SAFA Skysailor Magazine

6 SKY SAILOR January | February 2024 Having started hang gliding less than four years ago, I was just in time for three wet La Niña years. One of the first things I learnt about was ‘hang waiting’. As part of a group of five other hang glider pilots, we chased every chance we could to fly, haunting various weather apps, and spending many days on top of hills with too much or too little wind, or a wind direction other than the predicted. Becoming motorised To get more airtime, I decided to try powered hang gliding and purchased a Sub-70kg machine. It allowed me to fly more, about two hours powered flying to each normal hang gliding hour. However, it’s not the same. Firstly it’s not with a fun group of people, and secondly, you don’t have to hunt for lift – if you want to go up, you open the throttle, job done. Easy, but far less satisfying. Two of my group took a different approach last year and learned to aerotow. Once re- leased, the thermal game was on. I’d followed them to Forbes, taking my Sub-70 so I could launch as well. I did a few flights of around an hour and a half, taking in the scenery around Forbes town, following rivers down low, weaving along their path, watching the bird life and even fish. Climbing high, I got some great Go-Pro footage of massive flocks of cockatoos wheeling around in cloud-size flocks. The area was largely flat with massive, ploughed paddocks as big as suburbs. This had me thinking, ‘If I had an engine out which way would I land? With the furrows or across?’ I made a choice, luckily I didn’t have an engine out, because I’d decided across which would have made a mess of my machine and possibly myself – with the furrows is the correct choice. Learning to aerotow by Andrew Berenyi Dragonfly tugs