Spy From The Sky

This is a true first-hand account of a crazy

identity mix-up mishap that occurred at an official
South American Gliding (Soaring) Championship
event held in the town of Ribeirão Preto, state of
São Paulo, Brazil many years ago in the past.
The year was 1971 (or was it ‘72?) and the
location was the small town of Ribeirão Preto, far
out into the countryside in the state of São Paulo
and largely sugar cane and coffee agricultural
territory. The name of the town of Ribeirão Preto is
translated from Portuguese (Brazilian) to English
as “Black Creek.”
Now, it’s not every day that a 16 year-old boy
gets the chance to participate in and experience
first-hand the combined sense of adventure and
feeling of comradeship to be gained by being part
of a Glider ground-recovery team that was
equipped with a jeep, ham radio and trailer... I was
thrilled naturally, you can well imagine!
However, as I began the long journey by car
with my father - who was a gliding enthusiast and
student pilot - from São Paulo to Ribeirão Preto that
early summer day, I had no idea how weird,
gripping and surprising our participation in this
gliding championship would turn out to be!
Upon arrival at the Ribeirão Preto airport
hosting the gliding championship, I was assigned to
a ground-recovery team for one of the gliding pilot
contestants from our gliding club located in
another small town called Itu (near São Paulo).
The pilot’s first name was “Hans” I seem to recall,
and he was a tall, robust, and friendly middle aged
fellow of German descent who was one of the
premier pilots from our glider club. His flying craft
was also one of the best at that time, an ultra-sleek
and ham- radio equipped white colored single-seat
Libelle glider (German design) which can boast of a
39-to-1 maximum gliding ratio. As part of
championship competition rules, the glider also
had a camera specially fitted to it to take pictures
of ground checkpoints in order to provide definitive
proof later that the craft had indeed flown over
them.
 As member of the ground-recovery crew, our
job was simply to keep track of the
location/progress of the team’s glider when it took
off for its triangular and closed circuit course each
day and to be ready to respond for a ground pick-
up should the glider be forced to land before
returning to its point of origin. The wings of the
glider can be detached once on the ground and it
was then just a matter of loading the body and two
wing sections on the towing trailer, securing the
load, and then towing it back to the airport.
On day two or three of the gliding
championship, we learned some time after our pilot
Hans had taken off, that he had found sufficient
gliding conditions that hot day among the myriad
of well-developed cumulus clouds and ample
altitude to begin the triangular course. Within
some matter of hours, however, it appeared that
Hans was going to have to abandon his attempt at
completing the course and worse yet, was going to
have to perform an improvised landing in some
farmer’s fields since he could not sustain his
altitude and get back to the airport. Our ground-
recovery crew was called into action.
We embarked in the jeep with a map and
trailer in tow and left the airport heading on roads
that would eventually get us to the same
coordinates that the pilot had radioed to us. It took
considerable map consulting and round-about
driving for a number of hours, but we eventually
neared to the reported downed location of the
craft. We drove into the outskirts of a small village
along dirt and unimproved roads amongst the
sugar cane fields, through a cluster of small houses
and buildings which was some small village center,
and then headed farther into the countryside in
search of the glider and its pilot. Within several
minutes we saw the safely landed glider which was
some small distance off the dirt road in what
looked like an uncultivated farmer’s field.
As we approached closer by driving directly
across that field, it became apparent that the pilot
Hans was nowhere in sight, and that the glider
wings had already been detached. Suddenly I
heard the sound of another jeep vehicle
approaching from behind us in pursuit. A good
look revealed the source of the noise and forced
the sudden realization of our predicament upon me
when I saw someone actually standing up in the
jeep as it got nearer to us. That someone was
holding and pointing a real sub-machine gun
directly at us. They were obviously some official
looking police personnel in uniforms. They halted
their jeep directly next to us and made it clear that
we were to be detained. We were told to put up
our hands!
As I soon found out, these were actual village
police and they had already detained our pilot
Hans and now they were escorting us back to the
village at gun point to join the “Spy” they had
captured earlier. They forced us to enter a small
jail cell with a dirt floor where we also found our
pilot Hans. Despite our repeated protestations that
we were all part of the Gliding Championship event
currently happening in Ribeirão Preto, the police
did not believe that to be the case, in fact they
thought that this tall German looking pilot was in
fact a “Spy” since clearly his flying craft had a
camera in it for taking pictures of the land below it.
We learned that our captors hadn’t heard anything
about a South American Gliding Championship and
so they had naturally assumed the worse!
We were stuck in the small jail cell it seemed
for probably up to an hour or so while the police
investigated by making several phone calls to
government officials (who represented the
equivalent of the Brazilian “Federal Aeronautic”
bureau office I suppose), to find out if our story was
indeed true. At long last, the police were
convinced of our authentic identity and the
purpose of the flying craft, its camera, pilot and
ground-crew, so they released us unharmed from
the jail cell.
Our ground-recovery team and the pilot then
went back to the sailplane’s landing site, loaded
the partially disassembled craft onto the trailer and
drove it back to the Ribeirão Preto airport
uneventfully.
What a crazy case of mistaken identity this
little adventure had been! I’ll probably never be
able to forget these true and colorful events that
happened almost 40 years ago!

[Original story and artwork © 2010 by Pierre R.

Desloover who lived in São Paulo, Brazil @1969-
73.]