhead wave surfing in the sky. Come along for the ride, it was pretty wild.