Waiting for the Wind

Hang glider pilots are a patient lot. They have to be. You can't fly without the wind, and you need that wind to come from the right direction, which is straight up the launch ramp. Consequently they spend a lot of time sitting around swapping yarns next to their "flying machines in pieces on the ground" as James Taylor put it so succinctly in Fire and Rain. I wonder if he was a pilot?

SELF PORTRAIT AT STANWELL PARK Sunlight diffracted by water droplets around the shadow on the cloud. Photograph:  Neil Evans

What do they talk about? Well, the weather, and hang gliding, and the weather again, and a bit more about hang gliding. In fact most of the pilots I've met are so knowledgeable that they can speak at length about any subject you care to name—as long as it's hang gliding.

Unlike most specialist fields where conversation is boring to the uninitiated (how much do you know, or want to know, about the Fantasy variation of the Caro-Kann Defence in chess?) hang gliding conversations tend to be fascinating.

Take the story of American pilot "Nine Lives" Lenehan.
When Lenehan was in Australia for the world championship, somebody asked him about the nine little emblems sewn on his flight suit. He explained that every time he had a serious accident and walked away from it he sewed on another badge. They added up to nine lives saved so far, but fortunately, since he's not a cat, he must have a couple in hand.
Because, at Hay, he tried for Number 10!
It's no coincidence that Banjo Paterson's poem "Hay, Hell and Booligal" was inspired in that area. In the summertime it gets as hot as Hades with temperatures often over 40° Celsius (105°+ Fahrenheit). But with the heat come the updrafts pilots need to gain height and distance, which makes it good flying country.
Of course, the heat and wind don't just breed gentle thermals, they also breed dust devils and Lenehan managed to find one.
Like Icarus flying too close to the Sun, Lenehan flew too close to this devil and was caught up. If he hoped to ride it like a thermal he underestimated its strength. This was a thermal on steroids! It not only held him close to it's bosom it took an active dislike to his glider and proceeded to break it up.
There was only one option open. He threw his parachute. (In hang gliding you don't pull a rip cord—your body has no velocity for the air pressure to force air into the canopy—you throw the thing.)
The parachute inflated—after all, what else could it do in all that turbulence, but his troubles weren't over yet.
Instead of going down, he went up!
Lenehan finally made it to the ground and walked away unhurt but his hang glider was a write-off.

I had the opportunity to attend the Corryong Cup, an interclub event held in the Australian Alps at Corryong, Victoria.
That year there were difficult wind conditions with much gusting and turbulence.
After spending a lot of time on launch one morning and with a severe storm front threatening, it was decided to abandon competition for the day.
Almost everybody packed up their gear but three guys thought it looked safe enough to take a chance.
Their timing was impeccable. No sooner had they launched than the storm hit with winds gusting to fifty knots.
Off they went, heading involunatarily for New South Wales (the storm didn't allow them any choice) while a few pilots jumped in their cars to chase.
Neil found one guy on the local race course. Somehow he had managed to get it down but he was strapped into a glider that wanted get back up and play in the big wind and he couldn't get a hand free to unstrap the harness or immobilise the hang glider.
Neil jumped a couple of fences and managed to get hold of the kite from the other side but the guy couldn't see him through the fabric and didn't know he was there.
Neil couldn't see him either, of course, but he did hear him. And the commentary was a despairing repetition of, "Oh shit!"
Perfectly understandable in the circumstances and you'll probably agree that it can be a useful part of any pilot's vocabulary.

There is an art to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
                    —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

One pilot told me of a time he and a group of friends were flying off Mount Keira at Wollongong, a coastal city just south of Sydney. When they ran out of air they looked about for a place to land and found a football field at Wollongong University.
There was a game of "Australian Rules" (in the U.S. those few people who have ever seen the game call it "fumble ball") in progress on one of the fields but the next field was vacant.
As my friend turned into the wind for the landing run his course took him straight across the game, very low and very fast—so the first warning any of the footballers had was the sound of the wind rushing through the rigging and a bloody great shadow flashing across the ground. (He assures me he didn't do it on purpose and, since he has an honest face, I believe him.) Most of the players jumped a mile!
As the rest of the group followed him in he said the hang gliders got more attention than the game.

You can't fly closer to Nature than hang gliding—but sometimes it can be a little too close. Sure, you get difficult wind conditions and all kinds of weather abnormalities that keep you on your toes, but that's not all. There are also birds.
Of course, you don't have a jet intake so you don't need to worry about sea gulls getting drawn into your engine, and you certainly don't need to worry about something splattering across your windscreen but there's another problem.—Some birds aren't intimidated by the size of your kite and may well dispute your right to fly in their territory. These are the eagles.
One of my hang gliding videos shows a hang glider at Corryong, Victoria, being attacked simultaneously by two eagles. Since the attack was being recorded by a video camera on launch the comments of the watchers, themselves all pilots, are clearly audible. Were they sympathetic? Not a bit! They seemed to think it was lots of fun. "Somebody get a gun and put that pilot out of his misery," said one guy.

The year after that video was recorded the same situation cropped up in the same area, but this time the eagles had become more selective. They picked one kite, a brand-new high-performance glider being flown by a visiting Japanese, and attacked it every time it flew, leaving everybody else in peace. Maybe they didn't like the colour but, then again, maybe they were racist.

There are many stories to be told about hang gliding and they'll be added from time to time. Keep watching.