Hang Gliding - The 12-step-off-a-cliff Program
Outside Magazine . February 2001

Thanks to improved safety standards & tandem flights, scores of acrophobes are giving Hang Gliding a second wind, and now they're soaring in style - over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Hi. My name is Brad. I'm six feet, seven inches tall - and I'm afraid of heights. No. Really. It's not a paralyzing fear. I'm able to keep the panic in check so long as I have an immediate goal. Yet going up, time and again, only reinforces what I already know: I'm afraid of coming down. And when I stare into an abyss - lying on my belly, peering over the brink of Yosemite's Half Dome, say - a different sort of swoon ceases me. I feel drawn over the edge, as if the void were calling me. It's not a death wish; I am petrified by the impulse. But it won't be blinked away, this seductive urge to go and fly. To deal with my fear, I have, over the years, devised my own acrophobia-recovery scheme. I've let friends take me up the odd Bay Bridge tower. Twice, I tried bungee jumping, and while both jumps gave me an inkling of what it was to let gravity have it's way with me, only at the very top of a bungee bounce--weightless for an instance--did I get a sense of what it might be like to fly. Then a friend turned me onto tandem hang gliding. Often marketed as "discovery flights"-- designed to give you a taste of flight and help you to determine if you'd like to sign up for the dozen odd courses you'll need to become a certified novice, and oh, yes, buy a new $1,500 - $3,000 entry-level rig--these introductory lessons are bringing hang gliding and paragliding to the masses like never before. Some 40 percent of the United States Hang Gliding Association's 10,000 members joined in the past two years. Fueled by web marketing, tandem flights and solo aero towing (in which an ultralight plane tows a Hang Glider heavenward) have given rise to what association president David Glover describes as a nationwide renaissance. Improved safety hasn't hurt either. "In the early years, it was like war," says Chris Wills, 49, who with his brother Bobby flew the nations first foot-launched tandem wing off Palmdale, California's Delta Hill in 1973. Chris, now an orthopedic surgeon in the nearby town of Orange, eventually lost not one, but two brothers (including Bobby) to crashes. "There were about 40 pilots in the first US Hang Gliding championship," Wills says. "A few years later about half of them were gone. But the technology today is vastly improved. It's a much safer sport now." Indeed, in 1976 alone, 38 American pilots "augured in" (that is, bought the farm); in 2000 there were just two hang gliding fatalities.

You don't have to tell Bodhi Kroll that the sport is booming. The founder of the San Francisco Hang Gliding Center (www.sfhanggliding.com or 510-528-2300) watched his revenue quadruple in his second year and double in the two years since. He now has five pilots working year-round, and after finally securing permits from the Coast Guard and the FAA as well as various municipal bodies, Krolls firm began offering the first tandem flights over San Francisco Bay last September. Kroll says February offers fewer flying days than most months, but when rain does retreat it often leaves behind afternoons of cotton-candy cumulus and blustery winds that can keep the wing airborne for 30 minutes a stretch.

Hearing last summer that this was in the works and that I might buzz the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, I resolved to take my vertigo shock therapy in a new direction: straight up, over the waters of Northern California.

OK, so it wasn't that funny at first. The pontoon flights over the Bay were, at that point still snarled in red tape. So I signed on for one of the traditional run-off-a-cliff jobbers. From the town of Stinson Beach, 10 miles up the coast from San Francisco, it's only a five-minute switch back drive up the western flank of 2,572-foot Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in Marin County, to the launch point. And five minutes is not a great deal of time to get to know a man you're about to entrust with your life. Raised in Berkeley, Kroll's first and middle names are Bodhi Dharma - after a Buddhist who achieved enlightenment but forsook Nirvana to be reincarnated as a teacher. Good juju, I decide. A pilot for 17 years, the 35 year old Kroll apprenticed as an instructor at the Sydney Hang Gliding Centre, in Australia. When he smiles I'm convinced I'm in good hands. He still has all his front teeth.

We pull into a trail head parking lot on Mount Tam's Bolinas Ridge. Our launchpad is a rounded outcropping about 50 feet down the slope, with a drop sufficient for us to run off, gain lift, and clear the tall pines below. I walk across the road to get a glimpse of where I'm going, and take in a sweeping view of Stinson Beach. We watch a quick instructional video on the portable television. It's no great shakes but it lets me know what to expect. I am to run alongside Kroll, straight off the ridge. I'm not to grab the tubes of the gliders frame at any time; that could throw the craft out of balance. After signing a few waivers, I stuff myself into my harness - a vest for my torso and stirrups for my knees, to winch my legs up parallel once we're airborne. On account of my height Kroll tells me I'll have to keep running after his feet have left the ground. He jokes that given my size - together we'll be more than 12 and a half feet and more than four hundred pounds of human cargo-- our flight should be "interesting." He stops laughing when he sees my face fall. "No, it's going to be great," he says. "You want it to be interesting!"

It's true. Thank Buddha there were more instructions to distract me. They reel through my brain on an infinite loop of nervous energy, which keeps me from focussing too hard on the fact that in a few moments I'll be soaring thousands of feet above the earth with a grinning bald man I barely know. I will ride next to Kroll, not behind him. I will be clicked into the hang glider with my right hand on his left shoulder. I will keep my body inside the metal triangle that extends down from the wing; should I stray beyond it, my weight could throw us horribly off-kilter. I flash on Darth Vader spinning into space-- no, I will be fine.

We take one practice sprint. Then we run for real. My pulse pounds in my chest, throat, and ears. I feel like I have several hearts each beating at a pressure point.

The moment we lift off and clear the trees is, as I expected, terrifying. The scramble to get situated in the rig feels like tacking a sailboat-- albeit two thousand feet terra firma - but there's barely time to register the terror before we're soaring up and out and I feel... wonderful. Incredibly secure. A minute out, Kroll asked me how I'm doing. When I tell him great, he lowers the steering bar a notch and we scream straight for a stand of trees, pulling up - wuuuuh - with plenty of time to spare.

A few more minutes and our batmen shadow slips high over California and the Pacific Ocean just beyond. It is from this very vantage point, three weeks after my flight, that Kroll will spot an eight foot great white pushing through the sea just beyond the breakers. But there are no sharks today, only bewildered beachcombers, who scatter as we approach our beach landing strip. Kroll yells at them not to move. Though he's never hit anyone on landing, people, like startled deer, could run directly into the flight path.

We touch down without braining anyone and come to a painless stop in a spray of sand. I'm completely giddy. No doubt about it - I'll be back for more. I was meant to fly.

--Brad Wiener