Soaring Road Trip
STUDENTS
Potential students, interested persons, and active students are welcome to come along to flying sites to partake in the process. H2 / P2 rated pilots with a USHPA Observer can fly some sites but not other sites requiring more experience and skills.
Even if a person is not flying but want to learn they can come help -we see this working at few of the clubs we fly at now. Next year’s students are tagging along this year and helping wire crew, shuttling cars, generally helping as a pit crew for the flyers. Future students learn a lot just by observing. By the time they have their first lesson they have the general idea of how flying looks. They have visually seen the motions of launching and landing it gets tucked away in the mental synapses.
Newcomers watching, talking with pilots, asking question will go a long way to helping someone get started in this sport. Training takes a student so far, the pilot community takes the student and refines the student into a pilot.
The United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association maintains a list of Hang Gliding and Paragliding Flight Schools and Instructors - please go to USHPA’s website.
It is beneficial to ask around with some of the newer pilots who just went though training about their experiences with schools and instructors. Opinions will vary, but the students will give you the good bad and the ugly of their experiences if you ask.