Hang Gliding
I always wanted to fly.
Personally I blame my mother. As a mere slip of a girl, with a good job in post
war austerity Britain, she and a friend had spare money in their pockets but no
ration cards to buy nice clothes so they decided to learn to fly. It wasn't
like learning to fly today, just some ex-RAF hero with a Tiger Moth trainer
that was probably as war-surplus as he was, but she did it.
I don't think it was so much the actual flying that she passed on to me but
the attitude that 'I can do that' that came down in the blood. But it nearly
didn't happen. I got involved in physics and electronics which made for a good
few years of university then a good career that had lots of fun in it. Like
most people in these fields I ended up working mostly as a computer programmer
because computers are our key tools both to run the processes we want and to
capture and rework the data we need. Hobby wise it was a long infatuation with
racing motorcycles and then, when the total skeletal damage added up too far,
it was scuba diving.
Now a friend has a PPL and he took me up a couple of times but holding a Piper
steering wheel somehow didn't do it for me. Then somebody pointed me at hang
gliding. Now that was the something more visceral that appealed to the
motor-cycle racer in me. This would be really flying. You were out in it, doing
it 'by hand' so to speak.
Now stop and put me in context. I was now 59. I was a widower and a practicing
grand-father. I am still reasonably fit in that I can still climb hills and
ladders, I just hesitate at clambering up trees these days. OK the bike racing
has left me with a few aches and pains (and a heart condition) but I am not
your usual enthusiastic youngster.
Google is your friend. I found first 'Sussex Hang Gliding and Paragliding' and
through them 'Southdowns Hang Gliding' and that was local enough to Brighton to
be easy so I just booked myself in for a week's worth of lessons. OK a week
might have been a bit over optimistic. I'm not so good at learning new motor
skills any more so it took a bit more time.
So I'm a total beginner but somehow I seem to own an
Avian
Rio 15 and an
Aeros Target. I'm learning more and more by the day but my total flying
'hours' are still best measured in minutes to save embarrassing
fractions.
Proper pictures will happen when I get somebody to photograph me looking cool
in the air. However so far all I have managed are states of perplexed,
confused, mildly terrified and then wildly excited when something actually
starts to work right so 'cool' certainly hasn't happened on camera yet. Also,
since I took most of these pictures, I'm not in them either. I have ideas about
attaching a video camera to the wing but that hasn't happened yet.
Mum, by the way, is now 85 and thoroughly approves.
So why a hang glider? The hang-glider pilot is suspended from an aerofoil wing
that is relatively rigid while a paraglider, the alternative foot launched
aircraft, 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. Perhaps that's why there seem to be so many of
those paraglider things about now.
I admit I never quite fancied paragliding but 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 and Matt, the two instructors, were 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 one of the
training gliders sufficiently hard to break a control frame upright John just
stoically changed it, clipped me back in and launched me off again. I can
thoroughly recommend them.
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, it just seemed that the glider got much better
at recognising what I really 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 straight forward
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 check on 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 local 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.
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 may have been a pretty pointless exercise but it
felt really good.
It's blue underneath so imagine it with the training wheels on and heading
for a tree and you're getting the idea.
So have I been nice to it? Well I got it a big fancy Vario (a Flight Instument)
and I started wiring my helmet for sound but I have to confess to bending it
already. OK it was my fault. I saw the bump and looked at it and it went
unerringly for it, clipped the top to trip me up and then dropped me down the
far side so I swung into the frame. totally avoidable. However I bought it some
nice new struts for the sides of the A-frame (yes I know it's a triangle not an
A) and some rather straighter bolts and it all went back together as good as
new. <sigh> Why do all my hobbies seem to involve mending or
rebuilding things?
OK so why two gliders? Well I did the Elementary Pilot course on the school's
gliders and finally dragged up the ability to fly them consistently enough at
low level to be signed off for the grade. The Club Pilot course, however, needs
your own glider so when you graduate you can go straight off and fly it. I
bought the Rio 15 and it's rather good. On the initial flights of CP I was
finding it hard to control but it was still flying 20% further than my fellow
students, this is several hundred feet more down the landing field and it's
very noticeable. However almost every flight was ending in a botched, over
speed landing and only the training wheels were saving me from ploughing a
furrow with my face. This was getting more than a bit frustrating as I felt I
had mastered all that in EP and a nice 'walk to a stop' landing was now
normal.
In the end I had to admit my Rio was a bit too good for an old newbie so I
bought the used Aeros Target which was about the same spec as the school's
training gliders and did two not quite walk but at least run to a halt landings
on the first two flights. That was a relief. I'll come back to the Rio when I'm
a bit more experienced but, as a bonus, I now have a glider that packs down to
an airline friendly two meters long and, worst case, it was so darn cheap I'll
have to roll it up into a ball of bent metal and torn sail to make it
depreciate any more.
My stuff
Training pictures page that's getting a bit bloggy.
Hang glider physics: a work in progress.
Weather because most of the stuff they tell you is wrong.
Other stuff
Wind Forecast
RASP
Tomorrow's forecast Chart
