How Are Paragliders And Harnesses Designed And Made?

Gin Seok Song has flown since 1977, first on basic Rogallo hang gliders that took off and landed a minute later. When paragliding arrived he pushed it in Korea, because it suited a small country with few places to land and many power lines; he ran a big school and worked with local government to open new sites. He designed wings for Edel, and when he left in 1997 he meant to take a break. Someone asked for competition wings, so he drew them, had a small factory sew them and sent them to Japan. When Japanese pilots started reaching World Cup podiums, he asked them not to say who had designed the wing and to call it the Boomerang. Top pilots soon worked out where it came from and came to see him, and he built a small company around that one model: Gin Gliders.

Eric Roussel started in the industry at 19 as a trainee, a stint that took him to Edel in Korea, joined Gin Gliders when it was created and was Gin's distributor in France. His own brand began with one harness. On a climbing trip he compared a friend's harness, which had to be stepped into like trousers, with his own bouldering harness, which opened around the legs. The result was the String, a paragliding harness whose leg strap closes straight into the carabiner. Friends bought it and asked why he did not start a brand, so he put his small savings into it; friends added a little money, and there has never been a big investor. His first rule for anyone who wants to make gear: fly, and love flying. People who come in for ego, or expecting a big business, are in the wrong place, he says.

For years Gin Seok Song designed from experience, which he says came from hang gliding before paragliding, and from the feedback of a large team of competition pilots. About ten years ago he decided that was no longer enough. The universities he approached understood aircraft but not slow wings like paragliders; he found one student, later a professor, who did. With about a million dollars of Korean government support they developed what Gin calls the wave leading edge, and a newer grant of about two million dollars over four years is going into wing shapes and tips. He treats CFD, the computer simulation of airflow, as a reference, and trusts wind tunnel tests in the university's tunnel for practical data.

The idea comes from the fins of whales, which carry bumps called tubercles. The first version put them along the whole leading edge: glide was good, but the wing spun early and the tips stalled quickly. The professor traced it to the curvature of a paraglider, which changes the flow compared with a straight fin, so the tubercles now run along the central 60 percent of the span and the tips keep a plain leading edge. Gin says the bumps delay the separation of the airflow behind the leading edge, which he credits with a much slower reaction after a big collapse. At Neo, Eric Roussel describes the same patience with a harness. For its lightweight competition pod harness, the team simulated more than 80 shapes on a computer, because 80 prototypes were unaffordable, but the geometry underneath, which he considers the foundation of any harness, took two to three hundred hours in the air to get right.

Pal Takats started flying at 16, about 25 years ago. He agrees with the pilots who told him gliders are not the main problem: task setting and behaviour in the air are. In crowded gaggles, he says, some pilots commit to a turn without knowing where they will end up and force others to make room. He once did the meet director's job at a Superfinal, unofficially, and knows the pressure from pilots who have spent thousands on gear and travel and want to fly. His question for the sport is whether it wants to keep people happy or alive. He backs a concept, nearly ready in his account, to grade events from A to E, green to red, on infrastructure, medical cover and whether a helicopter can reach you, and would grade gliders the same way. He wants a pilot union, floats one standard glider for some events, as in some Olympic classes, and asks brands to consider dropping the last few percent of top speed, since a race will use all of it. When the first submarine harnesses arrived with compromises he disliked, a smaller protector and an instrument out of sight, he blamed the certification framework that allowed them rather than the brand that built them. For himself, he now enters a competition because he wants to fly the site, not because the event is there.

Goran Dimiskovski has flown since 1991, came up through his national aero club, and joined the Paragliding World Cup as a paying member in 1994, before he had been to a single event. He now leads the association, which he describes as a loose, pilot-run body under French law: a committee of up to 13, currently 10, gathers what competing pilots say, while he negotiates with organisers and plans about three years ahead in detail and five or six in outline. On safety he is blunt. No competition system offers a complete safety net; in World Cup racing the only real safety measure is the quality of the pilots, which is why places are given on results alone, through a letter system that groups pilots of similar level. He does not want the circuit chasing the next big thing, just serious organisers, good service to pilots and decent media coverage. For a newer pilot he sees modest competitions as the fastest classroom there is, because everything except the flying is organised for you.