Year 4 Hang Gliding

It is that time of the year again for my annual recollection of my last year of 12 months hang gliding.

To help any new readers catch up, four years ago as a wildly enthusiastic beginner I was tearing around the Marlborough countryside hurling myself off any likely looking hill whenever I could sneak a few hours spare time. My enthusiasm was always matched and often exceeded by my partner in crime Chris Shaw, whose name will be familiar to all of you who have read my articles in the past. Any day that wasn’t a hurricane or raining was fair game. Even heavy morning fog would not put us off. I have great memories of driving up Paul Newton’s hill near Havelock to get above the fog. We would then wait around rigged up until a hole would burn off that was big enough to fly down though. This year has been significantly different. Chris has all but given up (please phone him on 03 547 1194 to abuse/encourage him back into the air) and I have been spending a shameful number of flyable days on my windsurfer. And yet I have been more involved in our sport than ever before. How so?

Well…around April my dear wife Heather got the job of NZHGPA Administrator. This was on my encouragement and was my cunning way of extracting a useful profit out of my marriage. And yes, the profits are rolling (well, dribbling...) in as planned. There has been one serious glitch though: as I am home more than Heather I have often been the one to deal with pilot queries and plough though some of the data entry. Before long I was the one with my finger on the pulse and had the slickest database skills. So as luck would have it I find myself “helping her” with about 50% of the work. This was not the dream! On the bright side though, I have discovered a great joy in fixing people’s bureaucratic problems. Try me one day... you’ll be pleasantly surprised at my soothing bedside manner and interminable bouts of verbal diarrhoea as I bombard you with the finest details on how to pay the Association more money. You may find my helpfulness dry up remarkably quickly if you’re after a refund though. Just joking, I am at your service 24/7. But let me not bore you any further with what is in fact the most tedious job in the universe.

another magic mountain launch

Far more exciting is my new hang gliding invention. Has anyone noticed that for many HG pilots the word “landing” would be more accurately replaced with the word “crashing”? Especially when landing fast gliders into light or nil wind. I can’t go into too much detail about my brilliant invention because a) it will be stolen by dark forces of commercial greed and b) you will all laugh at me. Ah, what the hell, they are flexible tapered plastic rods that point straight backwards during flight, but then lock into position pointing straight down at the ground for landing. The rods bend backwards when they start skimming the ground, turning into something resembling springy sled runners. Don’t laugh, but I call them “Fangs”. They will basically be something to replace wheels, but twenty times better. They will be so good as to make the flare redundant. In theory even a downwind landing will be doable. (Any volunteers for testing that one?) With the help of your toes dragging along the ground you could shorten any nil wind landing field down to 10m instead of the usual 40-60m. The implications of such a brilliant invention are nothing short of revolutionary. The hardest thing about hang gliding will become the easiest. I am confident that paraglider pilots and other weaklings will start defecting to the One True Sport in their thousands. Unfortunately I am also very confident that the invention will not work. The forces involved will probably be too significant for any known material to cope with. But I am embarrassed to say I am actually exploring the concept until I confirm that it can’t be done. Luckily I have an engineering student called Eddie using it as a live exercise for his CAD and CNC studies. (I am not dumb enough to spend actual money proving it won’t work! Eddie can destroy my dream in 3D virtual reality instead.) If it does actually work I will become the richest person in the entire universe.... as long as there are about 2 million HG pilots who are a) useless at landing, b) sensitive and new-agey enough to stick such unmanly items in their glider, and c) rich enough to buy them. I haven’t discovered such a pilot yet but the search goes on… I am sure they must exist because there’s this one dude who sells carbon fibre caterpillar tracks for hang glider basebars for €1100 a pair! And people actually buy them… idiots!

I remember running the fangs idea past Chris Lawry about 3 years ago and he said, “Why don’t you just learn how to land.” Ouch, baby… very ouch. He has a point, although in my defence I’ve yet to damage a glider personally on a landing, mainly because I carefully studied an article in Airborn about how to land a hang glider, written by Tish and/or Chris. (I can summarise it with 2 points: Keep your wings very level, and flare exactly when the downtubes start pushing back into your hands. Easy.) Great article, one that has served me well, but the fact remains landing is a source of some stress and alot of expensive damage to many pilots. Just watch 50 landings on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. Or watch Chris Shaw land once.... (Yes, I will pay dearly for that comment.)

Marcel Bakker completing a great low save at Magic

While I have your partial attention, I would like to take this opportunity to encourage all you pilots (including all you PG pilots out there who are still reading me in spite of the countless insults I have rained down upon your lowly caste over the years…) out there to look for new launch sites. When I started flying around here, there were hardly any pilots and hardly any sites. I had no concept of flying at “established “sites, and just assumed it was up to me to find places to takeoff from. This has turned out to be surprisingly easy. I can count eight sites that I personally found, got access to, and “christened”. They are all excellent in at least one way. Shane McKay has chipped in with another four or five excellent sites. We now have more than we need, but are slowly learning which sites are best for which conditions. My latest discovery (see photos of me with Shane) is a huge treeless peak right by the main highway that we have fantasized about as a takeoff for four years now. I had a spare afternoon last month so drove to the farmer’s house, asked him, and he was delighted to let us fly there. He is even going to grade the road for us so we can cane it on the way up. So get out there and discover the next Magic Mountain or Taylor’s Mistake or Paeroas. You can be the worst pilot in NZ and still discover the greatest sites. Lord knows I am living proof of that statement.

I have managed to get through most of an article without really mentioning my own flying. This is no coincidence. I have done very little flying this year, with most of my summer stolen by working on a cruise ship in Antarctica again. I did get to the Omarama Classic though. I must repeat how much I love this event and urge other pilots to come on down next year. Start the subtle hints to your significant other about now. I find just staring into the middle distance with a wistful, slightly moist-eyed look and saying things like “One day before I die I would love to do the Omarama Classic....” If this doesn’t work just start faking a full-on midlife crisis until you have permission to go. Anyway, I digress. I want to tell you briefly about 2 flights of mine at the OXCC.

A sailplane pulls up and around after a Magic mountain beatup

The first one was a launch from magic at the “Cheese Grater” but launching towards Omarama into a light easterly breeze/thermals. Rod Stuart told me if you head left off this launch to the next spur it always seems to work. Why should I listen to Rod? Well, because Rod is extremely old. So old, his PIN number is only 3 digits. (I know this because I am Ben “The Administrator” McAlpine. Actually “The Adminstrator’s Helper”, but that doesn’t sound as imposing...) He is so old he has living memory of constructing his first glider from bamboo, polythene and gaffer tape. So old, he was born before Rod Stuart was a silly name to call your baby. Anyway, three pilots took off, went right, bombed out into the Ahuriri river. Rod took off, went left, and skied out. 10 more pilots then took off, went right, bombed out. Now I’m no genius of calculus, but I could detect a subtle statistical trend here. I came up with a plan to exploit this after some careful number crunching. The plan was …. “GO LEFT.” I headed straight for that spur without a single beep of lift for about 2 minutes. I would have been tempted to turn back but I had faith in the ancient one’s words. Sure enough, when I got directly over the spur I was rewarded with my vario doing a convincing impression of (young pilots avert your eyes here) a female Japanese porn star doing her most wildly enthusiastic high pitched staccato scream of painful but unbridled pleasure at the hands of the world’s most amazingly virile and well-endowed stud. That would be me in this instance..."Oh yeah, who’s your Daddy...." but I digress. From cloudbase I linked a few more likely looking trigger points (note to learners: that is how you describe flying around with your fingers crossed and praying you’ll blunder into a thermal) and made it over Mt Cuthbert towards Otematata for a 31km flight. My landing was the only glitch. I flared too hard into the sea Breeze, too early and with unlevel wings, and did a ground level wingover thing (note to learners: that is how you make a complete cock-up sound like an exciting stunt) and ended up on the ground in an upside down glider. I miraculously didn’t ruin my impeccable record of never damaging a glider on landing (Take that, Mr Lawry!), and I was very pleased to have a decent flight on a day most pilots bombed out. But the interesting thing was when I was circling in that first thermal I watched the next 5 pilots all take off, go right and bomb out. Only about 8 out of 25 pilots that day got away from takeoff properly. Thank you Rod... if you say it I will do it. Unless it is something stupid like you normally say…

The other flight of note for me was 47km to Tarras over the Lindis Pass. It started reasonably badly. Very badly actually. I launched first of everyone into a goodish thermal and found lift so widespread decided to go for a tiki tour to use up some time while everyone else launched. To cut a long story short my tiki tour somehow put me on the deck within 20 minutes. Thank God a kind driver named…. Ummm...shit I can’t remember now but I bought him a ALOT of beer… raced down the hill and took me back up for a reflight. We were alone on launch and after the world’s fastest, angriest rigging, my face burning with shame, I charged off straight into Rachel (the house thermal) and got slungshot straight to cloudbase, whereupon I pinned my ears back and sprinted to that peak above Killermont. I demanded a thermal when I got there and repeated this process at each subsequent peak as necessary. I was still fuming the entire flight at being such a dick, and the interesting thing was how fast I flew because of that. I was determined to catch up the field. I was like one of those proper racers you read about, ignoring weak lift and confidently caning it to my next thermal trigger. When I think about it, I was actually a lot better than Johnny Durand that day. If it wasn’t for my bombout causing my late departure and therefore getting myself grounded by a seabreeze, I would have broken the NZ record by flying to Stewart Island. Anyway, as the flight progressed I noticed I became subconsciously tuned in to a minimum pitch of screaming from the vario (let’s call her Noriko). If she wasn’t screaming to the pitch I was used to from earlier thermals, the glider just seemed to leave it of its own accord and sniff around until it was happily ensconced in another core worthy of the day. I ended up with about the fourth longest flight of the day and was about an hour faster than other pilots of a similar distance. It was a great change from my normal style of “never leave lift until you hit cloudbase”. That can really slow down your progress, pissing around in dribbly bits of lift you find between or at the edges of the proper grunty thermals. I hereby vow to fly like this from now on. So all you hotshots watch out, I predict I will be unbeatable from now on.

Also of note about that flight was that I logged it on my Aircotec “Top Navigator” flight instrument. I bought this off an Aussie pilot via their HGFA forum for $500 and it is awesome. It lays turds on the screen when you’re in lift, so if you lose the lift you just look at the screen and fly back into the biggest bunch of turds you can find. You invariably end up in a gaggle with the Dunedin Flying Club. (That was a joke! You DFC guys know I love you dearly….) But seriously, you fly into the bunch of turds and magically the vario starts going off again. It even compensates for the wind drift of the day. As the brochure says: “It’s like wearing thermal goggles!” The Top Navigator is quite an old design, so I imagine there will be some truly amazing developments in flight instruments in the next few years. Watch this space.

I put my flight log of that day into Google Earth and have enjoyed replaying it and flying around it in 3D. (See my screenshot of me coring the delightful Rachel.) In fact I think I have done that flight “virtually” for more minutes than the real flight took.

So where to from here? I am fully psyched for a summer of personal (if not competitive) triumphs. Last year I expressed my ultimate dream as being the man to break the NZ XC record. This was a very lofty goal, and it was always very unlikely to happen with my minimal talent and sub-optimal equipment. But it took a further blow last summer when Dave Newton broke Matt Barlow’s record by 20km or so. I would like to think I inspired him in this achievement. My publicly stated intention to break the record obviously sent a shiver of terror down his spine and spurred him on to greatness. All is not lost though. I intend lodging a formal protest with the FAI to have his record disqualified on the grounds of his obvious cheating: It is clear to anyone who has met Dave that he has had some sort of surgical implant into his nose to make it more than twice the size of any normal human’s. The aerodynamic advantages he enjoys because of this are fantastic, but surely against the spirit of the sport. I know of one other pilot who has employed this same dastardly technique of cheating. To protect his identity, instead of using his real name, let’s call him “John Smith”. I have included photographic proof of both these cheats so you can see for yourself. A few years ago “John Smith” totally dominated the field in a number of international competitions in speed gliding. Not just in the after match drinking games either. I think he even beat Manfred “Vicious” Ruhmer in one competition. Surprise surprise... some people disgust me! There is a happy ending though, with this pilot quite properly receiving a lifetime ban by the CAA. Hopefully “Dave Newton” will be next in line. Rest assured I am using my newly acquired administrative assistant powers in the NZHGPA to make sure this happens at all costs!