THE SOUL OF A HANG GLIDER : A Sport That Began as High-Risk Kicks Has Evolved to High-Tech Obsession

TWO MILES HIGH, under dark storm clouds, the hang-glider pilot raced northward. Navigating the cold, rough currents above the high peaks between California and Nevada, he had soared 70 miles in two hours. The landing zone lay just ahead on the desert floor, beyond a curtain of rain that hung beneath a lone cloud.

“Pilot No. 110 to goal,” he radioed, flying into the rain. “I’m approaching at 10,000 feet. Be there in five minutes.”

Static shocks, increasing in volume, sparked over his earphone. He jerked the phone from his helmet, but moments later stronger jolts arced from his control bar through his gloves, up his arm and then out through one of the straps suspending his harness from the keel. He let go, breaking the circuit, and dangled free from the keel. He had flown into a field of static-charged air, a precursor to lightning.

The glider started to stall. The pilot grabbed a downtube, and another jolt knocked him back. Bracing his boots on the control bar and steering with his feet, he managed to hold the ship in a spiral dive for a full 15 minutes. Stung each time the turbulence flung him against aluminum, he wondered how deep the field extended below him. A hundred feet off the ground, a shock made him fear that if he was hooked in when he landed, he might ground out and be electrocuted. Quickly, he unclipped his harness from the keel. Coming in at 30 knots, he jumped at five feet and hit the ground rolling.

He stood up and brushed himself off, relieved, but angry that he’d come so close and yet failed to complete his flight on the fifth day of the national championships--not that No. 110, Tony Barton of Tucson, was a contender. Barton inspected his ship: a heap of bent aluminum. It was his first week in the infamous Owens Valley.

THE OWENS VALLEY, one of the deepest in America, divides the 14,000-foot peaks of the White Mountains from the Sierra Nevada. It is a long, narrow solar furnace that heats air into rising bubbles and columns--thermals. Birdmen from all over the world come here for the farthest flights of their lives. They call this valley the world’s greatest thermal corridor. In the early days they called it the Valley of Death.

In the late afternoon you can launch into an invisible gyre spiraling out of a canyon and circle upward two miles in 10 minutes to the great concave base of a cumulus cloud. The cloud itself blossoms as moisture, pumped up by the gyre, cools and condenses. You could fly higher, at the risk of getting lost in the icy grayness, sucked up to the core, electrocuted, frozen and dropped miles away, a hailstone.

Sky sailors, as some serious hang-glider pilots like to be called, routinely evade “cloud suck.” Today, however, the chief danger is from random gust fronts--walls of wind that can burst from a cloud at 50 knots, shredding any glider in their path, leaving a stunned pilot drifting to the earth with a parachute.

The fliers stand watching the sky. Rainstorms obscure both ends of the valley, and between the storms cruise two dozen flat-bottomed thunderheads. Below, several dust devils, translucent tornadoes, cut across the desert floor.

“You don’t want a dead man in this contest!” Josef (Hang Czech Joe) Bostik yells at a meet director.

“I don’t want anyone to dive out into the zone and get killed by gust fronts,” explains Mark Axen, one of the last bearded longhairs on the sky-sailing scene. “But we came all the way up here, and if the storm system shuts down, making conditions safe, I want to have a contest day.”

“Call a task or call it a day!” someone yells, impatient to soar the daily task, a course over which he’ll be timed.

Tempers flare. For five hours, 80 pilots have been waiting along a switchback of an old mining road, 8,000 feet up a barren ridge in the White Mountains. Most everyone wants to go down immediately. A handful of the super-competitive want to wait out the storm. Axen decides to keep them grounded until the day draws too close to dark to call a task.

“The Indian spirits are against us today,” says the Czech, a 23-year-old defector with an early-Beatles haircut and a mustache.

Ten days before the nationals, Bostik had broken the world distance record. Launching from the southern end of the valley, he’d soared along the silver cirques of the Sierra, gliding from gyre to gyre. At 50 miles, he had crossed the valley and sailed north again along the spine of the Whites, then crossed another valley and picked up a range in Nevada. After nine hours he touched down 228 miles from takeoff--eight miles farther than the old record set in 1983 by Larry Tudor.

On the same day that Hang Czech Joe broke the distance record, Tudor, 32, an itinerant flyer whose first passion had been tournament chess, set a distance-to-a-goal record of 220 miles, a feat that only a sky sailor could truly appreciate--choosing a landing zone at that distance when only 10 pilots had ever flown more than 200 miles in the first place.

Tudor and Bostik drove back together that night. “We were both very tired,” Bostik remembers. “But we could see on each other that it was the day of our lives--especially mine, my first 200-mile flight. Larry did it four times.”

It had been an exceptional day. Spectacular “cloud streets,” floating on top of strong thermals, had hung above the mountain spines, marking the way. A steady tail wind had blown from the south, accelerating their 30-knot cruising speed. “I was in the right place at the right time. I don’t think the record is that special because any pilot with the same skill and endurance could do it.” Bostik has a calm and earnest demeanor. “Everybody is talking about 300 miles. We all believe it is possible, but it’s going to take a long day.”

MY FRIENDS IN Czechoslovakia will be really surprised to know that I have the longest flight in a hang glider. I think some of the guys there can make a world record, but they will never have the chance. That’s one of the reasons I left my country.”

The year before his defection, Bostik had taught himself to fly. He had passed a theoretical course on sail planes--the $30,000 rigs towed up by airplanes--only to learn: “In my country they won’t let you fly. They were scared that you would escape.” A friend bought a crude hang glider, and one day Bostik watched him. “I still thought it was crazy to hang glide. I had the same view on the sport that the general public’s got today. I saw my friend, and I found out he’s doing a lot of things wrong.” A week later Bostik bought a primitive kite, and soon he was diving from a hilltop for one-minute glides. “It was something I’d never experienced, just in my dreams, and so I went on and on. I never had an instructor. I just learned everything by myself, and it was the hard way but it was more exciting.”

One night he and his friends dismantled a more sophisticated double-surface glider brought over by a visiting West German. The Czechs studied the design and then fashioned their own double-surface airfoil. “We made it out of garden plastic and tubes. We successfully flew it for a year. I had one seven-mile cross-country flight. My friend almost died on that glider. It didn’t recover like today’s ships, and he didn’t have a fast-deploying parachute. It was not very safe when I started. Today it is the safest flying there is. Safer than riding a bike or walking in downtown L.A.”

Pilots are acutely sensitive to charges that they’re daredevils. Indeed, the term sky sailing was coined by a contingent of pilots who want to rid themselves of the term hang gliding and the image of oblivion seekers it evokes. They insist that this most birdlike form of aviation is perfectly safe, basing their argument on the fact that hang gliders can withstand the most terrible turbulence, and that expert sky sailors know more about the sky’s currents than airplane pilots.

They say that when you’re in the sky nothing can hurt you but yourself. They blame most accidents on stupidity. As safe as the sport has become--there were six fatal hang-gliding accidents in 1985 compared with 43 in 1976, and there are now certification standards for both pilots and gliders--they wonder why so few people learn how to soar. (The United States Hang Gliding Assn. has 7,000 active members and estimates there are 3,000 more regular pilots in the U.S.)

For years American pilots have been frustrated because only one or two ski areas in the country support the sport in the manner of European resorts, allowing them to carry gliders up in trams and launch from the peaks. Racers wish that Budweiser or Coors would pump some money into the circuit. For no prize money at all, racers pay for travel, $3,000 racing ships and $300 entry fees. “It’s an under-the-ground, back-of-the-woods, boondocks movement not a lot of people know about,” remarked a collector from the Smithsonian Institute, visiting the Owens Valley and impressed by the sophistication and simplicity of sky sailing: flight as Da Vinci first conceived it. “You don’t get any financial support so it’s more ideological,” says the Czech. “Basically top pilots are never satisfied with their flights. They always want something more challenging to prove to themselves what they can do.”

In 1982 Bostik escaped from Czechoslovakia through Yugoslavia, leaving behind his village near Prague and his mother, father and sister. He spent nine months in West Germany, fed and quartered with money from the American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees, until he was granted asylum in the United States. “I came to California where I lived with my aunt for three months until I knew enough English to go out on my own. Then I started to hang glide again,” he says.

“When I first came I got excited about the style of living over here, but after some time I started to wonder why--why did I come here? I decided if I’m going to fall into a normal life I could basically stay in my country and do the same thing--just work and have a family and never travel. I wanted to travel, and soaring is the best way, because you see everything and it brings you right close to the nature of the place.”

No longer play, flying has become a disciplined way of life. Bostik has spent most of 1987 hitting meets in this country and Mexico. He lives out of a van, eats in diners. The rest of the time he’s a carpenter in San Juan Capistrano, based in a garage with a telephone and an answering machine. He soars nearly every day, either on mountain thermals or coastal winds.

“The fun kind of disappeared when I tried to win a meet. It’s hard work, not doing anything eccentric, just concentrating on flying, waking up in the morning thinking about flying, going to sleep with ideas of flying. Somebody would say it’s boring, and sometimes I get bored. But I know how to deal with it. I stop hang gliding for a week and then I have to get in the air again.” He finds cross-country soaring, the pursuit of records, more gratifying than competing in meets--a series of timed flights on set paths. “It’s not battle between humans. It’s battle between the human and nature. You just show what the human can do. Pilots don’t know who is world champion. But they always remember who has the longest flight. I think that’s why so many guys are talking about 300 miles. It’s something that nobody’s done.”

EVERY DAY ON LAUNCH, each pilot sets up in the exact spot he had used the day before, minimizing risk through repetition. The 70-pound Dacron and aluminum airfoils are perched nose up in a row along the old mining road. As a strong head wind flows up the ridge, each pilot clips his hang straps to the keel, then shoulders the big wing. One by one they charge down the scree slope. In the gyre above launch they circle 30 at a time, gaining altitude for a run down the range.

Alone, plying the troposphere, gazing at the curvature of the earth, each pilot is elated--slightly hypoxic. They’re experiencing the effects of oxygen deprivation, which they must monitor to ensure that elation doesn’t turn to panic, or to a dangerous lack of concentration or judgment. “I smoke grass on the ground to approximate the conditions at 18,000 feet,” says one respected racer. “Up there you feel good; you’re not worried about anything. That’s why everyone says hypoxia doesn’t bother them.”

Up there, the pilots are connoisseurs of rare experience. Sometimes they share thermals with eagles as the great birds scan the ground for prey, or with hawks that soar to 14,000 feet for no apparent reason. Hang Czech Joe told of times when hawks have dived at his ship with their talons open, swooping by several times but never touching. “It’s a beautiful view of the bird trying to protect its property. No other way to get that close to birds.”

Dropping toward the goal, the pilots unzip their cocoons, lower their legs and touch down running, pushing the ships’ noses upward to slow down. On the last day of the nationals, some of the kites hover down almost vertically, settling slowly into a bubble of air rising off the landing zone.

At the awards ceremony, held on a ranch at the base of the Whites, Bostik receives a circular stained-glass rendering of an eagle over a mountainside. His fourth-place finish, combined with the results of other meets, makes him national points champion and qualifies him for the world meet in Australia in January.

“These mountains kicked me around when I didn’t pay attention,” a racer from Tahoe, standing by the beer keg, tells Bostik and Tudor. “I’ve found a new mecca. You don’t learn this place in a week.”

“You never know this place,” says Tudor, who has been coming here for 10 years. “Even when you know it, it’ll trick you.”

“What about the invisible electric zone that guy from Tucson flew into?”

“One day I run into St. Elmo’s fire,’ says Hang Czech Joe, recalling a dose of shock treatment he received flying into a storm. “All of a sudden I get shocks from one earphone to another through my head. I got really scared but everything ended up all right. Just landed with a major headache.”