Paragliding SIV tutorial - Basics (Spirals, Collapses, Pitch pendulum) 

Only requirements are to have a P3 or equivalent. P2 can fly with an instructor commitment to supervise. Insurance is at your discretion, but not required by the mountain.

@@beyondsiv Thanks Kris!

This topic is probably deserving of it's own video, but I'll try to answer it. "Do I HAVE (emphasis mine) to learn all these things?" - Short answer- no. There are plenty of sites and types of pilots that can have a safe flying career without formal maneuvers training, particularly those that only fly laminar conditions and have no grander aspirations. There are also quite experienced and accomplished cross country pilots who learned active piloting through gradual exposure and have never taken a maneuvers course. But the way you phrase the question is perhaps not the best way to think about it - emphasizing whether or not something is necessary without asking what the benefits are. Everyone wants to learn how to soar or spot land or go places, and is excited to actually use their glider as an aircraft - otherwise you would be taking up parasailing where there is nothing to control at all. Learning how to control your glider in conditions other than straight and level flight is useful, gives you additional confidence and mental bandwidth during your normal flying, and many people find it intrinsically fun, no different than many of the drills they went through during their initial training. I see this question a lot and in my experience it tends to come from people who fixate on the stress and fear rather than the excitement of learning. There are particular safety aspects to learning these skills, particularly the spiral dive and spin appreciation. So, so many accidents stem from pilots who are unfamiliar with these situations and could have been easily avoided. I like to tell people that if you know how to recognize the onset of a spin and know how to control a deep spiral, you're 80% of the way towards not crashing.

@@beyondsiv let me put it another way I pour my mom died I always wanted to try this and I paid the last of the money I had for the wing and equipment I bought the whole shootin match one guy one price. I'm going to the school and get my insurance ticket. I'm not squeamish about this I've been looking at every fatality I can find and try to figure out where the instructor is lacking in the instructions or the student is lacking in learning about paragliders in time. The main problem that I see for the new pilot with his first launched first flight first landing is using the brakes. He's flying to slow he's too deep in the brakes he turns loose one break too fast and that side gives in thrust and it comes around and when it comes around begins to turn this guy was flying heavy in the weight range almost over the insurance weight. As he makes this circle he will have a certain a bank angle no matter what he weighs. However when he flies heavy on the wing and generates centrifical force that gobbles lift with the square of the velocity. If you are flying heavy and you are flying slow you are asking for trouble. If you are flying heavy and you were turning a curve with a large Bank angle you are asking for trouble. Your glide ratio drops off steeply with your turn. When you were flying heavy you were coming in heavy like a gangster everywhere you go you can't just turn into a little girl when your Tony soprano and a little girl is what you need. I watch these guys and when they're flying heavy on the wing they fall into the corner. You are already flying faster because you are heavy and now you were turning and you were turning faster for the same input that you were heavy and compounding that you're centrifical force in the downward component are going office square and did I mention that your heavy when you come down through that equation to. I'm not too sure active flying is all that necessary on the epsilon 9 because it's only recommended. The mathematician there said if you put your hands up it will fly through any kind of turbulence better than you can fly it.

@@beyondsiv I can ask a better question that's a little more to the point I'm old I don't have much money I can't afford to go to good sites I'll be flying by myself on sites that I pick. How much of these things do I need to know to not become a fatality or lay there on the ground for three or four days before anybody finds me and finds out if they'd have been there an hour earlier I would have been okay? It seems to me currently I can make a landing with just a Roll axis under control if I have a big enough space to make a landing in front of me I'm going to the first few flights I make so I'm going to eliminate that pitch axis swinging me down and breaking my back on the ground. I can see where the pitch control training would be very good to get the feel for the timing and it would improve my skills a great deal. I don't really think I want to do a spin too much and I don't think I want to stall. I'm a mathematician if it is flying I'm going to fly it straight so I don't get centrifical Force pulling me down and slapping me on the ground. It would seem to me if you had a tip tuck and you were flying heavy and began to fall into that curve there is a very likely point of no return that you could reach with your velocity. If you have a tip toc and you instantly jump on It fly it straight and flat all the way down for you land if a couple of break pumps don't knock it out that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to stall a perfectly flying wing.

The situation you describe is unfortunately too common and is really why the spin appreciation drill is very important. A lot of the time this happens because many pilots have a tendency to rely on the brakes when they get nervous, so they start flying with very little airspeed. There are a number of other ways this can happen too, such as ending up in a position where they are trying to fit into a constricted landing area, or turning tight in lift or to avoid another glider or obstacle, or any number of reasons. The trouble is that we do not have airspeed or angle of attack indicators. Even if we did have that instrument data, our airspeed is so low that both of those parameters are significantly affected by changes in the air itself. We end up relying on flying by feeling and develop good airmanship habits (hopefully). It is absolutely possible to fly safely without specifically training maneuvers. If your goal is simply to take off and land in basic conditions and you are well trained, there is no reason you cannot fly this way. All students learn this way and most do not come to train maneuvers until they already have a reasonable amount of flight experience, so they have proven it can be done. But this sport is inherently dangerous and can be unforgiving of mistakes, so it is important to accept that you can never remove risk entirely, only make decisions which mitigates the risk to an acceptable level.

@@beyondsiv I love you very much for your kind and generous attitude towards most of us. I wish I could come there and fly with you and learn from you there and we could be friends. Even if I had a great deal of money, I would never outfly you, or come even close to your skills. I saw a great drummer from Africa was ma ma be. That means made for it. He was made to beat on them drums and just dance up rhythms and patterns and things of beauty that I will never be able to duplicate. In the beginning I'm going to ignore the pitch axis mostly, I have a spot 1000 ft wide 1500 long. I have to make a 100 ft long high-speed trim speed approach flying heavy on the wing. I don't take no bullshit off anybody I already told the instructor I'm not going to land over here where you're doing the launches and all those people have cars parked and stuff like I can do anything I'm going to land over there, I'll be 100 ft altitude when I make my approach. I'm not sure where I will be because I'm not going to do any cornering on my first flight using the brakes it's all going to be weight shift to try and get everything pointed around in a circle to fly back to the launch site and downwind and then make another turn hopefully I got all the two to burn and I go around the circle a couple of times maybe I don't so I just point into the wind and 100 ft bite my mouthpiece. My perceptions at this point do not cover enough information to make a swoop landing, or hit a certain point. In my mind and in my mind's eye and in my motion I think all I will be able to understand accurately enough about my flight path is coming in at trim speed as much parasitic drag as possible in a straight line. I mean with the roll axis spot on with weight shift. I'm going to have the brakes up high not just actifly none of that those brakes will be high until I slam them on at the pointe at the bottom of the slope of the straight line. I can think it I can picture it I can see it while I'm doing it and I can pull them breaks down and hold them with my teeth gritted and eat a parachute landing fall. The inherent pitch stability turbulence characteristics of the epsilon 9 will allow me to make that last hundred feet run hanging stabled directly below the shoot with no pitch axis input of any sort as long as I stay out of the breaks after I unbuckle my chest strap and leaned forward with my legs under me for this horrible landing I'm about to induce on myself I will have no concerns with the pitch axes I'll hang there and I'll lean back and forth to control the roll axis. When I bite that mouthpiece I think I will be able to see the wind sock. I will point into the wind at the windsock indication on the ground 100 ft in the air and after that I'm done caring about wind direction I don't give too s**** about wind speed I can't do anything about it I don't care about when shifting around because I'm too fat slow and piss poor it being a pilot to chase wind direction with just my weight shift I'd just be wasting my stability for nothing. This is an absolutely risk-free landing for me and my situation at my school where they fly me up on a string two thousand feet in the air. I don't have to think about anything else except this single event,my landing. I believe I could just stowe the brakes and put a hood over my head, assume the parachute landing fall position with a mouthpiece credit in between my teeth and take my lumps with this style landing. I saw people freeze and get hurt high in the sky and drift down to the land and their paraglider love them and let them down to the Earth where we could help. I don't think an epsilon nine straight line landing is any worse than being thrown off a horse. What everybody seems to think I as a mathematician rather a potato instead of a pilot a payload. Need the fly in heavy like Tony soprano and bet all my chips on a complex curve in three-dimensional space. Fly into the slow speed let your hands up and dive. Apply the brakes and fly level or swoop to a landing. I paid $5,000 for that epsilon 9 and all the lessons. I am delighted to sit here and be anxious over crash after crash that I watch over and over, then I get out my pencil and I get out my physics ideas and I try to think it through why does this behave the way it does? If you look at that put your hands up put your brakes back on and swing on your pitch axis from this intentionally, it seems like a very poor idea for someone like me or Tony soprano that's flying heavy on the wing, to miss on a complex calculation with all that swinging adding to the velocity of the crash. If you do not apply enough break after you do disturb the pitch axes at low altitude you cut a curve that comes down and runs you square into the ground. When I come down along I continue a straight line at an angle that 25 miles an hour, stable with my legs under me and leaning forward, I'm not like a car on the street pointed towards a block retaining wall and swerving at the last minute to miss it. I might wait till my feet touch and then slam the brakes on his hard and quick as I can like a karate strike. People hate me in this sport because I do the math and I see where the car is driving towards the wall, or the car is grazing the wall. If I'm applying 5 mi an hour descent rate and 25 miles an hour forward rate would probably be the worst-case. If I jam on those brakes too soon I have to keep them on no matter what and think about that mathematician over there at the advance company pulling his hair out saying "he did what?". I didn't sign on to be a flying gangster heavy on the wing to follow a bunch of rules and fail and pay for it. I watch people try to do those fancy curves with all the swing and action in the pitch axis and they made some miscalculations. Basically I think that they were moving at 20 mph total, but they had this pretty steep ground component that I had to calculate at 14 miles an hour. I don't see why some other genius other than myself has not come forward and admitted that the greatest sin of all is flying to perpendicular to the ground. You can get by with sin quite a bit. But you may not get forgiveness. I'm not really a gangster I just play one in a small town. We are all working our own angle. When I come down to the ground fly in a straight line with the stable pitch axes from the last hundred feet of altitude, my angle is 15 degrees. I'm not going to get close to the ground where you have windshear turbulence wind gradients and think I can fly a curve, and bet 45 degrees at .7 , against 15 degrees .25... That would be the downward component of the total velocity.worst case I saw online. I'm absolutely certain that and maybe the 15-minute flight I get I will not be able to establish eye and hand coordination well enough to disturb that pitch axis that close to the ground. I'm at the ground handling stage right now and I have to go back to the school soon and do some more ground handling. I was poor and one guy was a tandem pilot and knew I was poor and so he was giving me a free ride and I tipped him $20 to make a video after the ride and give me the full treatment I came down here running my mouth obnoxious old guy show me no mercy. We were towed up-in-the-air. He flew around in a big curve and he just went back to the landing zone. When you got there we had altitude and he started to do spiral dive and hit 58 miles an hour he was going asymmetric and I had all my muscles tensed up so I can keep my consciousness going and I saw the wing and the sky and the Earth flashing passed each other and I thought we were supposed to be going down in a corkscrew I must be passing out and then I found out later it was a asymmetrical spiral. He flew back to The landing zone and we went back and forth right in front of the trees where the air was rising and I thought he might run into a tree and I was ready to grab whatever came up and catch us but he didn't. He made s couples figure eights and was sitting there completely relaxed. I had and all the sudden we just sat down on the ground. It has dawned on me ever since that this landing he did in front of those trees was in rising air and that's why they landed there because of the rising are and that's why I could not. There was too much "set" coming around the corner of the tree for me to come in and even try to land there. It was coming around the corner of that Grove of trees much like it was going over the top and a skilled person could read that and benefit. I saw one girl who was a very skilled parachute pilot but she came to parasailing and she flew to slow but she was good at it. She came in easy on that low speed and the wind blew her into the cornfield. I have to land in corn. I'm going to try to land in a straight line over the center of the road. If I get drift I won't correct it and I will go in the cornfield but I will have a flat Wing for the hundred feet. I will hang stable below my wing and face my fate as a person who plays a gangster in a small town and has to fly heavy on the wing. I'm afraid I don't have the perception to ease into the brakes like an adjustment and keep the wing flat when I make my flare. If you screw up the flare and you were on the even you can swing and swinging is the worst thing that can happen, close to the ground, while you were still trying to figure out landing.