Plummeting Through the Sky with the Greatest of Ease

It's been just over a year since I got my novice paragliding license, and the most important thing I've learned since graduation is that becoming a pilot isn't something that happens when you finish your minimum number of flights and pass your HPAC exam. The more flying experiences I have, the more I realize there is to learn and experience and the more I realize that becoming a paragliding pilot is a process, perhaps one that never ends.

I've had a fantastic year of flying. From my first unsupervised launch and my first solo, local flying day, I've gone on to do my first paragliding trip (Russ, Craig, and I went to Nova Scotia, where I also had my first coastal ridge soaring flights), attended my first fly-in (the Can-Am at Black Mountain), and quadrupled the number of different of sites I've flown at. All steps towards becoming a better and more confident paraglider, but the most important step of all was one I took last weekend: my first SIV clinic.

SIV is a French abbreviation for "Simulation d'Incident en Vol", which translates to "simulation of incidents in flight". Over water, you do things to your wing to imitate bad things that can happen while flying and practice recovering. You learn how to recognize problems, learn what actions you should or should not take in various scenarios, get a feel for long it takes for normal flight to resume, and figure out about how much altitude you lose in the meantime.

For iParaglide's SIV, we go to a remote little beach on Lillooet Lake near Pemberton. We set up a simulator on the beach and take turns walking through the different maneuvers on it before taking our turn in the air. We use a boat, piloted by the wonderful Ted, with a special winch to tow each of us, one at a time, to about 3000 feet above the water. Getting towed up isn't a passive process, but one where you have to constantly monitor the boat and steer to follow it and constantly monitor your paraglider and brake to keep it steady and overhead. The boat gets you up, but you are also flying the whole time, which, as another participant put it, has some advantages over driving up a hot and dusty road to a mountain launch. Then there is also the great opportunity to learn from each participant's tow and SIV moves while watching a spectacular show from the comfort of a beach chair! Ted has the very best towing equipment, so launching was very safe with no risk of being dragged, and I found following the boat to be a fun challenge.

Once high over the water, our instructor, Dion, uses the radio to remind you about what you are going to do, then guides you through the process. For example, to do a frontal, he'll remind you that what you are going to do is pull down all the A-risers on both sides. He'll say: "So grab all the metal carabiners for both A-lines on both sides. On my command, you'll pull them both down hard and then release. Ready? Three, two, one: huy-yah!" And on the "huy-yah", you haul down on those lines and the entire front of your wing collapses and you release the lines and you fall a little until the wing opens again. And as it happens, Dion says: "OK, release. Great. The wing is open again. Good." And then he gets you ready for the next move. It is all progressive: you start with a move called big ears, which is easy and benign, and move up to slightly more exciting incidents that are likely to happen at some point in your time in the air, like frontals and asymmetrics (where some portion of your paraglider collapses, usually because of turbulent air, and you have to shift on to the good side of the wing and fly with that until the collapsed portion pops back out).

If you are responding well to commands on those first moves, on subsequent flights, you learn B-line stalls and spirals, both of which will help get you down should you encounter cloud suck or other undesirable weather conditions. Then you move to the "Big Scary Move" for most of us: the full stall. To stall of paraglider, you pull both brakes symmetrically all the way down and hold on to the bottom of your harness while your wing turns into a flapping mess above you and you rock back and forth and plummet downwards. The important part of the full stall is to release the stall only when your paraglider is in front of you; if you release while it is behind you, it will start a cascade, so you'll be swinging drastically forward and backwards in a fairly uncontrolled manner, still losing altitude. Dion gives clear instructions, saying "hold, hold, hold, and release", but if you don't respond quickly to the commands, it can still lead to some crazy stuff. Before going out for the clinic, I was worried about my physical ability to hold down the brakes during the stall and about my ability to do just the right thing at just the right time while my wing is flapping around above me, but I understood that this is an important move to learn: the full stall can be used as a re-set if other things are going awry.

It turns out, the full stall wasn't that hard for me. As long as I followed Dion's instructions as far as posture, I could hold the full stall quite well.

What I couldn't do was the B-line stall; no matter how hard I pulled, those lines would not move. This has to do with the Icaro Instinct's incredible stability in the A- and B-line portion of the glider's leading edge: it doesn't fold easily, and wants to stay solid and open. I was a bit discouraged about not being able to pull a B-stall at first, but after landing, Dion and I discussed the characteristics of my particular wing and my physical strength and decided to try a C-line stall on my next flight. C-line stall is not recommended on most paragliders, but it works really well with with an Icaro Instinct, and accomplishes the same thing as a B-line stall: increases your descent rate a lot while staying relatively stable. You drop quickly - it feels a bit like a descending elevator - and you only rock around for a couple of moments until it steadies. As long as you wait until everything is steady before releasing and release slightly more gradually than exiting a full stall, all is very safe and sane feeling. It's a really important tool to add to my paragliding toolbox, so the whole weekend was worth it for that discovery alone.

Many of us were quivering from adrenaline after at least some of the flights. Since I'm a "Sunday driver" type of flyer, rather than a "race car driver" type, that level of excitement made for an intense weekend for me. Still, I learned so much about flying, about my wing, and about myself, that I'm eager to do it all again next year. I'm taking another step towards feeling like a real paragliding pilot!

Comments

[Jeff]

Huy-yah! Great article Melissa!