Hang Gliding
Hang-gliding. I'm a total beginner. I own an
Avian
Rio 15 and I'm learning more and more by the day but my total flying
'hours' are still best measured in minutes to save embarrassing
fractions.
This page is basically a place-holder for my usual ramblings but currently I'm
a newbie muppet so I know better than to have opinions.
Proper pictures will happen when I get somebody to photograph me looking cool
in the air but so far all I've managed are states of perplexed, confused,
mildly terrified and wildly excited when something actually starts to work so
'cool' certainly hasn't happened on camera yet.
Hang gliding seems to have been slightly eclipsed by its upstart younger
sibling paragliding. Essentially they both accomplish the same end by launching
you into the air for an unaided flight with the bare minimum of equipment but
this is no 747 ride, you are out in the elements actually flying for
real.
The hang-glider pilot is suspended from an aerofoil wing that is relatively
rigid while the paraglider is derived from a parachute but transformed into a
controllable wing when inflated. The hang glider offers a greater speed range
so you aren't blown out quite so often on windy days but you pay for it in more
rigging time and a more awkward shape to transport. My 'little' Rio is 5.6
meters long in its bag and although if you get out the spanners you can reduce
that to 3.8 meters to airfreight it you don't want to do that too often.
Meanwhile a paraglider bundles up into a ball of less than a meter diameter and
goes in your car not on your car. Pace out 5.6 meters and work
out where on earth you would store that in your house.
I never quite fancied paragliding although you see enough of them these days
but I've wanted to fly for years and somehow hang-gliding just struck a chord
in me. I looked for a school that was reasonably local and ended up with John
Barratt at South Downs Hang
Gliding. John was enormously patient with an older than usual student, slow
to learn new motor skills and with no particular aptitude for flying. Even the
day when I landed his training glider sufficiently hard to break one of the
control frame uprights he just stoically changed it, clipped me back in and
launched me again. I can thoroughly recommend him.
So what happens when you sign up for the course? Well you need a school to take
you through the first bits so I did the first basic training on an Australian
built Airbourne
'Fun' glider. Much of the initial training is on tethered lines to stop you
getting out of control with the inevitable hard landing. The system works well
and allows you to learn one thing at a time so you can learn airspeed control
and landings before you have to simultaneously steer the thing. A talented
student can do it in less than the average five days but I took more. Actually
I couldn't claim I learnt much, just that the glider seemed to get much better
at recognising what I realy wanted it to do as time passed. This will qualify
you as 'Elementary Pilot'. Elementary Pilot implies you can maintain course and
airspeed, do simple turns and do simple landings. These are simple
top-to-bottom slope glides. Once you have managed EP they will let you fly your
own glider and train you to 'Club Pilot' on that. Club pilot introduces
concepts like soaring and more complex flight plans including flying in more
busy airspace. You also get a whole bunch of safety rules, weather knowledge
and aircraft law that is examined at both levels. A Club pilot is safe to let
out into a club environment with other people to oversee much of their planning
and as you take this on board you qualify as Pilot.
What else do you need? Well third party insurance so if you hang yourself up on
a set of pylons you may get deep fried but your family doesn't need to foot the
bill for blacking out half of Sussex. To get this you join the
BHPA either by the day or in increments up
to a year. They are the governing body and general overseers of the sport. They
would also love to sell you some books and send you a magazine.
The other thing you need is a club. OK if you own your own hills you can
probably do without that but it is the clubs that do the deals to set up flying
sites and landing areas. Clubs also put you in contact with other gliders so
you can share the pickup chores which saves you having to get the Butler to
come out in the SUV to fetch you back from Kent. My local club is the
Southern Hang Gliding Club whose sites
are around Brighton, Ditchling and over to Eastbourne. Clubs deal with other
clubs so you don't have to join lots and the BHPA puts you in contact with
others.
So what about the physics of the system, because that's always been my thing?
Well my
Rio,
for example, is just 25Kgs fully rigged and ready to fly. With all
my kit and helmet on I weigh about 83Kgs so my weight is the most significant
force available. I am suspended from a point virtually on the centre of lift
for the wing such that if I 'hands off' the controls it is in balance to fly a
rather slow but efficient glide back to earth. If I pull the bar attached to
the wing back towards me rather than me swinging forward the wing tips nose
down and the glide accelerates, push it forward and we slow down. Twist my body
so instead of hanging straight down I am slightly offset and the wing rolls to
try to put me back underneath and if I leave it at that rolled position I am
turning. There are no controls, everything depends on how I hang. The design
may be sophisticated but the actual control is about as basic as it comes. This
is riding a bike not driving a car. Where you go depends on where you put your
bottom. It's that simple.
So what do you learn? The thing that took me a while to realise is that, just
like a push bike, going faster makes it much easier. The modern wings are so
designed that they will still try to fly right down to a very slow airspeed but
just as your bike got wobblier and wobblier as you slowed right down so does
your hang glider. All those things they tell you about pitch and steering work
a bit but the wretched thing really doesn't seem to cooperate when you're too
slow.
Then you pluck up the nerve to pull the bar back a bit more and the wing speeds
up. Suddenly the efficiency rises and your sink rate drops so that slope that
you kept touching your feet down on before becomes flyable as you do more
horizontal distance for your vertical sink. More importantly the steering and
pitch control becomes far more crisp. Finally, far beyond where you got to last
time, you run out of height and flare for a landing and it all happens quickly.
You pass through the slow wobbles almost before they happen and there you are,
standing stopped, holding your glider and feeling cool.
Here's the Rio the first time I rigged it. It was after my first day off the
training lines doing runs down the 'nursery' slope to fine tune my 'wings
level' and steering skills so well before I was qualified to fly it but I just
wanted to unwrap my new toy and look at it so John oversaw me rigging it, that
took half an hour, he took my picture and then I took it to pieces again and
put it back in its bag.
It's blue underneath so imagine it with training wheels and heading
for a tree and you're getting the idea.
Training pics
Glideslope analysis
Weather
