Eight musketeers...We met up with the guys at Irwyn Jehu’s house on Friday night and reported to Flyeo at 8am this morning for our equipment check and safety briefing. There are eight of us doing the SIV/pilotage course: Tony Blacker, Richard Butterworth, Pat Dower, Cris Miles, Nigel Prior, Roger Purnelle, Geoff and me.

I’ve been very nervous in the run up to the course, and Geoff and I have discussed our fears and what we hope to achieve this weekend. I am terrified of doing a full stall and getting it wrong, and Geoff will do pretty much anything not to have to throw his chute and land in water. Having talked to lots of people about their SIV experience, I’m not really sure what to expect, but I haven’t set my pod up properly, believing that I’ll have to take it off for the course, and I have asked to do certain manouvers which I’ll need for the advanced pilot exam. Within the group we are all experienced XC and/or comp pilots, but Geoff and I are the least experienced in radical conditions on a paraglider. Suddenly, starting hang gliding again seems like a quite good idea.

Our instructor is Fabien Blanco, test, acro and competition pilot. He wants us to do the course with exactly the set up we usually fly with (minus instruments). Three of us have cocoon harnesses, which he says will add to the entertainment factor. It hadn’t occurred to me that flying with a pod makes a big difference when doing maneuvers. He talked us all through the safety briefing and spoke to us individually about what we want to achieve. Our first tasks were to practise our pitching, so pulling the brakes until the glider is behind you, then releasing it and letting it pitch forward, then braking hard again to get an oscillation. When I first started paragliding, Len Hull drummed into me that hands up meant life and hands down meant death. I never knew how ingrained that lesson had become. Fabien had his work cut out trying to get me to resist the urge constantly to dampen out the pitch and fly normally again. His mantra became “More, more, more, Judith, more brake!”. Next came spiralling and exiting the spiral fast, with a big pitch movement on exit. It took me a lot of attempts (“More, more, more, Judith, more brake!”), but eventually I did lock in and felt myself being pushed into the back of the harness. I know now that the couple of times I thought I had done a spiral in the past, it was a steep 360 at best. On the video it looks pretty tame in comparison to the others, but I did manage to do it in the end. I also now know why I used to stick to steep 360s… I hate the high G stuff. I find it disorientating and it makes me feel sick.

Roger was the action man of the day. On his first flight, Fabien told him to to turn by pulling on his right brake. He yanked it down with conviction and did a helicopter!

After three flights we headed back to HQ to watch the videos of our three flights and to have a thorough de-brief. We didn’t finish until 8pm and after twelve hours, lots of adrenaline and sunshine, I was exhausted and very, very hungry. The pizza went down a treat and we all headed to bed ready for day two.

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