45 Glider pilots

Gliding is a recreational activity and competitive air sport in which pilots fly unpowered aircraft known as gliders or sailplanes using naturally occurring currents of rising air in the atmosphere to remain airborne. The word soaring is also used for the sport.

Raynold Edward Acre (1889–1966) was a member of the Early Birds of Aviation, a small group of pilots that flew before World War I.

Sergey Nikolaevich Anokhin was a Soviet test pilot.

Liesel Bach was a German aerobatic pilot and flight instructor. She was the first woman to fly over Mount Everest.

Princess Basmah Bani Ahmad Otoom is the second wife of Prince Hamzah bin Hussein of Jordan.

Luca Bertossio is an Italian aerobatics pilot performing glider aerobatics as competitor for the Italian National Glider Aerobatic Team and as a professional Airshow pilot and Flight Instructor.

Paul F. Bikle was director of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Dryden Flight Research Facility from 1959 until 1971, and author of more than 40 technical publications. He was associated with major aeronautical research programs including the hypersonic X-15 rocket plane, and was a world record-setting glider pilot.

Paul Harwood Blanchard was one of the early Flying Instructors of the Cambridge University Gliding Club (1947–49) and author of Elementary Gliding – A Pupil's Manual.

Élisabeth Thérèse Marie Juliette Boselli, was a French military and civilian pilot. She was the first female fighter pilot to serve in the French Air Force, and held eight world records for distance, altitude and speed.

Janusz Centka is a Polish glider pilot who has won two European and three World Gliding Championships.

Oskar Dinort was a German general and ground attack aircraft pilot during World War II.

Eric Cecil Gordon England AFRAeS, FIMT, was a British aviator, racing driver and engineer. E.C. Gordon England was one of the early pioneers of gliding, and his glider flight in 1909 is considered to be the birth of the sport of soaring.

Andrea Fenzau-Lehmann is a German aviator. She holds licences for ultralight, motor glider and light aircraft, and specialises in gliding and gliding aerobatics. She has represented Germany at European and international gliding competitions.

Gerhard Wilhelm Goetze was a German-born Ph.D. researcher and inventor in Atomic physics. He was primarily known for his work on the Moon-to-Earth Apollo TV camera making live broadcast in both brilliant sunlight and pitch darkness possible. Goetze discovered the Secondary Electron Conduction (SEC) effect which amplified light through high-speed electrons deposited in thin film storage targets. The SEC tube was additionally used in ground-based astronomy, inspection of integrated circuits, electron-microscope-based biological tissue study, security, and night vision. Goetze received ten patents for his inventions.

Rear Admiral Hilary Charles Nicholas 'Nick' Goodhart CB FRAeS was an engineer and aviator who invented the mirror-sight deck landing system for aircraft carriers. He was also a world champion and record breaker in gliding.

Wolfram Kurt Erhard Hirth was a German gliding pioneer and sailplane designer. He was a co-founder of Schempp-Hirth, still a renowned glider manufacturer.

David Henry Gason Ince DFC was a Royal Air Force pilot of the Second World War in Hawker Typhoons who flew nearly 150 sorties and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He flew the only raid in Europe to use Napalm near Arnhem in April 1945. In 1958 he flew an Olympia 419 glider from Lavenham, Suffolk, to Land's End, a distance of 315 miles and a UK glider distance record at that time.

Georgij Kaminski is a Soviet and Russian pilot. He was the absolute champion in FAI World Glider Aerobatic Championships in 2005, 2007 and 2009. He became world vice-champion of Gliding Aerobatics as a pilot in 2013. Kaminski won multiple world and European championships. He is a master of sports (MSMK), honored coach of Russian team. He is member of the Russian Gliding Aerobatics team.

Joachim Kuettner, also spelled Küttner, was a German-American atmospheric scientist.

Jean Marie Le Bris was a French aviator, born in Concarneau, Brittany, who accomplished a glider flight in December 1856.

Douglas George Lee MBE is a glider pilot who was world gliding champion on three consecutive occasions.

Paul B. MacCready Jr. was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "Do more with less".

Daniel John Maloney was an American pioneering aviator and test pilot who made the first high-altitude flights by man using a Montgomery glider in 1905.

Mikhail Mamistov, is a Russian powered and glider aerobatic pilot.

Peter C. Masak was an engineer, inventor, and glider pilot. He graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in May 1981 from the University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada. He earned his glider pilot license at the age of 16 and his power pilot license at the age of 18, the minimum ages for both. Peter was a Canadian soaring record holder and represented Canada and later the United States in the World Gliding Championships. He logged almost 2000 hours of glider flight time. He was living in West Chester, Pennsylvania with his wife Adrienne and their three children when he died.

Michael Winston Melvill is a world-record-breaking pilot and one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, the experimental spaceplane developed by Scaled Composites. Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne on its first flight past the edge of space, flight 15P on June 21, 2004, thus becoming the first commercial astronaut and the 435th person to go into space. He was also the pilot on SpaceShipOne's flight 16P, the first competitive flight in the Ansari X Prize competition.

Arseny Dmitrievich Mironov was a Russian scientist, aerospace engineer, and aviator. He was one of the oldest researchers in aircraft aerodynamics and flight testing, a Gromov Flight Research Institute (GFRI) director from 1981 to 1985, a recipient of the Stalin Prize in 1948 and the USSR State Prize in 1976, and an honorary citizen of Zhukovsky.

John Joseph Montgomery was an American inventor, physicist, engineer, and professor at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California who is best known for his invention of controlled heavier-than-air flying machines.

Louis Pierre Mouillard was a French artist and innovator who worked on human mechanical flight in the second half of the 19th century. He based much of his work on the investigation of birds in Algeria and Cairo. Around the early 1900s he was considered the father of aviation.

Klaus Ohlmann is a German glider pilot who has established 36 world records approved by FAI. Among these is the record for a free distance flight with up to 3 turn-points by flying 3,009 km from Chapelco Airport at San Martín de los Andes (Argentina) in a Schempp-Hirth Nimbus 4 DM on 21 January 2003 with his co-pilot Karl Rabeder. He also broke Hans-Werner Grosse's free distance record, which had lasted over 30 years, on 9 January 2003 by a flight of 2,247.6 km in a Schempp-Hirth Nimbus 4 DM at El Calafate in Argentina.

Alexandru "Alex" Papană was a Romanian-American aviator and bobsledder who competed from the early 1930s to the late 1940s.

Alan Derek Piggott was one of Britain's best known glider pilots and instructors. He had over 5,000 hours on over 153 types of powered aircraft and over 5,000 hours on over 184 types of glider. He was honoured for his work on the instruction and safety of glider pilots. In 1961 he became the first person to make an officially authenticated take-off and flight in a man-powered aircraft. He also worked as a stunt pilot in several feature films.

Ella Sophia Gertrude Pilcher was a British pioneer aviator, and the first woman to fly in a glider in the British Isles. She co-created and flew in gliders designed by Percy Pilcher, her younger brother, in the 1890s. She was made an honorary member of the Royal Aeronautical Society in December 1899.

Percy Sinclair Pilcher was a British inventor and pioneer aviator who was his country's foremost experimenter in unpowered flight at the end of the nineteenth century.

Jadwiga Piłsudska-Jaraczewska was a Polish pilot, who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War. She was one of two daughters of Józef Piłsudski.

Gregorius Radvenis or Gregorius Heidrikis was a squadron commander in the Lithuanian Air Force. He achieved the rank of captain in 1936. He became a qualified glider pilot pioneering and promoting gliding in Lithuania and holding the first gliding records in Lithuania. He managed and taught at gliding schools.

Hanna Reitsch was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors.

Clifford Parker Robertson III was an American actor and aviator whose career in film and television spanned half a century. Robertson portrayed a young John F. Kennedy in the 1963 film PT 109, and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film Charly.

Wallace Aiken Scott was an American aviator and author, a holder of several international sailplane records, and a multi-time recipient of the Lewin B. Barringer trophy awarded for the longest, free-distance, sailplane flight of each year made in the United States. Over 36 years Wallace Wally Scott increased the distance flown in a sailplane.

Wolfgang Späte was a German Luftwaffe fighter pilot during World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves. For fighter pilots it was a quantifiable measure of skill and combat success. He is attributed by some, for an early, 1938 version of the speed to fly theory, usually attributed to Paul MacCready. Already a talented glider pilot before the war, he went on to become one of the Luftwaffe's foremost test pilots.

Ernst August Wilhelm Steinhoff was a rocket scientist and member of the "von Braun rocket group", at the Peenemünde Army Research Center (1939–1945). Ernst Steinhoff saw National Socialist (Nazi) doctrines as "ideals" and became a member of the NSDAP in May 1937. He was a glider pilot, holding distance records, and had the honorary Luftwaffe rank of "Flight Captain".

Ferenc Tóth is a Hungarian glider aerobatic pilot who won the FAI European Glider Aerobatic Championships 2000, 2006 and 2008, and the FAI World Glider Aerobatic Championships 2003. Furthermore, he won a gold medal at The World Games 2017 in Wroclaw, Poland.

Gustave Albin Whitehead was an aviation pioneer who emigrated from Germany to the United States where he designed and built gliders, flying machines, and engines between 1897 and 1915. Controversy surrounds published accounts and Whitehead's own claims that he flew a powered machine successfully several times in 1901 and 1902, predating the first flights by the Wright Brothers in 1903.

The Wright brothers—Orville and Wilbur —were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful motor-operated airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, 4 mi (6 km) south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1904–05, the brothers developed their flying machine to make longer-running and more aerodynamic flights with the Wright Flyer II, followed by the first truly practical fixed-wing aircraft, the Wright Flyer III. The Wright brothers were also the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.