600ft flight, Dungiven

This was an awesome day. With only one thing that I would have changed, one less thistle in the landing field. Bertie (my instructor) took me to a new site that overlooked the town of Dungiven. We stopped at the bottom of a steep road and climbed into a field which I was to land in, we surveyed the site from this angle and talked about the hazards (telegraph poles, power lines and stone walls), set up a wind sock and then set off up the hill road in the car.

Dungiven, 600 feet above the landing field.

At the top there was the view of the town of Dungiven below and mountains in the distance. I laid out the glider and did my daily inspection. Discussed my flight plan, by the time it came for me to attempt the flight the wind had moved from W to WNW, which was just about ok for me to fly. After one false start (make sure the glider is above your head before you stop leaning into the hardness) in a reverse launch I got the glider above my head and stable, so I turned and ran and ran, and ran (with the encouragement of Bertie, "run, run, run" on the radio). Eventually I took off (it seems there was a short lull in wind at the exact moment I decided to take off) and was happily flying according to my flight plan, got a few 180 degree turns in, and generally enjoyed myself.

After I had lost enough height I started my final approach to the landing field. I was aiming for landing on the wind sock, but as I was coming in, the landing slope seemed to be about the same gradient as my wing's glide angle and I just flew on and on past the wind sock with my boots about 8 feet of the ground. Eventually I realised that I need to do something so I slowly pulled the controls for a fairly gentle (if at a jogging pace) landing directly on top of a thistle. It went straight between my legs, spiking both as it passed. It wasn't yet time to cry though as I had to concentrate on collapsing the canopy in a controlled manner, and I sort of succeeded. I spent the next fifteen minutes alternating between packing the glider away and picking thorns out of my jeans.

Dungiven is a great site because if you land in the bottom field, some kindly soul will drive down and collect you. When Bertie picked me up I asked what height that was, so he got out a variometer (a device for measuring rates of lift and sink, plus it tells you your altitude) and reset it before we drove back up the hill, it turns out it was 600 feet!

After some messing with Google Earth (an invaluable tool for wannabe paraglider pilots' daydreaming I might add) I worked out that I would have flown over a mile in distance albeit repeatedly over the same area multiple times.


After this flight the wind moved around more to the north, rendering the site un-flyable (at least for me). At this point I would have called it a day and gone home, but my instructor had other ideas, we went to a private site called White mountain. Site familiarisation is a very important part of paragliding but unfortunately this is all the weather allowed me to do, then again the pain of not flying is dulled by views like these.

That is Lough Neagh in the distance