Customer Reviews

The Sun Ship Game

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The Sun Ship Game is an excellent film depicting state of the art sailplane racing at the end of the 60's. The film has many wonderful air to air shots and also has interviews with pilots and ground crews that helps viewers see into the minds of the competition pilots. The contest finishes of the sailplanes arriving at the finish gates in low altitude high speed passes and dumping water ballast before the pullups and turns to final are fun to see. Some of the air to air shots were filmed from camera rigs in a Schweizer 2-32 glider and other shots were from helicopters. A fun film for glider fans. Sailplanes depicted in the film include an ASW-12, Libelles, HP's and others.

Soaring--or gliding, as many call it--stemmed from the first heavier-than-air manned flying machine created in the late 18th century by the Briton George Cayley, a hundred years before the Wrights. Since then, gliders--or, as we pilots prefer to call them, sailplanes--have been at the forefront of aerodynamics and materials technology, much of which is only now reaching commercial aviation in the early 21st century. Indeed, Cayley (a contemporary of the Montgolfier brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, lighter-than-air pioneers, or balloonatics) is known widely as "The Father of Aerodynamics."

Why all this preamble, in a review of a soaring movie? Because it is essential to grasp the significance of sailplanes and to realize that though they may be sporting machines they represent the leading technology in many aspects of modern aviation. Not coincidentally, sailplanes are among the most exquisitely beautiful artifacts on earth, literally shaped by the wind and executed through the minds and skills of some of the most remarkable aircraft designers in the world. Sailplanes are best considered as living sculpture that the pilot enters, to climb invisible mountains in the sky, to fly long distances (over 1,000 miles), to great heights (over 50,000 feet), at glide ratios of 60:1 and better and at high speeds (well above 100 MPH). This is raw flying efficiency, leading to modern airliners such as Boeing's 787 'Dreamliner,' made of composite (carbonfiber) construction that competition sailplanes have used for decades. Precisely the same technologies took Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager's 'Voyager' on the world's first non-stop, unrefueled flight.

Robert Drew, a former WWII P-51 pilot, soaring enthusiast and documentary film director/producer, journeyed to the Big Bend area of Texas, to legendary Marfa, to capture on film the exquisite beauty and deadly competition of a National Soaring Championship.
Creating the film demanded immense skill and commitment, using helicopter and sailplane camera ships with great ingenuity and skill, to take the viewer directly into the adrenalin-charged action. Drew delivers.

"The Sun Ship Game," so called because the sun-warmed earth produces thermals that enable sailplanes (the 'ships') to climb to great altitudes, shows the clash of two determined men: George Moffat, the analytical and scheming craftsman of soaring efficiency, and Gleb Derujinsky, the artist and dreamer who intuits brilliantly to great performances. There isn't a dull frame in the film. It's edge-of-the-seat thrilling and engrossing, and wildly beautiful.

A grave danger awaits the viewer: he or she will inevitably fall in love with the beauty and challenge of soaring, and will be forever unwilling merely to look up to the skies but will want to become a part of them, in the most compelling flying imaginable.

For more information, go to the website of the Soaring Society of America, and prepare to have your life changed forever. Thank you, Bob Drew.

I have been familiar with this documentary since 1978 when I became the Soaring Society of America's marketing/public relations "director" when the club was located in Santa Monica, California.

We owned a 16mm copy of the film which I would show to groups, the largest being at the annual Experimental Aircraft Association's meet in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I showed the movie in one of the university buildings in the evening. The reaction of the large crowd was very enthusiastic, considering 95% of them owned planes with motors.

One woman who had watched the film came up to me afterwards and asked, "who were those actors?" I told her they were not actors but real people and the film was a documentary, not fiction. She was amazed. That should be a pretty good indicator as to the quality of the film's story.

There is plenty of human interest in the story with the competition between the two main characters who have opposite approaches to the "art" of soaring.

The other great attribute of the film is the background of this "conflict". The scenery. Mother Nature in all her glory. From the beautiful hills, forests, and quaint farms of New England to the stark, forbidding landscape of West Texas and its mountains out in Big Bend, these pilots fight their way from one turn point to another, attempting to be the fastest combination of ship and pilot in that weather that day.

If you are any kind of pilot you will enjoy this documentary. If you ever wanted to be a pilot, this might just spur you on to a specialized flying that demands a lot from pilot and craft. When, after having owned and learned to fly a classic taildragger Cessna, people would ask me why I switched to sailplanes, I would tell them, "It's pretty easy to fly a plane with a motor out to the dam and back, but it's a much bigger thrill to do it without a motor."

Post Script: Fair warning: This movie is over 3 decades old and was created using the technology of the mid '70s. I am pretty sure it was filmed in 16mm as are/were most documentaries, so the quality is not what one would get if done in 35mm or even the latest video technology. This isn't HD. It isn't hard core Hollywood. A heads up for you technology buffs.

The quality of the print they used was pretty good but there are some "drop outs" but these seem to become fewer more into the movie. I watched it on an HD set using a Blu Ray player and then tried it on a regular DVD player to see how it looked using it. Less technolgy seemed to help. The format is 4:3 which is okay but I put the TV on "panoramic" which made it wide screen and only cut off the top and bottom a bit and the quality didn't suffer.

The DVD packaging is nice with quite a few "liner notes" and a few photos on a fold-out holder.

BTW, the story I was told over the years when checking with Drew's office is that some, if not all, of the delay in putting this film on DVD (or even VHS which never happened) had to do with the music rights from the Bee Gees. I was surprised the Bee Gees' music is still in the film.