Hang Glider Believes He Can Fly

http://uvideo100.com/glider.html ^

[rocky50]

Hang Glider finds it's not as easy as it looks.

[JaguarXKE]

http://youtu.be/SxHVhxbtrhY

[DManA]

That was pretty similar to my one attempt to hang glide.

[mylife]

Ping

[Tigerized]

I tried it AFTER I had a pilots license.

For those who have no previous concept of angle of attack, lift vs. drag, and stalls, it’s madness to try to hang glide without some previous instruction in the basics of how a wing works.

This guy doesn’t have a clue, from the very short interval between departure and arrival.

[fireman15]

We have four hang gliders, an ultralight airplane, and a Piper Cherokee airplane.

If the guy had hang glider training wheels he wouldn't have come to such an abrupt stop.

I found out about this the hard way. I caused a perminent injury to my lower back trying to teach myself how to hang glide.

Hang gliding is incredibly fun although the risk of broken bones on a botched landing is fairly high. The risk is fairly minimal if one finds a good instructor. You simply cannot imagine what a thrill it is to be soaring for hours in the mountains after jumping off a cliff. Our airplanes are a lot of fun but hang gliding is the most pure form of flying as far as I am concerned.

I have tried paragliding but I don't find it to be nearly as enjoyable although it is easier to learn.

[DManA]

I know you speak the truth. I dream about flying several times a week.

[kinsman redeemer]

I used to have regular “flying with nothing but simple low effort arm flapping” dreams. I don’t have those dreams any more. I miss them.

I would love to soar like a hawk.

[PrivateIdaho]

I used to have regular “flying with nothing but simple low effort arm flapping” dreams. I don’t have those dreams any more. I miss them.

Same here - those were the best dreams ever, but I haven't had one for years. They seem to have been replaced by dreams where I'm on an airplane that just can't get altitude and skims the trees, flies under overpasses, around buildings, etc. I think my ability to fly is declining with age...

[fireman15]

I would love to soar like a hawk.

That is why I love hang gliding so much and paragliding doesn't do much for me. A hang glider actually allows you to soar like a hawk given the right conditions. A paraglider feels more like a moving rope swing suspended from the sky.

We live 70 miles from a place called “Dog Mountain” a few miles South East from a place called Morton, WA. The terrain and prevailing wind conditions make it soar-able most of the time spring through fall. This means that most of the time you can soar until you get tired. The only problem is that it pretty much have to set aside an entire day any time you want to go hang gliding. We actually live on a small airport surrounded by 116 homes. So I can fly one of the airplanes any time and only use an hour or two. We also live only half an hour from Tiger Mountain, a good paragliding spot.

[Boiling point]

From my experience here’s what I could tell from the video. The hill wasn’t tall enough. The slope of the hill was shallower than the glide ratio of his glider.

[higgmeister]

For those who have no previous concept of angle of attack, lift vs. drag, and stalls, it’s madness to try to hang glide without some previous instruction in the basics of how a wing works.

I have never done it, but I know you must push the bar away from you to raise the nose. And I know that it would be difficult to push so much that it would stall a hang glider. Even a neophyte could watch it again and see this person kept their arms bent at the elbows while not even grasping the horizontal bar.

[Ainast]

“In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.” 

[fireman15]

It looks like a typical “training hill”. A lot of people feel more comfortable if they don’t get very far off of the ground. It is probably steep enough to get a good “sled run” especially if there is a bit of a breeze. Actually to me his technique didn’t look bad. I don’t think he had enough airspeed to get his nose up once he left the ground. A little more speed and he probably would have made it all the way to the bottom of the hill.

You see this type of mishap at every training hill. A guy I was taking lessons with broke his arm about the 4th time he made that same type of “landing”. I weighed about 50 pounds less than him and had a double surface glider. I made it to the bottom of the hill everytime and he crashed everytime. Even with “training wheels” he still managed to break his arm.

[golux]

I regularly dream that I can’t figure out where my cars are, that I have acquired cars I can’t find, that I’m some sort of strange, hidden-away parking lot next to a car I know is mine, but I don’t have the key. The cars are all older exotics of one kind or another, and the dreams are in fact very disturbing.

[coop71]

Thanks for an original link.