Hang Gliding

These days most of those flyers will be paragliders, since the portability and ease of paragliding makes it a more obvious choice for beginners. A select few, however, will be hanging horizontally, slung beneath the sleek delta wings of hang gliders. So what's the difference? Ask a paraglider pilot and they will point out that hang gliders take longer to master, can't be packed into a backpack and usually require a car to transport. Ask a hang-gliding pilot and they will tell you that hang gliders are far faster, with superior gliding characteristics and the ability to fly in stronger wind. Which may explain why you are more likely to see hang gliders in the brisk breezes of the Sussex cliffs and paragliders in the soft winds of the tropics.

Partisans of both approaches will argue until they are blue in the face about which is the safest. Probably the best approach is to remember the original story of flying man, in which Icarus ended up tumbling out of the sky. What's often forgotten in that tale is that Icarus was not alone in the sky and that his father Daedalus completed his flight successfully. The moral of the story is that it is the pilot, more often than the craft, that defines the risk factor.

Learning to hang glide takes a week to ten days to get up to a basic level where you are free to join clubs or turn up at popular sites and launch your own craft. Flying requires very little strength because you hang from a sling, not from your arms, but launching is tiring because you have to jog along with 35 kg of glider on your shoulders. This means that the first week is probably the most tiring part of your flying career. You'll have company, though, since the instructor is going to have to jog alongside you over and over as you go through dummy launches.

You will progress to low skimming flights, 30º turns (you turn by shifting your weight to the side or forwards/backwards in the harness), and then off the training gliders onto higher-performance craft and higher flights. You'll need to show the ability to perform a 180º controlled turn and land where you're told to - which involves a process called 'flaring', essentially stalling the wing just as you want to stop. Finally you'll have to pass a theory exam covering the law and physics of flying as well as the basics of navigation. Navigation? Well, yes: you can end up travelling a fair old way. The current record flights are over the 700 km mark, and while altitude is often governed by the airspace regulations of the country you are in, flights can reach 4800 m or more when the pilots are equipped with oxygen. Which makes it more of a budget airline than a sport.

The trick to long distance and altitude is reading the air's behaviour. As with any gliding you will be looking for thermals, places where a column of warmer air rises. These occur anywhere that patches of ground absorb heat faster than their surroundings, including car parks, tarmac roads or rocks surrounded by grass. The other major source of lift is known as ridge lift and occurs where wind blows onto a cliff or hill and is forced up the face so that it goes upwards, creating a wall of rising air and enabling a technique called ridge soaring. Put simply, thermals enable cross-country flying, and ridge lift is what allows pilots to hang seemingly motionless above the ground looking out to sea, like gulls.


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