Question from Daniel Mobile
Question from Daniel Mobile
How about hang gliding?
Your answer
Wow, a good question about Hang Gliding. that was in Golden Co when I lived in Boulder and before I had enough money or fright to take up proper sailplanes. I had. Ordered. A seagull. Uh, high aspect glider. Just before I fell off the glacier and when I was in the hospital in Denver, I had one of the nurses hold a phone and dial the number so I could cancel my order when I lay paralyzed in the hospital bed. Right I was. Flying. Uh, taking instructions in Golden and uh. On one morning I watched the thermal build all the way up the slope. The rustling of the. Uh, brush and flowers and, uh, grasses came all the way up. Where I was, and so I launched forward by running down toward it. And immediately got jerked violently upward. For about 100 and 5200 feet vertical and then violently shoved downward as I flew forward. Because it wasn't a thermal, it was a rotor. It was a huge. Spinning swirl of air. And so now I found myself not just stalled, but being pushed toward the ground just as fast as I went up. So the only thing I could do was to accelerate, and that was to aim the glider straight at the ground and hopefully gain some airspeed. And it was at the last moment, probably 50 feet above the ground, that I caught just enough air and was able to level out. Pretty violently scared everybody that was watching me that I almost crashed completely and they cancelled the rest of the lessons for the day and it was about a week or two later that I went up on the glacier and asked for guidance. I didn't take up glider flying or. Sailplanes until I was in. San Antonio, TX. With Angelina and I would start riding my bicycle out to Bernie, Texas and finishing my 100 hours of flight training. Uh, Carissa came out on one trip and went up, uh, on a uh. Tandem flight with the instructor and I watched her from the ground do a loop and do a high speed. Down the full length of the runway before landing. That was fun, but I have a bunch of good memories. I'll share in another, uh, audio about flying with, uh, Buzzards and. Learning to, to fly all around Texas. I actually even flew in Minden, NV and in couple places kind of near Lake Pleasant. There was a in Arizona, there was a glider port that I flew. So yeah, I I really love flying, but just couldn't afford to keep doing it.