ICARUS HANG GLIDER HOW TO

“She screamed the entire flight, and when we approached the ground, she wanted me to slow down.” As anyone who knows about gliding or flying, you want that energy and speed to be big when approaching a landing so the flair back brings the sail into as much cupping wind as possible so the pilot ends up on his feet, not forehead and elbows. After he husband did a great tandem run and solo flight, the woman still wanted to continue. The problem was that the wife had never been on a mountain, and while she did well on the training hills, Sanderson said she white knuckled Dale all the way up Steptoe Butte. Htold me about a husband and wife team from Battle Creek, Mich., who west for one of Inland Air Sports’ five-day from-no-experience- to- beginner-to-novice class. He’s been on a multitude of flights around the country, yet he still likes Tekoa and Lake Chelan, Wash. Sanderson is all about safety and training, using a hill like a ski instructor would use the bunny slope to make sure the body-mind-elements syncopation is at least functional for students. Then the sheer, and the human squadron got pushed into the side of the Catalina Mountains, killing two out of the six. Those were dangerous days, and I remember living in Arizona when several friends caught killer thermals in the Sonora desert, so corkscrewy and intense that they went past 20 circling California buzzards at 15,000 feet. The sport’s equipment has gone through five generations of radical design changes, Sanderson said, and the first Rogallo “wing,” named after a NASA engineer (Francis Rogallo) working on spaceship recovery systems, was the progenitor. It’s all body language, as I tried the huge training glider, a Condor, designed to have extra sail to capture any sort of light wind for beginners to feel lift. With wide eyes and intense body language, Simpson tried flight after flight to get the feel of one of the most naked ways to move oneself with a “machine.” I was with him while he was training Coeur d’Alene architect Jack Simpson near Fish Trap Lake.

There’s an obvious spiritual thing when talking to Sanderson and others who get into these fast climbs, sometimes 1,200 feet per minute, while hitting cloud bases 10,000-14,000 feet, sometimes higher. Then he leaped off a ridge overlooking an illegal dump near where he was stationed. It’s a far cry from the early days when Sanderson read a book, bought a used hang glider, and strapped on every sort of motocross body armor he could muster.

He watched wild hang gliders in the Ozarks, on Petit Jean Mountain, in 1977, and has been hooked ever since. “I’ve always felt like I was flying in my dreams.”Ĭall it mystical, or “one with drafts, wind sheers and thermals,” but Sanderson has logged more than 4,650 hours hang gliding since first trying it on his own while stationed in the U.S.

ICARUS HANG GLIDER HOW TO

“I guess it’s in my blood,” said Dale Sanderson, graduate of West Valley High School and owner, operator and instructor for Inland Air Sports, which has been teaching novices and intermediates how to soar like birds. Maybe he wanted to find the great Pacific Flyway.įor one Inland Northwest seasoned hang glider, who for more than three decades has instructed hundreds of people to become pilots, there’s no place closer to nirvana than wind and sky while red-tail hawks come horning in on your thermal. It makes sense, when floating around Steptoe Butte, that Icarus would have wanted to defy gravity, impugn the gods and challenge the sun to soar closer to the ionosphere.

Icarus hang glider