What Is Hang Gliding?
Picture this. You’re standing on a rounded hilltop. A soft breeze is in your face. In front of you is a gentle, grassy slope leading down into the valley. You step forward down the slope, letting gravity pull you from a walk to a gentle run. Within a few steps, you are lifted; the ground falls away beneath your feet – you’re running on air. You’re flying.
Have you ever dreamed of flying? We don’t mean riding in an airplane, but really flying, the way the birds fly: gliding gently through the air with a bird’s eye view of everything below and out to the horizon, or soaring upwards on rising thermal currents, banking and turning to follow the lifting air. Maybe you’ve even been aware that there are some people who do fly this way but thought that you could never do it; that it was too difficult, or too dangerous.
And maybe once that was true. But today, you can fly, if you want to. The modern sports of hang gliding and paragliding offer the easiest, safest access to personal, bird-like flight that has ever been available. Hang glider pilots utilize lightweight wings made of aerospace aluminum alloys covered with space-age polymer fabric, shifting their weight to control speed and direction. Paraglider pilots fly suspended beneath a ram-air inflated nylon parachute canopy, using brake toggles for control.
How to Learn Hang Gliding
Today’s advanced teaching methods, coupled with modern flying equipment, make the learning process easy, safe, and fun. You can get involved at any level and to whatever degree you choose, from a single, introductory lesson to a full course of instruction leading to solo flight and your own pilot rating. To start, you can fly from a mountain in a tandem wing with an instructor at your side, or skim over soft sand dunes under an instructor’s supervision, just a few feet off the ground. If you choose to go farther, you’ll learn the finer points of controlling your wing under the guidance of your instructor, while you also learn to understand the winds and how they affect your flight. You’ll become part of a community of pilots, and find that people who share a love of flying are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet – people who live life with a sense of adventure and with a passion that few experience.
Find a Hang Gliding School
Whichever method of flying you choose, there is a worldwide network of professional instructors and authorized Wills Wing retailers to help you learn the proper way and get the best equipment.
The sky is waiting for you. Visit our hang gliding flight schools page to find instruction near you, or explore the other Learn To Fly pages for more detailed information.
The United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association offers a fantastic video (DVD) “Discover Hang Gliding Today”. The video is filled with exciting video footage from around the world and gives a superb introduction to the experience of hang gliding and paragliding.
Click here to watch the video, “To Fly: Discover Hang Gliding” on USHPA.