Adventures with my short-pack

As a paragliding instructor living in the Swiss Alps, I want to share my favourite flights from the past year – all of them under my short-pack hang glider. Most of my days are spent teaching what has become the most accessible form of aviation. Paragliding has grown and diversified rapidly: XC, acro, hike-and-fly, speedflying, parakites – our young sport keeps reinventing itself.

Hang gliding, its older sibling, has taken a different path. The focus has leaned toward performance and sleek wings, and its pilot base is ageing and shrinking. Active paraglider pilots and tandem passengers outnumber their hang gliding counterparts by roughly 100 to 1. Sometimes it feels that the original free-flight sport traded accessibility for glide ratio. And yet.

Over the past 12 months, my most meaningful flights were not on a paraglider. They were on a hang glider – a short-pack hang glider. Three flights in particular changed the way I see the sport, and maybe where it could go next. I fly a Finsterwalder Funfex, a model from the late 1980s by the German manufacturer which is still in production today, one of several short-pack wings on the market.

It is as old as I am. With a speed range of 25-80km/h and a best glide of...