The Search for Safe Landings

Hang gliders search for thermals the way surfers hunt for waves.

They read the conditions for telltale signs: spiraling buzzards, dust devils, cumulus clouds towering above the haze. The rising warm air lifts them by their Dacron wings. Aloft, circling with the swifts, altimeters beeping, giddy from hypoxia, they are singing alone and aloud in the open sky.

But inevitably the updrafts wane.

And pilots, ascending ever higher for two decades, are coming down to earth with the growing realization that safe landing spots are disappearing beneath them.

Where once fields and pastures provided safe haven, subdivisions have covered the Southern California landscape. With fewer places to set down, hang gliding--the closest humans have gotten to free flight--is threatened in the place where it first soared to popularity.

Few young people have taken it up since its peak in the 1980s, and gone are popular sites in Del Mar, Dana Point, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Pasadena, Cucamonga, Lancaster and Santa Barbara.

To save the last of their fields, pilots are trying to shed their image as pot-smoking rebels who heedlessly hurled themselves into oblivion. Now, well into middle age, most promote themselves as professional aviators--with lots of insurance.

But they’re the first to admit that smoothing their rough edges won’t stop the relentless encroachment of homes and strip malls.

“Back 20 years ago, you could literally go anywhere. It was wonderful,” said a wistful Bill Kimball, 46, of San Diego. “Hang gliding is definitely on the decline. Every year, we get older and older.”

In his county, pilots have launched a letter-writing campaign to keep access to property that the California park service is acquiring in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park area at the foot of the Laguna Mountains. Most of the coastal hills around San Diego already have been lost.

To the north in Elsinore--one of the best spots for monster thermals--pilots resort to landing in a steep field once considered a bailout zone. New homes, a proposed power plant and transmission lines may force the hang gliders away from the Riverside County site altogether.

And in Sylmar, a popular flight park has been threatened by a proposed college expansion and homes pushing against the San Gabriel Mountains. The launch site on Kagel Peak, 2,200 feet above the landing area, is one of the few places in Los Angeles County with a designated landing zone. Pasadena has issued strict regulations that have all but eliminated takeoffs from Mt. Wilson.

“We’re down to one spot now,” said Joe Greblo, a 49-year-old instructor and glider activist who fought to save the Sylmar site. “I’d like to see our sport stop shrinking, but the thing that will kill it is land use.”

Greblo laments the lack of young enthusiasts in a sport in which the average flier is climbing into the high 40s. To turn the tide, he led the effort to save Dockweiler State Beach for gliders and hopes that training ground will spawn a new generation of pilots.

Training Facility Is Saved

The beach, with its steady sea breezes and soft sand landings, was one of the cradles of hang gliding. But in 1986, officials banned flying at the aerial bunny hill near Los Angeles International Airport.

Greblo lobbied City Council members, trying to convince them that the sport was relatively safe and promising that the city would not be held liable for injuries or deaths. His efforts paid off in 1999 with the opening of a flight park and training facility--the only place in the county for novices to learn.

Such coastal bluffs as those at Dockweiler and Torrey Pines, near La Jolla, provide what is called ridge lift, which occurs when wind hits a cliff and turns skyward. The band of updraft is narrow and uniform and doesn’t go very high.

Pilots may progress to riding the thermal columns off the mountains and valleys. They can use those updrafts as steppingstones to fly hundreds of miles, following lines of pale cumulus and ascending to 18,000 feet--beyond which the Federal Aviation Administration bans them from rising. But cross-country flying is becoming increasingly rare because pilots always need landing spots if they can’t find a new thermal.

You might be able to take off above Sylmar, but flying to Pasadena or Yucaipa--as Greblo has done--can be risky. The cross-country flight route follows the foothills, with Little Tujunga Wash the next spot to set down, miles away.

From aloft, you can watch the city growing into the path. Graded lots scar the hills, and subdivisions snake ever higher up the mountains.

Accelerating upward in a thermal 1,000 feet above Kagel Peak, you see the boulevards stretch forever south in a hazy gray soup. Windshields sparkle on the grids far below.

You glide along the spine of a ridge looking for rock outcroppings that radiate heat and rising air. You feel your weight press against the harness as you lift. The sensation is instant. Carving off the trough of a rolling air swell, you swoop upward.

You hold the triangular steering bar hard to the right, spiraling tightly inside the thermal. Five other gliders are doing the same. On weekends, dozens of pilots ride the same thermal, like a warm Fourth of July wave at Malibu, but a collision here means more than a dinged surfboard.

You’ll hover here because going for a distant thermal would carry you away from your landing zone. The inversion layer is capping the updrafts at 4,500 feet, so you’re fine just studying the topography--the ceanothus blooming blue, the deep canyon shadows and green water behind Pacoima Dam. Flying the childhood dream: Peter Pan soaring over steeples and chimney tops.

A queasy stomach brings you down, right over the new homes, with their swimming pools and barbecues, to an easy landing.

After years of legal wrangling and real estate dickering, members of the Sylmar Flight Club have secured a tenuous foothold on a bare spot in the Pacoima Wash.

Initially, the neighbors didn’t want them. And for good reason.

In the heady days of the late 1970s, glider pilots were seen as a ragtag band of surfer-stoners who sometimes landed, like birds against windows, in bloody heaps on roofs and hillsides. One was electrocuted in view of hundreds of spectators when he got hung up in power lines over Pacific Coast Highway.

The sky bandits stomped through strawberry fields and left beer cans scattered about. The gliders were equally unrefined, sometimes homemade. Most flights were more like extended jumps--overgrown kids leaping off the roof with souped-up umbrellas.

“It was all blood and guts,” said Fred Wagner, 69, who started gliding in 1971. “I’m a professional stuntman. Me and my two partners, we didn’t know what . . . we were doing.”

Ken de Russy, a longtime glider and historian of the sport, said he saw far more friends die hang gliding in the 1970s and early 1980s than he saw killed in combat in Vietnam. Forty people died nationwide in 1974, compared to fewer than 10 in most recent years. “My only goal in all those years was I didn’t want to splatter,” he said.

Though humans have tried to use gliders since the 19th century--when a German designer named Otto Lilienthal briefly took to the air off a hill in Berlin--the sport was truly launched from a field in Corona del Mar in May 1971. National Geographic covered the event, at which about 25 daredevils wearing bamboo and vinyl wings took long jumps off a grassy hill.

“It was just a jump, but in your mind it was something so much more,” said De Russy, 52, who, like many pilots, talks about the sport with a child’s sense of wonder. Despite the dangers, he says he can’t understand why more people aren’t inspired to take to the air.

For a while, more people did. By the sport’s peak in the 1980s, about 30,000 people took to the skies, but landowners fearing lawsuits began restricting access.

Running Out of Landing Room

With fewer choices these days, the dream of flying occasionally verges on a nightmare. Bill Hellewell, 56, jumped off Little Black Mountain near Del Mar about a year ago, headed for points east. He crossed Interstate 15, looking for a thermal he usually finds on a hillside in Poway. It wasn’t there.

Suddenly, Hellewell was no more than an oversized bird with flapless wings, watching the terra cotta roofs come into sharp relief. His contingency landing fields were gone, swallowed by suburbs.

Nerves fired. At about 300 feet, he had less than two minutes to decide where to put down. He radioed his flight buddies, who thought they could make it to a schoolyard.

But it looked far off. Hellewell spotted some freshly graded lots on a hillside and homed in, landing with a jolt.

“If I did a cross-country like that again,” he said, “I’d have to drive around Poway before and make sure the fields I know are not gone.”

Pilots try to assure landowners they will not be sued in the event of a crash. They say liability should not be an issue because most are members of the U.S. Hang Gliding Assn., which requires hours of instruction and provides a $1-million insurance policy.

Still, there is little incentive for a property owner to take the risk.

“Almost without fail, a landowner who asks his lawyer: ‘Should I have hang gliders land on my property?’ will get a resounding no,” said the association’s David Leggett.

Leggett said that as open land becomes more precious, hang gliding also is opposed by conservationists, who don’t want gliders tramping on natural habitat. Now the four main gliding clubs in Southern California are working with the U.S. Forest Service to ensure that they have a voice in new management plans.

The hang gliding association says its membership consistently hovers around 10,000, thanks to growth outside California and the related sport of para-gliding.

As part of its effort to improve the group’s image, Greblo, owner of a Van Nuys hang gliding shop, recently took state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar) on a tandem flight. The instructor bought a house next to the flight park, just so the gliders would have a presence in the community. And his commanding and legendary status in the sport ensures that the rules will be obeyed.

But over in Elsinore, the atmosphere is more of a hangover from the glory days. One of the group’s leaders is Mickey Sarraile. A 41-year-old welder with wispy blond hair and ragged sideburns, he grinds down the calluses on his hands with a belt sander. He’s missing a leg from a motorcycle accident, but gets around easily enough. He calls his group outcasts and jokes that you’d better keep them away from your girlfriend. In their outlaw days, they flew with laundry in their parachute pouches--instead of chutes--to flout protocol.

“We just don’t like rules,” Sarraile said. “This is one of the only free sports around any more. But we need new blood in it or it will die. People need to realize how cool it is.”

To keep their landing zone, however, they had to become members of the hang gliding association and now must abide by the rules.

Reluctantly reformed, Sarraile circled in a thermal high above the Santa Ana Mountains recently, his parachute tucked properly into its pouch. His friends pointed out that his one leg made him easy to recognize from the ground: He looked like a scorpion. After half an hour or so, he swooped down, landed hard and watched the others come in. One glider couldn’t make it over a ridge and improvised a landing in a field surrounded by new homes.

Another skimmed along the downward-sloping landing zone--past the oak where they drink Coors, past a wrecked water tank--not able to touch down.

“Whack! Whack! Whack!” the spectators chanted gleefully, glider jargon for a clumsy landing. As the pilot neared the end of the makeshift runway, his feet skipping along the ground, he pulled the glider’s nose up and then dived head-on into the dirt. “Whack!” they roared, laughing.

Pointing to the houses whose backyard fences edge the sloping runway, Sarraile said: “They’re pushing us into the danger zone.”