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magine parking your car
at a beautiful upland van-
tage point on a sparkling
spring day. You open the
boot and don flying suit
and boots, then lift out
your incredibly light flying
machine in its carrying
rucksack and trek off a few yards to
where your friends are preparing to
fly. After a few minutes spent inspect-
ing your equipment you don helmet
and harness, look around, allow the
wind to raise the canopy - and launch
off into space. This is paragliding!
What exactly is it?
Developed from parachuting cano-
pies, modern paragliders can be
soared effortlessly on windward
slopes, and flown across country in
good conditions. It‘s the same free-
dom that hang glider pilots enjoy, but
a paraglide is more portable and a
little easier to learn to fly. They are
more hampered by strong winds than
hang gliders but are easier to land in
small fields.
What can you do with one?
Many paraglider pilots strive to
perfect their skills in cross-country
flying. A summer sky filled with fluffy
cumulus clouds provides abundant -
but invisible - lifting currents, which
pilots use to gain altitude. Setting
off on such a day, either towards a
pre-selected goal or just drifting where
the wind will take you is one of the
most breathtaking experiences avail-
able today. Most pilots will talk of
the sense of privilege they feel when
drifting from cloud to cloud, in almost
total silence, watching the landscape
unfold beneath them as they navigate
across the sky.
Do they always need a hill?
Paragliding is not limited to upland en-
vironments. Tow launching, the launch
technique use in the flatlands, uses an
engine-driven winch to pull pilots aloft
where they search for lift like their hill
flying friends.
I
Paraglider Types
Today hill schools and tow schools
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MAGAZINE - JUNE 2012