If you only have some wishy washy, abstract answer – you're going to whack. Here's the million dollar question – When do you flare? If you can answer that (with confidence), then you will have no problem landing well. They are designed to resist this tendency, so you need to work to make it happen (and you really wouldn't want one that likes to tailslide as it would be very unpleasant to fly). You're trying to get the glider to tailslide. After that, if the tips are still flying, they're going to win. You've got momentum and sheer weight on your side, but only for a second. Since the nose will stall first, you want the tips to stall very quickly after. If this happens and the tail is still lifting, guess what? You're going to whack. Once the nose stalls, it's no longer lifting.
This means that the nose of the glider will stall before the tips. So the root is always a higher AOA than the tips. Let's review the cardinal rule of landing a hang glider – STALL THE TIPS!Ī glider is twisted. This concept is crucial to any discussion of landing technique and before it is understood, no real progress is made./p> This is when pilots feel like the glider is "getting ahead of them". The nose of the glider will quite happily stall, leaving your tips flying and pushing the trailing edge up. Because at this speed (descending at trim), it is insanely difficult to stall your tips. And that is the #1 reason why people whack. So instinctively you want to slow down, both horizontally and vertically, to a speed which will not harm you. Every instinct you have screams at you to not do this, every bone in your body begs you to come in at a speed that won't hurt.
You have to approach the ground at a speed both vertically and horizontally which, if you did nothing else, would hurt and would likely put you in the hospital. You must stop the glider and make it tailslide – something you never do otherwise and never even toy with otherwise as the results would be disastrous. So many inadequate explanations that all start with "well you just…"įirst of all landing a hang glider is unnatural.
How you accomplish this is the source of so much debate. If you do not stall them, you will not have a good landing. Quite simply, if you can stall the tips of your glider, you will have a good landing. There's so much focus on body position and hand position, which do help, but virtually nothing on how the whole shooting match works. This post was influenced by recent conversations on and mostly is an edited compilation of Jim Rooney’s replies. So in this post we are going to describe few landing techniques which will help you improve your landings. The sad truth is that there are too many people who can not land their hang gliders properly.