Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Roland,
Speaker 1: and as I said, there's me Josh Clark, which makes
Speaker 1: this Stuff you Should Know a sore In addition, wow
Speaker 1: soaring soaring Okay, the sore toe edition. I don't know
Speaker 1: what that means either. It doesn't mean anything. It's just
Speaker 1: kind of a sore toe is kind of the opposite
Speaker 1: of soaring, you know, really drags you down to earth
Speaker 1: because you think, like now I have to go to
Speaker 1: like a urgent care center and get this toe checked
Speaker 1: out and probably take some pills that make me throw up.
Speaker 1: And it's just not like soaring high above the earth
Speaker 1: on a hand glider, I imagine. And I've never hand glided,
Speaker 1: of you, um no, but I've had a sword too,
Speaker 1: so so you know, so do you have any desire
Speaker 1: to hang glide after this? Because I gotta tell you, man,
Speaker 1: I got kind of jazzed about the idea of trying
Speaker 1: it from researching this article. Not really, no, so like
Speaker 1: if you were somewhere on vacation and they had like
Speaker 1: hand gliding lessons as part of the place you were staying.
Speaker 1: Would you like go over and try it, you think,
Speaker 1: or you just absolutely aren't enthused by it at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of depends, I guess on my mood and
Speaker 1: what else is going on. I mean, I could see that.
Speaker 1: I think that's fair. I wouldn't I wouldn't like seek
Speaker 1: it out though. But if I was literally within fifty
Speaker 1: ft of someone doing this right, and somebody picked you
Speaker 1: up and put you into the hardest and I might
Speaker 1: do it. But and I'm not afraid of it or anything.
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, I don't really care. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I get that sense that you're not afraid of it.
Speaker 1: I am terrified of heights, as you know. Um, but
Speaker 1: this still sounds pretty appealing to me. Actually, I think
Speaker 1: I might try it. I mean I used to do
Speaker 1: repelling and stuff like that. So oh yeah, with your
Speaker 1: dad right down Stone Mountain, they'll let you do that.
Speaker 1: I thought they might. So hand gliding is what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, Chuck. And it turns out this article, this
Speaker 1: is an old school, old school how stuff works article,
Speaker 1: which were really weird in a lot of different ways. Um,
Speaker 1: But once we kind of dug in. We've we found that,
Speaker 1: like the topic is actually a little more interesting than
Speaker 1: the house Stuff Works article would lead someone to believe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little dry, just his head bone dry, and
Speaker 1: this is a Freud and Rich joint. He knows what
Speaker 1: he's doing. He's got a PhD after his name. But
Speaker 1: I think it was the culture of the age, you know, Like,
Speaker 1: for example, in the article, he talks about a personal
Speaker 1: experience hang gliding. You know exactly what I'm gonna say,
Speaker 1: don't you. I don't know. I don't actually, so he
Speaker 1: said that the place that he was taking this hand
Speaker 1: gliding lesson is called Jockey's Ridge and it's a public park.
Speaker 1: So he writes that, as you know, before they took
Speaker 1: off the hand gliding instructor check to make sure that
Speaker 1: our intended flight path was clear of obstacles and people
Speaker 1: because it was a public park. That's like such a
Speaker 1: two thousand one era how stuff works thing to mention
Speaker 1: in an article. You know, yeah, I kind of found
Speaker 1: myself skimming that part once I started reading it. There's
Speaker 1: some good info in it, but yeah, the whole personal
Speaker 1: experience thing, it just doesn't it doesn't click with me.
Speaker 1: You know, so, um, hang gliding, should we should we
Speaker 1: do a little history. I think we should do a
Speaker 1: little bit of history because, like I said, it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. Yeah, and this is one that you would
Speaker 1: not Um. I was a little bit surprised to know
Speaker 1: that NASA had anything to do with hang gliding, because
Speaker 1: it seems like obviously those two things would be opposite
Speaker 1: of one another, sort of like tow toe gliding sort
Speaker 1: toe and storing. Yeah, it's like an s A T question,
Speaker 1: it is. But there was an engineer for NASA named
Speaker 1: Francis Rogelo, so you kind have had an idea in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties to use his Rogallo wing, uh, which
Speaker 1: was I guess sort of a crude hang glider to
Speaker 1: return space help return spacecraft to Earth. Yeah, instead of
Speaker 1: a mere parachute, which is what I guess had been
Speaker 1: used for a little while. Yeah. Like you know those
Speaker 1: famous images of like the Gemini capsules coming back to
Speaker 1: Earth and splashing down the ocean and they have like
Speaker 1: a drag shoot you know that they're from Originally they're like,
Speaker 1: what if we try this other thing? That's that will
Speaker 1: be one day. The predecessor of the hang glider and
Speaker 1: everyone said, what's the hang glider? And that person said,
Speaker 1: just wait a little while. So Rigalo and his wife
Speaker 1: actually were amateur aviation enthusiasts, and that's they were just
Speaker 1: kind of doing this on the side. But when he
Speaker 1: started working at NASA, they he said, hey, I've got
Speaker 1: this idea. And it didn't pan out. But the the
Speaker 1: the pictures of these tests that made it into magazines
Speaker 1: captured the imagination of some people around the world all
Speaker 1: at once. Different people who weren't in communication with one
Speaker 1: another saw these pictures and thought, you know what, I
Speaker 1: could do something with that. I could turn something like
Speaker 1: that into like a personal, non motorized flight machine. And
Speaker 1: they did. Yeah, But he was not the first person
Speaker 1: to ever do stuff like this, because everyone, i think
Speaker 1: has seen images of weirdos in the nineteenth century jumping
Speaker 1: off of buildings with all manner of winged suits and
Speaker 1: things like that, and one such guy, and that's just
Speaker 1: the humans obsession with like literally flying themselves, like not
Speaker 1: in a plane. There's also that it takes a certain
Speaker 1: type though, if you think about it, like even today,
Speaker 1: like somebody who says, wow, I'd really like to fly,
Speaker 1: and someone who says wow, I'd really like to fly,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna spend ten years creating my own personal
Speaker 1: flying machine. Those are two different people, yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: like the right brothers versus uh, this guy right exactly
Speaker 1: that you've never heard of because he didn't do anything
Speaker 1: otto lilienthal is that is that a good way to
Speaker 1: pronounce that? Oh yeah, not this guy. This guy did
Speaker 1: a lot. Yeah. Oh yeah, you're talking about the crackpots. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was a German engineer, obviously from that name, and
Speaker 1: he was crazy about this stuff. And he literally did
Speaker 1: over two thousand successful flights with these what they called
Speaker 1: weight shift hand gliders, so hang gliders, where as you
Speaker 1: will see, like the modern hang lider, you you shift
Speaker 1: your weight to steer the thing, and he was he
Speaker 1: was doing that in a kind of a crude way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he basically I mean like Leonardo da Vinci had like
Speaker 1: some design for a hang glider. I don't know if
Speaker 1: he's ever built, and the Chinese used to make criminals
Speaker 1: hang glide for fun. But this is like the guy
Speaker 1: who like actually went to the trouble of figuring out
Speaker 1: how to make this right from his own designs, and
Speaker 1: and like you said, two thousand successful flights. Is I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's proven technology, you know, so I say, and
Speaker 1: I don't think it's just us, but Otto Lilienthal is
Speaker 1: basically known as the father of hang gliding, the Opah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess OPA's grandfather. Yeah, but isn't that is that German? Yeah? Oh,
Speaker 1: I thought that was Greek. Well I don't. It may
Speaker 1: be Greek too, but I don't know. Opa is German
Speaker 1: for uh. But you know, he did a good job.
Speaker 1: Then the Rogue Rogallo machine or whatever they called it,
Speaker 1: the Rogallo, the fantastic flying Rogallos came on the scene. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they apparently were not inspired by anything Lilienthal did.
Speaker 1: His stuff really kind of fell to the wayside once
Speaker 1: the Right Brothers started. You could see that a motorized flight, right,
Speaker 1: Everybody's like, why would you want this thing when you
Speaker 1: can just fly in a plane. And the Right Brothers
Speaker 1: themselves experimented with hang gliders first and then um moved
Speaker 1: on to two planes from their hang gliders. But by
Speaker 1: this time, like the idea of hang gliding was was
Speaker 1: dead and from what I understand, unknown to the Rigalos, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we should totally do a right brothers show at some point.
Speaker 1: I can't believe we haven't. I know there's a lot
Speaker 1: out there. We will. Uh So flash forward some though
Speaker 1: toe at the very hot party, the Auto Lilienthal anniversary
Speaker 1: meet up in California. So he still had his people,
Speaker 1: you know, I would guess the sort of early um
Speaker 1: extreme stunt enthusiasts who held people like Otto Lilienthal Is
Speaker 1: in high regard, and people came from all over the
Speaker 1: place too to hang out and hang glide, I guess,
Speaker 1: And that's where I think it was. Everyone sort of
Speaker 1: points to that meet up that year is when the
Speaker 1: reinvention of modern hang gliding came around, do you care
Speaker 1: to say? I think so? And part of this that
Speaker 1: So you've got alto Lilienthal, You've got the rigolos who
Speaker 1: may or may not have been influenced by Lilienthal. And
Speaker 1: then you've got a guy named Bruce Dickinson. No it's not,
Speaker 1: he's the guy from John Dickinson and Australian Tom. No,
Speaker 1: well this is Tom h Are there two of them?
Speaker 1: Doug Dickinson? Was it Tom Dickinson? I mean that's what
Speaker 1: this one article says. But okay, well I'm sure that
Speaker 1: one's right. But so Tom Dickinson. I think he was
Speaker 1: one of the ones who was inspired by those photos
Speaker 1: of the Rigala wing from NASA and built his own
Speaker 1: hand glider. And he created um like what you would
Speaker 1: call um what's it called when you're like on a
Speaker 1: your parasailing and you're being towed behind a boat parasailing. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he invented basically that which later, to confuse things,
Speaker 1: was reinvented in the eighties or rediscovered in the eighties
Speaker 1: and became basically a separate but related sport to hang gliding.
Speaker 1: But his designs for this paraglider early paraglider, was based
Speaker 1: on the Rigala wing and basically improved it enough so
Speaker 1: that other people said, hey, you know what, you could
Speaker 1: turn this into what we call a foot launched hand glider.
Speaker 1: And and by the early nineteen seventies it was under
Speaker 1: it was it was the design had been improved enough that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could have like an invitational meetup of the crackpots
Speaker 1: who are into this kind of thing back then, right,
Speaker 1: And then a couple of years after that, a couple
Speaker 1: of brothers named Bob and Chris wills Uh started Manufacturing
Speaker 1: actually formed a company called Will's Wing, and by all accounts,
Speaker 1: those dudes really really grew the sport in the early
Speaker 1: to mid seventies because it's a very I mean, I know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of been reborn now with these uh what
Speaker 1: are they called, not solid wing or I guess you
Speaker 1: could call him solid wing rigid Yeah, rigid wing. But
Speaker 1: those early hand gliders, it's a very seventies sport, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're so pretty in the seventies way to like
Speaker 1: the colors they use. Yeah, for sure, love looking at
Speaker 1: hand gliders looks like a catamaran sale up there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a Hobie Cat or something. And you know, like
Speaker 1: every I'm sure there was an episode of Chips where
Speaker 1: one of them hand glided. They were it made its appearance,
Speaker 1: It had its fingerprints all over seventies pop culture. Do
Speaker 1: you remember, like back in the day on prices, right,
Speaker 1: one of the standard um one of the standard prizes
Speaker 1: was a Hobie Cat personal sailboat. Yeah, like anyone, You're like,
Speaker 1: what am I going to do with that? In Texas? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: I guess Texas has a shoreline though, look at me? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. How about Nebraska? Yeah, no shore line
Speaker 1: of Nebraska. So by the seventies this thing had kind
Speaker 1: of taken off, if you will forgive the unintended punt um,
Speaker 1: and it's it's I don't have the impression that it's
Speaker 1: like nearly as much of a craze today, even though
Speaker 1: there have been major improvements like the rigid wing design.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's the seventies and maybe the eighties
Speaker 1: were the heyday, right. I get the feeling that today
Speaker 1: it's sort of in that extreme sports category, especially with
Speaker 1: these rigid wing But back in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: like dudes like my dad would probably go out and
Speaker 1: give it a whirl right in his jeep. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: Like my dad para glided or paras sailed on one
Speaker 1: Florida trip one time, I remember, and in true like
Speaker 1: my dad fashion was he was like, I'm the only
Speaker 1: one doing this. It's like, I'm not gonna pay for
Speaker 1: you guys to do it. The one but no way,
Speaker 1: the one behind the boat. Mhmm. Yeah, Uman did that.
Speaker 1: Once it got stuck up there for some reason, they
Speaker 1: couldn't get her, like her and the friends she was
Speaker 1: with down for a while, suck floating aloft. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: don't they just stop the boat and you come down.
Speaker 1: I don't remember what the problem was, but there was
Speaker 1: an issue that they couldn't like her her turn or
Speaker 1: her ride or whatever, just kept going on and on
Speaker 1: and on for some reason. I feel like the boat
Speaker 1: didn't stop. They're like, I can't take my foot off
Speaker 1: the gas. But by the way, and something you do
Speaker 1: probably it's usually with the hand. I can't take my
Speaker 1: hand off the gas. Yeah, exactly. There. So you want
Speaker 1: to take a little break and then come back and
Speaker 1: get into hang gliders themselves, Yeah, let's suit up. Okay, yeah, okay, man.
Speaker 1: So hang gliders at its core an extremely simple machine, right,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's actually a pretty clever one too, to
Speaker 1: tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure. I can't
Speaker 1: really put my finger on why I'm so jazzed about
Speaker 1: the idea of trying it, but it's somewhere in here. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: So you get the hang glider, which is basically an
Speaker 1: air foil, right, yeah, and are we going to differentiate
Speaker 1: a lot between the sort of the old school and
Speaker 1: the and the new ones and the rigid wing. I
Speaker 1: I looked up the difference and I didn't see a
Speaker 1: terrible amount of difference. I saw that the rigid ones
Speaker 1: have um they glide a lot longer, I think um
Speaker 1: or they have like less of a sync rate. But
Speaker 1: other than that, it's more of like a matter of
Speaker 1: personal preference. And then you would train on the flexible
Speaker 1: one for sure, So they still use flex wings. Okay,
Speaker 1: I just wasn't. I had for some reason thought reddit
Speaker 1: as sort of like the rigid wing took the place
Speaker 1: of the flexible wing. No, I think it did not. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's a different it's a modified design. And if you're
Speaker 1: really really good at um at hand gliding, you you
Speaker 1: may prefer the rigid, but you may also prefer the
Speaker 1: flex you don't, you wouldn't necessarily graduate from one to
Speaker 1: the other. And then the rigid didn't replace the flex wing,
Speaker 1: all right, And just so people know for sure, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the flexible wing. It's sort of that old
Speaker 1: school hang glidder you think of that. Uh, it looks
Speaker 1: like a modified parachute, and in fact it is like
Speaker 1: a nylon parachute that you can hear kind of flapping
Speaker 1: in the wind over some sort of aluminum frame. The
Speaker 1: rigid wing is ordered the same but the fabric, it's
Speaker 1: the wings themselves are it's just stiffer. It's not like
Speaker 1: it's made out of wood or anything like that. It's
Speaker 1: just like a stiffer um like the exoskeleton. I'm not
Speaker 1: describing this very well. Once you bring the exo skeleton in,
Speaker 1: it's all downhill from there. How would you describe the
Speaker 1: rigid wing? So like it was, like you said, the
Speaker 1: flex wing, it kind of flaps in the wind. It's
Speaker 1: it's it covers a skeleton. But the rigid wing is
Speaker 1: is virtually the same thing, but it has like struts, say,
Speaker 1: woven into it that keeps it from flapping as much.
Speaker 1: It makes it makes the fabric rigid. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: like a pre fab wing you know that you would
Speaker 1: load out of your car. Yeah. They're really tough to
Speaker 1: travel with it from what I understand. As far as
Speaker 1: like if you're flying somewhere on an airplane, you would
Speaker 1: you would have to take your flexible wing pair and
Speaker 1: glider like on an airplane. Yeah. Yeah, they disassemble really easily.
Speaker 1: The like all of the joints are hinged, the tubes
Speaker 1: pop out of one another. Um. The the actual um
Speaker 1: fabric folds up and comes off and the wires, you know,
Speaker 1: snap off. It's like whenever you're you're going to hang glide,
Speaker 1: you want to put your thing, you want to assemble it,
Speaker 1: and then you disassemble it when you're done. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: they're like somewhere between forty seventy pounds, and from what
Speaker 1: I can tell, the ones that way less are the
Speaker 1: much more expensive ones because they might not even be
Speaker 1: made out of aluminum. They may be made out of
Speaker 1: something even light or like carbon fiber or something like that.
Speaker 1: So the so, the whole, the whole point, whether you're
Speaker 1: talking about and I don't really think we need to
Speaker 1: get into two rigid wing just because it is just
Speaker 1: a modified version of the flexible wing and the flexible
Speaker 1: wings the one that everybody's familiar with. But with the
Speaker 1: flexible wing, it's basically it's just a triangular skeleton made
Speaker 1: of hollow aluminum aircraft grade aluminum tubes or carbon fiber tubes,
Speaker 1: and you've basically got three um three tubes coming out
Speaker 1: at one point. Did you ever take an art class
Speaker 1: of drawing class? Nope, this can not make sense to you. Then,
Speaker 1: well I've seen a hang glider though, Okay, well, so
Speaker 1: if there's a point, if there's a the very front
Speaker 1: tip of the triangle of that, that the that is
Speaker 1: the hand glider. Then right the widow maker, the that's
Speaker 1: the nose. Out of the nose, going directly back away
Speaker 1: from you is a piece of metal, a tube called
Speaker 1: the keel, yes, going at angles out of the nose
Speaker 1: backward away from you as well. Those are the leading
Speaker 1: edge tubes. And then about halfway back from the nose,
Speaker 1: crossing the leading edge tubes and the keel connecting them all,
Speaker 1: that's the crossbar. You have those four bars put together,
Speaker 1: that's the basically the basic skeleton of the of the
Speaker 1: hand glider. Okay, And if you haven't seen one of these,
Speaker 1: just crawl out from under your rock, go to your laptop,
Speaker 1: look at a picture of it. And you know, when
Speaker 1: I was researching this, especially when Freud and Rich started
Speaker 1: to get into the wires, the front wires and the
Speaker 1: landing wires, and I was like, now I fully understand
Speaker 1: what they mean when they say that a picture is
Speaker 1: worth a thousand words. Like Freuden Rich could have spent
Speaker 1: five thousand words explaining all this and he still wouldn't
Speaker 1: have nailed it like a picture would it's just impossible
Speaker 1: in a situation like this. Well, you've already explained more
Speaker 1: than I would have. I would have just said, a
Speaker 1: series of tubes and wires. Okay, So a series of
Speaker 1: tubes connected, and then you've got the fabric covering that
Speaker 1: you got wires having like holly, connecting everything um and
Speaker 1: stabilizing it. And then the key to all of this,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of keys. This is where it starts
Speaker 1: to get fascinating. There's something called the control bar, right,
Speaker 1: and the control bar is like a triangle that dangles
Speaker 1: right in front of you when you're hanging from the
Speaker 1: hand glider. And this is the thing that you you
Speaker 1: have your hands on. It's it's how you control the
Speaker 1: hand glidder, which is why it's called the control bar.
Speaker 1: And then the next really essential piece, and I'll stop
Speaker 1: after this, I promise, is the harness, which is suspended
Speaker 1: from the keel above you, right behind where the control
Speaker 1: bar hits the keel right, and so you are prone,
Speaker 1: you're lying on your stomach when you're flying, and you're
Speaker 1: hanging onto the control bar and you're dangling from the
Speaker 1: hand glider above, which is why it's called hand gliding.
Speaker 1: Because you're hanging from the hand glider. Fascinating it is,
Speaker 1: and I imagine in the nineties seventies it seemed like
Speaker 1: a fun idea when you're in Hawaii, we've had a
Speaker 1: couple of rum drinks to uh to get in a suit,
Speaker 1: throw on the helmet, strap into that harness and run
Speaker 1: off the side of a cliff because that's how you used.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can still launch like that, but it
Speaker 1: looks like it's gotten a little more uh, like that's
Speaker 1: fallen out of fashion a little bit, the run off
Speaker 1: the cliff version. I don't know if that's true. Man,
Speaker 1: I think that that's like, um, that you're an advanced
Speaker 1: hand glider, that's probably how you're going to try it,
Speaker 1: although you yeah, although you can't, I mean, you can't
Speaker 1: do um, you know, like a dune or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's really good for training or whatever. But they have
Speaker 1: like I don't know if you call it, like a
Speaker 1: launch ramp or something like that, but like some sort
Speaker 1: of launch that they build onto the edges of cliffs
Speaker 1: to run off of for hand gliding, and they're just
Speaker 1: terrifying to even look at pictures of. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: i'd say I'm not scared to do it, but I'm
Speaker 1: I imagine I would have some butterflies when you go
Speaker 1: and run and jump off that thing, Right, I would too, man,
Speaker 1: So don't feel bad. But you see people do it.
Speaker 1: And my immediate thought is I'm gonna nose dive, But
Speaker 1: you don't knows dive thanks to physics. Right, And do
Speaker 1: you want to take a break and then get into
Speaker 1: the physics. Yeah, we might as well hang gliding shock
Speaker 1: all right, physics. So the reason a hang glider works
Speaker 1: is because of its elegant lightweight design and the way
Speaker 1: the air moves over these wings, and then all of
Speaker 1: these other forces acting in concert with one another to
Speaker 1: make sure you stay up there for as long as possible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first one we're talking about is lift. The
Speaker 1: air goes over the surface of that wing, and that's
Speaker 1: going to generate that lift when you run and you
Speaker 1: jump off of that platform, and it's going to counter
Speaker 1: the gravity. But gravity in this case is not bad
Speaker 1: like gravity is actually going to be. While it does
Speaker 1: want to pull you to Earth, it's what's making you
Speaker 1: go forward continuing that airflow. Gravity is is your friend
Speaker 1: in this case. Yeah, and then you've got drag, which
Speaker 1: is really the the other one. Um, those three factors
Speaker 1: together are what really applied to hang gliding, and drag
Speaker 1: is what ultimately slows you down. It's you're running into
Speaker 1: air molecules, and the faster you go, the more drag
Speaker 1: you have, the more the faster you get slowed down,
Speaker 1: which then brings in the syncrate, which is the speed
Speaker 1: at which a hang glider starts to descend towards Earth.
Speaker 1: It's measured in like feet per second in still air, okay, right,
Speaker 1: and the distance it can travel is determined by something
Speaker 1: called the glide ratio, which is the ratio of the
Speaker 1: forward distance through the vertical distance dropped for forward distance
Speaker 1: you've traveled to your to that drop rate. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: like say every twenty four ft you move forward, you
Speaker 1: drop like one ft downward. Right, So that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's really basically it for physics. But the hand gliding
Speaker 1: would be like an entirely different sport if it weren't
Speaker 1: for um, the ability to catch air currents. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of all about that. Otherwise they would just be
Speaker 1: pretty quick rides. They would be I mean, like it'd
Speaker 1: be pretty awesome still, especially if you like you launched
Speaker 1: off a cliff and then just kind of glided slowly
Speaker 1: downward toward the toward the Earth. It's still be pretty cool,
Speaker 1: but you can you can catch air currents if you
Speaker 1: know what you're doing and stay aloft for hours and
Speaker 1: go across parts entire parts of the country. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, the um the record for the longest
Speaker 1: distance traveled is like four hundred and seventy two miles,
Speaker 1: so I think it's like seven kilometers. They basically what
Speaker 1: these two dudes went from Lubbock, Texas to Nuevo Laredo
Speaker 1: over the course of I think like eleven hours maybe
Speaker 1: something like that. And the way that you do this
Speaker 1: is that you go find these air currents, and there's
Speaker 1: a couple of places you can reasonably expect you're going
Speaker 1: to find upward lift from air, right, Yeah, hot air
Speaker 1: is one way thermal lift. And that's like over a desert,
Speaker 1: like hot sand or pavement prefer the hot sand over pavement,
Speaker 1: or if it's super sunny. And and I get the
Speaker 1: feeling that when the more experience you have, the more
Speaker 1: you know how to how to look around your environment
Speaker 1: to feel and see where this might be happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Supposedly one way that they do it is to look
Speaker 1: for birds that are just sitting there kind of soaring. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you can just go catch that air column whatever
Speaker 1: it is that they're soaring on. Right. That's one of
Speaker 1: the most like relaxing things for me to see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a hawk, almost emotionless, just sort of floating. Now
Speaker 1: imagine doing it yourself. Yeah, didn't that seem relaxing? I
Speaker 1: think it sounds great. Yeah, No, I would. I would
Speaker 1: enjoy it. I'm sure it's not gonna get through a
Speaker 1: lot of effort to make it happen. Yeah, apparently I've
Speaker 1: made it my mission to get you hang gliding for
Speaker 1: some reason. And what it's a in the Chips episode,
Speaker 1: you will have rigged my hang glider to cratch right,
Speaker 1: poor Robert Pine. Uh. And then he's Robert Pine. He
Speaker 1: was there like captain or sergeant. Yeah, great, great actor.
Speaker 1: I can picture him immediately in my brain. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then you've got something called ridge lift, and that's air
Speaker 1: that's that's deflected up by um like a mountain or
Speaker 1: a ridge, and the basically the topography of the ground
Speaker 1: beneath you and around you. You can learn to read
Speaker 1: that stuff and you know where these swells and columns
Speaker 1: of air gonna be right. And when you when you
Speaker 1: find these columns of air, these lifts, like, you don't
Speaker 1: just fly into them and all of a sudden you're
Speaker 1: up because they're actually usually fairly small. Um, so you
Speaker 1: would basically fly right through them, maybe get a little
Speaker 1: bit of lift, but then you just keep going and
Speaker 1: start descending again. If you're going to catch an air
Speaker 1: current and upward air current, you um basically want to
Speaker 1: enter into a tight spiral, basically an upward corkscrew spiral.
Speaker 1: You're you're following the air current upward. And to do this,
Speaker 1: it's all just basically based on simple movements of your body.
Speaker 1: That's the whole thing with steering and controlling a hand glider.
Speaker 1: It all has to do with the different um adjustments
Speaker 1: to the weight you're putting on the control bar at
Speaker 1: triangle that's in front of you that you're hanging onto.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. So um, you know you go left and right,
Speaker 1: but I think literally shifting your body as it's hanging
Speaker 1: and you go up and down by tipping and it's
Speaker 1: you know, it may see encounterintuitive or who knows. Once
Speaker 1: you're up there. It may seem like the right way
Speaker 1: to do it, but in order to go up, you
Speaker 1: tip the nose down, and then vice versa. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: to tip the nose down, you pull the control bar
Speaker 1: towards you, so you're shifting your weight forward, and when
Speaker 1: you push put that that nose down, your trade again
Speaker 1: some of your altitude. You know, you're you're basically creating
Speaker 1: a nose dive, but just for just enough to to
Speaker 1: speed up and then to slow down. You push the
Speaker 1: control bar away from you, which tips the nose up,
Speaker 1: which basically stops the um the glide of the glider.
Speaker 1: It turns it. Yeah, it turns it into like a
Speaker 1: piece of fabric trying to go forward through space rather
Speaker 1: than something just cutting smoothly horizontally. It's it's starting, it's
Speaker 1: now vertical in some way, and it slows it down.
Speaker 1: And that's actually the way you land too. Apparently you
Speaker 1: can land on your feet very gently. Once you're close
Speaker 1: to the ground, you start to stall by pushing the
Speaker 1: control bar away from you, That lifts the nose up,
Speaker 1: cut your speed off, and then you just kind of
Speaker 1: in a nice gentle trot, hit the ground and and
Speaker 1: you say, I just hang glided. Yes, I think what
Speaker 1: I would worry about for myself is that, um, some
Speaker 1: of this stuff may not be intuitive or instinctive, and
Speaker 1: I would do the wrong thing and then panic. So, uh,
Speaker 1: that's actually a really good point. Um. This group called
Speaker 1: Kitty Hawk Kites from North Carolina, which are actually sited
Speaker 1: in the House to Works article, they had like a
Speaker 1: really good tips for beginner's article as well, and they
Speaker 1: say one of the things that you have to learn
Speaker 1: is to remain calm, because it takes a bit of finesse.
Speaker 1: From what I understand it takes. Um. You have to
Speaker 1: you have to be able to very smoothly move your
Speaker 1: weight around and if you're anxious and you're hanging onto
Speaker 1: the control bar too too tight, your movements are going
Speaker 1: to be kind of herky jerky, and it's it's not
Speaker 1: a good way to hang glide. So you want to
Speaker 1: be you want to be relaxed and controlled. And they
Speaker 1: say that the best way to do this is to
Speaker 1: have a few tandem lessons. First, I have a few drinks.
Speaker 1: I would guess that. I don't know if they would
Speaker 1: recommend that or not. Maybe yeah, and maybe one for
Speaker 1: when you're up there too. But yeah, yeah, they're like
Speaker 1: where'd you get that? But they offer like tandem lessons, right,
Speaker 1: so you're you're on there next to somebody who is
Speaker 1: an experienced hang glider and they're controlling and then they
Speaker 1: can hand over the control the control bar to you,
Speaker 1: but say, okay, now let's go left or let's go right,
Speaker 1: And all that is is just shifting your weight left,
Speaker 1: shifting your weight right, shifting your weight forward or backward
Speaker 1: for up or down. It's as simple as that. But
Speaker 1: I think remaining calm is a huge part of the
Speaker 1: whole thing. That's a good point, yeah, for sure. Um
Speaker 1: So if you're an experienced pilot, you might also have
Speaker 1: some other gear up there with you, um, like in
Speaker 1: a variometer, and this is what in a lot of
Speaker 1: these you can hear, so you don't have to look
Speaker 1: at it. It'll like, I guess it barks out. You know,
Speaker 1: you're climbing in descent rate, which is pretty handy. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then what's the other one the altimeter? Uh altimeter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the one that just tells you what your altitude
Speaker 1: is called the altimeter altimet tear and you're gonna want
Speaker 1: goggles and obviously the helmet. And I think if you
Speaker 1: do these more, the higher up extreme things, you're gonna
Speaker 1: also have a parachute. Yeah, when you're hitting thousands of feet. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They say that most of the accidents that happened happened
Speaker 1: on takeoff or landing, that it's rarely. Um, does somebody
Speaker 1: just fall out of the sky even when they hit turbulence.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna like just drop out of the sky
Speaker 1: like a stone. Um, that's just not how aerodynamics works.
Speaker 1: But you'll have a bumpy ride. It's more like you, um,
Speaker 1: you hit a tree or you um like you feel
Speaker 1: like you fall off the cliff, like you're your your
Speaker 1: hand glider doesn't catch air right or something like that.
Speaker 1: That that's usually on takeoff or landing when you when
Speaker 1: you have a crash. Although I did see, um I
Speaker 1: think it was might have and because that is of course,
Speaker 1: looked up hand gliding deaths and um, this one guy
Speaker 1: like fell out of his hand glider entirely, oh man
Speaker 1: and went to the ground. Yeah, that would be That'd
Speaker 1: be one way that it could happen too. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if we said or not. Otto Lilienthal died
Speaker 1: in a hand gliding crash. That's how he went, Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't think I need that very appropriately, you know,
Speaker 1: so um in reading Kittie hawk Kites description of you
Speaker 1: know what what it feels like when you're learning how
Speaker 1: to hang glide? So they hang glide on sand dunes,
Speaker 1: which is virtually the same area that the Wright brothers
Speaker 1: tried their stuff out on. And the reason why they
Speaker 1: use sand dunes because there's a gentle slope for one,
Speaker 1: but number two, if you fall, you fall into sand,
Speaker 1: which is much more forgiving than, like you said, pavement. Right,
Speaker 1: But when you're when you're hang gliding, when you're learning
Speaker 1: how to do this, the whole point is, man, they
Speaker 1: did such a good job describing me. And basically they said,
Speaker 1: imagine you're running down a hill, right, and you don't
Speaker 1: have a hang glider. You're just running downhill. Eventually you're
Speaker 1: gonna pick up enough speed that your legs can't keep
Speaker 1: up with it. Gravity is pulling you downward, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna start tumbling downhill. So it's you you just crashed
Speaker 1: running downhill, right, they said. With a hang glider, what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're running downhill and you're picking up
Speaker 1: that same speed. But you're using the hang glider to
Speaker 1: stabilize yourself so that your legs don't get ahead of yourself.
Speaker 1: And if you can find that balance, and it just
Speaker 1: takes a few times to practice this, well, probably several times,
Speaker 1: but if you can find that balance to where you
Speaker 1: can trust and stabilize yourself with the hang glider as
Speaker 1: you're running down the slope, eventually the weight of your
Speaker 1: body and the hand glider that you're holding, because remember
Speaker 1: it ways up to about seventy pounds, the weight of
Speaker 1: the two things starts to be transferred as the there
Speaker 1: as lift is produced under the hand glider from the
Speaker 1: bottoms of your feet to the straps of your harness,
Speaker 1: and little by little that that weight is transferred and
Speaker 1: eventually your feet are no longer making contact with the ground.
Speaker 1: And I'll bet there's a cute few seconds where your
Speaker 1: feet are just going through the area, you know, and
Speaker 1: the it's now the straps holding you up and through
Speaker 1: so it's the hang glider through the straps holding you up,
Speaker 1: and you've just taken off and now you're so ring
Speaker 1: but I would be like, I'm not ready yet, and
Speaker 1: then then you just pull the pull back on the
Speaker 1: control bar or push No, I'm sorry, you push forward
Speaker 1: on the control bar, the nose would go up and
Speaker 1: you'd you'd land after just you know, being a couple
Speaker 1: of feet off the ground if you had your head
Speaker 1: about you. But what they're saying is is like, even
Speaker 1: if you never do catch air, as long as you
Speaker 1: don't hesitate and you just keep you know, using the
Speaker 1: hand glider to stabilize yourself, at the worst, you're gonna
Speaker 1: just end up at the bottom of the hill having
Speaker 1: run down there and never caught air. At best you
Speaker 1: will have caught air right and you'll just taken off.
Speaker 1: But the whole point with them is is that you're
Speaker 1: training on sand, so even if you bite it, you're
Speaker 1: still just in sand, so it's fine. All this explains though,
Speaker 1: why they don't just say, okay, here's a cliff with
Speaker 1: a lawn tramp run off. You have to know what
Speaker 1: you're doing and it eventually you wanted to be You
Speaker 1: wanted to go from a gradual transfer to a very
Speaker 1: sudden transfer of weight from your feet to the strap
Speaker 1: to the harness. Correct. Yeah, And then there's one other
Speaker 1: way that you can do this too, and it's being
Speaker 1: towed by a machine. Like Paris sailing right, you're being
Speaker 1: towed by a boat. Well, I was reading this article
Speaker 1: from I think, and people in Kansas they have nothing
Speaker 1: to launch off of. But they were still in hang gliding,
Speaker 1: so they were using tow trucks or not toe trucks,
Speaker 1: pickup trucks. They just sit in the back of pickup
Speaker 1: trucks with like a little cable attached to them, and
Speaker 1: as the pickup chuck gain speed, there glider would start
Speaker 1: to be picked up and they eventually disconnect themselves and
Speaker 1: hang glide around. Kansas launched me a pickup of course,
Speaker 1: it's Kansas awesome. It does not surprise me. No, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. I think I might even feel a little
Speaker 1: better about automobile doing the work for me. Oh really,
Speaker 1: a pickup chuck? Well maybe, I mean, do they do
Speaker 1: they just tell you around? Literally parasl styled. Do they
Speaker 1: tell you to ord a Well, they don't have any
Speaker 1: cliffs in Kansas. No, they don't. They don't have anything.
Speaker 1: You're your your golden in that respect. The only cliffs
Speaker 1: in Kansas are delivering your mail. Nice one, Um, I
Speaker 1: have one more thing, You got anything else? I got
Speaker 1: one more thing. So the earliest earliest hand gliding designs
Speaker 1: didn't use a harness. It was like a hang glider
Speaker 1: like you have, right, but you would run and then eventually,
Speaker 1: like the hang glider would would just lift off and
Speaker 1: you'd be dangling like a rock from the control bar,
Speaker 1: hanging on for dear life. Rather than being connected by
Speaker 1: a harness in a prone position. You would just be
Speaker 1: hanging from like downward from the control bard. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean it was nothing like the hang glider like experience
Speaker 1: that we have now. They didn't last very long and
Speaker 1: they didn't go very far and get very high. But
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of like a zip line. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's it. That's hang glider man. There you have it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go do it this uh this spring. We
Speaker 1: are yes, we are all right. If you want to
Speaker 1: know more about hand gladding, go take a lesson and
Speaker 1: try it yourself. And in the meantime you can go
Speaker 1: check out this ancient how stuff works article. It's hilarious. Um,
Speaker 1: and just type in hand gliding and the search bar,
Speaker 1: you know, bring this up and said say said that
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