Manbirds: Hang Gliders and Hang Gliding (The Motorless flight series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book popped up as an option to review after I'd posted a review about an unrelated item. As I've been a hang glider pilot for almost 30 years and read the book when I first learned to fly, I feel honored to review Manbirds.
While Manbirds is today extremely out of date when compared to the modern day sport, reading it is still a wonderful way to connect with the pilots and the sport in its infancy as it reached across the country from California to the east coast. You'll learn how the national organization, teaching protocols, and manufacturer testing took form. Manbirds is a marvelous read where you can breathe the air of the earliest days of this sport considered, "daredevil" by many but known to those who fly as a, "story of adventuresome intellects" in a sport now grown-up.
The hang gliding company Maralys Wills family started, Wills Wing, Inc., is today the only remaining U.S. manufacturer of gliders. One of my greatest privileges was the chance to meet this award winning author at our acclaimed hang gliding site, Wallaby Ranch, in Florida. Maralys is an icon in the sport and to shake her hand and have her autograph her book, A Circus Without Elephants, a memoir about her extraordinary family, was truly special for me. The following day, I launched and thermalled with a dozen other gliders. As I watched each taunt, efficient sail turn in coordination with mine, words from Manbirds came to my mind, "men now do fly like birds - huge, multicolored birds."

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Joy of Soaring: A Training Manual Review

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(More customer reviews)THE JOY OF SOARING: A Training Manual
First published in 1969,by the Soaring Society of America, revised by The Soaring Society of America (SSA) in 1989

In the mid-1960s, soaring experienced a tremendous surge in popularity across the U.S. as thousands of pilots came to the sport. Many got their first look at the sport through Walt Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" TV feature "The Boy Who Flew with the Condors." Although interest surged, at the time there was no standardized training manual available to student glider pilots, only the individual manuals used at various soaring sites around the country. The "Joy of Soaring" collected and repackaged the very best practices in a readable and well-illustrated format. It has since been superceeded by other soaring texts for the Practical Test Standards for a Glider Rating. Many other specialist publications give detailed treatment to more contemporary aspects of soaring today. This book's lasting appeal as the best-loved soaring primer comes from its practical, readable, common sense approach to the nuances of proficient glider flight. The book contains many black and white photographs of classic gliders. Illustrated by Gil Parcell, who was well known for his cartoons in Soaring magazine, this book captures the essence of soaring during its heyday. It is still the preferred introduction to the sport of unpowered flight. It remains in print, so a reader has the choice of a crisp new edition, or the nostalgia of owning one of the ubiquitous original, used copies.

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