Stephen Elop joins board of trustees
Elop began flying at Brampton, Ontario, in 1987 and has more than 3,500 flight hours. He holds an airline transport pilot certificate with multiengine land and single-engine sea ratings as well as a Part 107 remote pilot certificate. He also has a Canadian-based private pilot certificate with instrument ratings. He currently owns a 2007 Cessna T182T and a 2019 Cessna Citation CJ3+.
A resident of Kirkland, Washington, Elop is the CEO of Digital.ai, an AI-driven software delivery and management platform company, and has a history of senior leadership roles in the technology industry—including CEO at Macromedia, president of Worldwide Field Operations at Adobe Systems, COO at Juniper Networks, president (MBD) at Microsoft, and CEO at Nokia.
Aviation History
Who has made the longest glider flights?
By Ian J. Twombly
Observing nature’s power on a different level is one of the many privileges of being a pilot. Elite-level glider pilots take that privilege a step further and harness that power. Browsing through glider records is a study in the incredible ability these pilots have to read the conditions and adapt to them in order to stay aloft as long as possible or fly as far as possible. For decades, American Thomas Knauff held the world record for the longest out-and-back distance in a glider when he flew the spine of the Appalachians for a total of 1,023 miles.
Then along came German Klaus Ohlmann, flying the 87-foot-wingspan Schempp-Hirth Nimbus 4 DM. Using the wave action of the Andes Mountains, Ohlmann has made so many 2,000-kilometer (1,242-mile) flights that his followers have stopped counting. The longest yet was his world record flight of 1,869 miles. That’s the equivalent of flying from New York to the Grand Canyon, nonstop, and without an engine. While his longest flight was a traditional glider triangle route, he’s also made straight-line flights of more than 2,000 kilometers, a feat made possible with modern gliders and an increasingly intimate knowledge of the Andean waves.
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