The theme for issue 72, whose sunny cover shows a hang glider in a steep turn over Hawaii. Readers were taken on a tour of the Canaries the Portuguese archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores and the Pacific Ocean’s Hawaii. Samll, volcanic landmasses in the sea, sun-drenched and battered by north-easterly trade winds, each island is a lure for sun-seekers and pilots looking for something different.
For instance, the “aggressive, almost violent” landscape of Tenerife is dominated by the 3700m Mount Teide, the highest landmass in Spain and third largest volcano in the world (the other two are in Hawaii). Most of the flying happens in the south of the island, which thus tends to breed very technical pilots with good lee-side flying skillson an island where take off is often at 1000m and cloudbase at 1700m. The rewards are reportedly fantastic offering varied views of deep verdant gorges and seashore moonscapes.
In the Portfolio pages Welsh photographer Ray Wood captured some stunning landscapes, a dark red sky and black silhouettes of a summit cross and a lone walker descending a rocky ridge, sadly uncaptioned. Ray’s images ranges from beautiful compositions filled with the lurid purples and fluorescent pinks of early 1990s paragliding, to some telling reportage shots. In one Bob Drury stands on in amusement as an angry Welsh farmer marches straight across his laid-out glider in protest, on the summit of Snowdon. In another the viewer can only look in horror, grateful that the picture suspends time, for what happened next must surely have been unpleasant. Pilot Patrice Bonnefond is mid-fall beneath a glider that is a total mess, a few metres above the ground just after take-off at the 1993 Worlds in Verbier. I hope Patrice was not too badly injured.
Competitions still had a bad reputation when it come to accidents. The competitive flying world at the time was digesting CIVL’s announcement of new pilot entry requirements for the 2001 paragliding World Championships. It said pilots had to have an FAI Gold Badge, have flown 100 km and also to have finished in the top 2/3 of a PWC. CIVL said it was a necessary move to make competitions safer, as inexperienced pilots were “maiming or killing themselves far too often.
Posted by: Lets Go Paraglide
