lastig landen

Davis postte dit stukje, te mooi om niet integraal over te nemen:

Jim Rooney writes:

The first issue with landing a hang glider, the nose stalls before the tips.

There's so much focus on body position and hand position, which do help, but virtually nothing on how the whole shooting match works. Quite simply, if you can stall the tips of your glider, you will have a good landing. If you do not stall them, you will not have a good landing.

How you accomplish this is the source of so much debate. So many inadequate explanations that all start with "well you just…"

Landing a hang glider is unnatural. To do it well, you must come in fast. You must stop the glider and make it tail slide, something you never do otherwise and never even toy with otherwise, as the results would be disastrous.

You have to approach the ground at a speed both vertically and horizontally which, if you did nothing else, would hurt and would likely put you in the hospital. Every instinct you have screams at you to not do this.

Every bone in your body begs you to come in at a speed that won't hurt. You want to slow down, both horizontally and vertically, to a speed which will not harm you. This is the #1 reason people whack.

Because at this slower speed (descending at trim), it is insanely difficult to stall your tips. The nose of the glider will quite happily stall, leaving your tips flying and pushing the trailing edge up. This pushes the nose down. This is why pilots feel like the glider is "getting ahead of them".

This concept is crucial to any discussion of landing technique. Before it is understood, no real progress is made. There is so much emphasis on the rest of "how to land," and universally, people skip the lynch pin of landing.