The Sport of Hanging Around : John Heiney Is Earning His Wings

John Heiney of San Clemente has seen Greece from his hang glider and has been watched hang gliding by television audiences in Japan.

The 38-year-old hang glider pilot has traveled the world to launch his glider off mountains.

Last year, Heiney was recruited by the Greek government to help train the Greek national hang gliding team for five weeks.

He also was featured in a Japanese animal television show in which he took a dog and a girl up on his hang glider at the same time.

Hang gliding is Heiney’s life. His telephone answering machine says, “I’m not home right now. I’m probably out hang gliding. . . . Keep an eye to the sky.”

Heiney spends much of his time soaring, hanging from aluminum tubing covered with sail cloth and rigged tightly with steel aircraft cables.

He is a full-time hang glider pilot who, to make ends meet, does electrical work and sells photographs he takes from his glider.

“There’s nothing like having the freedom to go wherever you want to go,” Heiney said. “The idea of not being inside a noisy plane and just having wings attached to your body is great. It’s the ultimate personal freedom of motion.”

But it’s not often that Heiney reaches his personal high without conflict.

A woman walking past him said, “Boy, that was just a beautiful sight to see,” after he had landed his multicolored, butterfly-design hang glider illegally on the sand at Salt Creek Beach.

Heiney responded, “Write your congressman,” with a smile on his face.

The reason is, there aren’t many landing sites in Southern California for hang gliders.

Hang glider pilots don’t often get a warm reception when they touch down. They’re sometimes greeted by a police officer, ready to issue a ticket.

“It’s liability that’s shutting down sports aviation,” said Gil Dodgen, editor of Hang Gliding Magazine and a hang glider pilot since 1978. “People don’t want to be sued if someone gets hurt on their property.

“As a result, sites are closing.”

Also, a lot of the land used now by glider pilots is being developed.

Dodgen says there are only a handful of places that allow gliders to land in the Los Angeles basin. In Orange County, there aren’t any.

One of the nearby facilities, the Playa Del Rey training site, was closed about eight months ago by the City of Los Angeles because of problems with parking and gliders coming too close to the bike path.

So Heiney has no choice when hang gliding locally other than to bring his glider down on private property, off-limits forest land or even the beach, where he often is approached by a lifeguard threatening to call the police.

“There’s no reason for it,” said Heiney, who usually launches at Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.

“There have been two major changes in hang gliding in the last couple of years that have made it very safe.

“The first is that, today, gliders are designed a lot better, so the performance has improved a great deal. The second change is in instruction.

“In the old days, instruction was pretty sketchy. You could just go out to the beach and see someone flying, show interest and he’d let you fly. Now there are sophisticated schools with instructors that have many years of experience.”

Erik Fair, co-owner of Hang Flight System, a school in Santa Ana, says that last year, five hang gliding fatalities were reported, compared with 45 fatalities made public in 1977.

“There are still deaths in hang gliding and there always will be,” he said. “But back then, it was because of poor instruction and faulty equipment. Today, it’s due to bad judgment on the part of the pilot. It’s not because they don’t know what they’re doing up there.”

Another conflict Heiney has faced throughout his nine-year hang gliding career is negative response from the public.

“We get a lot of abuse,” he said. “People don’t think we’re normal. Flying without a plane is abnormal, and most people think we’re just crazy.”

But Heiney has learned to deal with it. In July of this year, he won the Grouse Mountain World Invitational in Vancouver, Canada, for aerobatic hang gliding, which involves a series of maneuvers. The first-place prize was $375.

“There’s not much money to be made,” Heiney said. “Most competitions don’t have any prize money. People just compete for the satisfaction of having won.”

The event in Vancouver is one of only two aerobatic competitions in North America because aerobatics is not as popular as cross-country competition, which ranges from 50 to 600 miles.

The reason for cross-country’s popularity is that most pilots want to go places and see things, according to Brad Fowler, a spokesman for the Orange County Hang Gliding Assn.

However, he says there are some very talented aerobatic pilots, and Heiney is one of them.

“John is very good and he really knows what he’s doing,” Fowler said. “Very few people out there are better than him.”

In aerobatics, there are four basic maneuvers: the spin, in which the pilot stalls one wing and the other rotates while the glider descends rapidly; the climb-over, in which the hang glider dives to gain speed, then turns to the side; the roll-over, in which the glider dives to gain speed, then rolls around, and the loops, which are similar to airplane loops, with the glider gaining speeds of up to 80 m.p.h.

Heiney used to compete in cross-country events but decided to try aerobatics five years ago for the added challenge. He decided to specialize in it this year because it’s better for creative photography.

“I started doing it because I had a particular need for adventure and excitement,” he said.

Heiney hopes to become the top aerobatic pilot in the world and to fly in the Olympics, because he believes that hang gliding will someday be an Olympic sport.

Nine years ago, it seemed unlikely that Heiney would even start hang gliding.

He lived in Illinois, where the sport is rarely practiced because of the mostly flat land. But in 1974, Heiney came to California for a visit.

That’s when, at Escape Country in Orange County, he first saw hang gliding and knew right away he wanted to participate.

“It was just one of those things where you see something and it clicks,” he said.

Heiney has an associate’s degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and had taken a few airplane flying lessons, but he said he was bored with his life. So in 1978, he moved to California because it is considered the hang gliding capital of the United States.

He told his mother he’d be back home in Illinois after a few months. She’s still waiting.

“Before I did this, life really didn’t mean anything to me,” said Heiney, looking at a photo in his living room of himself hang gliding. “It’s improved my self-image and my self-confidence.

“I really didn’t care about living or dying. I figure you’ve got to do something in this life. You can’t just sit around and collect stamps.”

Heiney took his first lesson at Playa Del Rey in 1978. In ‘81, he earned his first victory in the Southern California Cross-Country competition, in which he traveled 56 miles. Two years ago, he won the Southern California Open for going the same distance.

But it’s not just the titles Heiney is after.

In addition to his trip to Greece and his appearance on Japanese television, he has had photos published in Hang Gliding Magazine, including a center spread in the June issue that he took while gliding in Mexico.

Next month, he will compete in another North American aerobatic competition, this time at Telluride in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. But first he will take part in a silent air show demonstration in San Francisco at the end of this month to benefit the fight against muscular dystrophy.

“I know that, slowly, hang gliding will become more acceptable,” Heiney said. “Hang gliding is not weird, and there’s nothing wrong with people who do it.