What a Lovely Lousy Flight
by Itamar Neuner
Actually I don't know
too much about paragliding.
True, I've been
messing around with paragliders now for a couple of years,
had some good flights which I enjoyed, and an accident which I did not. But the
fact is, I'm not much more than just a mere beginner,
with so much more to learn and experience to gain.
Yes, I have set a
record, and gained a title: having flown 76.5 km, I am the unofficial Israeli
distance record holder ...in the geriatric section.
I am an air-line
pilot, so I travel around. I've flown the Alps in France and Switzerland. And when it's winter in Israel, cold and wet and muddy - I ask
for flights to South-Africa.
* * *
So here I am on the
hill at
'The Dam'
, outside Pretoria in South-Africa. With me is my
host, Alex Louw, chief test pilot for Apco, and many of his friends, all of them top paragliding competition
pilots.
I came down to
South-Africa dreaming of those "Hundred K Days" - as Alex calls them.
They are supposed to be quite common in South-Africa. Those are the days when
you shoot up to cloud-base, ram the speed bar, and don't hit the deck again
till you've done a couple of hundred km's. For an
Israeli that is paradise! You see, drifting downwind across Israel you find yourself at the other
side after only 60 km, and in enemy territory if you
go any further.
But it doesn't seem to
be a "Hundred K Day" today. In fact, it doesn't seem to be flyable at
all. No wind, white skies, even the occasional vultures passing by have to
cheat and flap their wings.
The local pilots wait
patiently, telling stories, passing on the latest gossip. Some give it a try
and jump off the hill - straight down to the landing zone.
A
dead day.
Yesterday was the
same, and tomorrow I'm flying home. Are these the famous “excellent South-African summer flying
conditions” I came for? What am I going to tell my envious friends when I get
back to Israel? I'm sure right now they are
enjoying better flying conditions than me!
Time is passing by. One
o'clock...
half past one... The sun, overhead, slowly moving to the
west. A quarter past two... The day will end and I'm still on the
ground. Some more South-Africans give it a try and fall out of the sky. Should
I take the chance, or wait?
Half past two; it's now or never. What the hell - better do a short hop
than absolutely nothing.
I lay out my Apco Futura, get into the
harness, wait for a puff - and launch.
Down I go, just as I
expected. There's a bubble of hot air in the ravine below. I manage to stop my descent,
and even gain a bit. But it's just a bubble, and it's gone. A buzzard passes by
- it's 'fingers' spread out: - lift! I rush out and join. Not much, but together we make it to the top.
A paraglider is taking off. Good, we'll work together
to find lift in this dead air.
He goes straight down.
So do I! 1500m... 1470m... I head out to where I found the bird. The grass is moving, a slight pull on my left
wing; my vario wobbles around the zero. I'm still
losing height. I go around the corner, to where there are some red rocks. But
I'm still going down. I stop my turn and face out away from the hill. Somewhere
inside me I feel,
that out there I might find a thermal. And sure enough there it is. Am I
beginning to get the instincts of a bird? At 1700m I pass low over the crowd at
Launch. The wind sock, empty, is dangling in the heat. Some have spread out and
are in their harnesses, but nobody is taking off.
"Please somebody
come and join me. It would be so much easier if there were other gliders in the
air."
I'm sinking out again,
frustrated. Down to 1400m, nearly all the way to the landing
zone. People there are folding up; others are walking away with their
packs on their backs.
A batch
of swifts do
their aerobatics over a big shed's corrugated iron roof. I join. We are going
up. Slowly, no more than +0.2m/s, but it's up and not down. I leave the shed
and go to the ravine. Then around the corner to the red
rocks, and back to where I found the buzzard. I slow down as much as I dare, sit level in my
seat to feel which wing is pulling more. I work puffs no wider than the span of
my wing, fight for every meter gained, curse every meter lost, and curse
South-Africa with it's “Lovely Summer Flying Conditions”.
After an hour I'm
fed-up. Totally fed-up. Desperate,
and frustrated. One more 360° over the corrugate iron roof, and then I
glide in, to a one-legged landing. My other leg is smashed and shattered; I use
it only for walking, not for landing.
I gather my
"rag" and limp off the field. Two South-Africans are approaching me,
all big smiles. What do they want?
"Congratulations!!!
That was a superb piece of flying!" and they want to shake my hand...
"What are you
talking about? Get lost!" - I think, but say a polite
"thank-you".
Back at the club
everybody is enjoying cold beers. "How did you manage it?" - one of them asks - "are you very light for the size of
your wing?"
- "No, in fact
I'm just two or three kgs below the maximum."
Others come and ask me
questions, about my "tactics" and "secret methods of finding
lift"...
It is only in the car
on the way home, still frustrated about today's lousy flight, that I start to
realize what I had done: -
"Listen, Itamar" - Alex always says 'listen' when he knows I am
- "All the top South-African competition pilots were on the hill today,
and the only one to remain airborne - and for a full hour and a quarter - was a
ruddy visitor from Israel!!!"
Only then did it
slowly sink in, that the lousy flight I thought I had,
was really a superb one.
* *
*
But it wasn't until
late that night that I really got to appreciate the magnitude of my
achievement. The phone in my hotel room rang; it was one of those top
South-African pilots:
- "Tell me, Itamar, when are you flying back home?"
- "tomorrow
morning"
- "Oh, that's a
pity. I thought maybe you'd like to come flying with
us tomorrow."
Only then did I
realize that I had been accepted into the
South-African paragliding community.
Itamar Neuner
54, is an x-Israeli air-force pilot, an flies today as a
captain for El-Al, Israel Air-Lines. His book “Stories Of a
Mirage Pilot” was published in Israel a few years ago.
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