A Flight in a Hang Glider ``Today I may die.'' On every launch I repeat these words to myself, knowing it's true. Trying to BELIEVE it enough that I'll be careful to ensure that it doesn't happen. I've been hang gliding eight years, and yet every launch is still a dance with death. So why the hell do I do it? I ask myself this question often when I'm at home or in the office. Why take such chance with my life? It's the only one I have. ``Traffic, please'' ``There's the orange Sensor you can see on the right, and two more kites about 500 over. That's it.'' ``Hang check, please.'' I step back under my wing and hook my carabiner into the back-up loop. ``CLICK -- THUNK'' I always hook into my hang loops separately and give them a strong jerk, so I KNOW I'm locked in. It's slight overkill, I've never seen anyone else do it like this, but it makes me feel good. Sort of a solid feeling. I suppose this isn't really necessary, and yet... It's become a ritual for me, and I love ritual. It gives me that same, confident feeling I get from strapping into an airplane or kicking my ski boot into my skis. It's a statement to the world that I intend to commit aviation. ``CLICK -- THUNK'' My main. I swing clear under my wing and kick into my ``boot'' -- the part of my harness where my feet go. ``How do I look?'' ``Through both loops, your ``Biner's'' locked, your lines are straight. Looks good to me.'' I'm looking over my shoulder to make sure. I once had a nose man make a mistake... ``OK. Please stay on my nose until I have have control and ask you to clear.'' ``Right. I'll tell you when I'm clear.'' I pull out of my boot, swing forward now and stand, balancing the awkward weight of the glider on my sholders. I'm facing a 20 knot wind, so as I let my nose rise into it, I need to struggle to get this new ``non-weight'' balanced again. My noseman is feeding the pitch to me cautiously -- sometimes giving me full control, sometimes tightening a grip as the nose tries to escape. 150 square feet of sail, mounted on a ``floating'' frame in a 20 knot head wind is not an easy thing to control. Plenty of pilots have gotten themselves hurt ``just'' standing on the ground. I am quite aware that I am trusting my wiremen with my life. This gives a person a certain amount of, ah, humility? respect? Now I've got her steady, riding the wind and lightly tugging at my harness. ``Clear nose'' Linda removes her hands form the wires she had been sort-of holding. She steps back and moves quickly behind my wing. The sidewire men begin talking to me. ``Neutral...'' ``Pressure, I'm pulling back.'' ``Neutral...'' ``Neutral...'' My wings are level, I have full control, the wind is smooth... ``Clear!'' I hesitate a split second to feel everything perfect. Then I start running, smoothly, evenly, powerfully. In three steps I'm aloft, but I don't stop running. I ``pull in'' so the nose drops and we (my kite and I) continue to skim along, five feet above the slope, picking up speed: 20, 25 knots. A slight gust lifts my left wing, but I've got speed now, and speed is power. I pull in a bit more and shift my weight against the gust. Five seconds later I have cleared the edge of the gently sloping mountain. I'm 200 feet over Mt. McClellen and climbing. Safe. Only now do I turn my attention to kicking into my boot, wiggling down and making myself comfortable. I relax my grip on the base tube, slowing to a more normal flying speed of 20 knots. I lean slightly to my right and begin a slow traversal of the face of the hill. Anyone with good math skills could tell you that if I am flying North-West at 20 knots, and if there's also a 20 knot headwind blowing due East, into the hill, then I must find myself being blown backwards into said hill. And I do, so I pull in a bit. 20 knots is a pretty stiff headwind for my kite, and I dream of having a higher performance glider. You probably noticed that my noseman wasn't. A man, I mean. And yet I referred to her as such. This is a philosophical point for me: I think of Linda in precisely the same terms that I think of all the other pilots in, and I refer to her the same way. You see, I -- WE recognize two kinds of humans. There are pilots, and there are ``Wuffos'' (``What for you do that?''). I am a pilot. And every other pilot is my best friend. Oh, sure, there are boy pilots, and girl pilots, black ones, white ones, gay, straight, Asian, Indian, even paraplegic ones. But those are mere details. They are pilots first, therefore they are my equals, and my friends. I suppose this is something unique to hang-gliding, this automatic fellowship of pilots. There are so few of us in the world, that we feel a kinship with every other pilot we see. In other sports, there are just too many people involved for this to occur. A ball player doesn't stop everyone on the street who's wearing a T-shirt advertising that sport. A pilot does. Over the past few minutes, my ``vario'' has been beeping regularly, letting me know that I have been climbing in the rising air, as I've passed back and forth across the face of the hill. Several pilots have launched below me, and several more have taken off across the valley. This particular rising air is called ``ridge lift''. As the wind comes across the valley from the west, it hits the hill, and the only way ``out'' is up. So it rises, and when we fly in it, we rise too. Clever, eh? I wish I could say it was all our idea, but other fliers figured it out first. Beat us by a few million years. Thus we share our lift with the soaring birds -- Eagles, Falcons, Buzzards, Seagulls. On days when the lift is weak, we keep our eyes peeled for anyone getting good lift. When we spot someone climbing, we dash over to join them. It doesn't matter if ``they'' are human or avian. Lift is lift. Every now and then, you get paid the ultimate compliment. A passing falcon will see you climbing, and come over and join you! Lift is lift. After five minutes at 500 over, it becomes clear that I'm not going to gain any more altitude in front of launch. Ridge lift is seldom good for more than that. I look around. It's a long glide to the Landing Zone from where I am, and I have zero chance of making it directly with this headwind. So I decide to work my way up the ridge, taking what lift I can find, while moving closer to the ``LZ''. It's a long, slow trip. My maximum cruising speed is about 25 knots. If I fly any faster than that, then areodynamic drag of my kite grows too high and I just sink out. I keep the bar pulled in to maintain my 25 knots, and look for lift. My vario emits a long, low tone to let me know I'm sinking at a normal rate -- two to four hundred feet per minute. Now and then the tone gets lower, and I know I'm in sinking air. I pull the bar in some more so that I can hurry across this ``bad'' stretch. After a bit, the vario starts chirping in a squeeky little voice. I've hit lift! This time it's thermal lift, hot air that rises through the cooler air aloft. To work the thermal, I turn tight circles in it, so that I stay in the middle. A smooth `J' motion (pull in, shift weight to the left, push out), puts my glider up in a 30 degree bank, and I hold that through several 360s. Unfortunately, this means that I tend to get blown back over the hills, where I must struggle to get out in front again. Beyond the bother of working my way back out, the lee side of a mountain is a dangerous place to be. As the wind comes over the top of the mountain, it tries to follow the curve of the mountain back down. When it's strong, the wind can't do it, and it ``breaks off'' the slope and falls into weird eddies and swirls -- ``rotors''. This is the same thing that happens when a river wraps around a boulder, and it is deadly for something as frail as a hang glider. So I exit the thermal lower than I'd like, and fly back to the front of the hill. And I repeat this with the next thermal, and the next, and the next. An hour of this, and I'm tired. The thermals are small and bumpy today, so it takes a great deal of pushing and pulling on that six foot aluminium bar to stay in control. I haven't flown a single 360 without having to readjust my pitch or my bank angle at least twice. My arms tire quickly. I find myself above the LZ, a vast 500 feet above it, with no lift to be found anywhere. My normal sink rate is 200' per minute, so I haven't much time. I turn a couple of tight 360s, searching for a target. It's got to be away from the other kites that are already down, and it must be recognizable, so I'll know if I hit it. The brown and green speckled field doesn't provide much, but I select one patch as my ``spot'' and begin a crosswind approach. I drift slowly on my crosswind leg, then pull in, turn a short down wind, followed by a long base leg. At 50' I speed up more and begin my final approach. I fly my approaches at higher speeds than most pilots. It makes it more difficult to hit the spot, but it's safer. Speed is power. Speed is control. Speed is life. I kick out of my harness while still high, and shift my grip to my downtubes -- landing configuration. I am right where I want to be, on course, in control, and fast. As I pass down to 10 feet, I encounter a ``wind gradiant''. The wind near the surface is often slower than it is above, so my 30 knot airspeed is suddenly cut to 20. Not a big deal. Now if I'd been flying at 20... I skim the bushes at 20, 15, 12. The kite grows sluggish and I begin to push out in a slow flare. It grows sloppier and tries to fall off to the right. I counter, and push out hard into a full flare. I pop up two feet, then drop gently onto my own. A near-perfect landing right next to my spot! I unhook, carry my kite out of the LZ and park it, tail to the wind, next to the others. I get a few complements. We shoot the bull as the last few pilots come in. Rudy whacks the nose of his kite and we all laugh. Dan comes in too slow, and loses control in the wind gradient. He breaks a downtube and skins his knee. We don't laugh until we know he's OK, and we've helped him over to the parking area. Then we give him a bad time. The score for the day is two downtubes, a leading edge, a bloody knee, and 22 hours aloft. Not bad for a rough day. We are all dirty, smelly, tired, and have a six hour drive in front of us. So why the hell do we do it? Go ask a bird.