Hang Gliding

I can fly! Oops, no I can’t! Crash: My hang-gliding career was cut short by a VW Bug.  Mickey Muñoz Collection

I tried hang gliding and skydiving a few times. I learned a lot about the relativity of time while skydiving. I did it on a static line, an umbilical cord basically. You step out of the airplane, and the cord pulls the chute out. You had about three seconds of freefall before the line starts to drag your chute out.

Three seconds doesn’t seem like very long, but when you’re climbing out the door of an airplane with your feet on the wheel strut and your hand on the wing strut and you’re looking down 4,000 or 5,000 feet to the ground below on your first jump, it seems like forever. It’s surreal; you’re in a pretty heightened state of anxiety and awareness. Time is relative to how fast your brain is operating. It’s like being in an auto accident; you can do a hell of a lot of thinking and calculating in the second or two before it happens.

I loved that aspect of skydiving, but it was expensive, and between surfing and building boats, I didn’t keep pursuing it. Later on, I decided I’d try hang gliding: I loved the idea of being able to fly.

I took hang gliding lessons, and after ground school instruction covered the basics, they set you up at the top of this hill and you ran downhill until you were airborne, and then you were free – you were flying. On my first flight I overcontrolled a bit but then started to get it. The second flight I went farther and did better. I was starting to understand the dynamics of it and learning where the limits were. The third and fourth flight were better yet. By the fifth flight, I figured I had it down, no problem.

On the last flight of the day, my sixth flight, I really wanted to get a long one. So I asked the instructor if I could go up on the hill as far as I could, launch up there and make some turns. If I could clear the parking lot and go down the next hill, I would get a really long flight. He agreed, so I backed up the hill with my kite and launched. I gained altitude: 50 feet, then 75 feet, got into a little left turn, and then angled back the other way in a right turn.

My vision was fixed on the parking lot that I wanted to clear, and I didn’t see the Volkswagen coming down the dirt road below me. The driver was going to pick up her boyfriend who had flown off another hill. I was concentrating on getting as much speed and lift as possible to clear the parking lot. I was less than 15 feet off the ground with another 100 feet to go. I knew I could make it, but only by a couple of feet: I was in full trim and calculating how fast I was dropping.

Then I saw her. We were both going about 15 miles per hour and it looked like we were headed for a collision. I did a lot of quick thinking in those several seconds and realized that I wasn’t going to make it. I held my line, thinking that the only chance I had was to push the control bar straight forward at the last minute and put the kite in a stall right before we hit and try and pop over the VW. It was the right thing to do – there was no turning, there was no stopping, there was no going up, other than stalling – and it almost worked.

She still hadn’t seen me when all of a sudden my right foot came shattering through her closed passenger window. The top of the kite went over the car, but my body didn’t. My left foot hit the doorpost, slid off of it, crushing the side of the car, and almost turning it over. I broke the main strut of the kite, and completely wrecked the Volkswagen. The woman driving was in shock; she had no idea what had just happened. People were screaming and running around; my girlfriend at the time thought I had been killed. The instructor, of course, was nearly shitting himself and hoping he had insurance.

I sprained my wrists from pushing on the control bar during the collision, but that was the extent of my injuries. I walked away otherwise unscathed. Then the discussion of who was responsible started, and we both concluded that the person in the air has right of way. That was the end of my hang gliding career.