National Soaring Museum: America's Soaring Capital
Near Watkins Glen, New York
You are passing near Harris Hill, a ridge south of Elmira that holds a peculiar distinction: it is the soaring capital of America, and has been since the summer of nineteen thirty.
In July of that year, a pilot named Jack O'Meara launched from this ridgeline in a motorless glider called a Baker-McMillen Cadet and stayed aloft for one hour and thirty-eight minutes, setting what was then the longest recorded motorless flight in the country. The thermal columns rising off the Chemung Valley turned out to be exceptionally reliable, and word traveled fast through the small but passionate world of American soaring.
Harris Hill would go on to host the first thirteen consecutive National Soaring Championships, from nineteen thirty through nineteen forty-six. Three brothers from the area, Paul, Ernest, and William Schweizer, began experimenting with glider construction nearby, and their work quietly became the backbone of American sailplane manufacturing. The Schweizer Aircraft Corporation, headquartered locally, would go on to produce more than half of all American-built sailplanes during the twentieth century.
When World War Two broke out, Elmira's ridge was tapped for a different purpose. The Army chose it as one of the first sites in the country to develop a military glider program, training pilots in the kind of silent, engine-off landings that would eventually carry troops into Normandy and Sicily.
In nineteen sixty-nine, the National Soaring Museum opened at Harris Hill to preserve all of it, from fragile pre-war wooden gliders to sleek fiberglass sailplanes of the postwar era. Today it holds one of the largest collections of historical gliders and sailplanes in the world, along with a replica of the Wright brothers' nineteen eleven glider built by Ernest Schweizer himself.
The airfield directly in front of the museum is still active. On clear days you can watch modern sailplanes catch the same ridgeline thermals that O'Meara rode nearly a century ago, quiet as shadows in the blue air above the Southern Tier.
