SAFA Skysailor Magazine

10 SKY SAILOR May | June 2021 by Tina Thorburn ‘Fearless’ and ‘freak’ are some of the things I’ve been called in my six months of paragliding, but fortunately for me, perseverance is one of my greatest character traits. As a female paraglider pilot, I know I’m in the minority – only 6.34% of paraglider pilots in Australia identify as female. As an enthusiastic, female PG pilot, unapologetically chasing kilometres, I’m in an even smaller minority and unfortunately have come to expect comments like these. What saddens me is not the fact that I have to deal with these and other roadblocks, but the reality that these hurdles are gender specific. There is an inherent expectation that as a woman I should present as more fearful, and if I don’t, something is wrong with me rather than with the presumption. Of course I experience fear – who doesn’t? As a woman, I am intimate with fear. Since I was a girl, fear has protected me and kept me alive. In my travels, I have been fearful of being assaulted, or worse. In my day-to-day life, I find myself regularly making calculations of my safety and risk profiling certain outcomes based on where I am and who I am with. Fear is my friend, in large part due to my gender. What is often overlooked is that with fear comes hyper vigilance, acute awareness and heightened sensitivity. My childhood and gender have gifted me a healthy respect for fear, and I have worked hard to develop tools to move within the world without being paralysed by it. This year in mid-March I found myself sitting around a table with three other female pilots discussing fear and its physical manifestations in the air, and I felt grateful for my life experiences. As we prepared for a cross-country clinic with Bright Flight Paragliding, we each voiced the ways fear affects us during flight and identified overlap, creating space for fear to be acknowledged, appreciated and accepted. Not long after, we were up on launch assessing condi- tions, and before I knew it we were all in the air. For me, the first 30 to 60 minutes of a flight are the most anxiety provoking. During that time, I am assessing what the air is like on the day, how it is interacting with my wing, and From fear to a 50km flat triangle