I'm not a hang glider but I am interested in becoming one, hence why I'm watching this vid (and many others on it). I am however an experienced skydiver. Specifically I'm what we call a swooper. Swoopers concentrate on the parachute part and not so much on to skydive part. We jump out of the plane at around 5000ft and immediatly open our parachutes (the others go further up to 13.000ft to actually go skydiving. Swooper fly the most extreme and fastest smallest parachutes. We "swoop" down with our canopy from a given height (for me around 500 - 600ft) and then plane out 1 m above the ground and come to a stop much like a hang glider does. We flare out our canopy when our horizontal speed is decreased and lift drops. I gather it's much the same with hang gliding. In the air we fly our canopies mainly with body input (harness input) due to the small sizes of our parachutes (compared to more traditional sizes) the canopy reacts very swiftly to such inputs which again seems to correspond to the way a hang glider is flown. I'm wondering now, since in my skydiving career I've always been more interested in flying my canopy than skydiving that perhaps I've chosen the wrong hobby. I'm pretty certain I can bring over some experience from swooping to hang gliding as I see lots of similarities. It also seems the cost of hang gliding is the same. A full gear for skydiving which includes a main parachute, a reserve (which also is a RAM air parachute), a harness, an AAD (automatic activation device), helmet & altimeter (usually two, one audio altimeter and one visual on the wrist) all this would set you back around 7000 to 8000 eur. You can get it down to 3000 to 4000 if you buy second hand.
It's almost been a year. Have you given it a try? I like swooping as well but in a hang glider. If you are trying to replicate the swoop from a canopy, there are small paragliders called speed gliders than can extend a very similar experience to you are getting but all the way down a mountainside. Hang gliding is better if you like higher speeds better glide ratios and the ability do dive without slipping into it. Paragliding is better if you don't have the ability to store a glider, don't want to put racks on your vehicle, or want to hike and fly. Both craft can do aerobatics, fly very high and can keep you up in the air for hours. Check out speed gliding videos for both hang gliders and paragliders.
I would love to fly a hang glider but transporting one with a trailor or roof mount big car and then to carry to the take off sites is quite a task, a hang glider needs more space to land whereas the paraglider can land in tight spots.
@@Myaliammar It can be done. maybe not as portable as a paraglider, but some hang gliders break down pretty small. I'd like to see companies like this do more development int that area. Instead they push the high performance stuff that ends up being more like a sailplane.
Thanks for your work but i have to correct you. It was not Otto Lilienthal who was the first Inventor of a controlled aircraft. Thousand years before him it was Abbas Ibn Firnas ;)
LUFF Lines reminds me of sailing on our family yachts some large, some small, but all sail. I remember my dear old dad explaining the Foul/ curvature of the sail and the physics that act upon this curvature/ foul.
Really great video Andre! I'm a hang glider pilot in Los Angeles and Tim Swait in this video has so much great information. Many thanks for sharing. If you're ever in Los Angeles, come fly with us at Sylmar Gliderport!
We went to Sylmar, with a dual flexwing and the folks there were really friendly and hospitable but the weather didn't play ball. We got a hire car (and a roof rack lent to us for free, by the guy at the Schwinn cycle shop, as his son used to work as a test flyer of hangliders) and travelled to the Owens and Elsinore and flew there.
Some models break down and pack into a roughly 2 meter bundle. I flew about 50 years ago and modified my old rogallo wing to pack up into a bundle just a bit longer than that, and I was able (in the 1970s) to check it as baggage on domestic airline flights (in the US) since I travelled back and forth across the country during my college years. I would actually carry it on my shoulder while wrestling my luggage through the airports, and I'm a little guy. God I was crazy and a lot stronger then! But I met others who put me to shame. Drove over to San Bernardino CA to fly at a training site called "Little Mountain" and ran into a teenage kid who built a homemade side-car and rack for his bicycle, and he would peddle out to the hill from his house in town with the kite strapped alongside his bike. Also while we were there, a semi-truck driver pulled over and had a wing strapped under the trailer. Took a flight or two and then packed up and drove off to deliver his cargo. And none of us had any formal training or Hang Gliding certifications like today. Young people were crazy in the 70's!
Sheffield is my city of birth and current city of residence, great to watch this knowing exactly where it was filmed just 2 minutes down the road from me. voler haut amis! Andre and Gemma
Thank you so very much for recording and sharing this! This was very interesting. Too bad you got caught on his left side while he was pointing to object on the right side. All and all a great discussion and video.
