Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons

Letʼs face it, nuclear weapons are the elephant in the room that no one likes to talk about. So letʼs approach the issue from the less threatening perspective of the awesome picture below.1 Figure 1: A glider executing a high speed low pass. The glider looks like itʼs suspended above the runway, but in reality itʼs screaming toward the photographer at 150 mph in a maneuver known as a high speed low pass. The pilot starts about 2000 feet high and a mile from the runway. He then dives to convert altitude into speed and skims the runway. Next, he does a steep climb to reconvert some of that speed into altitude so he can turn and land. Given that the glider has no engine, you might wonder how the pilot can be sure heʼll gain enough altitude in the climb to safely turn and land. The laws of physics tell us exactly how altitude is traded for speed and vice versa. While there is a loss due to the air resistance of the glider, that is a known quantity which the pilot takes it into account by starting from a higher altitude than needed for the landing phase. But itʼs important to read the fine print in that guarantee provided by the laws of physics. It only applies if the air is stationary. If thereʼs a slight wind the difference is negligible, but if the air movement is unusually strong all bets are off – which is what happened to a friend of mine who had safely executed the maneuver many times before. But this time he hit an unusually strong, continuous downdraft. The laws of physics still applied