Hang gliding?

LoLPilot

LoLPilot

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LoLPilot
Sorry if this is the wrong place for this thread! Please move if it’s better suited in a different section.

Has anybody here ever tried hang gliding? I’m still healing financially from my instrument rating and haven’t been airborne much since December. I’ve decided not to pursue my commercial rating right away and to do some other aviation learning while I finish school. There’s a glider school near me where one of my friends told me she could introduce me and see if I could get a ride-along to see how the engineless guys do it! I’m also thinking of taking some aerobatic instruction just to see if I like it.

I also saw some hang gliders in my recent Sport Aviation magazine! It looked super fun and so I looked up lesson prices online and it doesn’t look terribly expensive. Has anybody ever done it, and did you enjoy it?
 
I did a couple of tandem aerotows. They were fun, but the bug didn't bite. Aerobatics and sailplanes sound better...
 
@Hang 4 , @Bill Jennings , and I have all been hang glider pilots. I've done skydiving, power plane flying, trike flying, and hang gliding, and hang gliding is my favorite. If you have ever had a flying dream, hang gliding is the closest thing to fulfilling that dream that there is. It's also affordable to a lot more people, you can get your Hang 2 rating (given by the USHPA, and what's needed to fly by yourself for less than $2000, and all the equipment you need for less than $5000 for a mix of new and used. Once you're rated, it's very inexpensive to fly.

The biggest downside is that you need fairly specific conditions to fly, and there aren't that many places to do it. Chuck Yeager once described hang gliding as "the flyingest flying" and I agree. I'd encourage every fixed wing pilot to try it. If you're doing foot launch training, you get to fly solo your first day, at a very low altitude.

Edit: I've done a little time in a sailplane as well.

 
Nobody hang glides out of practicality, but it it were me, I'd opt for a powered ultralight of the type you can use to fly from close to home to a rural McDonalds and make Youtube videos of the trip.
 
FormerHangie said:
@Hang 4 , @Bill Jennings , and I have all been hang glider pilots. I've done skydiving, power plane flying, trike flying, and hang gliding, and hang gliding is my favorite. If you have ever had a flying dream, hang gliding is the closest thing to fulfilling that dream that there is. It's also affordable to a lot more people, you can get your Hang 2 rating (given by the USHPA, and what's needed to fly by yourself for less than $2000, and all the equipment you need for less than $5000 for a mix of new and used. Once you're rated, it's very inexpensive to fly.

The biggest downside is that you need fairly specific conditions to fly, and there aren't that many places to do it. Chuck Yeager once described hang gliding as "the flyingest flying" and I agree. I'd encourage every fixed wing pilot to try it. If you're doing foot launch training, you get to fly solo your first day, at a very low altitude.

Edit: I've done a little time in a sailplane as well.

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Thanks! Where I'm at we have some bluffs nearby close to the Mississippi River and I THINK guys occasionally hang glide off of there. After seeing the pictures in the magazine and watching a few videos I thought it looked like a lot of fun. Kind of like wingsuit flying but a bit less insane.


Sac Arrow said:
Nobody hang glides out of practicality, but it it were me, I'd opt for a powered ultralight of the type you can use to fly from close to home to a rural McDonalds and make Youtube videos of the trip.
Click to expand...

Nobody FLIES out of practicality! I'm not trying to fly as a career, it's just a fun thing and I wanted the commercial so that I could go on and get my CFI one day. Like I said I'm still sort of recovering from my IR, which went over budget by a bit. I figured why not continue flying by trying to pick up another part of it that might not be as expensive, and I've heard good things about learning non-powered flight if you're a power pilot.
 
I did a tandem towed flight once.
It was fun in a way but I did not like it. felt out of control the whole time....pull the bar back to go down and push to go up is just wrong....
 
I was among those crazy people who were already pilots and decided to jump off of sand dunes and cliffs. Behavior that would probably cause a denial of issue for a flight physical nowadays.

I learned to fly on the old Rogallo Delta wing weight shift gliders. We flew off the cliffs onto the beach near Santa Cruz, CA. From there I graduated to running off the cliffs and soaring for long flights in the desert North of Trona, CA

Looking back, I'd say that was my earliest close encounters with death!
 
Brad W said:
I did a tandem towed flight once.
It was fun in a way but I did not like it. felt out of control the whole time....pull the bar back to go down and push to go up is just wrong....
Click to expand...

No, it's pull the back to go down, push out to go up slightly and then down faster...
 
Brad W said:
I did a tandem towed flight once.
It was fun in a way but I did not like it. felt out of control the whole time....pull the bar back to go down and push to go up is just wrong....
Click to expand...
Trick is to think of your body as the stick, not the control bar. Bring yourself forward to pitch down, back to pitch up. I did hang gliding long before HG and had no issue switching.

When you have it dialed in, it's a really pure way to fly like @FormerHangie said. Seeing some birds circling in a thermal, gliding to them and climbing at 500fpm+ to cloudbase (500 ft below :) is just awesome. Tying multiples of those together to go >100 miles is even better.
 
This article gives a sense of what HG is like at a real high level. These two pilots set the current world distance record. They launched about 20 minutes apart, ended up together, then separated then came back together at the end. One guy got the record by going about 3 miles further than the other. He did that by getting one last climb that put him 100 ft higher. There's a cool video linked to the article as well. Interesting read if you're into it. (The prior two sentences are the cliff notes version). The flight was ~475 miles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/...nt-realization-of-a-purer-form-of-flight.html
 
I had a bad landing just about two years ago that ended in a distal spiral fracture of the humerus. After a $6k hospital bill and some rehab I’m as good as new.

I still have my wing and still maintain my USHPA membership, but haven’t flown since. I really need to excrement or get off the pot...
 
I flew hang gliders in college and loved it. Easy to learn, inexpensive, and we had a large group of people who did it and that made it fun. What got tough for me is the waiting around until the conditions got optimal for flying. You also always need a driver to pick you up where you land. It is not uncommon to spend an entire day driving to a sight, waiting around, and not flying. I could see myself owning a powered parachute someday in addition to the plane.
 
I had no idea that you could get those kinds of distances out of them. I guess I'm very ignorant of it but I just assumed that it was more of a "local" type thing where you could launch and then maybe glide around for a couple minutes and get a few miles from your starting point!
 
Hang 4 said:
Trick is to think of your body as the stick, not the control bar. Bring yourself forward to pitch down, back to pitch up.
Click to expand...

Funny story. When I was about 10 years old back in the 70’s, my Dad spotted a guy hang glideing off a near by hill. Now my Dad was an instrument rated commercial pilot and had several thousand hours at the time. Rated single and multi engine, land and sea, glider, and helicopter. He was a CFII with instructor privileges in all of the above. Type rated in DC-3s. So, he decided to go watch the hang glider guy. Took me along. Received very strict instructions from my Mom prior to our departure not to try it. Yes dear.

Got to the hill. Watched the hang glider guy make several flights. Struck up a conversation, and somehow my Dad let slip that he was a pilot (how do you know someone’s a pilot? He’ll let you know). Anyway, next thing I knew, Dad was strapped into the thing, just to see how it feels, of course. Well, one thing led to another, and Dad was running down the hill with the Glider. Liftoff airspeed being achieved, it was time to rotate and soar with the birds. You all know what happened next. Thousands of hours of muscle memory were not his friend that day. Rotate? Stick back of course.

Broken hang glider, 13 stitches, and a very angry Mom.
 
It's a sensation like no other, especially when you're far above the mountain. My personal record is 13,250', just over 3,000' above the takeoff on Albuquerque's Sandia Crest.
 
Many years ago my wife hired a tile setter who was an avid (fanatical) hang glider. We were doing a period renovation on a historic house. He did exquisite work. Mrs GRG55 announced her immense satisfaction, and proceeded to tell me it came with a "lifetime guarantee". Naturally I asked "Who's lifetime?".
 
GRG55 said:
Many years ago my wife hired a tile setter who was an avid (fanatical) hang glider. We were doing a period renovation on a historic house. He did exquisite work. Mrs GRG55 announced her immense satisfaction, and proceeded to tell me it came with a "lifetime guarantee". Naturally I asked "Who's lifetime?".
Click to expand...

Har Har.

Actually hang gliding is not more likely to kill you than is power plane flying.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Nobody hang glides out of practicality, but it it were me, I'd opt for a powered ultralight of the type you can use to fly from close to home to a rural McDonalds and make Youtube videos of the trip.
Click to expand...
PPG. We have 5-6 on the field here
 
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