When I have a pilot with five or ten hours, there’s so much to learn before we even start talking about the safety aspect of SIV. What I’ll be doing with those pilots is looking at the movements of the paraglider and the relationship between how the glider moves and how the body moves, because that relationship changes the outcome of almost every situation you’ll experience later in your flying.
We’ll spend time understanding the movements of the glider in a rotation, how the wing moves towards the edge of the turn, and what happens as you come through the exit. When you really understand the angle of the wing, where the edge of the turn is and the feeling as it rolls back through the exit window, that doesn’t just help you in SIV—it translates directly into becoming a better thermal pilot.
When you understand how to regulate the roll of the wing, you don’t just become better at light spirals or deep spirals. You also start to master your thermalling. We spend a huge amount of our time on a paraglider in some form of rotation, and there’s so much detail in what you see and what you feel during those turns. You don’t need a lot of energy, and it doesn’t need to be extreme, to start understanding those movements.
It’s important to learn this early. A lot of pilots get their licence, start flying in thermic conditions and become frightened by movements they don’t understand. They then come to SIV with those fears already ingrained. I’d much rather teach those movements before that happens.
Once you understand what the wing is doing, you can either use those movements to your advantage or cancel them. From there we start working on the fundamentals: how you use your harness, your full brake range and your situational awareness. Then we move on to collapses.
By the time you leave, I want you to understand the movements you’re going to experience in thermic conditions, and I want you to have the safety skills to stop any rotation that develops into something you don’t want.
For me, that’s one of the biggest benefits of SIV. It’s not just about learning manoeuvres. It’s about understanding how the wing moves, because that understanding will stay with you every time you fly.