SSA Grant 2025 Interim Report

Soaring Tigers contact information of people responsible for implementing the proposed projects:

• Konstantinos Manos, (609) 436-8126, km4382@princeton.edu
• Nishant Goel, (609) 375-4988, nishant@princeton.edu

Soaring Tigers, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, was one of the recipients of a $6,000 grant awarded by the SSA last year to support Soaring Tigers’ initiatives to promote soaring. This document outlines the initiatives that have been successfully implemented to date and serves as an interim report covering the portion of the grant funds utilized thus far. A comprehensive final report will be submitted in January 2027, following the continuing utilization of the grant funds, as previously notified and approved in correspondence with the SSA Administration dated July 18, 2025. Between the time we received the grant in late August and the conclusion of the soaring season in early December, we were able to make progress on most of the initiatives we had proposed, as outlined in the next section below.

Accelerating certification of our university student pilots
Our Soaring Tigers club’s operations are almost exclusively focused on glider flight instruction, and five out of our seven student pilots are currently PhD graduate students at Princeton University. In recent years, many of our university-affiliated student pilots have been unable to take full advantage of instructional glider flights due to financial constraints. With the support of the SSA grant, we were able to subsidize towing costs for student pilots by 50 percent. Despite consistently poor weekend weather during the summer of 2025 and the presence of TFRs, our club nonetheless recorded the highest number of instructional flights since 2018 as shown in Table 1. This was enabled by SSA’s generous grant.

Table 1: Total number of flights over the last 8 years in our instructional SGS 2-33A ship.

To facilitate tracking of the subsidized instructional flights and managing reimbursements, we developed and published an online Google Spreadsheet (see Fig. 1), which we will be happy to share (without our club member’s data) with the SSA and other glider clubs to help streamline their operations and administrative processes.

Fig 1: Picture of the spreadsheet we developed to keep track and automatically calculate SSA’s individual and total contribution to our instructional flights.

This program allowed the first one of our student pilots, Irene Sha, to make her first solo flight and three other student pilots to make substantial flight training progress and are now expected to make their first solo flights during the 2026 season. A total amount of $2,081 was spent towards accelerating the certification of our university student pilots. The picture on the right shows student pilots Irene Sha, Konstantinos Manos, and Nishant Goel at Van Sant airfield taking instructional flights. We now look forward to an increased number of instructional flights during the 2026 soaring season.

The subsidization of towing fees through the SSA grant enabled one woman student pilot in our club to complete the final phase of her instructional flights within a short period, ultimately leading to her successful solo flight in December 2025.

Fig. 2: From left to right:

• CFI-G Kris Hristoforatos and Irene before her first solo flight on a chilly 22°F morning,
• Irene after her solo landing, and
• T-shirt art to celebrate Irene’s first solo flights.

Video of Irene’s first solo take off: Irene Sha’s first glider solo flight
Video of Irene’s first solo landing: Irene Sha’s first SGS 2-33A glider landing

With the support of the SSA grant, demand for instructional flights from our student pilots exceeded the club’s instructional capacity, reflecting strong and growing engagement in our training programs. This increased activity also inspired a Soaring Tigers club member with a power pilot CFI rating to earn a CFI-G rating last year. With the addition of this new CFI-G, we are now well positioned to meet the growing demand for instructional flights in the upcoming soaring season. The picture on the right shows our new CFI-G, Ke Liu doing the preflight inspection before his FAA CFI-G check ride flight.

We enthusiastically engaged with three power pilots to introduce them to the sport of soaring. Two of these pilots had the chance to visit the field, where they observed our operations firsthand, took introductory flights with our CFI-Gs, and learned key soaring fundamentals. We are delighted to report that one of these pilots has since joined our club.

Given that most of our club members are currently university students, we have been able to more effectively spread awareness of soaring among young people through our student membership. Through these university-affiliated members, we have offered multiple opportunities for interested young people to visit the field and experience soaring firsthand. On the picture on the right, Vibha, a university student and prospective student pilot is observing the pre-takeoff procedures while our student pilot Gauri Wadhwa and our CFI-G, Dave Cooke are preparing for takeoff. An increased number of university students have shown interest in visiting the airfield and taking introductory flights with the support of the SSA grant. Due to weather conditions and the availability of the prospective new members, we had to reschedule some of these trips. We now look forward to organizing more field trips and offering more introductory flights during the 2026 soaring season.

We are pleased to note that in 2025, all of our student pilot Soaring Tigers club members participated in a six-session, Zoom-based ground school offered by the Philadelphia Glider Council (PGC). This training has significantly enhanced the value of each SSA grant–subsidized instructional flight by enabling our student pilots to gain more knowledge and insight from every lesson.

We have now scheduled a February 2026 3-day weekend field trip to Elmira New York. It will be attended by many of our glider student pilots plus other members of our Soaring Tigers club. We’ll tour the National Soaring Museum, visit the Harris Hill Soaring club, and also take a tour of the nearby K & L Soaring operation that provides parts for our fleet of Schweizer sailplanes. Our student pilot club members are very interested in learning about the history of soaring flights in the USA plus the evolution of our Soaring Tigers club.

We’ll be very pleased to report more about this in our January 2027 final report.

Of historic note is that back in 1974 our Soaring Tigers club (then named the Soaring Society of Princeton University – SSPU) was established by Steve Sliwa, a glider CFI-G member of the Harris Hill club, who at the time became a Princeton University undergraduate freshman student. Steve had a varied career that included serving as research manager at NASA, founder of an educational software company, VP of Product Development for a public Silicon Valley engineering-software company, President of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and founder of Insitu manufacturing miniature robotic airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles, and Seeq Corporation.

Steve’s mother Shirley Sliwa served for 10 years as the Director of the National Soaring Museum and had been associated with the Museum for 17 years. She played a crucial role in its expansion. Shirley was also a 1990 winner of the Soaring Society of America’s highest award, the Warren E. Eaton Trophy, she was recognized nationally and internationally for her outstanding efforts on behalf of soaring and the National Soaring Museum. She was twice awarded the SSA Certificate of Appreciation.