JohnFritsche wrote:Every major manufacturer makes gliders that make learning a far easier, safer, more pleasant experience than the crap I had to learn on. Especially WW--the Falcon is a beautiful trainer, but then they topped that with the Condor and Alpha. How much easier can it get?
It takes you 10-20 flying days to learn to fly, after which Alpha vs Falcon becomes more irrelevant every day. Maybe you'll learn 30% faster / easier on an Alpha. Alpha is surely a step in the right direction, but it doesn't address the storage roadblock that most potential pilots face.
If you live in an apartment, it's most often a dealbreaker. Maybe you have an airpark near you offering storage, but most people don't. Maybe you have a good friend with a garage, but then you're lucky (and they're awesome), but you still need to drive to them and bother them every time. Storage companies (in Vancouver at least) don't have such long rooms, or if they do, they cost a few grand per year or are an hour too far or both.
It's funny that everyone just brushes off this logistics problem as an inalienable cost of doing hang gliding, simply because it existed for as long as hang gliders did. Then we have annual "why is our sport dying" threads which raise lots of good points such as availability of instructors, but completely disregard this one. I don't know why, I'm sick of saying the same stuff over and over again. The only reason I even bother is that someone who is considering building a portable hang glider will perhaps see some of my posts and that'll take him 1% closer to deciding to do it.