Stuff You Should Know - How Hang Gliding Works

Episode Date: January 18, 2018

It’s a super 70s thing, sure, but hang gliding is a thrill ride for the ages. So strap in with Josh and Chuck and learn all about the earliest method of human flight, originally created by a German man who flew over 2000 times before dying in a crash! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland.

And as I said, there's me, Josh Clark, which makes this Stuff You Should Know, the Soaring Edition. Wow. Soaring? Soaring. Oh, okay. The Soar Toe Edition.

I don't know what that means either. It doesn't mean anything. It's just kinda, a sore toe's kinda the opposite of soaring, you know? Really drags you down to earth. Gotcha. Cause you think like, now I have to go to like an urgent care center and get this toe checked out

and probably take some pills that make me throw up. And it's just not like soaring high above the earth on a hang glider. I imagine I've never hang glided, have you? No, but I've had a sore toe, so. So you know. So do you have any desire to hang glide after this? Because I gotta tell you, man,

I got kinda jazzed about the idea of trying it from researching this article. No. Not really. No? So like, if you were somewhere on vacation and they had like hang gliding lessons as part of the place you were staying,

would you like go over and try it, you think? Or you just absolutely aren't enthused by it at all? Yeah. Kinda depends, I guess, on my mood and what else is going on. I mean, I can see that. I think that's fair. I wouldn't like seek it out though, but if I was literally within 50 feet of someone doing this.

Right? And somebody picked you up and put you into the harness? Then I might do it. But I'm not afraid of it or anything. It's just, I don't know, I don't really care. Yeah, no, I get that sense that you're not afraid of it. I am terrified of heights, as you know.

But this still sounds pretty appealing to me, actually. I think I might try it. Yeah. I mean, I used to do repelling and stuff like that, so. I imagine. Oh yeah, with your dad, right? Yeah. Down Stone Mountain?

No. Okay. They don't let you do that. Yeah, I thought they might. So, hand gliding is what we're talking about, Chuck. And it turns out, this article, this is an old school, old school, House of Works article. Yeah.

Which are really weird in a lot of different ways. But once we kinda dug in, we found that the topic is actually a little more interesting than the House of Works article would lead someone to believe. Yeah, for sure. It's a little dry. Just a tad.

Bone dry. And this is a Freud and Rich joint. He knows what he's doing. He's got a PhD after his name. But I think it was the culture of the age, you know? Sure. Like, for example, in the article, he talks about a personal experience hand gliding.

You know exactly what I'm gonna say, don't you? I don't know. I don't actually. So he said that the place that he was taking this hand gliding lesson is called Jackie's Ridge. And it's a public park. Uh-huh. So he writes that as, you know, before they took off,

the hand gliding instructor checked to make sure that our intended flight path was clear of obstacles in people because it was a public park. That's like such a 2001 era House of Works thing to mention in an article, you know? Yeah, I kinda found myself skimming that part once I started reading it. And there's some good info in it,

but yeah, the whole personal experience thing, it just doesn't, it doesn't click with me, you know? So, hand gliding. Should we do a little history? I think we should do a little bit of history because like I said, it's kinda interesting. Yeah, and this is one that you would not, I was a little bit surprised to know

that NASA had anything to do with hand gliding because it seems like obviously those two things would be opposite of one another. Sort of like toe, toe gliding, toe soaring. No, sore toe and soaring, yeah. I like toe soaring. It's like a SAT question. It is, but there was an engineer

for NASA named Francis Rogalow. So he kinda had an idea in the 1940s to use his Rogalow wing, which was I guess sort of a crude hang glider to return, help return spacecraft to Earth. Yeah. Instead of a mere parachute, which is what I guess had been used for a little while. Well, yeah, like you know those famous images

of like the Gemini capsules coming back to Earth and splashing down the ocean and they have like a drag chute, you know, that they're hanging from. Originally they were like, what if we try this other thing that will be one day the predecessor of the hang glider? And everyone said, what's a hang glider? And the person said, just wait a little while.

So Rogalow and his wife actually were amateur, aviation enthusiasts and that's, they were just kinda doing this on the side. But when he started working at NASA, he said, hey, I've got this idea. And it didn't pan out, but the pictures of these tests that made it into magazines captured the imagination

of some people around the world all at once. Different people who weren't in communication with one another saw these pictures and thought, you know what, I could do something with that. I could turn something like that into like a personal non-motorized flight machine. And they did. Yeah, but he was not the first person

to ever do stuff like this because everyone I think has seen images of weirdos in the 19th century jumping off of buildings with all manner of winged suits and things like that. And one such guy, and that's just the human's obsession with like literally flying themselves, like not in a plane. There's also that.

It takes a certain type though, if you think about it. Like even today, like somebody who says, wow, I'd really like to fly. And somebody who says, wow, I'd really like to fly. So I'm gonna spend 10 years creating my own personal flying machine. Those are two different people. Yeah, for sure.

Like the Wright Brothers versus this guy. Right, exactly. You've never heard of, cause he didn't do anything. Otto Lilienthal, is that a good way to pronounce that? Oh yeah, not this guy. This guy did a lot, yeah. Oh yeah, you're talking about the crackpots. Right, right.

Yeah, he was a German engineer, obviously, from that name. And he was crazy about this stuff. And he literally did over 2,000 successful flights with these, what they called weight shift hang gliders. So hang gliders where, as you will see, like the modern hang glider, you shift your weight to steer the thing. And he was doing that in a kind of a crude way.

Yeah, he basically, I mean, like Leonardo da Vinci had like some design for a hang glider. I don't know if it's ever built. And the Chinese used to make criminals hang glide for fun. But this is like the guy who like actually went to the trouble of figuring out how to make this right from his own designs. And like you said, 2,000 successful flights is,

I mean, that's proven technology, you know? Sure. So I say, and I don't think it's just us, but Otto Lillenthal is basically known as the father of hang gliding. The Opa. Yeah. I guess Opa's grandfather.

Yeah, but isn't that, is that German? Yeah. Oh, I thought that was Greek. Well, it may be Greek too, but I know Opa's German for Grandma. Okay, gotcha. But you know, he did a good job. Then the regalo machine or whatever they call it,

the regalo, the fantastic flying regalos came on the scene. Yeah, but they apparently were not inspired by anything Lillenthal did. His stuff really kind of fell to the wayside once the Wright brothers started. Yeah, I could see that. A motorized flight, right? Everybody's like, why would you want this thing

when you can just fly in a plane? And the Wright brothers themselves experimented with hang gliders first and then moved on to planes from their hang gliders. But by this time, the idea of hang gliding was dead. And from what I understand, unknown to the regalos. Yeah, we should totally do a Wright brothers show at some point.

I can't believe we haven't. I know, there's a lot out there. We will. So flash forward some though to 1971 at the very hot party, the Otto Lillenthal anniversary meetup in California. So he still had his people, I would guess these sort of early extreme stunt enthusiasts

who held people like Otto Lillenthal is in high regard. And people came from all over the place to hang out and hang glide, I guess. And that's where I think it was, everyone sort of points to that meetup that year is when the reinvention of modern hang gliding came around. Is that fair to say? I think so.

And part of this, so you've got Otto Lillenthal, you've got the regalos who may or may not have been influenced by Lillenthal. And then you've got a guy named Bruce Dickinson. No, it's not Bruce Dickinson, he's the guy from Ironman. John Dickinson, an Australian. Not quite, Tom? No.

Well, this is Tom, are there two of them? Doug Dickinson? Was it Tom Dickinson? I mean, that's what this one article says. Okay, well, I'm sure that one's right. But so Tom Dickinson, I think he was one of the ones who was inspired by those photos of the regala wing from NASA and built his own hang glider.

And he created what you would call, what's it called when you're parasailing and you're being towed behind a boat? Parasailing. Okay, so he invented basically that, which later, to confuse things, was reinvented in the 80s or rediscovered in the 80s and became basically a separate

but related sport to hang gliding. But his designs for this early paraglider was based on the regala wing and basically improved it enough so that other people said, hey, you know what? You could turn this into what we call a foot-launched hang glider. And by the early 1970s, it was under,

it was the design had been improved enough that yeah, you could have like an invitational meetup of the crackpots who were into this kind of thing back then. Right, and then a couple of years after that, a couple of brothers named Bob and Chris Wills started manufacturing, actually formed a company called Wills Wing and by all accounts, those dudes really, really grew the sport

in the early to mid-70s because it's a very, I mean, I know it's kind of been reborn now with these, what do they call it, not solid wing, or I guess you could call them solid wing. Rigid? Yeah, rigid wing. But those early hang gliders, it's a very 70s sport. Totally is.

And they're so pretty in the 70s way too, like the colors they used for them. Yeah, for sure. Love looking at hang gliders. Looks like a catamaran sail up there. Yeah, like a hobby cat or something. And you know, like every, I'm sure there was an episode of chips where one of them hang glided.

They were, it made its appearance, it had its fingerprints all over 70s pop culture. Totally. Do you remember like back in the day on Prices Right, one of the standard, one of the standard prizes was a hobby cat, a little personal sailboat. Yeah, like anyone, they're like, what am I gonna do with that?

I live in Texas. Right. Well, I guess Texas has a shoreline though, look at me. Yeah, there you go. How about Nebraska? Yeah, no shoreline of Nebraska. No. So by the 70s, this thing had kind of taken off,

if you will, forgive the unintended pun. And it's, I don't have the impression that it's like nearly as much of a craze today, even though there have been major improvements like the rigid wing design. Yeah. It seems like it's the 70s and maybe the 80s were the heyday, right?

I get the feeling that today, it's sort of in that extreme sports category, especially with these rigid wing, but back in the 70s and 80s, like dudes like my dad would probably go out and give it a whirl. Right, in his Jeep. Yeah, absolutely.

Like my dad Paraglided or Parasailed. Oh yeah? On one Florida trip one time, I remember. And in true, like my dad fashion was, he was like, I'm the only one doing this. It's like, I'm not gonna pay for you guys to do it. Oh really? No way, the one behind the boat? Yeah, Yumi did that once it got stuck up there

for some reason, they couldn't get her, like her and the friends she was with down for a while. She was stuck floating? Aloft, yeah. Well, don't they just stop the boat and you come down? I don't remember what the problem was, but there was an issue that they couldn't, like her turn or her ride or whatever

just kept going on and on and on for some reason. Sounds like the boat couldn't stop. They're like, I can't take my foot off the gas. Your boat's, you don't steer with gas puddle, by the way. Sure, well on some you do probably. It's usually with a hand. I can't take my hand off the gas. Yeah, exactly.

There you go. So you wanna take a little break and then come back and get into hand gliders themselves? Yeah, let's suit up. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and we're going to do it again. We're going to do it again. We're going to do it again.

We're going to do it again. We're going to do it again. It's our friends to come back and we live it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

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of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael.

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If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like it's not true, I'm shocked. Okay, man.

So a hand glider is at its core, an extremely simple machine. Yeah. And it's actually a pretty clever one too, to tell you the truth. I'm not quite sure. I can't really put my finger on why I'm so jazzed about the idea of trying it, but it's somewhere in here. Okay?

Okay. So you get the hand glider, which is basically an airfoil, right? Yeah, and are we gonna differentiate a lot between the old school and the new ones and the rigid wing? I looked up the difference and I didn't see a terrible amount of difference. I saw that the rigid ones have,

they glide a lot longer, I think, or they have less of a sink rate. But other than that, it's more of a matter of personal preference, and then you would train on the flexible one for sure. So they still use flex wings? Oh yeah. I just wasn't, I had, for some reason,

thought Reddit as sort of like the rigid wing took the place of the flexible wing. No, I think it did not, actually. It's a different, it's a modified design, and if you're really, really good at hand gliding, you may prefer the rigid, but you may also prefer the flex. You wouldn't necessarily graduate from one to the other,

and then the rigid didn't replace the flex wing. All right, and just so people know, for sure what we're talking about, the flexible wing is sort of that old school hang glider you think of that looks like a modified parachute, and in fact it is. Right. Like a nylon parachute that you can hear

kind of flapping in the wind over some sort of aluminum frame. The rigid wing is sort of the same, but the fabric, the wings themselves are, it's just stiffer. It's not like it's made out of wood or anything like that. It's just like a stiffer, like the exoskeleton, I'm not describing this very well. Once you bring the exoskeleton in,

it's all downhill from there. Yeah. How would you describe the rigid wing? So like it was, like you said, the flex wing, it kind of flaps in the wind, it covers a skeleton, but the rigid wing is virtually the same thing, but it has like struts, say, woven into it that keeps it from flapping as much.

It makes the fabric rigid. Yeah, and it's like a pre-fab wing that you would load out of your car. Yeah, they're really tough to travel with from what I understand, as far as like, if you're flying somewhere on an airplane, you would have to take your flexible wing hand glider. Oh, like on an airplane?

Yeah, yeah, they disassemble really easily. Like all of the joints are hinged, the tubes pop out of one another, the actual fabric folds up and comes off and the wires snap off. It's like whenever you're going to hang glider, you want to put your thing, you want to assemble it

and then you disassemble it when you're done. All right. Yeah, and they're like somewhere between 40 to 70 pounds. And from what I can tell, the ones that weigh less are the much more expensive ones, because they might not even be made out of aluminum, they may be made out of something even lighter, like carbon fiber or something like that.

Gotcha. So the whole point, whether you're talking about, and I don't really think we need to get into rigid wing, just because it is just a modified version of the flexible wing, and the flexible wing is the one that everybody's familiar with. But with the flexible wing,

it's basically it's just a triangular skeleton made of hollow aluminum aircraft grade aluminum tubes or carbon fiber tubes. And you've basically got three, three tubes coming out of one point. Did you ever take an art class, a drawing class? Nope. This is gonna not make sense to you then.

Well, I've seen a hang glider though. Okay, well, so if there's a point, if there's the very front tip of the triangle of that, that is the hang glider. Yeah, the stabber. Then, right, the widow maker, that's the nose. Yes. Out of the nose, going directly back away from you

is a piece of metal, a tube called the keel. Yes. Going at angles out of the nose, backward away from you as well, those are the leading edge tubes. And then about halfway back from the nose, crossing the leading edge tubes and the keel, connecting them all.

That's the crossbar. You have those four bars put together. That's basically the basic skeleton of the hang glider. Yeah. Okay. And if you haven't seen one of these, just crawl out from under your rock, go to your laptop and look at a picture of it.

And you know, when I was researching this, especially when Freud and Rich started to get into the wires, the front wires and the landing wires, I was like, now I fully understand what they mean when they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Like Freud and Rich could have spent 5,000 words explaining all this, and he still wouldn't have nailed it like a picture would.

It's just impossible in a situation like this. Well, you've already explained more than I would have. I would have just said a series of tubes and wires. Okay. So a series of tubes connected, and then you've got the fabric covering that. Sure. You've got wires, like holding,

connecting everything and stabilizing it. And then the key to all of this, oh, there's a couple of keys, but this is where it starts to get fascinating. There's something called the control bar, right? And the control bar is like a triangle that dangles right in front of you when you're hanging from the hang glider.

And this is the thing that you have your hands on. It's how you control the hang glider, which is why it's called the control bar. And then the next really essential piece, and I'll stop after this, I promise, is the harness, which is suspended from the keel above you right behind where the control bar hits the keel, right? And so you are prone, you're lying on your stomach

when you're flying, and you're hanging onto the control bar and you're dangling from the hang glider above, which is why it's called hang gliding, because you're hanging from the hang glider. Fascinating. It is. And I imagine in the 1970s, it seemed like a fun idea when you're in Hawaii, you've had a couple of rum drinks

to get in a suit, throw on the helmet, strap into that harness, and run off the side of a cliff. Because that's how you use, I mean, you can still launch like that, but it looks like it's gotten a little more, like that's fallen out of fashion a little bit, the run off the cliff version. I don't know if that's true, man.

I think that you're an advanced hang glider, that's probably how you're gonna try it. Although you, yeah, although you can, I mean, you can do like a dune or something like that. It's really good for training or whatever. But they have like, I don't know if you'd call it like a launch ramp or something like that, but like some sort of launch that they build

onto the edges of cliffs to run off of for hang gliding, and they're just terrifying to even look at pictures of. Yeah, I mean, I'd say I'm not scared to do it, but I imagine I would have some butterflies when you go and run and jump off that thing. Right, I would too, man, so I don't feel bad. But you see people do it, and my immediate thought is, I'm gonna nosedive, but you don't nosedive

thanks to physics. Right, and do you wanna take a break and then get into the physics? Yeah, we might as well. Ha ha ha, hang gliding. ["Hang Gliding"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like a joshua in shock. All right, physics. So the reason a hang glider works is because of its elegant, lightweight design

and the way the air moves over these wings. And then all of these other forces acting in concert with one another to make sure you stay up there for as long as possible. Yeah. So the first one we're talking about is lift. The air goes over the surface of that wing, and that's going to generate that lift when you run

and you jump off of that platform. And it's going to counter the gravity. But gravity, in this case, is not bad. Like gravity is actually going to be, while it does want to pull you to Earth, it's what's making you go forward, continuing that air flow. Yes, that's a good point. So gravity is your friend in this case.

Yeah. And then you've got drag, which is really the other one. Those three factors together are what really apply to hang gliding. And drag is what ultimately slows you down. It's you running into air molecules. And the faster you go, the more drag you have, the faster you get slowed down.

Which then brings in the sink rate, which is the speed at which a hang glider starts to descend toward Earth. It's measured in feet per second in still air. That's right. And the distance it can travel is determined by something called the glide ratio, which is the ratio of the forward distance

to the vertical distance dropped. Forward distance you've traveled to that drop rate. Yeah, so like say every 24 feet you move forward, you drop like one foot downward. Right. So that's really basically it for physics. But the hang gliding would be like an entirely different sport if it weren't for the ability to catch air currents.

Yeah, it's kind of all about that. Otherwise, they would just be pretty quick rides. They would be. I mean, it'd be pretty awesome still, especially if you launched off a cliff and then just kind of glided slowly downward toward the Earth. It'd still be pretty cool. But you can catch air currents.

If you know what you're doing, and stay aloft for hours and go across parts, entire parts of the country. As a matter of fact, the record for the longest distance traveled is like 472 miles. That's crazy. I think it's like 700 kilometers. Wow. They basically, these two dudes went from Lubbock, Texas

to Nuevo, Laredo over the course of, I think, like 11 hours maybe, something like that? Wow. And the way that you do this is that you go find these air currents. And there's a couple of places you can reasonably expect you're going to find upward lift from air, right? Yeah, hot air is one way, thermal lift.

And that's like over a desert, like hot sand or pavement. I would prefer the hot sand over pavement. Or if it's super sunny. And I get the feeling that the more experience you have, the more you know how to look around your environment to feel and see where this might be happening. Yeah, supposedly one way that they do it is to look for birds that are just sitting there kind of soaring.

And you can just go catch that air column, whatever it is that they're soaring on, right? That's one of the most relaxing things for me to see. Yeah. There's a hawk, almost motionless, just sort of floating. Now, imagine doing it yourself. Yeah. Doesn't that seem relaxing?

I think it sounds great. Yeah, I would enjoy it, I'm sure. I'm just not going to go through a lot of effort to make it happen. Yeah, apparently I've made it my mission to get you hang gliding for some reason. And what it's, in the chips episode, you will have rigged my hang glider to crash.

Poor Robert Pine. And then who's Robert Pine? He was there, like, captain or the general sergeant. Yeah, great, great actor. I can picture him immediately in my brain. Yeah, me too. And then you've got something called ridge lift, and that's air that's deflected up by a mountain or a ridge.

And basically the topography of the ground beneath you and around you, you can learn to read that stuff. And you know where these swells and columns of air are going to be. Right, and when you find these columns of air, these lifts, you don't just fly into them, and all of a sudden you're up, because they're actually usually fairly small.

So you would basically fly right through them, maybe get a little bit of lift, but then you just keep going and start descending again. If you're going to catch an upward air current, you basically want to enter into a tight spiral, basically an upward corkscrew spiral. You're following the air current upward. And to do this, it's all just basically

based on simple movements of your body. That's the whole thing with steering and controlling a hang glider. It all has to do with the different adjustments to the weight you're putting on the control bar, that triangle that's in front of you that you're hanging on to. Yeah, exactly. So you go left and right by, I think, literally

shifting your body as it's hanging. And you go up and down by tipping. And it may seem counterintuitive, or who knows? Once you're up there, it may seem like the right way to do it. But in order to go up, you tip the nose down and then vice versa. Yeah, and to tip the nose down, you pull the control bar towards you. So you're shifting your weight forward.

And when you put that nose down, you're trading in some of your altitude. You're basically creating a nosedive, but just enough to speed up. And then to slow down, you push the control bar away from you, which tips the nose up, which basically stops the glide of the glider. It turns it into like a piece of fabric

trying to go forward through space rather than something just cutting smoothly horizontally. It's starting, it's now vertical in some way, and it slows it down. And that's actually the way you land, too, apparently. You can land on your feet very gently. Once you're close to the ground, you start to stall by pushing the control bar away from you.

That lifts the nose up, it cuts your speed off, and then you just kind of, in a nice gentle trot, hit the ground, and you say, I just hang glided. Yes. I think what I would worry about for myself is that some of this stuff may not be intuitive or instinctive. And I would do the wrong thing and then panic.

So that's actually a really good point. This group called Kitty Hawk Kites from North Carolina, which are actually cited in the House of Works article, they had a really good Tips for Beginners article as well. And they say one of the things that you have to learn is to remain calm. Because it takes a bit of finesse from what I understand. It takes, you have to be able to very smoothly move

your weight around. And if you're anxious and you're hanging on to the control bar too tight, your movements are going to be kind of herky-jerky. And it's not a good way to hang glides. So you want to be relaxed and controlled. And they say that the best way to do this is to have a few tandem lessons first.

I think you can say have a few drinks. I would guess that I don't know if they would recommend that or not. Maybe one drink to loosen you up, but that's it. Maybe. Yeah, and maybe one for when you're up there too. Oh, bring a roadie? Yeah.

That'd be nice. They're like, where'd you get that? But they offer like tandem lessons, right? So you're on there next to somebody who is an experienced hang glider. And they're controlling. And then they can hand over the control bar to you by saying, OK, now let's go left or let's go right.

And all that is is just shifting your weight left, shifting your weight right, shifting your weight forward or backward for up or down. It's as simple as that. But I think remaining calm is a huge part of the whole thing. That's a good point. Yeah, for sure. If you're an experienced pilot, you

might also have some other gear up there with you, like a variometer. And this is what in a lot of these you can hear. So you don't have to look at it. I guess it barks out, you know, you're climbing in descent rate, which is pretty handy. And then what's the other one, the altimeter? Altimeter?

Yeah, that's the one that just tells you what your altitude is. They call it the altimeter. Altimeter. And you're going to want goggles and obviously that helmet. And I think if you do these higher up extreme things, you're going to also have a parachute. Yeah, when you're hitting thousands of feet.

Yeah. They say that most of the accidents that happen happen on takeoff or landing. That it's rarely does somebody just fall out of the sky. Even when they hit turbulence, you're not going to just drop out of the sky like a stone. That's just not how aerodynamics works. But you'll have a bumpy ride.

It's more like you hit a tree or you fall off the cliff. Like your hang glider doesn't catch air right or something like that. But that's usually on takeoff or landing when you have a crash. Although I did see, I think it was, it might have been 2016. And because of this, of course, looked up hang gliding deaths. And this one guy fell out of his hang glider entirely.

Oh, man. And went to the ground. Yeah, that would be one way that it could happen too. And I don't know if we said or not. Otto Lillenthal died in a hang gliding crash. That's how he went. Oh, I don't think I knew that. Very appropriately, you know?

So in reading Kitty Hawk Kite's description of what it feels like when you're learning how to hang glide. So they hang glide on sand dunes, which is virtually the same area that the Wright brothers tried their stuff out on. And the reason why they use sand dunes is because there's a gentle slope for one. But number two, if you fall, you fall into sand,

which is much more forgiving than, like you said, pavement. But when you're hang gliding, when you're learning how to do this, the whole point is, man, they did such a good job describing it. Basically, they said, imagine you're running down a hill. And you don't have a hang glider. You're just running down hill. Eventually, you're going to pick up

enough speed that your legs can't keep up with it. Gravity's pulling you downward, and you're going to start tumbling downhill. And so you've just crashed running downhill, right? They said, with a hang glider, what you're doing is you're running downhill, and you're picking up that same speed. But you're using the hang glider to stabilize yourself

so that your legs don't get ahead of yourself. And if you can find that balance, and it just takes a few times to practice this, well, probably several times. But if you can find that balance to where you can trust and stabilize yourself with the hang glider as you're running down the slope, eventually the weight of your body and the hang glider that you're holding,

because remember, it weighs up to about 70 pounds, the weight of the two things starts to be transferred as lift is produced under the hang glider from the bottoms of your feet to the straps of your harness. And little by little, that weight is transferred. And eventually, your feet are no longer making contact with the ground. And I'll bet there's a cute few seconds

when your feet are just going through the air, you know? And it's now the straps holding you up. So it's the hang glider through the straps holding you up, and you've just taken off, and now you're soaring. But I would be like, I'm not ready yet, and then what? Well, then you just pull back on the control bar or push. No, I'm sorry, you push forward on the control bar. The nose would go up, and you'd land after just being

a couple of feet off the ground if you had your head about you. Exactly. But what they're saying is, even if you never do catch air, as long as you don't hesitate, and you just keep using the hang glider to stabilize yourself, at the worst, you're going to just end up at the bottom of the hill having run down there and never caught air.

At best, you will have caught air, right? And you'll just take it off. But the whole point with them is that you're training on sand. So even if you bite it, you're still just in sand. So it's fine. Right. All this explains, though, why they don't just say, OK, here's a cliff with a launch ramp run off.

Right. You have to know what you're doing. And eventually, you want it to be, you want it to go from a gradual transfer to a very sudden transfer of weight from your feet to the straps of the harness. Correct. Yeah.

And then there's one other way that you can do this, too. And it's being towed by a machine, like parrot sailing, right? You're being towed by a boat. Well, I was reading this article from, I think, like 1988. And people in Kansas, they have nothing to launch off of, but they were still into hand gliding. So they were using tow trucks, or not tow trucks, pickup trucks.

They just sit in the back of pickup trucks with a little cable attached to them. And as the pickup truck gained speed, their glider would start to be picked up. And they'd eventually disconnect themselves and hand glide around Kansas, launch via pickup. Of course, it's Kansas. Awesome.

It does not surprise me. No. That makes sense. I think I might even feel a little better about a automobile doing the work for me. Oh, really? A pickup truck? Well, maybe.

I mean, do they just tow you around literally parasail style? Do they tow you toward a, well, they don't have any cliffs in Kansas? No, they don't. They don't have anything. You're golden in that respect. The only cliffs in Kansas are delivering your mail.

Right. Nice one. I have one more thing. You got anything else? No. I got one more thing. So the earliest, earliest hand gliding designs didn't use a harness.

It was like a hand glider like you have, right? But you would run and then eventually the hand glider would just lift off and you'd be dangling like a rock from the control bar hanging on for dear life. Rather than being connected by a harness in a prone position, you would just be hanging from downward from the control bar. And that worked? Yeah, I mean, it was nothing like the hand glide experience

that we have now. Yeah. They didn't last very long and they didn't go very far, get very high. But I think it's kind of like a zipline thing. Wow. Yeah. So that's it.

That's hand gliding, man. There you have it. We're going to go do it this spring. We are? Yes, we are. All right. If you want to know more about hand gliding, go take a lesson and try it yourself.

And in the meantime, you can go check out this ancient How Stuff Works article. It's hilarious. And just type in hand gliding in the search bar. And it'll bring this up. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this just a really nice email from a nice dude.

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visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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