Now that we got IAG in the air, I can tell the story of my long hiatus from hang gliding.
I learned to fly and soar (staying up in thermals and ridge lift) in the mountains of Tennessee at a place called Henson's Gap. Beautiful place to fly.
After that, I did most of my flying in Whitewater, Wisconsin. There we did something called aerotowing, where you tow up to a couple thousand feet behind an ultralight. Then you release and hopefully stay up in thermals for a long time. It was a great place to fly cross-country from.
I was on a gliding trip to Whitewater with a girlfriend, and she decided that she wanted to learn. It used to be that everyone learned to fly, first, on training hills, then bigger mountains, then towing, if towing was something you wanted to do. Towing is significantly more dangerous. Things can get pretty sketchy at the dangerous altitude of 50-200 feet, where it's high enough to kill you, but low enough that you have very little time to make decisions and act on them.
Here's someone doing a very bad job of aerotowing. He was lucky that he was at about 500 feet when he finally had a lockout. If it happened a few hundred feet lower, it would have been very bad news.
Pretty shitty landing, too, but he was probably a bit flummoxed at the time.
Anyhow, the instructor at Whitewater had begun a program that taught hang gliding without the mountain-flying step. He was replacing that step with a bunch of tandem aerotowing, then moving right into solo aerotowing. I now think this is a horrible idea, but he had a decades long perfect safety record with the old method, and I assumed that he knew best.
So anyway, my girlfriend moved through the whole process, and had a relatively uneventful first solo flight. On her second solo flight, she had a similar lockout to the one in the video above. It wasn't as severe as that one, but she was only at about 100 feet. An experienced pilot could have straightened out and landed, but she didn't have nearly enough experience.
She crashed hard into a corn field and badly broke her spine. Amazingly she suffered no spinal cord damage, but one of her vertebrae literally burst and was removed in the surgery that put a plate in her back. It was a serious operation, a serious recovery, and she still has a lot of pain issues.
So, for the three years that we stayed together after the accident, hang-gliding wasn't really in the cards for me. I got really into rock climbing and a bit into snowboarding during that period, and by the time I found myself in a position to fly again, I was just enough into other things that I wasn't motivated to get back into it.
But I almost certainly will. I can't think of a nicer way to spend my older years, if I make it that far.
uke: