HGFA Skysailor Magazine

SKY SAILOR 19 January | February 2019 After grinding my way through five weeks of sleeping in yurts and eating nothing but fat-filled dumpling and mutton dishes, this very modern European/post Soviet Russian-style city seemed like heaven. The stunning landscape and epic hiking potential surrounding the city made it a perfect base to ‘recover’ for a few weeks. After enjoying the city’s booming nightlife of clubs and café bars the night before, I lay in bed extremely hung over, only to find a social media request from ‘deltaplan_almaty’. There was actually a club of very active hang glider and paraglider pilots in the area! Within 10 minutes of messaging, they had organised me a Moyes Litespeed S4.5 and a training harness to go with it! I was pumped! I was mainly in contact with Eugenia, one of the two main commercial tandem pilots in the area. Thankfully, she spoke very good English and had impressive knowledge about tandem operations and the local area, given she had only been flying for four years. Eugenia and Igor, a veteran of over 35 years hang gliding, picked me up at the edge of town and drove me out to their clubhouse. The clubhouse was a 12m shipping container, big enough to store over 20 gliders and house up to eight pilots in bunk beds. It overlooked a landing paddock and a small training hill, which was in constant use by dozens of paragliders honing their accuracy landing skills (not tomention an interesting breed of marijuana growing everywhere). After being acquainted with an old training harness that looked like a Bill Moyes original, we were off. The crew loaded their prototype trailer with gliders and headed up to the 6500ft/2000m launch. If you look up the area on Google Earth, you can see a giant east-to-west range of huge snow-capped peaks, green vegetated mountains and smooth grassy hills, perfect for hang gliding launches. The range faces NW to NE and overlooks endless flatlands to the northern horizon. The Kazakhstan mountain scenery Loaded up, ready to go