How Hang Gliding Works

what that means either. It doesn't mean anything. It's just kind of a sore toe is kind of the opposite of soaring, you know, really drags you down to earth because you think, like now I have to go to like a urgent care center and get this toe checked out and probably take some pills that make me throw up. And it's just not like soaring high above the earth on a hand glider, I imagine. And I've never hand glided, of you, um no, but I've had a sword too, so so you know, so do you have any desire

to hang glide after this? Because I gotta tell you, man, I got kind of jazzed about the idea of trying it from researching this article. Not really, no, so like if you were somewhere on vacation and they had like hand gliding lessons as part of the place you were staying. Would you like go over and try it, you think, or you just absolutely aren't enthused by it at all. Yeah, it kind of depends, I guess on my mood and what else is going on. I mean, I could see that.

I think that's fair. I wouldn't I wouldn't like seek it out though. But if I was literally within fifty ft of someone doing this right, and somebody picked you up and put you into the hardest and I might do it. But and I'm not afraid of it or anything. It's just I don't know, I don't really care. Yeah, No, I get that sense that you're not afraid of it. I am terrified of heights, as you know. Um, but this still sounds pretty appealing to me. Actually, I think I might try it. I mean I used to do

repelling and stuff like that. So oh yeah, with your dad right down Stone Mountain, they'll let you do that. I thought they might. So hand gliding is what we're talking about, Chuck. And it turns out this article, this is an old school, old school how stuff works article, which were really weird in a lot of different ways. Um,

But once we kind of dug in. We've we found that, like the topic is actually a little more interesting than the house Stuff Works article would lead someone to believe, Yeah, it's a little dry, just his head bone dry, and this is a Freud and Rich joint. He knows what he's doing. He's got a PhD after his name. But I think it was the culture of the age, you know, Like, for example, in the article, he talks about a personal experience hang gliding. You know exactly what I'm gonna say,

don't you. I don't know. I don't actually, so he said that the place that he was taking this hand gliding lesson is called Jockey's Ridge and it's a public park. So he writes that, as you know, before they took off the hand gliding instructor check to make sure that our intended flight path was clear of obstacles and people because it was a public park. That's like such a two thousand one era how stuff works thing to mention in an article. You know, yeah, I kind of found

myself skimming that part once I started reading it. There's some good info in it, but yeah, the whole personal experience thing, it just doesn't it doesn't click with me. You know, so, um, hang gliding, should we should we do a little history. I think we should do a little bit of history because, like I said, it's kind of interesting. Yeah, and this is one that you would

not Um. I was a little bit surprised to know that NASA had anything to do with hang gliding, because it seems like obviously those two things would be opposite of one another, sort of like tow toe gliding sort toe and storing. Yeah, it's like an s A T question, it is. But there was an engineer for NASA named Francis Rogelo, so you kind have had an idea in the nineteen forties to use his Rogallo wing, uh, which was I guess sort of a crude hang glider to

return space help return spacecraft to Earth. Yeah, instead of a mere parachute, which is what I guess had been used for a little while. Yeah. Like you know those famous images of like the Gemini capsules coming back to Earth and splashing down the ocean and they have like a drag shoot you know that they're from Originally they're like, what if we try this other thing? That's that will be one day. The predecessor of the hang glider and everyone said, what's the hang glider? And that person said,

just wait a little while. So Rigalo and his wife actually were amateur aviation enthusiasts, and that's they were just kind of doing this on the side. But when he started working at NASA, they he said, hey, I've got this idea. And it didn't pan out. But the the the pictures of these tests that made it into magazines captured the imagination of some people around the world all at once. Different people who weren't in communication with one another saw these pictures and thought, you know what, I

could do something with that. I could turn something like that into like a personal, non motorized flight machine. And they did. Yeah, But he was not the first person to ever do stuff like this, because everyone, i think has seen images of weirdos in the nineteenth century jumping off of buildings with all manner of winged suits and things like that, and one such guy, and that's just the humans obsession with like literally flying themselves, like not

in a plane. There's also that it takes a certain type though, if you think about it, like even today, like somebody who says, wow, I'd really like to fly, and someone who says wow, I'd really like to fly, so I'm gonna spend ten years creating my own personal flying machine. Those are two different people, yeah, for sure, like the right brothers versus uh, this guy right exactly that you've never heard of because he didn't do anything otto lilienthal is that is that a good way to

pronounce that? Oh yeah, not this guy. This guy did a lot. Yeah. Oh yeah, you're talking about the crackpots. Uh. Yeah. He was a German engineer, obviously from that name, and he was crazy about this stuff. And he literally did over two thousand successful flights with these what they called weight shift hand gliders, so hang gliders, where as you will see, like the modern hang lider, you you shift your weight to steer the thing, and he was he

was doing that in a kind of a crude way. Yeah, he basically I mean like Leonardo da Vinci had like some design for a hang glider. I don't know if he's ever built, and the Chinese used to make criminals hang glide for fun. But this is like the guy who like actually went to the trouble of figuring out how to make this right from his own designs, and

and like you said, two thousand successful flights. Is I mean, that's that's proven technology, you know, so I say, and I don't think it's just us, but Otto Lilienthal is basically known as the father of hang gliding, the Opah. Yeah, I guess OPA's grandfather. Yeah, but isn't that is that German? Yeah? Oh, I thought that was Greek. Well I don't. It may be Greek too, but I don't know. Opa is German for uh. But you know, he did a good job. Then the Rogue Rogallo machine or whatever they called it,

the Rogallo, the fantastic flying Rogallos came on the scene. Yeah, but they apparently were not inspired by anything Lilienthal did. His stuff really kind of fell to the wayside once the Right Brothers started. You could see that a motorized flight, right, Everybody's like, why would you want this thing when you can just fly in a plane. And the Right Brothers themselves experimented with hang gliders first and then um moved

on to two planes from their hang gliders. But by this time, like the idea of hang gliding was was dead and from what I understand, unknown to the Rigalos, Yeah, we should totally do a right brothers show at some point. I can't believe we haven't. I know there's a lot out there. We will. Uh So flash forward some though toe at the very hot party, the Auto Lilienthal anniversary

meet up in California. So he still had his people, you know, I would guess the sort of early um extreme stunt enthusiasts who held people like Otto Lilienthal Is in high regard, and people came from all over the place too to hang out and hang glide, I guess, And that's where I think it was. Everyone sort of points to that meet up that year is when the reinvention of modern hang gliding came around, do you care

to say? I think so? And part of this that So you've got alto Lilienthal, You've got the rigolos who may or may not have been influenced by Lilienthal. And then you've got a guy named Bruce Dickinson. No it's not, he's the guy from John Dickinson and Australian Tom. No, well this is Tom h Are there two of them? Doug Dickinson? Was it Tom Dickinson? I mean that's what this one article says. But okay, well I'm sure that

one's right. But so Tom Dickinson. I think he was one of the ones who was inspired by those photos of the Rigala wing from NASA and built his own hand glider. And he created um like what you would call um what's it called when you're like on a

your parasailing and you're being towed behind a boat parasailing. Okay, So he invented basically that which later, to confuse things, was reinvented in the eighties or rediscovered in the eighties and became basically a separate but related sport to hang gliding. But his designs for this paraglider early paraglider, was based on the Rigala wing and basically improved it enough so that other people said, hey, you know what, you could turn this into what we call a foot launched hand glider.

And and by the early nineteen seventies it was under it was it was the design had been improved enough that, yeah, you could have like an invitational meetup of the crackpots who are into this kind of thing back then, right, And then a couple of years after that, a couple of brothers named Bob and Chris wills Uh started Manufacturing actually formed a company called Will's Wing, and by all accounts, those dudes really really grew the sport in the early

to mid seventies because it's a very I mean, I know, it's kind of been reborn now with these uh what are they called, not solid wing or I guess you could call him solid wing rigid Yeah, rigid wing. But those early hand gliders, it's a very seventies sport, you know, and they're so pretty in the seventies way to like the colors they use. Yeah, for sure, love looking at hand gliders looks like a catamaran sale up there, Yeah,

like a Hobie Cat or something. And you know, like every I'm sure there was an episode of Chips where one of them hand glided. They were it made its appearance, It had its fingerprints all over seventies pop culture. Do you remember, like back in the day on prices, right, one of the standard um one of the standard prizes was a Hobie Cat personal sailboat. Yeah, like anyone, You're like, what am I going to do with that? In Texas? Right? Well, I guess Texas has a shoreline though, look at me? Yeah,

there you go. How about Nebraska? Yeah, no shore line of Nebraska. So by the seventies this thing had kind of taken off, if you will forgive the unintended punt um, and it's it's I don't have the impression that it's like nearly as much of a craze today, even though there have been major improvements like the rigid wing design. It seems like it's the seventies and maybe the eighties

were the heyday, right. I get the feeling that today it's sort of in that extreme sports category, especially with these rigid wing But back in the seventies and eighties, like dudes like my dad would probably go out and give it a whirl right in his jeep. Yeah, absolutely, Like my dad para glided or paras sailed on one Florida trip one time, I remember, and in true like my dad fashion was he was like, I'm the only one doing this. It's like, I'm not gonna pay for

you guys to do it. The one but no way, the one behind the boat. Mhmm. Yeah, Uman did that. Once it got stuck up there for some reason, they couldn't get her, like her and the friends she was with down for a while, suck floating aloft. Yeah, well, don't they just stop the boat and you come down. I don't remember what the problem was, but there was an issue that they couldn't like her her turn or her ride or whatever, just kept going on and on and on for some reason. I feel like the boat

didn't stop. They're like, I can't take my foot off the gas. But by the way, and something you do probably it's usually with the hand. I can't take my hand off the gas. Yeah, exactly. There. So you want to take a little break and then come back and get into hang gliders themselves, Yeah, let's suit up. Okay, yeah, okay, man. So hang gliders at its core an extremely simple machine, right, and uh, it's actually a pretty clever one too, to

tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure. I can't really put my finger on why I'm so jazzed about the idea of trying it, but it's somewhere in here. Okay, Okay, So you get the hang glider, which is basically an air foil, right, yeah, and are we going to differentiate a lot between the sort of the old school and the and the new ones and the rigid wing. I I looked up the difference and I didn't see a terrible amount of difference. I saw that the rigid ones have um they glide a lot longer, I think um

or they have like less of a sync rate. But other than that, it's more of like a matter of personal preference. And then you would train on the flexible one for sure, So they still use flex wings. Okay, I just wasn't. I had for some reason thought reddit as sort of like the rigid wing took the place of the flexible wing. No, I think it did not. Actually,

it's a different it's a modified design. And if you're really really good at um at hand gliding, you you may prefer the rigid, but you may also prefer the flex you don't, you wouldn't necessarily graduate from one to the other. And then the rigid didn't replace the flex wing, all right, And just so people know for sure, we're talking about the flexible wing. It's sort of that old

school hang glidder you think of that. Uh, it looks like a modified parachute, and in fact it is like a nylon parachute that you can hear kind of flapping in the wind over some sort of aluminum frame. The rigid wing is ordered the same but the fabric, it's the wings themselves are it's just stiffer. It's not like it's made out of wood or anything like that. It's just like a stiffer um like the exoskeleton. I'm not describing this very well. Once you bring the exo skeleton in,

it's all downhill from there. How would you describe the rigid wing? So like it was, like you said, the flex wing, it kind of flaps in the wind. It's it's it covers a skeleton. But the rigid wing is is virtually the same thing, but it has like struts, say, woven into it that keeps it from flapping as much. It makes it makes the fabric rigid. Yeah, and it's like a pre fab wing you know that you would load out of your car. Yeah. They're really tough to

travel with it from what I understand. As far as like if you're flying somewhere on an airplane, you would you would have to take your flexible wing pair and glider like on an airplane. Yeah. Yeah, they disassemble really easily. The like all of the joints are hinged, the tubes pop out of one another. Um. The the actual um fabric folds up and comes off and the wires, you know, snap off. It's like whenever you're you're going to hang glide, you want to put your thing, you want to assemble it,

and then you disassemble it when you're done. Yeah, And they're like somewhere between forty seventy pounds, and from what I can tell, the ones that way less are the much more expensive ones because they might not even be made out of aluminum. They may be made out of something even light or like carbon fiber or something like that.

So the so, the whole, the whole point, whether you're talking about and I don't really think we need to get into two rigid wing just because it is just a modified version of the flexible wing and the flexible wings the one that everybody's familiar with. But with the flexible wing, it's basically it's just a triangular skeleton made of hollow aluminum aircraft grade aluminum tubes or carbon fiber tubes, and you've basically got three um three tubes coming out

at one point. Did you ever take an art class of drawing class? Nope, this can not make sense to you. Then, well I've seen a hang glider though, Okay, well, so if there's a point, if there's a the very front tip of the triangle of that, that the that is the hand glider. Then right the widow maker, the that's the nose. Out of the nose, going directly back away from you is a piece of metal, a tube called the keel, yes, going at angles out of the nose

backward away from you as well. Those are the leading edge tubes. And then about halfway back from the nose, crossing the leading edge tubes and the keel connecting them all, that's the crossbar. You have those four bars put together, that's the basically the basic skeleton of the of the hand glider. Okay, And if you haven't seen one of these, just crawl out from under your rock, go to your laptop,

look at a picture of it. And you know, when I was researching this, especially when Freud and Rich started to get into the wires, the front wires and the landing wires, and I was like, now I fully understand what they mean when they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Like Freuden Rich could have spent five thousand words explaining all this and he still wouldn't have nailed it like a picture would it's just impossible in a situation like this. Well, you've already explained more

than I would have. I would have just said, a series of tubes and wires. Okay, So a series of tubes connected, and then you've got the fabric covering that you got wires having like holly, connecting everything um and stabilizing it. And then the key to all of this, there's a couple of keys. This is where it starts to get fascinating. There's something called the control bar, right, and the control bar is like a triangle that dangles right in front of you when you're hanging from the

hand glider. And this is the thing that you you have your hands on. It's it's how you control the hand glidder, which is why it's called the control bar.

And then the next really essential piece, and I'll stop after this, I promise, is the harness, which is suspended from the keel above you, right behind where the control bar hits the keel right, and so you are prone, you're lying on your stomach when you're flying, and you're hanging onto the control bar and you're dangling from the hand glider above, which is why it's called hand gliding.

Because you're hanging from the hand glider. Fascinating it is, and I imagine in the nineties seventies it seemed like a fun idea when you're in Hawaii, we've had a couple of rum drinks to uh to get in a suit, throw on the helmet, strap into that harness and run off the side of a cliff because that's how you used. I mean, you can still launch like that, but it looks like it's gotten a little more uh, like that's fallen out of fashion a little bit, the run off

the cliff version. I don't know if that's true. Man, I think that that's like, um, that you're an advanced hand glider, that's probably how you're going to try it, although you yeah, although you can't, I mean, you can't do um, you know, like a dune or something like that.

It's really good for training or whatever. But they have like I don't know if you call it, like a launch ramp or something like that, but like some sort of launch that they build onto the edges of cliffs to run off of for hand gliding, and they're just terrifying to even look at pictures of. Yeah, I mean, i'd say I'm not scared to do it, but I'm I imagine I would have some butterflies when you go and run and jump off that thing, Right, I would too, man,

So don't feel bad. But you see people do it. And my immediate thought is I'm gonna nose dive, But you don't knows dive thanks to physics. Right, And do you want to take a break and then get into the physics. Yeah, we might as well hang gliding shock all right, physics. So the reason a hang glider works is because of its elegant lightweight design and the way the air moves over these wings, and then all of these other forces acting in concert with one another to

make sure you stay up there for as long as possible. Yeah. So the first one we're talking about is lift. The air goes over the surface of that wing, and that's going to generate that lift when you run and you jump off of that platform, and it's going to counter the gravity. But gravity in this case is not bad like gravity is actually going to be. While it does want to pull you to Earth, it's what's making you go forward continuing that airflow. Gravity is is your friend

in this case. Yeah, and then you've got drag, which is really the the other one. Um, those three factors together are what really applied to hang gliding, and drag is what ultimately slows you down. It's you're running into air molecules, and the faster you go, the more drag you have, the more the faster you get slowed down, which then brings in the syncrate, which is the speed at which a hang glider starts to descend towards Earth.

It's measured in like feet per second in still air, okay, right, and the distance it can travel is determined by something called the glide ratio, which is the ratio of the forward distance through the vertical distance dropped for forward distance you've traveled to your to that drop rate. Yeah, so like say every twenty four ft you move forward, you drop like one ft downward. Right, So that's I mean,

that's really basically it for physics. But the hand gliding would be like an entirely different sport if it weren't for um, the ability to catch air currents. Yeah, it's kind of all about that. Otherwise they would just be pretty quick rides. They would be I mean, like it'd be pretty awesome still, especially if you like you launched off a cliff and then just kind of glided slowly

downward toward the toward the Earth. It's still be pretty cool, but you can you can catch air currents if you know what you're doing and stay aloft for hours and go across parts entire parts of the country. As a matter of fact, the um the record for the longest distance traveled is like four hundred and seventy two miles, so I think it's like seven kilometers. They basically what these two dudes went from Lubbock, Texas to Nuevo Laredo over the course of I think like eleven hours maybe

something like that. And the way that you do this is that you go find these air currents, and there's a couple of places you can reasonably expect you're going to find upward lift from air, right, Yeah, hot air is one way thermal lift. And that's like over a desert, like hot sand or pavement prefer the hot sand over pavement, or if it's super sunny. And and I get the feeling that when the more experience you have, the more you know how to how to look around your environment

to feel and see where this might be happening. Yeah, Supposedly one way that they do it is to look for birds that are just sitting there kind of soaring. Uh, and you can just go catch that air column whatever it is that they're soaring on. Right. That's one of the most like relaxing things for me to see. Yeah, there's a hawk, almost emotionless, just sort of floating. Now imagine doing it yourself. Yeah, didn't that seem relaxing? I think it sounds great. Yeah, No, I would. I would

enjoy it. I'm sure it's not gonna get through a lot of effort to make it happen. Yeah, apparently I've made it my mission to get you hang gliding for some reason. And what it's a in the Chips episode, you will have rigged my hang glider to cratch right, poor Robert Pine. Uh. And then he's Robert Pine. He was there like captain or sergeant. Yeah, great, great actor.

I can picture him immediately in my brain. Uh. And then you've got something called ridge lift, and that's air that's that's deflected up by um like a mountain or a ridge, and the basically the topography of the ground beneath you and around you. You can learn to read that stuff and you know where these swells and columns of air gonna be right. And when you when you find these columns of air, these lifts, like, you don't just fly into them and all of a sudden you're

up because they're actually usually fairly small. Um, so you would basically fly right through them, maybe get a little bit of lift, but then you just keep going and start descending again. If you're going to catch an air current and upward air current, you um basically want to enter into a tight spiral, basically an upward corkscrew spiral. You're you're following the air current upward. And to do this, it's all just basically based on simple movements of your body.

That's the whole thing with steering and controlling a hand glider. It all has to do with the different um adjustments to the weight you're putting on the control bar at triangle that's in front of you that you're hanging onto. Yeah exactly. So um, you know you go left and right, but I think literally shifting your body as it's hanging and you go up and down by tipping and it's you know, it may see encounterintuitive or who knows. Once

you're up there. It may seem like the right way to do it, but in order to go up, you tip the nose down, and then vice versa. Yeah, And to tip the nose down, you pull the control bar towards you, so you're shifting your weight forward, and when you push put that that nose down, your trade again some of your altitude. You know, you're you're basically creating a nose dive, but just for just enough to to

speed up and then to slow down. You push the control bar away from you, which tips the nose up, which basically stops the um the glide of the glider. It turns it. Yeah, it turns it into like a piece of fabric trying to go forward through space rather than something just cutting smoothly horizontally. It's it's starting, it's now vertical in some way, and it slows it down. And that's actually the way you land too. Apparently you

can land on your feet very gently. Once you're close to the ground, you start to stall by pushing the control bar away from you, That lifts the nose up, cut your speed off, and then you just kind of in a nice gentle trot, hit the ground and and you say, I just hang glided. Yes, I think what I would worry about for myself is that, um, some of this stuff may not be intuitive or instinctive, and I would do the wrong thing and then panic. So, uh,

that's actually a really good point. Um. This group called Kitty Hawk Kites from North Carolina, which are actually sited in the House to Works article, they had like a really good tips for beginner's article as well, and they say one of the things that you have to learn is to remain calm, because it takes a bit of finesse.

From what I understand it takes. Um. You have to you have to be able to very smoothly move your weight around and if you're anxious and you're hanging onto the control bar too too tight, your movements are going to be kind of herky jerky, and it's it's not a good way to hang glide. So you want to be you want to be relaxed and controlled. And they say that the best way to do this is to have a few tandem lessons. First, I have a few drinks. I would guess that. I don't know if they would

recommend that or not. Maybe yeah, and maybe one for when you're up there too. But yeah, yeah, they're like

where'd you get that? But they offer like tandem lessons, right, so you're you're on there next to somebody who is an experienced hang glider and they're controlling and then they can hand over the control the control bar to you, but say, okay, now let's go left or let's go right, And all that is is just shifting your weight left, shifting your weight right, shifting your weight forward or backward for up or down. It's as simple as that. But I think remaining calm is a huge part of the

whole thing. That's a good point, yeah, for sure. Um So if you're an experienced pilot, you might also have some other gear up there with you, um, like in a variometer, and this is what in a lot of these you can hear, so you don't have to look at it. It'll like, I guess it barks out. You know, you're climbing in descent rate, which is pretty handy. Uh.

And then what's the other one the altimeter? Uh altimeter. Yeah, that's the one that just tells you what your altitude is called the altimeter altimet tear and you're gonna want goggles and obviously the helmet. And I think if you do these more, the higher up extreme things, you're gonna also have a parachute. Yeah, when you're hitting thousands of feet. Yeah. They say that most of the accidents that happened happened

on takeoff or landing, that it's rarely. Um, does somebody just fall out of the sky even when they hit turbulence. You're not gonna like just drop out of the sky like a stone. Um, that's just not how aerodynamics works. But you'll have a bumpy ride. It's more like you, um, you hit a tree or you um like you feel like you fall off the cliff, like you're your your hand glider doesn't catch air right or something like that. That that's usually on takeoff or landing when you when

you have a crash. Although I did see, um I think it was might have and because that is of course, looked up hand gliding deaths and um, this one guy like fell out of his hand glider entirely, oh man and went to the ground. Yeah, that would be That'd be one way that it could happen too. And I don't know if we said or not. Otto Lilienthal died

in a hand gliding crash. That's how he went, Oh, I don't think I need that very appropriately, you know, so um in reading Kittie hawk Kites description of you know what what it feels like when you're learning how to hang glide? So they hang glide on sand dunes, which is virtually the same area that the Wright brothers tried their stuff out on. And the reason why they use sand dunes because there's a gentle slope for one, but number two, if you fall, you fall into sand,

which is much more forgiving than, like you said, pavement. Right, But when you're when you're hang gliding, when you're learning how to do this, the whole point is, man, they did such a good job describing me. And basically they said, imagine you're running down a hill, right, and you don't have a hang glider. You're just running downhill. Eventually you're gonna pick up enough speed that your legs can't keep up with it. Gravity is pulling you downward, and you're

gonna start tumbling downhill. So it's you you just crashed running downhill, right, they said. With a hang glider, what you're doing is you're running downhill and you're picking up that same speed. But you're using the hang glider to stabilize yourself so that your legs don't get ahead of yourself.

And if you can find that balance, and it just takes a few times to practice this, well, probably several times, but if you can find that balance to where you can trust and stabilize yourself with the hang glider as you're running down the slope, eventually the weight of your body and the hand glider that you're holding, because remember it ways up to about seventy pounds, the weight of the two things starts to be transferred as the there as lift is produced under the hand glider from the

bottoms of your feet to the straps of your harness, and little by little that that weight is transferred and eventually your feet are no longer making contact with the ground.

And I'll bet there's a cute few seconds where your feet are just going through the area, you know, and the it's now the straps holding you up and through so it's the hang glider through the straps holding you up, and you've just taken off and now you're so ring but I would be like, I'm not ready yet, and then then you just pull the pull back on the control bar or push No, I'm sorry, you push forward on the control bar, the nose would go up and you'd you'd land after just you know, being a couple

of feet off the ground if you had your head about you. But what they're saying is is like, even if you never do catch air, as long as you don't hesitate and you just keep you know, using the hand glider to stabilize yourself, at the worst, you're gonna just end up at the bottom of the hill having run down there and never caught air. At best you will have caught air right and you'll just taken off. But the whole point with them is is that you're training on sand, so even if you bite it, you're

still just in sand, so it's fine. All this explains though, why they don't just say, okay, here's a cliff with a lawn tramp run off. You have to know what you're doing and it eventually you wanted to be You wanted to go from a gradual transfer to a very sudden transfer of weight from your feet to the strap to the harness. Correct. Yeah, And then there's one other way that you can do this too, and it's being towed by a machine. Like Paris sailing right, you're being

towed by a boat. Well, I was reading this article from I think, and people in Kansas they have nothing to launch off of. But they were still in hang gliding, so they were using tow trucks or not toe trucks, pickup trucks. They just sit in the back of pickup trucks with like a little cable attached to them, and as the pickup chuck gain speed, there glider would start to be picked up and they eventually disconnect themselves and hang glide around. Kansas launched me a pickup of course,

it's Kansas awesome. It does not surprise me. No, that makes sense. I think I might even feel a little better about automobile doing the work for me. Oh really, a pickup chuck? Well maybe, I mean, do they do they just tell you around? Literally parasl styled. Do they tell you to ord a Well, they don't have any cliffs in Kansas. No, they don't. They don't have anything. You're your your golden in that respect. The only cliffs in Kansas are delivering your mail. Nice one, Um, I

have one more thing, You got anything else? I got one more thing. So the earliest earliest hand gliding designs didn't use a harness. It was like a hang glider like you have, right, but you would run and then eventually, like the hang glider would would just lift off and you'd be dangling like a rock from the control bar, hanging on for dear life. Rather than being connected by a harness in a prone position. You would just be

hanging from like downward from the control bard. Yeah. I mean it was nothing like the hang glider like experience that we have now. They didn't last very long and they didn't go very far and get very high. But I think it's kind of like a zip line. Wow. Yeah, so that's it. That's hang glider man. There you have it. We're gonna go do it this uh this spring. We are yes, we are all right. If you want to know more about hand gladding, go take a lesson and

try it yourself. And in the meantime you can go check out this ancient how stuff works article. It's hilarious. Um, and just type in hand gliding and the search bar, you know, bring this up and said say said that it's time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this, uh, just a really nice email from a nice, dude, o't nice. Hey, guys, just recently finished my second run of every episode. How

about that. Hats off to you, dude, after hearing the Simpsons podcasts and understanding how it shaped so many lives. We'll let you know the stuff. You should know. It's helped me just as much, if not more. Just as you said, the Simpsons pointed me, you guys into the direction of pop pop culture. I think you said that. Um, your podcast shared of and shared knowledge have done the same for me and many other people who listen. I've been listening since two thousand nine, when I got my

first iPod at sixteen. Oh that's adorable, And at that time it did not have many friends, suffered from depression, and was dealing with a stressful life at home. When I first found the podcast, I was immediately hooked because it seemed like an audio version of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, which I was already an avid van of. Man, this kid's got it nailed. Um, I know he mentioned Mad Magazine,

then I'll know it's you. He As I continue to listen, I grew more and more attached to the comforting feeling of two intelligent guys having a friendly talk about interesting information. The show managed to give me a mental safe haven during rough times at home, and your nuggets of wisdom throughout the shows provide subtle life lessons that were crucial

to my formative years. The constant awareness of guiding listeners to have an open mind and warm heart is a needed reminder to be the best person I can be, to be more like Josh and Chuck. After high school, I joined the army and was isolated often in different parts of the country. Knowing that I could hear the witty, friendly banter of you two whenever I wanted always made me feel right at home. Right now, I am finally going back to college the Rifles, age twenty four and

is mostly thanks to you guys. You are my academic heroes. Stuff you should know. May not have changed the world as much as The Simpsons yet, but it has certainly changed mind. Man. How about that That was a great email. Thanks for picking that one, man, it was Thanks for always being there. It means more than you can ever know. Christian Stanley p s. If you read this for listener mail, it would be one of the highlights of my life. And will there you go, Christian Highlight achieved level up.

Thank you very much for that. That was a really great email, and thanks for listening all these years. We appreciate it. Yeah, Christian, we'd super duper appreciate it. And if you want to tell us high and that, uh you have been listening all these years, well we appreciate you too. You can let us know via Twitter at Josh M Clark or s y SK Podcasts on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know or slash Charles W.

Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com