2006, My First Year

I have been involved in aviation since I was about 20, most recently flying sailplanes and before that skydiving.

Having taken a few years out of aviation to get married, have children, etc I was getting "itchy" to fly again. I did some research and decided that hang gliding would be a good way to get back into flying.

I signed up for a course at Dynamic Flight just after Easter, loaded the family into the car and headed to Victoria. Rohan, who runs Dynamic Fight, is an excellent instructor as well as an excellent pilot. There were five of us on the course, with a few other people joining us on and off throughout the course.

We started the course on the trailer, then a couple of days on the training hills, followed by a few days towing. To finish the course off we had a couple of days on some bigger hills, with the last flying day being from Sugarloaf and Ben Nevis, which was great.

I picked up a secondhand Stealth II harness from Dynamic Flight while I was there and a Fun 190 when I got back to South Australia.

The weather didn't seem to want to cooperate for the first few months, I had lots of trips to the beach and hills but not too much flying. The weather improved a bit and I managed to get a few hours flying in.

I did my first cross country in September from Hallett Hill, it was a slow day, initially too windy to take off then the wind dropped right off. I managed 15km with a maximum height of 4400'asl.

The next highlight was the state comps. Most of the rounds seemed to be on difficult days with lots of pilots bombing out. Flying was not going so well until round 6, when I managed to get away and managed 42km of an 80km cross wind task. I also managed to get away from the hill in round 7, managing 62km, 8km short of goal. Fortunately there were only 3 floaters flying and these two flights were enough for me to win the floater class.

After the comps I decided it was time for a faster glider and started looking around, I fond a Shark 144 for sale, unfortunately it was in Queensland, 2000km from home. Christmas was approaching so we decided to drive to Queensland for Christmas and pick up the glider, which we did.

I finished the year with just under 30 hours flying from 17 sites, so I was a happy pilot.