Swooping a hang glider

[flyingZippy 0]

I posted a HG swoop here once before and received mostly positive comments, so I thought you guys might appreciate this one too.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=711568325520637

Enjoy,
Zac
For the record, I am a skydiver and BASE jumper too.

[shropshire 0]

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[pchapman 279]

(@ anyone reading, not just the OP:)

Nice, he gets 2 swoops in, in opposite directions more or less, before turning around yet again for a respectable final swoop and landing.

Skydiving has pretty much the only aerial activity where increasing speed as much as possible before landing, for fun, was the object. It has been a little bizarre in that way.

But there are exceptions.

I guess hang gliders got into the game some years ago, maybe a decade back, playing with swoops and also doing 'speed gliding' racing runs low to the ground on slopes. Mind you, they'll still have their fatalities, like Chris Mueller, who caught his bar on the ground during a flat land competition of sorts.

Not that I'm very in tune at all with what's going on in the HG world nowadays.

A small subset of glider pilots (aka sailplane pilots) play the swoop game, the ones returning to the finish line at the end of a major competition. As with the HG video, they may do a swoop at high speed just feet off the ground, downwind, starting a farm field back from the airfield, cross the airfield, then have the energy to pull up, do a teardrop 180 degree turn, and land back upwind normally at the airfield.

[Pendragon 1]

Nice!

--
BASE #1182
Muff #3573
PFI #52; UK WSI #13

[yoink 321]

The flying is cool.

The swooping near random people is most uncool.

[hypoxic_fool 0]

I wouldn't assume that the few there are "random people" but I could be dead wrong. Cool flying and swooping I hope to get into some hang gliding and paragliding in the future.

[yoink 321]

hypoxic_fool

I wouldn't assume that the few there are "random people" but I could be dead wrong. Cool flying and swooping I hope to get into some hang gliding and paragliding in the future.

'He's going to scare the hell out of these people!' suggests the people on the beach aren't part of any ground crew, or even know he's coming.

It's tough to see how far away they were with that angle though, they may well have been fine, but anytime you put high speed swooping mixed with unaware members of the public, the risk factor shoots up.

All it takes is for one to panic and run and it's problems.


Super cool flying, although to my mind not quite as cool as this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0o6gJmjlEQ

Just got to make sure we're making smart decisions when we're doing stuff like this. Not just getting our swoop on!

[hookitt 1]

Nice flying Zip!

My grammar sometimes resembles that of magnetic refrigerator poetry... Ghetto

[VectorBoy 0]

Nice Zippy! Gimme a call next time your coming down to Andy Jackson we have to catch up.

[flyingZippy 0]

Yoink,

You're absolutely right, swooping random people isn't cool. I wasn't as close as it looked from where it was filmed, and they couldn't have moved fast enough to get it the way if it was their goal.

I posted the river swoop video on DZ, it's my friend Wolfi, and we're off to South America together tomorrow for a competition and some filming.

Swoop smart
and remember... safety third! ;)

Zippy

[yoink 321]

flyingZippy

Yoink,


I posted the river swoop video on DZ, it's my friend Wolfi, and we're off to South America together tomorrow for a competition and some filming.

Zippy

Fantastic! Best of luck!

Mucho awesome video uploaded please!


(as a personal thing, I'd LOVE to see the 'making of' videos that go into one of these sort of things. The practice runs etc...for me, that's as fun to watch as the 1-off result!)