Gliders offer a bird’s-eye view of land and sky

Pilot Michael Henderson performs a preflight check as his passenger looks on.

Control stick? Check. Rudder pedals? Check. Spoilers? Check.

Henderson doesn't check the engine, though. There is no engine.

Henderson, 55, owns the Soaring Center at the Jean Airport, which provides glider rides 6,000 feet above the desert. Henderson's aircraft is about to be towed by one with power, westward and upward, via 200 feet of half-inch polyester rope.

"This is about as close as you can get to being a bird," Henderson said earlier.

Above the Jean Dry Lake Bed, the tow line will detach and a battle will commence between gravity and the updrafts caused by temperature differentials. Henderson will hopscotch from one thermal to another before returning in 45 minutes.

"What's really cool is when you get on opposite sides with an eagle," Henderson said, "and they make eye contact and give you that confused, you-don't-belong-here look."

Alternating among six gliders, the Soaring Center provides single-passenger rides for $175, doubles for $249. The latter are more popular, Henderson said, because of the many men who enjoy nail marks along their rib cage.

"It's a popular first date," he explained.

Henderson noted he sees a surprising number of locals, although tourists make up 75 percent of his business. Current passenger, Henrik Hansen, is a 45-year-old IT tech from Denmark staying at the Loews Lake Las Vegas Resort.

"I just want to see how it feels," Hansen said while waiting in the office that the Soaring Center shares with Sin City Skydiving.

Hansen already has an airplane pilot's license back home, so he's not nervous. But Henderson claims there's no reason for anyone to be. In his 41 years of piloting gliders, he said he has had only two hard landings.

"And those were just a bounce," he said, adding that he has never had a customer accident.

"Statistically, it's much safer than riding in an airliner," he said.

V-ROOM!

Pilot Tim Underwood starts the only engine in earshot, his tow plane, as Henderson completes the preflight check. Slowly, they begin their entwined roll along runway 20L.

Henderson and his wife, Karen, launched the Soaring Center in 1999 as Northwest Soaring in Cle Elum, Wash. By 2004, they had enough of shutting down from October to May every year because of clouds and rain. They relocated to the Jean Airport, filling a vacancy created when another company (the similarly named Las Vegas Soaring Center) soared out of business.

Since then, Henderson and his three full-time and 13 part-time employees have flown 6,000 passengers, about 10 a day. Their busiest day, when Microsoft had a Las Vegas sales retreat in 2006, saw 57. (Alas, none were Bill Gates.)

Teller glided here, too. But not Penn.

"He's too big," Henderson said.

When the recession began two years ago, Soaring Center business plummeted 30 percent.

"We were getting a lot of corporate activities before," Henderson said. "Merrill-Lynch was a big customer of ours, and they're gone."

Business started to take off again this year, by about 10 percent, Henderson said. But that was before all the rain.

"It's been cancel, cancel, cancel," he said. "But that's only temporary."

The tow plane and glider are now at full speed, 65 mph. The glider achieves liftoff first, because of its larger wingspan. After three minutes, the tandem blips vanish.

It's time to confuse some more eagles.

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@reviewjournal. com or 702-383-0456.