Jerry Nielsen / Washington Post 1989

[RichH]

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW IMPROVES AS HANG GLIDERS EXTEND THEIR RANGE
By ANGUS PHILLIPS
April 30, 1989
MCCONNELLSBURG, PA. -- In the hang-gliding pecking order, you can't get any higher than Jerry Nielsen's Hang-Five rating, which certifies him as a master at jumping off mountains and soaring around on gossamer wings of man. Nielsen has soared more than 600 unpowered hours in 13 years. He's done tandem, done tow, had cross-country runs of 50-plus miles. He's been up to 10,000 feet and stayed up for hours, riding boomer thermals. He's fought his way out of despised cloud suck, which can drag you up to airless, frozen 40,000 feet. He's taken off in twangers, soared where the spirit moved him and landed wherever he could. Once he flew from High Rock in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains all the way to a golf course outside Fort Meade. Descending, he spied an unsuspecting foursome and slid up silently behind. Nielsen, 36, plays the game himself and knows the lingo. "I got right over them and said, 'Hey, fellows, mind if I play through?' You should have seen them hit the ground." Great fun. But as the respectable owner of a Washington medical equipment company and past president of the 100-member Capital Hang Gliding Association, Nielsen also wants you to know his sport is not all yuks, and not just the province of thrill-seeking screwballs. Hang gliding has come a long way from its perilous origins 20 years ago, when wildmen crashing into hillsides gave it a bad name, he said. All pilots wear parachutes and helmets now; modern gliders are aircraft-tough; crashes and injuries or deaths are rare, and the grade of people you find at launch sites is impressive. Take Thursday, for example, when Nielsen led a group here to leap off The Pulpit at 2,000-foot Tuscarora Peak. There was Casey Lenox, who specializes in pediatric intensive care at Johns Hopkins; Skip Brown, a photographer for Outside and Sports Illustrated magazines; Rich Hiegel, veteran gliding instructor from REI, the national outdoors equipment company, and Bob Lowe, a commercial real estate man. Just a standard hang-glider crowd, said Brown, among whose other gliding associates is a PhD gene-splitter who does professional magic shows at night and hang-glides weekends. What draws these diverse people together is the remarkable ability to do what until recently humans could only dream of -- to soar like birds, unassisted, unpowered, unfettered. "Man has been fascinated by this since Day 1," said Nielsen, waxing lyrical while waiting for the wind to come in. "There's something spiritual about floating around on air. "Man has been jumping off cliffs trying to emulate birds since the beginning of time. Now, finally, we have the ability to soar. We literally have hawks flying with us for hours. Man has captured this magical gift." Of course, some days are better than others. While Nielsen mused, Thursday's crowd milled around the wooden, homemade launch ramp at The Pulpit, a four-acre launch site jointly owned by the D.C. and Maryland gliding associations. "It's like summer," said Nielsen, bemoaning the dead, still air. A turkey vulture floated by, flapping its wings lazily. "That's the one thing we can't do," said Nielsen. "We have wings now, but we still can't flap them." So hang gliders must wait for wind. This day it was a long wait. A front was due, which would bring a northwesterly breeze when it passed. If the northwester was stiff enough, it might even provide enough breeze for an exciting "twanger" launch. "That's when the wind is coming in at 20 knots or so and you need four or five guys just to hold the kite down," said Brown. "You're hanging on to these guy wires, which are drum-tight. When the pilot says, 'Clear!' you let go and it's like, 'Twang!' and he goes straight up." Brown enjoyed a near-twanger last weekend, when a front came through and he rode the lifts to a three-hour, 30-mile cross-country flight. He thought that was pretty good until word came in about veteran Western Maryland glider Tony Smolder, who rode the same front from Cumberland to Lexington Park for an East Coast distance record of more than 150 miles. "Tony ruined everything," said Nielsen. "Until now, we all thought a 50-mile day was the ultimate." Cross-country definitely is the new hang-gliding frontier, the crowd at The Pulpit agreed. In the early soaring days, it was an accomplishment just to jump off a mountain and land safely in the nearest valley. Now, with better equipment, radios to track each other and improved flying skills, top hang gliders are heading over the mountains for a little extemporaneous exploring. It's a lot like life -- first you learn to walk, then, you go someplace and get in trouble. Thursday, however, didn't prove a cross-country day. The weather front stalled and everyone waited and waited. Finally, a blast of chilly northwest wind rumbled through in midafternoon. Brown raced to his glider, trundled up the hill to the ramp, checked his straps and hollered, "Clear." Down the ramp he ran, right off the end of the earth. The glider dipped horribly for a moment, then recovered, and he soared out over the treetops. "Sled ride," said one of his mates, expecting Brown to go straight to a landing on a farm field in the green valley below. But halfway down, the glider bobbled momentarily as it struck an updraft. Brown banked around to the left; he'd found his thermal. Within moments he was circling like a hawk. Up, up, up he went, 1,000 feet above the ridge line, still rising. He slid back over the ramp and let out a howl: "Ya-hooooo!" But the others didn't hear. They were racing to get their own gliders. Though private gliding lessons are available for beginners and locally, the crowd at The Pulpit said the best place to start out is Kitty Hawk Kites on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where you're just about guaranteed a few good rides across the dunes. For information about hang gliding locally, write Capital Hang Gliding Association, 2201 Shorefield Dr., Wheaton, Md. 20902, or phone 949-7698.