Easily one of the best conversations I've ever had. There was nothing about his set-up that screamed what I imagine would be considered "well-off" in this crowd.
That's all to say, that I doubt money is as big of an obstacle to getting started in this as you imagine if you prioritized it.
I found the website to their glider club: http://www.franconiasoaring.org/glider-rides.php
A ride costs less than a full day lift ticket at most American ski resorts.
Very much the case! (Well, idk quite what gp imagined, but it's not as expensive as many things.)
When I was learning, around 2020, I budgeted ~$300 / month for glider flying, + ~$600 (I think: they've gone up!) for annual club dues. These days the monthly would be a bit higher, and the dues more like $700-800, I think. Flying as a club member is a lot cheaper than rides; you pay for the tow and for time on the aircraft, but aircraft time is way, way cheaper than power (no fuel to burn, no engine to maintain) and the instructors are volunteers.
NB this is in a club environment. The upside is that it's cheap and the club environment is a really good place to learn by osmosis / watching everybody else / listening to stories / seeing all kinds of different situations. The downside is that it's a huge time commitment. You'll drive 1.5 hrs and hang around all day to get twoish flights, sometimes < 10 min. each. And you have to be willing to commit all of every Saturday (or Sunday) for a year plus: you need to be flying just about every week, and given that some weekends'll be weathered out you have to be ready to take advantage of every flyable weekend. Folks that aren't committed just don't make progress: hang around, season after season, still flying with instructors, until they finally give up or just occasionally grind it out.
(I did the bulk of my training in 2020 and spring/early summer 2021. This was perfect: I was single and newish to the area I was living in, and thanks to Covid I had nothing else going on in my life. Even as things started to reopen in 2021 it was easy to maintain that "saturday? of course I'm at the field" habit.)
This is all harder to do as a Real Adult with responsibilities. Some folks manage to do it, but it's harder. Commercial operations, where you go and get a whole bunch of flying in relatively quickly, are also an option---but I hear there's a wide range of quality, and even the best won't get you the seasoning / airmanship you get from hanging around at the field every weekend for a year, flying in all sorts of conditions and taking advantage of the unofficial ground school from all the other instructor/student pairs there at the same time.
The economics change first once you've got your rating, when you're no longer doing short training flights and the bulk of your flying is (one hopes!) longer soaring flights; and then again when (if) you buy your own glider---but it's still that few thousand bucks / year order of magnitude. Expensive, but doable, especially compared to power.
Gliders themselves range from "surprisingly inexpensive" to "less expensive than a new powered aircraft", more or less. I'd expect to hear something like $5,000 for a Schweizer 1-26 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_SGS_1-26: classic glider, still widely flown by a devoted community, but appreciably lower performance than gliders built after the massive jump that came with the switch to fiberglass); I have a part-share in a Jantar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SZD-41_Jantar_Standard, early fiberglass) that totals $25,000 or a little less, with reasonably nice avionics.
So, all told, yes, flying gliders costs a meaningful amount of money, but isn't terribly terribly expensive. The question to ask yourself is really not whether you've got the money, but whether you've got the time.
It seems like this gets easier as the kids get older; I've seen parents of teenagers make it work. For some folks it's a family affair---several kids & one or both parents learning to fly. These families have been uniformly super fun to have at the field! For others I think it's a matter of the kids being old enough to have some independence, + I'm sure a very supportive partner.
So don't give up on gliders forever! I'm expecting times in my life when I can't get out to the field enough to stay proficient & safe, and I'll have to quit flying for a little---but a dearly hope not forever. It's just that, likewise, now's maybe not the right time for you.
These guys had a big oxygen tank.
It's nice to see they were using an Air Glide S and managed to make their goal against the odd 56kt headwind.
They take more calendar time, but do they take more instruction? Because if they make the same progress per session, I don't see why you would think it inferior to spread it out over several years.
(For the non pilots here, getting the private pilot license is equivalent to learning your first programming language/shipping your first app). All other accreditations and ratings are gated behind it.
Of course then there's these guys going to 90000 ft ... https://perlanproject.org/
https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/Miscell...
Another impressive journey was Truckee CA to Nephi, UT and then back again against the prevailing winds.
(Caveat is the start, you will be pulled up with a rope, another powered plane or have starter motor to get up once)
You can go thousands of miles without propulsion! IF the weather and wind plays nice.
So you go up with thermals (warm air) or lift from hill sides and go forward by gliding. Repeat with skill and luck.
Some basics: The major challenge in flying gliders is the inherent stochasticity in the weather system. Think of it as a contextual bandit problem with high variance w.r.t local weather (i.e. Even the best planning cannot help if the weather doesn't comply). We have some observability due to forecasting tools (skysight.io) and any policy must have affordances for pilot skill and a margin of safety. A good pilot (or 'policy') starts with multiple plans, quickly modifies to plans to suit the environment, and can seamlessly switch between plans. The primary "reward signals" are duration of flight, distance covered, and (in competitions) hitting certain waypoints.
Previous WR's for longest flight were mostly in the Andes or Alps. You want to be in a mountain range to utilize either the [ridge lift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orographic_lift) of a mountain face or [mountain wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_wave), ideally in a polar region during the summer to maximize the daylight hours so you can fly under VFR for longer.
However, while the Sierra Nevada's have great mountain wave and ridge lift, the number of daylight hours is not ``competitive''. Their main innovation was in acclimatizing themselves with using night vision goggles for long duration in a glider. There's an article on this [here](https://magazine.weglide.org/gliding-at-night-breaking-the-3...) which describes the acclimatizing flights and the 3k km flight in great detail. It doesn't get official recognition because the FAI requires the flight to be done in daylight, but still an extremely cool flight!
What's the difference between doing this in the summer vs the winter? I think I would be freaked out (probably an understatement) in an unpowered vehicle way up in the air if it were dark.