Piloting Your Own Business
by Bodhi Kroll. Hang Gliding. 1999. Contra Costa Times. August, 1998.

Would you like to do what you love, hang gliding or paragliding, 300 days a year, and earn $250 to $350 a day doing it? Is it possible to make a living working only three or four days a week and a great living if one is willing to work five or six days a week flying? That's exactly what I've managed to do.

After 16 years of hang gliding for sport, teaching and instructional tandem flight, I opened the San Francisco Hang Gliding Center (SFHGC). This is a successful business, not only for me, but for two other full-time instructors (and we could use even more). But getting to this point was quite a task. It involved a lot of hard work, planning and negotiating with state and county officials but it was all worth it.

Here's how it all began. In June of 1984, at the age of 18, inspired by a series of intense flying dreams since boyhood in Berkeley, California, watching red tail hawks and turkey vultures soaring over the hills, and television shows featuring our sport, I signed up for some lessons at a local hang gliding operation in Fremont, California (Mission Soaring Center). I saved money from newspaper routes, bussing dishes in a local eatery and doing scut-work at Mission Soaring. My first glider was a Harrier 177.

By 1988 l was an Advanced-rated pilot and instructor. In 1990, while studying in Australia, I worked as a hang gliding instructor outside Sydney along the breathtakingly beautiful 600-foot cliffs of Stanwell park. With a perfectly shaped launch area that is soarable in winds as low as six miles per hour, Stanwell is a magnificent tandem hang gliding site.

Little did I know then that in seven years I would have my own tandem hang gliding business at Mt. Tamalpais, landing on the public Marin County-owned beach.

Getting the rights to this operation took a great deal of effort and politicking. The launch zone is controlled by the State of California Department of Parks and Recreation. The landing area, Stinson Beach, is controlled by the Marin County Board of Supervisors. Both agencies needed to be convinced that the joys and beauty of tandem hang gliding and its reasonable safety record could overcome legitimate liability issues that concern government officials.

My first attempt to get approval for commercial tandem operations from the county ended in a six-to-three vote failure with the county's Parks and Open Space Commission. The Commission was influenced by the county counsel's warning about the liability issue. I had not fully prepared to address that issue and was swamped at the meeting by the response. Thereafter, I investigated the safety record and lawsuit history for tandem operations. I discovered to my surprise that there had not been a successful lawsuit against a property owner for an accident involving a commercial tandem operation.

When I appeared at the Marin County board meeting in 1998 to appeal the commission's ruling, I was prepared on the insurance and liability issue. Armed with a letter from USHGA confirming my position on the liability problem, and supported by the Stinson Beach Village Association and a $3 million liability policy, the board voted approval.

The State Parks Department was an easier sell because hang gliding use was well established in the state park and clearly in line with the public park mission statement: to "provide for the health, inspiration and education of the people of California by helping to preserve the state's extraordinary biological diversity, protecting its most valuable natural resources, and creating opportunities for high quality outdoor recreation." We operate from a 2,000- foot mountain flying out over ancient redwood forests and landing on the most popular and beautiful beach in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We operate seven days a week. SFHGC has no shop or storefront. We meet our clients at the site or on the beach. Recently, we became a dealer for North Wing, whose owner, Kamron Blevins, was one of the designers of the Fly 2 by Airwave.

Because this is the first and only commercial tandem business on Mt. Tam we have been inundated with requests from the media for articles and broadcasts on the recreational and business aspects of the company. This has given us tremendous exposure and increased business phenomenally in the past years. Cable television has also provided some relatively inexpensive advertising opportunities for us, as has the Internet. We have appeared on CNN, the Discovery Channel, the BBC, local television news and travel programs. There have been at multiple newspaper and magazine articles in the past several years. And Yellow Pages advertising has also been well worth the investment. All of this has combined with personal referrals from friends, relatives and past students to produce exponential growth in the business, and we're looking for competent, confident, enthusiastic hang gliding and paragliding instructors to round out our program.

A note about technique: After no fewer than 800 tandem flights I have concluded that the best technique for making a no-step, no-bent-tubes landing, even with a 220-pounder hanging next to me (I weigh 200 pounds) is a technique first taught to me by my former boss and mentor Chris Boyce of Sydney Hang Gliding Centre. I make the entire approach on the basetube where one has the best pitch and roll authority during flight, but after rounding out from a shallow dive from 50 feet, at two feet above the ground when the glider is near trim speed, I drop my hands back to the rear flying wires roughly two to two and a half feet back from the corner of the control frame. In light winds, when an aggressive flare is needed, an angle of attack of 90 degrees can be achieved for no-step landings. As an alternate technique, one of my instructors, Eric, uses 16" bike wheels which work extremely well even in the soft sand.

SFHGC may be contacted at (510) 528-2300.