How to Control a Hang Glider in the Air

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Duke, Welcome to Expert Village. In this next clip, we will show how you control the glider. When you're actually flying, flying, you'll be in this position, with your hands down on the base tube. This is a weight-shift glider; all of my weight is being supported through my hips, right up into the CG of the glider, the center of gravity of the glider. So the glider pivots off of that point. By shifting my weight, the glider wants to move various directions, and that's how I, how I control it. To control the speed, we control the speed at which we dive or climb, by diving more, I put my weight forward, and the nose gets heavy, the glider dives, and picks up speed. Just like a kid on a skateboard going downhill, with a certain amount of speed, I can then go up a certain distance. So I push my weight back, and I can climb all the way until, just like that kid, I run out of speed. At the top, before you start rolling backwards, that's called stall. So as you get to the top, and you feel the glider slowing down, you pull in back down to neutral speed, and you fly off at your new altitude. To turn the glider, you simply load one of the wings with weight. So you put your hip over here, where your center of gravity is, and that wing gets heavy, and the glider turns, and you coordinate the turn by pushing back, and the glider carves through the turn. If you need to, you can pull in a little bit and adjust your speed in that turn, until you've achieved the perfect bank and perfect speed for that bank. Ok, since this is a weight shift glider, I need to actually move the center of my mass over to one side or not. If I were to just rotate here, you can see that my body doesn't, my body's comfortable hanging, I don't want to return to neutral. So a lot of people think I'm over to this side, why isn't it turning, to the left? That's cause I haven't actually moved any weight. If I move my, if I lead with my feet, and get my weight over here, you can see that I have to have shifted something, because when I let go, I swing back to neutral. Whereas here, when I let go, I haven't shifted any weight, I could sit here all day, I haven't moved anything. You have to actually move your weight, to get it to turn. And your Instructor will go through that with you."