Posted on 03/09/2019 5:38:33 PM PST by navysealdad
First time hang gliding. Switzerland. HANG GLIDING WITHOUT A HARNESS HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE
(Excerpt) Read more at drdavehouseoffun.com ...
Most Certainly,
M.A.S.H.
I used to do a lot of hang gliding and still own four hang gliders. Every once in a while you hear about something like this. I remember telling my fiancé before I took her to a hang glider club meeting that it was really not that dangerous. But unfortunately we had a bad Spring and the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor looked a lot like an emergency room waiting area. I actually have known a lot more pilots that have died in small airplanes. But that is partially because there are not that many people who hang glide.
The problem with hang gliding is that half the time its not soarable and you end up wasting the whole day for a couple 10 minute sled run. We have a place in Washington called Dog Mountain where is it soarable most of the time. But I switched to ultralight airplanes and then general aviation aircraft to get more flight time.
But there is no purer bird like flying experience than hang gliding. And the hang gliders that they have these days are much easier to land than the 1st and 2nd generation double surface gliders that I learned with. The only aircraft that I am not that fond of are paragliders. They are easy to land but if the wind increases to much above 15 mph you can’t make forward progress and you can end up stuck in the top of a tall tree in an inaccessible area. That has happened to a friend of mine twice.
I’ll bet he had a load in his pants.
Adrenaline addiction.
Actually two them running into each other mid-air. In the video, that was one of worst TV reporters I have ever seen on air.
But I bet he wears the harness next time.
I am surprised he didn’t beat the pilot to a pulp with his good hand.
Best damn OD we ever had.
These were two para-gliders, not hang gliders. Para-gliders are parachutes designed for gliding. It takes much less skill to land them because they fly so slowly. If there is any wind at all you can basically land them with no forward motion. My two double surface hang gliders can safely accelerate to over 70 mph in a dive, but since they are older their stall speeds are 25mph.
With hang gliders midair collisions are fairly frequent because when the wind isn't very strong pilots have to share the same airspace close to the ridges with updrafts. When two hang gliders make contact many times the pilots can recover or deploy their parachutes if they have enough altitude. I used to go flying with a guy who was in his late seventies who had survived several midair collisions. He was considered by other hang glider pilots as an accident waiting to happen so everyone tried to keep a very close eye on him.
Para-gliders are typically considered safer than hang gliders because of their lower flying speeds, but many of the pilots are less experienced and they fly on days and in places where there is less wind so they congregate around the same sources of lift which makes collisions more likely. This accident demonstrates a serious vulnerability if their lines get tangled together.
Whoops.
He said he's going to try it again since he didn't have any fun the first time......
Going base jumping tomorrow.......LOL!
Tough to control a hang glider with just one hand....
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The hang gliding is fun, tried it at Kittyhawk a few times. From small planes I thought I’d pick it right up but instinctively kept pulling the bar back to land..
See if this works. Different story, same accident.
And I thought I was forgetful.
We have an old Rogallo style hang glider with floats that can be pulled behind a boat. My brother had already been an airline pilot for years. He pulled me a few times around the bay behind his ski boat, and then it was his turn. We were using around 500 feet of line so it was a little hard to communicate.
He got up on his water skis and became airborne. He would go up 20 or 40 feet, then he would come back down and bounce off the water. I thought that maybe I wasn't going fast enough, but all that happened when I went faster was that the frequency of the oscillation between being airborne and bouncing off the water became quicker and the amplitude, how high he went became more intense, so he was going 60 or 80 feet in the air and then bashing down on the water. He finally lost a ski. It turned out that he had plenty of lift; he was trying to stay close to the water, but couldn't keep the hang glider from making a quick ascent when the nose went up. He was completely exhausted and totally freaking out and didn't want to do it anymore.
I couldn't stop laughing when I figured out what had been going on. But I felt bad later because it kind of hurt his feelings and it really was completely my fault.
On the fire department we used to extend the 100 foot ladder on the truck at a high angle and make the trainees climb to the top, hook in to the top rung with their safety strap and then lean back so that their strap was the only thing keeping them from falling backward and plummeting back to earth. When the ladder is nearly straight up and it was windy it moved around quite a bit at the top. It wasn't very hard to figure out who had a difficult time overcoming their natural fear of heights. Sometimes one of us would have to climb up and assist the freaked out person back down. But by the end of my career this type of fun had become verboten.
It is too bad that you weren't able to experience soaring at Kittyhawk. Flying around for hours with just the updrafts keeping you up is the real joy of hang gliding. The beach is typically the best place to learn, but the soaring opportunities are much more limited than in the mountains or at a seaside spot with some tall cliffs. The place where I learned to hang glide, Cape Kiwanda in Oregon has soaring opportunities, especially if you go North to Oceanside, but nothing compared to mountain launch sites.
We got married in Hawaii; I wasn't able to take a hang glider with us, but my wife and I went out to a well known launch area. And that spot had such steady winds that the locals were soaring for hours off of cliffs that were not very high. They were telling me that launching from Mt. Haleakalā was fun but usually just a sled run. This was because of the direction of the prevailing winds and the distance to their landing area which was miles away.
We had a place in Washington that was like that. It was several miles from the launch to the landing area. So if you weren't able to get some good updrafts immediately after you launched you had to head straight for the landing area or you would end up with no good landing options almost immediately.
I see how you are not completely to blame for calling a paraglider, a hang glider. It is about the same as calling a helicopter an airplane.
Modern hang gliders are trimmed to fly hands off, but if you have a shifting load like an unattached passenger who is moving the center of gravity around and holding onto one side of the control bar to keep from falling to the ground... all bets are off.
I am actually a little surprised that the glider was controllable at all. I would have guessed that the uneven load on the control bar would have put the glider into a fairly steep spiral into the side of the hill. If the pilot had good directional control it might have been safer to turn back into the hill. I am a little surprised the guy was able to hold on for as long as he did. Since it worked out I would have to say that it probably was the best action, but if the passenger had fallen and been killed somewhere along the way, I am thinking that the pilot would have been facing some possible prison time.
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