re: #125 Testy Toad T

A great glider can do a 20:1 glideslope. If they’re flying at 80mph, that means they’d be going down at four miles per hour.

So you might get an hour or two. You couldn’t go all night.

Actually, modern gliders are a lot more efficent than that, but you are correct, if you just trade altitude for time, you’re going to run out of altitude LONG before you hit morning again.

With each generation of materials and with the improvements in aerodynamics, the performance of gliders has increased. One measure of performance is the glide ratio. A ratio of 30:1 means that in smooth air a glider can travel forward 30 meters while losing only 1 meter of altitude. Comparing some typical gliders that might be found in the fleet of a gliding club - the Grunau Baby from the 1930s had a glide ratio of just 17:1, the glass-fiber Libelle of the 1960s increased that to 39:1, and modern flapped 18 meter gliders such as the ASG29 have a glide ratio of over 50:1. The largest open-class glider, the eta, has a span of 30.9 meters and has a glide ratio over 70:1. Compare this to the infamous Gimli Glider, a Boeing 767 which ran out of fuel mid-flight and was found to have a glide ratio of only 12:1, or to the Space Shuttle with a glide ratio of 4.5:1.[10]
en.wikipedia.org