Paragliding
Learn how to paraglide with these tips from record-breaker Aaron Durogati
Paragliding is the purest form of flying and it's not that hard to start. Aaron Durogati, one of the world's best pilots, is here to explain how you can get yourself in the air.
Aaron Durogati was only six-years-old when he first went paragliding, and 20 years after that tandem ride with his dad, he won the Paragliding World Cup. "It's very easy to catch the bug," he explains.
If you've watched paragliders sailing over mountains or cliff tops and fancied a go, or if you've tried out a tandem flight and got a taste for it, how easy is it really to learn to fly by yourself? Turns out, it's not that hard at all, as Durogati explains.
Aaron Durogati's natural home is in the mountains
© Kelvin Trautman/Red Bull Content Pool
Why choose paragliding over other types of human flight?
Paragliding is something you can do all by yourself, and it gives you the ultimate freedom. Wingsuit flying is very cool, but you have to go to an airport and jump from a plane. Parachuting is the same. Gliding, you need a plane to give you a lift up, and hang gliding is just way more complicated.
With Paragliding, you just have a backpack that you carry up a mountain, and you don't have to ask anyone for help. If the weather is good, you can just fly.
It's also about the view and the peace – there's no engine noise, and you fly at a speed where you can see everything. It's about the thrill. At the start, even just doing a top to bottom flight makes you feel like superman. Then, as you get better, you can keep challenging yourself with different manoeuvres and harder conditions.
Paragliding is the ultimate freedom
© Daniele Molineris/Red Bull Content Pool
What physical preparation do you need to be able to paraglide?
If your goal is just to glide in a valley, with easy conditions, you don't need to be that strong – almost anyone can do it. However it's a bit like skiing, where to go from an easy blue run to riding the steep stuff requires a very different level of physical preparation.
Arm strength is obviously important to steer the glider, but you also need lower body strength, because to accelerate you have to push on a speed bar with your legs. You also need good neck strength, because you lie down to be more aerodynamic and the neck has a lot of forces on it.
Physical strength is important if you want to advance in paragliding
© Daniele Molineris/Red Bull Content Pool
What special techniques and skills are required?
Really, you just need to be a person who doesn't panic easily. If you're a calm person, you can fly. The basics are obvious: pull the right handle to fly right, pull the left to fly left, pull both down to go slower, and keep both up to go faster.
You can't just jump off a mountain straight away, so how do you learn?
You learn on a student field, which ideally starts steep and then flattens out, or is just flat. There you learn how to inflate the glider, and keep it above your head. You then run and fly maybe 2m above the ground, and then land. When you can deal with that well, you're ready for a real take-off.
At that stage, you'll always have a flying instructor connected to you via a radio, so you're basically like a drone. The instructor will steer you, telling you, "Okay, make 180° turn to the left, fly straight, and keep your hands up', and so on. Little by little you learn how to do it alone, and then go for it.
When you're starting out, make sure you take on a qualified instructor
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What kit does a beginner need to buy?
There are five essential pieces of equipment: the paraglider, a harness, a rescue parachute, helmet, and a flying instrument, which tells you your speed and how fast you're climbing or dropping. Normally, the school will lend you all this, and once you get your licence you buy your own.
In the past, it was popular to use overalls to fly in, but now people just wear the same sort of outfit you would in the mountains. Parachutists wear them, because they travel around 200kph when they jump and a normal jacket would flap. Paragliders cruise at about 40–60kph, so we don't have that problem.
A flying instrument is an important part of a paraglider's kit
© Vitek Ludvik/Red Bull Content Pool
How do you choose where to learn?
You have to do a course to be certified to fly, and usually people choose a school based on recommendations. If you don't know anyone who could advise, ask at a local club, or online on something like Paragliding Forum.
How much of learning is about confidence?
At the beginning, everything looks super difficult, and you can't imagine how it will work. However, the more you do it, the more you gain confidence. For me, I quite quickly started to feel comfortable in the air.
The more you paraglide, the more confident you get
© Daniele Molineris/Red Bull Content Pool
You put a lot of faith in equipment, and what checks do you do?
I always have a checklist in my head. Once I open my glider, I check the lines aren't twisted or knotted, and then I check I've connected the riser to the harness and that the harness is closed. Then I check it all again. A few accidents have happened where a pilot's harness wasn't properly closed and they fell, so to check everything is very important.
What are the common mistakes people make when they start?
People work the glider too much. If you do nothing and just leave the glider to fly by itself, it flies really well. Normally, beginners overcorrect and pull the brakes too much. If they get a collapse of the glider and are slowing it down too much, it will take much longer for it to recover and get back to normal flight. Instead, you should just put your hands up and do nothing.
Also, on take-off, the glider starts to pull you into the air after a couple of steps, and often beginners sit into the harness too quickly. You should keep running until you have a few metres below you. If you sit too early, the glider won't take off, because it doesn't have enough power to get up.
One, two, three, go
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Once you've learned, how do you progress?
You're always learning something new, and once you've mastered the basic skills, it's mostly about learning to read the conditions, spotting wind flows and thermals. For that, you need a lot of imagination.
You can't see what the air is doing, but it's always moving. It's like water. I always imagine it like a river running through the valley, and I use that to try to predict where the turbulence and lift will be.
Always be aware that air conditions can affect your paragliding experience
© Harald Tauderer/Red Bull Content Pool
You need to know what direction the wind's coming from, which you can tell from instruments, or from signs like a smoking chimney, a wind flag in the valley, how the clouds are moving, or what direction the birds are flying. You then look around, and think what the water would do. At a mountain ridge, for instance, it would go up the side and then drop down, so immediately you can imagine that on the lee side of the rock you'd get turbulence, and at the front you should get rising air.
Spotting thermals is another important technique. A thermal is air that is around three degrees warmer than the air around it, so you have look at the features in front of you, and think which will warm up most from the sun.
For example, if you see a forest, a rocky cliff and a field of yellow grass, the field would get hottest, so you would try to fly over it, because it should have a thermal there. It might not do what you'd expect, though, so then you'd fly to the rocks, as they would be the next warmest. The forest would be your last option.
That's the fun thing about paragliding. Even if your theory is right, you could be wrong, so you need multiple back up plans, or your flight will end quickly. I'm sure when I started to fly, I would have thought that when I got to the level I am now, I would know everything, but you don't. You're always learning little details that make you fly longer, further, and have more fun.