With great views and steady weather conditions, India has some great paragliding destinations. Manisha Pande lists the best places for the sport and what adventure seekers should look out for.
If you can walk and trek, you can fly.” We’re not talking about the level of fitness required to fly a plane cooped up in a cockpit, but the real deal — free flying with no engines, no noise, just the wind in your face and a bird’s-eye view to top it. At least, that’s what Sanjay Rao has to say about getting to grips with the extreme sport of paragliding. Rao, an avid paraglider, has been “flying” for about 15 years and first discovered the sport when few knew about it in India. An electronics engineer, he was fed up of “chips and circuits” and took a break, vacationing in Kamshet. “It was here that I met a bunch of foreigners who had their own paragliders, and tried my hand at flying. I was addicted.”
Situated in the Western Ghats — about 11 km away from the twin hill stations of Khandala and Lonavala in Maharashtra — Kamshet has come a long way since Rao’s first take-off back in the ’90s to become a destination that is widely deemed to be a “paragliders’ paradise”. A great landscape and predictable wind patterns make it popular with “high-flyers” as well as novices. “The Sahayadri range is friendly in terms of its topography. The hills are not very high and offer large and ample landing areas that are extremely important for beginners,” says Anita Deshpande Malik, business head at Templepilots, a paragliding school in the Kamshet region.
| SAFE LANDINGS |
| If you want to learn paragliding, DO…
DO NOT… |
- Take to paragliding on your own
- Rush into buying your own equipment unless you have completed EP and CP
- Buy old equipment; preference should be given to a new set of equipment
If you go for tandem paragliding…
- Make sure you fly with a reputed tandem pilot, club or operator
- Ensure that your tandem pilot has certified equipment — wing, harness (for pilot and passenger), helmet (for pilot and passenger) and a reserve parachute
Source: Paragliding Association of India (www.pgaoi.org)
| BEFORE YOU TAKE OFF |
Medical fitness
Mental aspects |
- A good judgement
- A concern for personal safety
- Ability to make reasonable decisions
- A positive attitude
- The will to fly
Source: Templepilots
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Templepilots, along with Rao’s Nirvana Adventures, is among the four schools that conduct beginners and pilot-level courses in Kamshet. A course for beginners can cost anywhere between Rs 8,000 and Rs 16,000 and can go on from two to four days. Anita says paragliding is a fun, safe way to experience flight in its purest form. “You simply lay out a wing on a hillside or mountain, inflate it over your head like a kite, run a few steps and before you know it, you’ve stepped off into the sky.” Once in the air, a pilot is able to maintain and even gain altitude using lifting and thermal air currents. Landing a paraglider, too, is extremely easy. A pilot simply steers it into the landing area, and glides down for a gentle touchdown back on earth.
Moreover, just about anyone can learn to paraglide. “The extreme sport is more about finesse than fitness,” says Anita. However, you need to be able to jog, run and walk up a hill, and should not suffer from asthma, epilepsy or heart diseases. The ability to make sound judgements and concern for personal safety are also important. In fact, most seasoned paragliders assure that learning the sport is not as tough as it may seem. Rao says a lot of people get scared thinking it’s a dangerous sport but it’s actually as simple as learning how to cycle or swim. The key is practice.
Even as most veteran paragliders unanimously agree that Kamshet is the best place to begin flying, it is Bir-Billing in Himachal Pradesh that is considered the Mecca for experienced pilots. Nestled in the Dhauladhar ranges of the lower Himalayas, Bir is a tiny Tibetan settlement about 80 km away from Dharamshala. Billing, a mountain top at an elevation of 3,890 metres, is where paragliders take off from to land 14 km away in Bir. Needless to say, the pull of spectacular views and high-altitude flying is hard to resist for those willing to push the limits. Another attraction is the cross-country route from Dharamshala and back. “To fly in Bir-Billing is what you learn paragliding for,” says Anita.
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For those who want to experience flying without having to go through the rigours of actually learning how to manoeuvre the paraglider, there’s tandem paragliding — which is basically a joyride that you can take with an experienced pilot. In Bir-Billing, you can take a tandem ride with India’s top pilot, Deb Choudhury, who has been flying paragliders in the Himalayas since he was 14. Choudhury is of Indian/Italian origin and has pioneered many of the routes including the first flight from Bir to Manali in 2000. He’s now one of India’s most experienced competition pilots, ranked 46th among the world champions.
Apart from Kamshet, Arambol and Anjuna in Goa, too, offer some of the best tandem rides that allow you to fly over the beaches. Panchgani in Maharashtra, Nandi Hills in Bangalore and Manali in Himachal Pradesh are other popular options. A tandem ride can cost around Rs 3,000 for 15 minutes.
A number of paragliding fatalities reported in the media may have put the sport under a cloud, but most veteran flyers insist that paragliding is as safe as driving a car or walking on the road — provided you learn it right and practise it correctly. “Of course, there’s an element of risk involved, but most accidents happen because flyers throw caution out of the window,” says Manoj Roy, secretary general of the Paragliding Association of India (PAI), which was formed by the pilots community to promote, develop, control and regulate paragliding and paramotoring in India.
Roy feels mishaps happen when people opt for unprofessional “tour operators” rather than qualified flyers to learn or take a tandem ride. India may be opening up to paragliding and has immense potential to develop the sport because of relatively steady weather conditions, but there’s lack of checks and government regulations. So, Roy cautions adventure enthusiasts to be very careful about who they learn from and fly with. “PAI is trying to streamline training and infrastructure guidelines for learning and practising. It has also formed a set of guidelines for tandem paragliding. These will be implemented from December 14,” says Roy.
The authority is in talks with various state governments, sports authorities and the aviation ministry to implement a certification and a rating system so that more people can take to the sport without having to fear for their safety.