Wing in a Bag

Here's some video footage I mashed together in about 5 minutes in iMovie. So simple and easy.

The nice gentleman giving me a hand with pre-launch checks and standby — just in case — is Page, a local who gave me an intro to the site prior to my first flight here 12 years ago, and who has been an annual flying buddy ever since. I've probably had 50 flights here, and never have I failed to be able to fly on any day I came to launch, and never have I failed to have an extended flight with altitude gains of hundreds — usually thousands — of feet over launch.

This flight was 30 minutes, and was my first flight in two years. On the landing, the hand position was perfect, and the flair timing a tad early. Being early is OK, and far, far preferable to being late, where you don't have sufficient energy (airspeed) to execute a full flair and you just mush for a good pound-in. My mistake was in not holding the flair, which is always rule #1, but goes counter to evolutionary "instinct." It's tough to do something your senses were not designed to handle, happens fast and there's no second chance, but your mind knows is exactly the right thing to do.

Had I held the flair, I'd have sunken right into a perfect no-step landing in zero wind, the gold standard of landing a hang glider.

I've got some other video shot since then, two days ago and I'll see what I can throw up, including an entire video of the 15-minute process of setting up the glider from a 19-foot long, 1-foot wide bagged contraption on top of my car, to an actual wing that's taken me as high as 12,000 feet (from a 4K launch). I'll cmpress it to a minute or so.