Paragliding

You and the glider are heavier than air and thus condemned to sink through it (hopefully not too quickly) until you meet the ground (hopefully not too painfully). However good the design of the wing it is only going to stay airborne if the column of air you happen to inhabit at that moment is rising away from the ground faster than you are falling towards it.

Paragliding started out when parachutists in the Alps realised they could launch their new, square, steerable canopies from the ground and land in the valleys below. Since then they have come a long way and you don't have to have a handy mountain to take off. Ridge soaring and cliff hanging are still the easiest ways to get airborne but a really good pilot can ascend now in very light thermals. By using those, paragliding has gone from something you did off a mountain (landing lower down the same mount) to a means of flying long distances (flights of over 400 km have been recorded) across country by using the thermals. At least that's the theory; in practice it depends where you are. Countries with a lot of sun and large expanses of barren rock will produce dramatic and predictable thermals for cross-country work. Countries with large amounts of cloud and soggy grassland make pilots work that much harder. In some ways this may make them better pilots (and weather bores) since successful gliding in variable conditions requires a very fine knowledge of the slightest indicators of thermals - including the flight patterns of insects and birds in the take-off area.

It's easy to underestimate the amount of meteorological knowledge involved in flying successfully but on the plus side the physical controls are not as complex as you might think. One of the odder points about a paraglider is that you don't steer it like an aeroplane. Aeroplanes have control surfaces that provide fine touches to modify the aerodynamics. Paragliders have control lines that basically twist the shape of the wing so that it acts like a brake, slowing one side down more than the other in order to turn. Put simply it's the same principle as a tank or a bulldozer - you slow down one side enough for the other to overtake it. Yup, those effortlessly graceful, feather-weight flight craft can be thought of as sky tanks when it comes to turns.

One of the beauties of paragliding is that it's possible to cram wing, harness, control lines, et al. into a backpack which makes it easy to get to fairly remote launch points, fly to somewhere and pack everything back up again. One example of which is the launch site at Lion's Head in Cape Town, where paragliders walk up the footpath to the hilltop, launch off the side - and when they're done they land on the beach at Camp's Bay before packing the wing back into their rucksacks and heading into the bars. You try that with a Cessna.

Try a tandem. Tandem flights are the best way to go for beginners because you can find out whether or not you like it without spending time learning about aerodynamics and meteorology. Even intermediates can still learn a lot from a tandem flight as it's the best chance you'll get to observe the experts from close up. They couldn't be simpler. Your pilot will lay out the glider, clip you into the harness and tell you when to run. You leg it, and before you know it your legs are still trying to run but you're not actually touching the ground. From there on you can relax and enjoy the view.


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