Boston University

06/09/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 06/10/2026 06:35

BU’s Gliding and Soaring Club Takes to the Air

BU's Gliding and Soaring Club Takes to the Air

Students get a rare chance to sail the skies in a motor glider and design and build their own remote-controlled gliders

ENG senior lecturer Kenn Sebesta's Stemme S6 in flight over Mansfield, Mass. Sebesta, the faculty advisor for BU's Gliding and Soaring (BUGS) club and an FAA-certified flight instructor, takes BUGS members up in his German-made motor glider. Photo by Kit Ng

Student Life

BU's Gliding and Soaring Club Takes to the Air

Students get a rare chance to sail the skies in a motor glider and design and build their own remote-controlled gliders

June 9, 2026
Twitter Facebook

For many travelers, the act of flying has become almost routine. Once ensconced in the long metal tube that is a commercial jetliner, you might gaze out the window at takeoff, watching the landscape drop away until it resembles an elaborate model train set. Then, you're in the clouds and, after a moment, you settle in to watch the in-flight flick.

It's easy to imagine how this experience might be a bit more exciting if you were in a two-seat propeller plane. In the smaller aircraft, you might feel a rush as you soar through the skies.

And what if, upon reaching a high altitude, you could turn the engine off? Suddenly, the only sound is that of the wind whistling across the wings-which have been designed to keep the plane aloft without power. You catch an updraft and circle silently through the air with the birds.

Once a week (weather permitting), members of the Boston University Gliding and Soaring (BUGS) club get the rare opportunity to do just that, sailing the skies in a Stemme S6 motor glider. The Stemme's powered propeller gives it the freedom to just take off. (No tedious wait for a tow plane, commonly used to pull a glider into the air.) Once at the desired altitude-say, 1,000 feet-the pilot cuts the power and coasts on air currents, the way birds do.

"In a plane with a motor, you're generally trying to get from point A to point B," says BUGS member Kit Ng (ENG'26). "In a glider, you're almost never doing that. It's more for fun, and kind of a test of your pilot skills, just to stay in the air."

"When I go up in the Stemme, it's very serene," says Sophia Becken (ENG'26), the club's outgoing president. "Very, very serene." With the Stemme's expansive cockpit window, she adds, "you can see all the way around. It's beautiful."

"Chess in the Sky"

This unique extracurricular activity is made possible by the plane's owner, Kenn Sebesta, director of BU's Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching and Innovation Center (RASTIC), a senior lecturer in the College of Engineering, and BUGS' faculty advisor. Sebesta's German-made Stemme S6 is one of just a handful in the United States.

Sebesta is also a Federal Aviation Administration-certified flight instructor. "He donates his time, which is super generous of him," says Harrison Grant (ENG'26), who served as BUGS vice president. "It massively lowers the cost of entry."

By providing and piloting the glider, "I lowered the amount of activation energy necessary for the students to found the club," says Sebesta.

Sebesta fell in love with gliding-also known as soaring-when he was in grad school in France. Flight by glider, he says, requires constant strategizing and decision-making. "Soaring is 100 percent cerebral all the time," Sebesta says. "They call it 'chess in the sky.'"

Whereas a lumbering jumbo jet just plows through pockets of air pressure (often causing that "turbulence" the captain speaks of), a glider uses them to rise and stay aloft. Guiding a glider by way of these invisible escalators is more akin to piloting a sailboat. Indeed, gliders are also called sailplanes.

BU Gliding and Soaring club member Alexander Rocca (ENG'25,'26) gets a bird's-eye view from the cockpit of the Stemme S6. Photo by Kenn Sebesta

"You look at everything" as a glider pilot, Sebesta says. "You are aware of the wind on the ground, the way that clouds are moving in the sky, smoke is coming off a chimney, or the direction that flags are blowing, the way the water moves. You're looking for circling birds-they indicate where the thermals are."

A thermal updraft is a rising column of warm air. "You feel when you hit a thermal, because the airplane just gets lifted upwards," Sebesta says.

The way both birds' and gliders' wings are shaped, they can float around the edge of the thermal. Then, as a pilot, you can look out for another one nearby. "You descend between the thermals," says Sebesta. "You get to the next thermal, you go back up, you descend, you go back up, and so on."

In this way, it's possible to travel for hours, covering hundreds of miles-if you're reading the signs correctly, that is. "It's planning and execution," says Sebesta. "It's the joy of figuring out what it is you want to do, and the thrill of finding out whether you called it right. You've got to find this relatively small patch in the sky. Thermals are not six-lane highways; they're one- or two-lane country roads. And so you use your senses and you feel it."

Sebesta once received Mother Nature's stamp of approval of his flying abilities: as he circled in a thermal updraft, a hawk saw what he was doing and joined him. In other words, the hawk used the glider to gauge where the thermal was.

Making Aviation Accessible

Since BUGS launched in 2024, club members have spent many Saturdays at Mansfield Municipal Airport in Mansfield, Mass., about 25 miles southwest of Boston. Students take turns riding in the Stemme with Sebesta, perhaps getting informal training. The glider's two seats are side by side, with identical controls, allowing for easier instruction.

"Our goal is to get every new member up in the air at least once for just a fun flight," says Becken. If they're interested, Sebesta will provide official lessons at cost, asking only for money to cover expenses related to using the glider, or the club will connect them with other instructors and even scholarships for those lessons.

"It's making aviation more accessible to students and finding them resources that they otherwise wouldn't have access to," says Becken. Several of the students are working toward a recreational pilot's license, and the regular airport visits with BUGS has accelerated that process.

While they wait their turn for a flight in the Stemme-or sometimes in ENG lecturer Erika Tsutsumi's Citabria, a two-seat, single-engine plane-students keep busy designing and building small, remote-controlled gliders. They also might be performing routine maintenance on one of the planes, or making crepes on Sebesta's 240-volt crepe maker.

BU Gliding and Soaring club members have the opportunity to fly the Stemme S6 and ENG lecturer Erika Tsutsumi's Citabria propeller plane. Photo by Harrison Grant

At the end of a day gliding, students wax the Stemme's wings to maintain its high performance. "If the wings were to get wet, the moisture would change the surface and the friction, and it would change everything," says BUGS vice president Hudson Reynolds (ENG'26). "It's hyper-optimized."

The team then detaches the wings-which are each 19 meters long-in order to fit the plane in the hangar. And, at dusk, they often hold a movie night, projecting a flick onto a neighboring hangar's blank, 30-foot-high exterior wall. (And, yes, of course they've screened Top Gun.)

When weather prevents the club from flying-for example, during pretty much the entirety of winter-the students train on an Oculus VR flight simulator at RASTIC, where they also use a 3D scanner and 3D printer to model and create parts for their remote-controlled gliders.

Aiming High

The BUGS experience is different for everyone. Becken calls a flight in the Stemme "serene," and Reynolds calls it "inspiring." But Jason Sayah (ENG'26) found it "terrifying," adding: "It just gave me a knot in my stomach."

However, Sayah is thoroughly interested in designing planes. "I realized I don't want to be in the aircraft, but I want to make them great," he says. So his flight experience has still been valuable, he adds: "It's great to just learn about all the avionics, the equipment, the process of getting off the ground, taxiing and preflight checks, and all the different components that you need to be paying attention to."

The club is open to students from all BU schools and colleges. But, not surprisingly, many come from the College of Engineering-and many of those students say they find their coursework and club activities to be mutually reinforcing.

"When we were taking aerodynamics, we would have lectures and then go to the airport that week and see what we just learned play out in real life," says Becken. "It made the design of the planes make a lot more sense."

BUGS is "making aviation more accessible," says outgoing president Sophia Becken (ENG'26) (from left), seen here with club members Tina Luong (ENG'28), Cyana Lee (ENG'28), Ying Zhang (ENG'28), and Sebastian Alanis (ENG'28), and BUGS' canine mascot Aka, hanging out in the Stemme's hangar. Photo courtesy of BU Gliding and Soaring club

Many club members have set their sights on aerospace industry careers. In doing the hands-on work of designing and building RC gliders, members are applying those principles of flight in a real and safe way, says Grant.

"We make them out of foam board, which is super cheap, so you can crash these things and rebuild them, and it's fine," Grant says. "And, at the same time, it teaches you all of the very basic aerodynamics of these control surfaces. Like, this is how you control for your pitch, or this is how you adjust your heading."

Many members are also in other mechanical engineering-heavy clubs that are geared more towards competitions or other specific team goals, and they appreciate the more recreational nature of BUGS. Though flying and making things that fly are inherently challenging and rigorous activities, "We don't have the added stress of a competition," says Reynolds. (Not counting a paper airplane contest.)

"We do want to be scientific and interface with the curriculum and gain a more complete understanding of aviation," Reynolds says. "But then we also just get to go hang out and barbecue at the airport, and it's super, super fun. It's a great thing to do on the weekend after a hard week of engineering and right before another one, and you learn to be a more sociable engineer."

Explore Related Topics:

  • Share this story

Share

BU's Gliding and Soaring Club Takes to the Air

Copy URL: Copy

Latest from BU Today

Boston University published this content on June 09, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 10, 2026 at 12:35 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]