My return to England and a holiday in France

Back to England
    After my first flying holiday in Spain I went back to work, but was unhappy in my job. Permanent nights meant I had no social life. I was divorced, my children were all grown up and married. If I let my house in England I could buy a house in Spain and live there till I got my pension. The plan was beginning to form in my mind. I had become one of thousands who thought they could escape to paradise.
    In 2003 I took a holiday to France to a place called Annecy. I had visited Annecy with my family in a motor home many years ago. I went back there several times on holiday and even took my little sailing dinghy once. I got a real buzz from sailing on the lake, but you had to be careful, because the winds could spring up and within half an hour you were sailing in choppy metre high waves and in real danger of a capsize.

This time I came back as a Paraglider pilot having taken a course in flying in the Yorkshire Dales in the intervening 22 years. I had about 50 hours flying time behind me by then and flying abroad was a big new challenge. I arrived in Annecy in late August just before the firework festival in the town. This is a really big event and people come from all over France to see it. The fireworks take up about an hour and you are very lucky if you can find a spot around the lake or on the hillsides to watch. Luckily, I was in a campsite above the lake and had a good view.
    The lake at Annecy is a Mecca for hang gliders and Paragliders. It is surrounded by mountains which warm up in the sun and cause the air around them to rise. This is a well known phenomenon known to flyers and at a certain point in the day just after noon there is enough lift to take off. The real challenge was to fly right around the lake in the ascending air currents.

The beauty of Annecy was it´s convenience. There were half a dozen very good campsites around the lake.

There was a minibus every hour which would pick you up at the landing area and drive you to the take off point for 1€, and a cafe which served coffee or beer with a variety of cooked snacks. The downside was that half of the paragliders and hang gliders in Europe were forming a big queue waiting to take off every afternoon. Mess up your take off and you went to the back of the queue.


One day after taking off I had a tuck on the left hand side of the wing. A tuck is when the two layers of fabric of the wing loose their internal air pressure and the wing simply folds up. Usually you can pull the brake handle several times on that side and it will re-inflate. I tried everything to pull out this tuck, but it would not inflate. The tuck was causing so much drag that I could not turn to the right. Turning to the left was encouraging an asymmetric collapse of the wing and a spin. Try as I might I could not make the glider turn to the right. Left hand turns were all I had.
    I flew out over the lake to escape from the lift and turbulence of the rising air currents, then gently let the glider drift to the left until I was heading for the landing area five km. away. I was sweating now because the landing strip at Annecy is quite small and it has a lot of traffic, both paragliders and hang gliders. I joined the stack of pilots waiting to land. They were doing nice tight circuits whilst I was meandering all over the sky trying to line up for a landing. Finally it was my turn to land and I lined myself up with the field. Everybody on the ground could see the tuck and knew I was struggling to maintain direction. The ground rose up to meet me and I pulled the brakes for a full flare landing three feet from the ground.  When I flared to land the tuck popped out and re-inflated, just as my feet touched the grass. As my glider collapsed around me I was already on the second round of all known swear words. The triangular field below is the congested landing area. I am circling at the top of a stack waiting my turn to land.