Flight Skills Archives - Flybubble Blog

How to use your speedbar safely

Using the speedbar on a paraglider can improve your safety in windy conditions, but it can also be very risky if used in the wrong way. Join Greg as he explains the ins and outs of the speedbar.

Improve Your Top Landing Approaches

On hills and coastal sites, paraglider pilots usually prefer to top land. Easy when you know how, and have plenty of practice. In this quick guide we examine the six essential steps to making a safe landing on the hill.

Paragliding Skills: Getting High livestream

Ask Flybubble: Get High On Your Paraglider

Join us for an hour long chat about thermaling on a paraglider. Learn more about thermal sources, thermal drift, why you need to go upwind, how to search, how to use your vario, what to do with your averager, how to interpret the wind reading, when to get in close to the terrain, and how to manage the transition into the thermal!

How to get great slope landings

Landing on the sloping side of a hill can be a very useful skill to have, to allow you to land when thermals pause, and relaunch when they return. Or perhaps there's no safe landing in the valley, and you need to put it in on the slope? With this simple, straightforward approach you can achieve a gentle touchdown.

Ask Flybubble: Flying alone, leeside, SIV

Join us for an hour long chat about paragliding safety, with our instructor Greg Hamerton. In this episode: can flying alone be safer? When to do SIV? How to cope with landing in wind shadow. How to handle mixed ridge traffic. How to know when the leeside is safe. Are two-liners more stable? And more...

Reserve Deployment Breakthrough!

Dr Matt Wilkes has produced an outstanding contribution to paragliding safety. Together with his many supporters, sports professionals, regulators and the team at the Thames Valley Club he ran a study on emergency parachute deployment during the annual reserve repacking event ... and reached some valuable conclusions about rescue systems and how to use them.

Using Tip Stalls to get down

The tipstall (B3/C3) is a relatively new descent technique that not many pilots know about. It is an effective alternative to Big Ears, but only on some wings – it depends on the wing design. It relies on the outer B or C line stack being in just the right position to create a neat stall that gets swept back in the wind.