The first thing I noticed about
In the
Technical note: As you all know, young females are incapable of comprehendible vocal communication and these ones demanded to be interviewed by text instead… As I am obviously too old to be able to text fast enough to hold their attention, a compromise was reached and the interviews were completed in Facebook chatrooms.
Marlina as a 13 year old about to launch
Marlina age 15
(Marlina is the little sister of Jonas our 17 year old prodigy who took second at last year’s HG nats and has been tearing up the men’s field in Australia under the tutelage of world number 2 Johnny Durand.)
BM: Thanks for the interview, I’ve never met you in person, but you can see from my profile photo I’m pretty cool…
ML: W8eva
“Kelly"
Kelly age 20
BM: I met you at Omarama but I must confess I don’t know your last name
Charlotte pretending to check her glider
Charlotte age 21
BM: I met you and Kelly at Omarama, and may I say you two are the most glamorous thing to happen in Hang Gliding since John O’Neill got a new pair of polyester slacks.
BM: You’re much friendlier than those other 2, and you write proper sentences.
(With this, we both closed our laptops and continued the interview by normal talking.)
Ok, I admit that maybe I made up one or two tiny details up to now, but from here on you can believe me, this all totally true stuff about
Charlotte was a gormless teenager (actually that’s a lie, she was a passionate ballet dancer until she suffered an injury) who saw her two brothers tearing up the local Dunedin hill every weekend with hang gliders on their roof racks. She went along and watched every so often and couldn’t for the life of her understand what the attraction was of “throwing grass around for half an hour and driving home again.” A few years drifted by with her giving little thought to the sport, but found herself stuck in a Dunedin rut (is there ever any other outcome?) and wondering what could give her back the spark she felt was missing. After some elaborate acts of deception to hide the fact from their mother,
At this point the interview takes an ugly turn as I interrogate
Has she ever got to cloudbase thermalling? “Yes, but it’s not like I’ve ever got to 10,000ft.” With this I choked on my beer and changed the subject before she found out I haven’t even made it to 9000ft. Has she ever gone cross country? “Yes, but not very successfully.” (thank God, I can still beat someone ….) How does she handle bombing out? “After seeing other pilots whining around the campfire, I made a decision early on not to cry about spilt milk. When I’m down in the bombout paddock I just think: Wow, I just flew off that huge hill and it was really lovely. Guys that land and have a temper tantrum, well, if you’re putting that much pressure on yourself you’re probably not going to enjoy your flying.”
I asked her how do guys handle it, romantically speaking, when they find out she’s a hang glider pilot? Did they feel intimidated and a tad emasculated when they find out she’s doing stuff ten times as brave as what they’ve ever done? “I’ve definitely had some strange reactions… and yes, believe it or not some guys have said exactly that…. townies mainly.”
I asked about the other DFC girls, Kelly and Marlina. (Please note that they were all much younger back then, hence my use of the dodgy term “girls”.) She started gushing, but not in a girly way...she has great memories of the whole gang spending days on the training hills together. (Footage of these heady days can be seen online. Go to YouTube and search: “omarama girls” to find it) I then attempted to delicately ask if it was harder to learn as a female than if she were male. After an appropriate amount of indignant protesting she settled down and gave me an interesting answer: “I had to sort of know myself quite well. There were points when I was learning where you might want to freak out, and subconsciously you kind of know in your head that because you’re a girl it’s almost OK for you to freak out… but I didn’t want to perpetuate any sexist stereotypes. Also, I didn’t want to be just ‘good for a girl’, I wanted to be good, full stop.… I think that girls make good pilots actually.” When pressed on why she thought this, she mentioned the well known (albeit mythical) female prowess in multi-tasking, the possibility that a certain precision is required of your input when you can’t rely on brute strength to fix any errors, and also the fact that female pilots aren’t so macho (funny, that…) means they may be less prone to making silly decisions based on ego rather than facts. I told her to stop dribbling such sissy nonsense.
I suggested to Charlotte that she could easily get in the NZ hang gliding team (with there being only about 5 female pilots active in hang gliding in NZ) if she got good at XC flying. This could give her the chance to compete at the Worlds. She again gushed, this time about the competition scene she witnessed in Aussie this year. “It was so cool being in that scene, with 80 hang gliders rigging up on the hill and everyone pushing themselves to fly further and faster, and everyone was just completely focussed on the flying, above all else. And yeah, I would love to represent NZ one day but that’s a long way off. For now I just want to get good”.
What is she flying these days? “Well, I don’t really want you to print this but I’ve moved on to a Litespeed S.” I again choked on my beer, this time with jealousy. I was also furious I had missed my chance to ask the “hilarious” question about whether she had done any topless hang gliding. Anyway, I duly promised not to print her comments and she opened up about it: “It’s fantastic, it’s really easy to fly, I love it.” Landings? “Well, so far I’ve only landed it into wind, so it’s been really easy. But when the time comes for a nil wind landing, I’ve made a pledge to just go for the big flare. If I f*** it up, so be it, but I don’t want to be a pansy about it.” Why didn’t she want it known she was flying a topless glider? She got a bit squirmy about that, and said she had experienced one or two people suggesting that “girls should stay on a skyfloater”, so she wanted to stay under the radar to avoid hearing such stuff…. Well, that was a bit of a bombshell to end the interview. More tea anyone?
She finished with a heartfelt plea to me to mention the fact that her achievements so far are more of a tribute to her instructors who have gone the extra mile, and wanted to thank them and her fellow trainees for great times so far. Trust a girl to get all soppy like that….
Charlie has her hair ruined by a lenticular cloud
Charlie doublng as the DFC hairdresser
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