Paragliding Skills: Improve Your Ground Handling

improving your ground handling skills is very important for paragliding both for your safety on the launch site and for building your confidence before you actually go in to fly what you're looking for is about 10 to 20 kilometers an hour of wind on an open slope it's better to try and do ground handling on a slightly sloping field than on a flat field because on a flat field your wing will sit back slightly from vertical and makes it harder to get a real feeling of what the glider will do on a launch site quite often if you just go to a paragliding site early in the morning before the crowds arrive you can just go off to the one side and just practice there stay back from the actual launching area a little bit si-hu more on the flat top of the hill and you won't fly off the slope but that gives you a really good real situation to try and learn what the wings going to be doing in a typical air flow on the launch site always remember to wear your helmets really important when your ground handling because you're very close to the ground so it's quite easy to just get tripped over or get lifted up into the air and then bang your head on something so put your helmet on also use back protection it's a good idea to have a harness with foam in the back that's going to be available for you when you get plucked and dumped on the ground you don't need a fall from very far to start breaking bones in your back so really just use your normal harness most of them have got back protection in also use your gloves it's very easy to get line burn and use your boots as you would for normal paragliding maybe you're flying trainers but definitely not in sandals because you're going to get dragged around across the ground there might be some rubbish lying there you don't mess up your feet use your normal equipment you'd normally use for flying that gives you a good practice gets you familiar with a feeling of your harness and your glider if you'd like we often have ground-handling wings and harnesses really cheap on our website those are there for you to get hold off so you can trash them so if you've got an unfriendly feel that you're gonna be ground handling in all very muddy or you just don't want to damage your wing pick up one of those onto skills to try in the beginning just focus on keeping it up in a reversed position so do a reverse launch facing the wing pulling up and just work on keeping it up nothing fancy just moving under the wing to Center it whenever it falls over one side of the other moving your feet keeping the wing up try and do small brake Corrections and big Corrections with your feet but then mix it up do it the other way around to see if you can learn what the inputs are doing use no foot input at all just stay in one spot and try and do everything on the brakes and see how that changes the feeling of the wing and its responses then turn around and face forward doing the same by feeling alone so you're just looking at the ground you're just looking ahead and you're feeling what the wings doing which way it's pulling responding to move underneath the wing if it's pulling one way or the other trying to feel what brake you need to put input in to stay correctly on the wing and to bring it back to Center you can spend quite a long time just walking around until you feel completely connected with Ewing then practice loading up the chest strap before running this helps prevent the harness from sliding up your legs and it also gives you much better connection to the wing than running upright so try and load the chest strap up and then increase the flying speed covering the minimum distance this can take you day is to get this right it's just a feeling of when you need to accelerate with your legs so to match the wing speed as its increasing so try and get it to launch you and get cleanly off the ground without much of a pendulum no you don't want to try and swing ahead of the wing and then the wing catches up and dumps you so just practice on that loading up the chest strap increasing the flying speed with the minimum distance covered then work on your transitions so go back from a reverse launch position turning without bobbing your head trying to keep a low martial arts stance that you can swing around you're facing forward and turn back to face reverse without the glider being aware that you've actually moved and focus on getting a smooth continuous pull up so from reverse position bringing the wing up turning continuously and running with a short launch run if you keep that process really smooth you can get a nice short effective launch then work on slowly bringing the wing up so controlling that speed that it's coming up with a slow rise you control the speed by your movement so moving away from the wing or towards the wing to control that pull up speed taking the power out of the wing to bring it up as slowly as you can so that's still coming up all the time and it's not dropping back and work on a slow descent controlling the descent speed by using your eyes this will give you some control develop a feeling of the power in the wing and also save your wing from being whacked down on the ground then explore the stall point try and drop the wing back a little bit either despite walking too or using a bit of brakes or both and try and establish exactly where the point is on the arc that your wing stalls every wing is different depends on the wind speed as well at you and the slope that you're standing on but it's very good to get an idea of when it's about to stall and just as it stalls see if you can get it to reef lie so work with that stalling it letting it reef lie you might need to grab the A's to reengage it to energize it again it depends on the wing but play with that an experiment with more or less stall so that you really learn about that transition fares between the wing flying and the wing not flying then explore the pitch forward allow the wing to search ahead of you on launch without checking it on the brakes and see if you can anticipate when it's going to collapse a sharp jab down on the brakes will sketch the collapse but often it's going to front tuck then blow back behind you you need to reverse pull it up again and just do that over and over until you develop a feeling of what the wings looks like and feels like just before it collapses in front of you do tip touches to develop fine control on the brakes sending the wing over to the side really slowly trying to keep your body position fixed leaning away from the wing so rotate your body slightly so you've got a nice balance position and then use the brake to just slowly fly the wing back up overhead do it on both sides this develops real fine control on the brakes it's much easier to stall the wing tip when it's over on the side so if you can fly it back up and put it back down again you know you've developed quite good control on your brakes then try some pull up variations see if your wing will pull up without the A's just leaning back into a stiff breeze and if it does that see if you can control the wing using the back risers only so leaning back letting the wing come up and then controlling the pitch with the back risers try both A's in one hand and the brake in the other and swapping hands that's quite a useful technique for thermic launches and when you're not quite sure about the wind direction or it's changing a lot practice that swapping hands pulling the wing up keeping control practice hooking the brake with your finger so you've got both brakes with their technique it's a nice variation and also experiment with the A's and C's launch see if that works on your wing what it's like how much steering you've got it's all about learning about your wing and your options there's lots of extra things you can try with crown handling if you board with those 10 exercises that I've given you you can try skew launches try aborted launches Cobra launches try launching backwards while still facing the wing in the reverse position and then swinging out in the air try on no control launch that's where you don't put any input on the brakes and try and do it all with body weight just bring the wing up balancing it turning running off launching if you still board go and look for some turbulence just like the crows they love to play behind something that's creating rotor well you've got that nice open slope for your ground handling go find an obstacle and miss around behind that so you learn about broken airflow and bringing the wing up from dead air up into strong wind and put some obstacles out run around them have fun you

Channel: Flybubble Paragliding

Views: 169,907

Rating: 4.9654889 out of 5

Keywords: vuelolibre, vollibre, paragleiten, paraglide, paragliders, flybubble, paragliding, kiting, ground control, FlybubbleParagliding, gleitschirm, ground handling, paraglider launch, freeflying, paraglider, freeflight

Id: o52Ldul4JLQ

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2018