October 14th 2013: Learning to Hang Glide in Charlestown, NH

Early this morning, I had an appointment to learn how to hang glide at Morningside Flight Park in Charlestown NH. It is at least 2 hours from where I live, so I had to get up really early to make it to the lesson on time. The scenery of the fall foliage along the way was awesome though.

I was really early, so the hillside where the lesson was to take place was still pretty void of gliders and people.

When the place finally opened up, I went inside the shop and waited for the lesson to start.

I had one other person learning to hang glide with me, and when he arrived, our instructor took us into the other room, where he taught us a little bit about the physics behind hang gliding, and the various components of a typical hang glider.

It was then time to take out our gliders and assemble them.

After unwrapping the cover encasing the glider,

the king post is first pushed up

before spreading open the wings on each side of the post and strapping the rigging wires to the top of the king post.

Taking out the battens which are of different sizes, one set being marked black and the other being white to signify which wing it is on,

the battens are then slit into slots on the wing

and strapped down to form its skeleton,

the longest one being the closest to the center, naturally.

The rigging wires are then secured to the keel.

With the gliders all set and ready to go, it is time to perform an inspection on the gliders to ensure there is no damage to it or potential for collapse during flight.

After ensuring that the probability of me dying during this experience was minimized, it was time to go get our helmets and harnesses.

Before putting the harness on, our instructor showed us what was the proper way to hold the glider on our shoulders,

and how to pick it up.

This I found pretty hard to do, especially getting the poles onto the right positions on my shoulders and balancing the glider properly.

Then came our first run flight on level ground, without being attached to the glider, where we start running with the glider to give it thrust with the glider being at ~12 degrees above the direction of the wind, keeping constant eye contact with our target destination, then we change our hold on the glider when we feel it start to fly, holding the bars close to our chest and continuing to run even though our feet might leave the ground, then finally push the bars away to slow down and land.

My first attempt went well enough, but I was so eager to go airborne that when I felt the glider lifting, I decided to lift my legs as well instead of continuing to run, so I got my jeans soiled instead.

After the first trial run, we put on the harnesses,

then strapped ourselves to the glider itself.

Besides repeating the first run, we also learnt how to change directions, by looking at our new destination and shifting our entire body in that direction.

After we were deemed to be successful, we moved slightly up the hill, and I managed to carry the glider all the way up.

From here on, it was practice run after practice run. On the last one, I managed to get at least 4 feet above the ground, so I guess that was pretty good for a first time. Apparently it takes tons of tries to finally go higher, when the instructors think that we are good and safe enough to progress to the next stage.

It was cool to see other hang gliders and paragliders in action today as well.

I definitely a long way to go to become this guy.

If you thought that was the end, you thought wrong. There always is the cleanup phase, which involves doing the reverse of assembling the glider.

After putting the gliders back in storage, it was time to call it a day. The day was still young for me though, so I decided to drive back to Massachusetts, and the rest of my Columbus Day can be found here.