Getting the hang of gliding

RIDGELY, Md.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon at Highland Aerosports, a tow park on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Sara Mai whoops and hollers with delight from a hang glider with orange, blue and white wings that span 34 feet.
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Ms. Mai, from Franconia, Va., has driven here with her sister and friends to celebrate her 33rd birthday. She has asked instructor Sunny Venesky to give her a thrill by taking her on a tandem flight — which means both are attached by harness to the same glider.

An ultralight plane tows the pair’s glider to an altitude of 2,500 feet, where the glider is let go. Mr. Venesky, an advanced instructor who earned the U.S. Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association’s Instructor of the Year award in 2003, drifts downward gradually for nearly 15 minutes.

At 100 feet he sails in circles that quickly narrow, the craft picking up speed as it nears the ground. Then the glider swoops down another 50 feet, making Ms. Mai’s stomach, she says later, feel as though it’s touching her back.

And then it banks sharply at 50 mph over a white one-story building, the wind rushing loudly over the glider’s wings, and settles swiftly and skillfully onto a grassy landing field.

“It was really exciting,” says Ms. Mai of her first flight in a hang glider, so called simply because the pilot or passenger hangs suspended beneath the wings.

“The freedom of being that high was just amazing,” she says.

Looking for lift

Ms. Mai is among the scores of area residents who fly — or try — hang gliders and their close cousins, the elliptical-canopied paragliders, nearly every weekend through much of the year.

Pilots bring their hang gliders either to flatland tow parks such as that here at Ridgely or to the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania or Maryland. They’re looking for fun, adventure and a chance to socialize with flying buddies — not to mention to enjoy the kick of soaring thousands of feet above the countryside, up where farmlands and forests look like green puzzle pieces and roads and rivers appear as long silver ribbons.

Wherever they are, hang glider pilots seek lift — rising columns of warm air called thermals that can carry their gliders thousands of feet into the air and allow them to soar, sometimes for hours.

Where to find that lift? Most seasoned pilots prefer the mountains, where the available boost includes not just thermals but ridge lift, created when wind strikes a mountain or high ridge and is then deflected upward over the peak, letting gliders soar for sometimes hundreds of miles.

But for novices and first-timers like Ms. Mai — as well as for experienced pilots on days when mountain winds are not favorable — tow parks are a reasonable solution.

“A tow park is the way to go in terms of safety,” says Steve Kinsley, a retired government worker and District resident who started hang gliding in 1978.

Mr. Kinsley flies two or three times a week, often with others in the mountains. But since a mishap in the mountains last year when he was flying alone, he now drives to a tow park when he flies by himself.

“You’re taking off and landing in a big field,” he says. “It’s a lot different from taking off someplace that’s got boulders and trees all over the place.”

That’s key: Every experienced pilot will tell beginners launches and landings are the most dangerous.

Prepping for safety

In the mountains, takeoffs are people-powered: The pilot, alone or with the help of buddies, runs a few feet to catch the mountain winds.

Tow park takeoffs are similar to Ms. Mai and Mr. Venesky’s: Their hang glider was connected to their ultralight tow plane by a 250-foot-long tow rope. On a pre-arranged signal, the glider pilot releases the tow rope, which stays with the ultralight. The ultralight then dives off in one direction while the glider drops off to the other.

Glider pilots, wherever they’re flying, go through a pre-flight checklist at least twice to make certain they are prepared, checking nuts and bolts and tubes, among other things. At tow parks, as at Highland, an assistant double-checks the pre-flight list once the pilot is fastened into his or her harness — which resembles a sleeping bag and is attached to the glider.

Pilots wear helmets and carry altimeters, variometers (which indicate how fast they’re rising or descending), small ham radios, GPS, cell phones and parachutes. As pilots line up for tow-launch, they fit their gliders into a launch cart with wheels so they can be towed down the grassy runway that lies next to a concrete runway. As the gliders rise from the ground behind an ultralight plane, the carts drop away and roll to the side.

Fly like an eagle

Then begins the struggle to stay aloft; that is, the hunt for thermals — for ground dark from plowing, which releases warm air that will rise in sunlight; for parking lots with cars, which will trap air between them, heat it up and send it skyward; for soaring birds, nature’s thermal hunters.

And when you find the birds, you fly with them. That might be the sport’s ultimate reward, to hear Christy Huddle tell it.

“The birds will come and fly with us,” says the 58-year-old Harpers Ferry resident, one of the most experienced hang glider pilots in the Washington area, who started hang gliding 19 years ago and has made some 1,363 flights, soaring in the Rockies at 17,000 feet and gliding in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela.

“They’ll see us in a thermal as we climb around and around, and they’ll join us. Sometimes we’ll see them in a thermal and we’ll join them. We help spot thermals for each other,” she says of the birds.

“It’s fantastic flying with birds. It’s peaceful; it’s spiritual. And you have that whole mountain scenery before you.”

No more fruitcakes

Hang glider pilots are not the wild-haired, wild-eyed adrenaline junkies one might expect. Most members of Washington-area glider clubs — the Capital Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association and the Maryland Hang Gliding Association — have white-collar jobs as IT specialists, engineers, government workers or lawyers.

All have spent hours learning the skills of their sport from an instructor certified by the U.S. Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association (USHPA), the sport’s national organization.

Still, hang gliding has been unable to completely rid itself of the screwball image that it earned in the early to mid-1970s, when the sport first became popular in the United States.

In that era, dozens of people died in accidents every year because of little or no training and jerry-built equipment.

“A lot of people were just making hang gliders themselves out of bamboo and plastic and flying in very poorly constructed homemade equipment,” says Lisa Tate, president of the USHPA.

“That, of course, produced a lot of accidents and injuries and gave our sport a very negative reputation,” she says. “That image from the early ’70s is a stigma that is very difficult to live down.”

The USHPA, incorporated in 1974, has 101 chapters across the country and in Puerto Rico. Among other things, it promotes safe flying practices, certifies pilots, instructors and schools and rates pilots’ proficiency (from “Hang 1” or beginner to “Hang 5” or master).

And it has worked out an understanding with the Federal Aviation Administration that enables it to keep the sport self-regulated. In other words, it is not illegal to fly a hang glider without an FAA license or USHPA certification. It’s just very dangerous. Most tow parks won’t allow it, and most clubs will keep takeoff sites secret from uncertified flyers.

And, says Ms. Tate, since the mid-’70s — when commercial manufacturers got into the business of making, testing and certifying gliders and equipment — the sport has come a long way from bamboo and plastic.

Today’s basic hang gliders, think resin-impregnated ripstop Dacron on a sturdy aluminum frame, retail at $3,000 to $7,000.

“The actual equipment we use today is very sophisticated, very strong equipment, very comprehensively tested,” Ms. Tate says. “In addition to that, we have much more education that is available to pilots.”

Managing the risk

Statistically, hang gliding is as safe a sport as other outdoor, adventure-type sports, Ms. Tate says, noting that while in 2004 five hang-glider flyers were killed in accidents, in 2006 and so far this year no one has died in a hang-gliding accident.

Pilots will sometimes compare their sport to motorcycling, which saw 4,810 motorcyclists killed on U.S. roads in 2005, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Ms. Huddle tells the story of a near-accident on her own motorcycle, when she managed to cut between two deer that ran in front of her on a narrow road.

“When that sort of thing happens, you feel that hang gliding is a lot safer,” she says.

Yet pilots themselves are the first to say that anyone going up in a hang glider had better have his or her wits on high alert.

“I would still have to classify it as a dangerous sport,” Mr. Kinsley says. “The stats are that it is dangerous. People get hurt. You have to constantly monitor what you’re doing so that you stay within the envelope of safety. You can get outside of it without realizing that you have gotten yourself into trouble.”

It’s a matter of risk management and the careful judging of circumstances, he says.

“It’s one thing to launch from a mountain site and the wind is blowing straight in at 5 mph. You might be able to do that every day — and if that were the only thing that would kill you, you’d live to be a couple of thousand years old,” he says.

“However, if you launched at the same site with 45-degree crosswind at 25 mph, you might have a one-in-500 chance of getting into a crash, which doesn’t sound like very much. But if you’re going to be around the sport for 30 years, you’re going to fly thousands and thousands of times and you can’t have that kind of stat. You’re going to get bit.”

Mr. Kinsley made his own strategic mistake in June of last year when he tried a solo launch in a strong wind at High Rock, an 1,100-foot mountain cliff near Thurmont, Md., that is famous among hang gliders.

“I shouldn’t have been there alone,” he says. “I needed help to launch and I tried to do it without help and it didn’t work. I got turned into the mountain as I came off the cliff and I slammed in at a pretty high rate of speed. I broke my nose and that didn’t feel good. I should have had someone else with me that time.”

That’s why he now heads for a tow park for solo flights.

Airborne bliss

What it comes down to is manageable risk weighed against the glider’s “high” — and that euphoria usually tips the balance. Every pilot has a story of an unforgettably blissful flight.

Mr. Kinsley tells of taking off from Highland Aerosports last year and soaring to 5,000 feet above the beach near Rehoboth Bay, to be rewarded with a view of endless blue.

Once, in the mountains, he thermaled with a bald eagle, both of them circling higher and higher in warm air, so close that Mr. Kinsley could see the bird’s big yellow eye looking at him.

“That’s a very nice part of the sport,” he says.

John Middleton, a 60-year-old Bethesda resident who owns and operates the Silver Wings hang gliding school in Arlington, is one of the most experienced pilots in the Washington area and a hang glider instructor for 19 years. He says hang gliding is not for everybody, that it’s challenging and involves some risk — but that it’s worth it.

“Sometimes we’re flying a glider and it’s just incredibly beautiful. We’re flying along occasionally with hawks and eagles and it’s just something that’s almost unbelievable,” he says.

“Even on training hills, I get enjoyment when I do flights. Even though they don’t last long and are not real high, for me it’s still pleasurable.”

Ready to soar with the eagles? Familiarize yourself with the local clubs, associations and schools listed here, and don’t forget their upcoming events.

Organizations and clubs

The Capital Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association: 3208 Fifth St. North, Arlington. Founded in 1974, with about 150 current members, CHGPA publishes a newsletter and sponsors fly-ins, competitions, glider displays, out-of-town flying trips, seminars, and parties. 703/516-7101, chgpa.org.

The 15th annual CHGPA Hang Gliding and Paragliding Festival: McConnellsburg, Pa. (about 25 miles north of the Maryland state line at the junction of routes 522 and 16). Competitions, demonstrations, hang glider displays, kite giveaway for children, more. Open to all. Sept. 15 and 16. See chgpa.org/HGFest/hgfest.html.

The Maryland Hang Gliding Association: 703 Brickston Road, Reisterstown, Md. A Baltimore-centered club that includes active pilots, students and non-flyers who enjoy the spirit of the sport. 410/526-3987 or marylandhanggliding.org.

Mountaineer Hang Gliding Association: 13818 Florida Ave., Cresaptown, Md. Founded in 1982, the Mountaineers do much of their flying near Cumberland, with occasional forays into West Virginia. 301/729-0773 or mountaineerflyers.org.

The U.S. Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association: A private, voluntary, membership, non-profit association incorporated in 1974, with headquarters in Colorado and 101 chapters across the country. 800/616-6888 or ushpa.org.

Instruction

Blue Sky: P.O. Box 212, Penn Laird, Va., east of Richmond. Full-time school with instruction for beginner through advanced pilots. Features “low and slow” motor-scooter tows for beginners. Camping available. 804/241-4324 (cell) or blueskyhg.com.

Highland Aerosports: 24038 Race Track Road, Ridgely, Md. Tandem (instructor plus student) hang gliding instruction, solo aerotows, and hang gliding equipment sales and service. On-site camping. 410/634-2700 or aerosports.net.

Maryland School of Hang Gliding: 2700 Paper Mill Road, Phoenix, Md., off I-83 east of Hunt Valley. Founded in 1982. Equipment sales and instruction. Specializes in, and strongly recommends, foot-launch instruction only, for every level of pilot. 410/527-0975 or mshg.com.

Silver Wings, Inc.: 6032 20th St. North, Arlington. Sales, instruction, and service of hang gliding equipment. Focuses on beginning, solo, foot-launch hang gliding instruction. No tandem flights. 703/533-1965 or silverwingshanggliding.com.

c For an audio slide show on hang gliding, please see The Washington Times on the Web at washingtontimes. com/section/photo.