Tips for a Landing Approach in Hang Gliding

Video Transcript

"Hi this is David Duke, welcome to Expert Village. In this next clip, we're going to talk about landing approaches. When you're on the training hill, and you are doing your first flight from one foot in the air, there's no need to set up an approach, because you already know where you're going to land, you're going to land about ten feet away from, the direction you were going in. There's no time to turn, etcetera. But, if you were the other extreme, and you were bringing in the space shuttle from outer space, you'd have to have a plan for how you're going to steer it down to Cape Canaveral, what angle you're going to come in, obviously you can't come in real steep, you'll burn up. In this glider, you don't come in real steep, because you'll over speed the glider, don't want to do that. You don't want to come in too shallow, etcetera. So just, just like in the space shuttle, you're going to have to have a plan. And the final part of the plan is always, you?re downwind, your base, and you?re final. You want to be landing maybe slightly uphill, and into the direction of the wind. So, if you know that you want to land at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and you want to be landing into the wind, and going slightly uphill, how do you get that ending point? As a matter of fact, why do you want to land into the wind and uphill? Because both of those features slow down your speed. So if this your final destination, uphill and into the wind, how do you get there? Well first, you come down, downwind, here. And then you, you judge your altitude and at the correct altitude that you think you're going to be able to hit your target, you turn onto your base. Now the interesting thing here is you're going to be going faster, because you're coming downwind. Now your speed is is going to be going about a third less, coming at your base, and at the correct angle, and when you're lined up, and then you turn onto final. And then you bring the glider in for speed, so that you can punch through any turbulence that you may encounter near the ground, and then you round out near ground level, and then as the glider loses energy and wants to seek, you push forward, the glider can't climb anymore, and it falls right onto the ground. It's tough to tell which way the wind direction is blowing, when, when you want to land. How do you know? Well, this is why you need an instructor. There's lots and lots of clues, how the glider goes faster when it's going downwind, as opposed to when you're flying this way. So if you're doing circles, and coring thermals, which we do up to the cloud base, then we usually drift, with the wind. As we're circling, we're making nice even circles, but we notice that we're, we're flying downwind, so we know that the wind is coming from that direction, and that's the direction I?m going to want to land, is into the wind. If you're flying near an airport, or at a standard hang-gliding location, you can tell the wind based on the wind sock there."