Sailing Seas of Air

By JOHN SKOW/OWENS VALLEY

"Dust devil!" someone yells, and a stinging, 30-ft.-high spiral of sand, sagebrush, shale bits and a lizard or two snicks up the cliffside. Everyone grabs for the gliders, fluttering half assembled and helpless an hour before launch.

! "We've got good instability today," a lean fellow with the quick eyes of a race-car driver says with satisfaction. He's an American hang-glider pilot named Jim Lee, and he is talking about air masses, not temperament. Instability, good to violent, is what the high desert of California's Owens Valley, near Bishop, is known for. Very hot, light air, cooking on the valley floor and over the canyons, rises at great speed in columnar thermal currents; and from upper altitudes, cold, heavy air sinks fast in compensation. You can "peg" your variometer here with no trouble at all -- i.e., rise faster than the 1,000 ft. a minute that the beeping rate-of-climb gauge will register. But great, eddying roils of turbulence called rotors wheel across the 14,000-ft. ridges of the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains, sometimes shearing the big thermals and otherwise raising hell. "It's the roughest place in the world for hang gliding," says Lee, a member of the six-man U.S. team, here with pilots from 40 other countries for the World Hang Gliding Championships.

Lee isn't woofing. Some flyers feared that countries new to the sport would send pilots not experienced enough to handle the valley's big air. As things turned out, two expert members of the top-ranked British team were tumbled upside down in separate incidents. When this happens, the pilot, who in normal flight dangles below the wing, can fall into the glider's underside and break the delicate structure of tubing and wires. The magical flying contraption instantly becomes wreckage, and the pilot has to deploy his emergency parachute. So it went for the two Brits, each of whom survived with minor injuries.

Lee came close to parachuting. Flying out of the fast-rising center of a thermal, he was struck by heavy, cold air that bashed downward with more force than he had ever encountered. The nose of his glider was knocked from a 3- o'clock position, level flight, through 6 o'clock, full dive. This is called "going over the falls," and it's not a surprise to a good pilot. But Lee's glider was shoved so hard that it pivoted on to 9 o'clock, completely upside down. A few more degrees of rotation -- 10 or 11 o'clock -- and he would have fallen. Instead, as he pulled hard on the control bar to shift his weight forward and gain airspeed, the glider sank back into a controllable dive. "I've always said that gliding was safe," Lee mused later. "This was as near as I've come to backing my opinion with my life." (A few days later % U.S. team member Brad Koji went over the falls, slammed into his glider and parachuted safely to earth from 14,000 ft.)

As risk sports go, hang gliding does seem to be fairly safe, and highly cerebral. A competitor's arms and shoulders ache after flying, but most of the wear and tear is mental. "It's three-dimensional chess, with a few invisible pieces," says Pete Lehmann, nonflying captain of the red-hot U.S. team. The U.S. had never won the World's, but after preliminary competition last week, Lehmann's bunch was first in the team standings. And tied for the individual lead with Aussie Steve Moyes, a former world champion, was lanky, long-haired Chris Arai of Oakland, California, an electronics engineer when he's not flying. (Each race is over a set course, usually of 80 to 110 miles, taking around 3 to 3 1/2 hours. After several days of competition, the best cumulative time wins.) As everyone is aware, it's possible that neither Arai nor Moyes would be leading if the current world champion, Tomas Suchanek, a pale, slightly built aeronautical engineer from the Czech Republic, had not been forced to land prematurely in the preliminaries.

Cross-country flying in any kind of powerless craft is a matter of finding a thermal and riding it up (18,000 ft. is the FAA ceiling here), then gliding till you find another thermal. A good hang glider sinks 1 ft. for every 10 ft. it travels. In uncertain air, a ridge line is surer than open country. When the world champion made his mistake, an observer recalls, "he was ahead of the pack, at about 14,000 ft. The rest followed the ridge. Tomas headed straight for the goal. He had 10,000 ft. to play with, and he didn't need much more lift, just a bit, to cross the goal. But there was nothing, and he burned out." To burn out is to lose your magic and to sink all the way to earth. Then you radio your chase crew and wait in the sun to be retrieved. Suchanek lost that day, but since then he has been relentless: two firsts, a second and a third.

Today's chess game is about to begin here at 8,200 ft., on a shoulder of White Mountain, 4,000 ft. above the valley floor. Hang gliding is a tiny subculture, and everyone at the launch knows everyone else. Kari Castle, a tall, athletic blond who's horsing around playing Hacky Sack -- yup, the one in the peach bikini -- is the holder of the women's long-distance record: 209 miles. On current performance she should be selected for the next U.S. team (there are no women in this year's competition). John Heiney, a thin, indrawn man who once, grandly or madly, flew a world-record 52 consecutive loops, is readying his glider to shoot aerial photos.

And hang gliding's first birdman is on hand to watch his son's launch. Steve Moyes' father Bill, now 60 and a manufacturer of gliders, was an Australian water-ski pro who first became airborne in the mid-'60s. He used a kite towed by a motorboat. That had been done before, but Moyes' kite was an innovative delta model, built for him after a design thought up by an American NASA engineer, Francis Rogallo, to aid spacecraft re-entry. Moyes' motorboat was supposed to lower him back to water level by slackening speed, but one day a driver headed him toward high-tension wires, and Moyes released the rope. He glided easily back to the water, completing the universe's first hang-glider flight. By 1970 he had flown off the south rim of the Grand Canyon. "The rangers were displeased," he recalls amiably. "They threw me in jail for three days."

Today's task is a 100-mile dogleg flight to the edge of Death Valley and back to a field near Bishop. Everyone knows the turn direction, which is left today. When 60 or 80 gliders spiral up in the same gaggle (as these lovely and frightening formations are called), prudence directs that everyone turn the same way.

Now the flyers have an hour's window in which to launch. At the hour's end, a big tarp is uncovered in a field, marking the start of the race. Each pilot must photograph the tarp from above. A sequence of designated turning points must also be photographed. In addition to a camera, pilots carry oxygen, water, a map, a two-way radio and an array of instruments. Launching early in the hour-long window gives time to rise high above the start tarp, but that's additional time in which to grind the edge off your mental freshness. So competitors wait, trying to outguess the wind and one another. Now and then someone shoulders his glider by the V-spreading downtubes, takes a big breath and charges straight downhill. It's an awkward, galumphing run, and the chrysalis-like harness, or body sack, hanging out behind, gives the pilot the look of a half-molted insect. As each glider comes airborne and alive, the whoosh of wind in its wires rises to flight pitch.

Everyone gets off safely, though later in the week Italian pilot Andrea Noseda would be helicoptered to a hospital with three broken vertebrae, after becoming airborne, then whirling back to earth in the swirl of a large dust devil.

Hang gliding is only briefly a spectator sport, but the moments are spectacular. The gaggles shift and re-form, climbing for position over the start tarp, with the mighty Sierra ridge line in the background stretching toward Mount Whitney to the south and Yosemite to the north. Sun illuminates translucent Dacron, and the spiral of colors seems lighthearted and serene: heavy, fragile men transformed as birds. Anthropomorphic bosh, of course; birds aren't especially serene, and the pilots are busy turning, conniving, wondering who has found good lift and how to grab some of it. From below, the view fades to blue as the pilots head north, then west to Death Valley.