Intriguing Paragliding Tales

If you go looking for them, there's quite a few really good paragliding tales on the Web. Let me tell you a few general things about them, which might inspire you to scribble or type something too!

I have trawled the Web to sample what people have written about their paragliding adventures. These paragliding tales bring out some interesting points and general observations.

In fact, you can enter your very own paragliding story right now if you want to! Your story can be featured next to those of other people, a bit further down this page.

When Pilots Write..

Some paragliding tales are almost minute-by-minute descriptions of a single epic flight. There are some great record-setting flight reports like this. One that comes to mind is a guy's account of setting the Texas distance record in 2002. He flew in the ugliest imaginable air (risking canopy deflations), and over some of the ugliest imaginable terrain (in terms of surviving a landing, or dying of exposure afterwards). Scary but amazing stuff.

Others emphasize a special flying location or region and the flying done there over a period of time. I can recall an ex-RAAF guy's articles about some extremely remote and spectacular mountain flying in New Guinea. Not for the faint-hearted.

Someone else wrote about conducting ridge flying clinics in wind-swept, hilly Colorado, USA. Good homey, beginner level stuff, but still makes you want to get out and fly!

Still others expose their talent for writing just as much as producing interesting material about the flying.

Paragliding tales from beginners can also be found and of course make a good read for those who are just getting into the sport. Finally, some material can be found on an emerging area, aerobatics.

I found some forum posts from this guy who backpacked around Europe going from comp to comp. But he was more into aerobatics. Yep, aerobatics in his paraglider, I kid you not. It's still illegal in some countries, for example Poland and Germany, and I get the feeling that these people are a little different from the rest of the paragliding crowd. They are risk-takers, young, independent-minded. And I suspect, almost exclusively male.

If you delve into it a little, you discover that, much like teenage skateboarders, these guys fill their paragliding tales with their own vocab. Every trick has its name, and its amazing what they can coax a flexible wing to do. For crying out loud, they can loop these things! Now, I've looped a sailplane many times, and a lot of fun it was, but I was taken aback to discover that loops were possible in a paraglider!

Check out these guys throwing around their SOL Sonic Synchro wings... Many other tricks involve maneuvers that correspond to the basic aerobatics that can be done in light aircraft. Others are exclusive to paragliding since they involve heavy distortions of the flexible wing.

I bet you can remember having a flight which left you grinning from ear to ear. Was it your very first soaring flight? A long long final glide to goal in the late afternoon? Or maybe finally pulling off that new acro maneuver with delicious perfection?

If you want to share your story with other visitors to this page, it's as easy as typing it in below.

Click below to see some great paragliding tales from other visitors to this page...

Ah! That awesome day at Nandihills! 
Woke up to the shrill ringing sound of my phone & it was none other than skygod Ulrich Amendt who visits us whenever his work (flying big jetliners !) brings ...

Simulated Flights in France and the USA

Some time ago, I bought myself a copy of Micro Flight 5 and went through a simulated paragliding phase for a few weeks. It's awesome flying around in the southern French Alps, in a Spider paraglider! All of France is modelled. Large areas of the U.S. too, although I never tried flying there.

You have to be pretty keen on non-powered flying to really get much out of a simulation such as this. There's nothing to shoot, no scoring, and very little choice of paragliders in the version I used. The air noise sound loop is terrible, particularly at high airspeeds when the looping becomes very obvious.

On the plus side, weather is modelled quite well for this sort of flying. Most impressively, you can make realistic downwind dashes to slope lift and work your way up mountain faces just like in real life. Go around the corner a bit, or upwind of the lift region and the lift strength drops off, and so on.

Thermals are modelled very well too, although they seem to be unrealistically strong, with no provisions for specifying maximum lift strength. I might contact the author about it.

Just to summarize my simulated paragliding, I basically went ridge-hopping (mountain-hopping?) in the south of France. Occasionally I'd take a thermal to 3000m (10,000ft) if the next likely-looking ridge seemed too far away.

The mountains of the Alps here conveniently line up East-West, so I went ridge-soaring in a light southerly airstream, hopping downwind to the next mountain face after gaining enough height. The fun part was executing close 'saves' after arriving almost too low at the next ridge, then working the really light lift in the foothills before eventually sailing up the main face, up to 2500m (8,000ft) or so. Very enjoyable stuff if you have unpowered flight in your blood!

The other day, I came across an excellent section of a site that contains nothing but a very carefully selected bunch of stories and some neatly organized photo galleries. Check it out, the paragliding tales really are the cream of what can be found on the web right now! If you think you have a story just half as good, why not share it around a bit. It will get plenty of exposure here, don't you worry! Just scroll back up to the section titled What Really Made Your Best Flight So Memorable?

How's your sense of humor? I was amazed at how many ways people managed to miss-spell er.. misspell uuhm mis.. get wrong the word paragliding in various articles or posts on the Web. So I devoted a whole page on my website to definitions of paraglidig and other interesting sports! ;-) Just for fun.

Last updated: 10 Jan 2008

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