Intriguing Paragliding Tales

This page features YOUR paragliding tales! Drop in here sometime to share an exciting, satisfying or otherwise interesting paragliding experience that you have had.

Further down, there's some more general info about flying stories and how they get written. There are some really great written pieces out there on the Web.

Ooops - to contribute here, you only have to recount an experience in your own words, nothing fancy or difficult! I'll even clean up all the typo's and spelling mistakes ;-)

Some people like to write about a long, high flight in booming conditions, while others are more likely to consider mid-flight incidents and happenings as worthy to share. It's all here, enjoy...

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Everyone Likes Flying Experience Stories - What's Yours?

Have you had a flight recently which left you grinning from ear to ear? Or perhaps just the opposite, but everything turned out OK in the end...

Was it your very first time at cloud-base? A dicey situation on a crowded ridge? If it was a flight that you re-lived a few times for days afterwards I bet it would be a good read for visitors here!

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

When Pilots Write..

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.

Paragliding is a 'sensation sport' so much is made of how it feels, and the emotions experienced. Exhilaration, addiction(!), beauty, serenity, relaxation, achievement to name a few. And let's not forget plain old 'fun'!

When people write paragliding stories, I have noticed they tend to fall into one of several categories...

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 tricks involve maneuvers that correspond to the basic aerobatics that can be done in light aircraft. Things like loops and wing-overs. Others are exclusive to paragliding since they involve big distortions of the flexible wing.

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. Like others have done, near the top of this page.

In the early days of this site, I had a bit of a play with some paragliding simulation software. Good fun if the weather's shutting you in!

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: 24 Nov 2009

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