The Flight-Day Runbook

This dashboard is tuned only for your setup - Advance Epsilon 9 size 26 at the top of the ideal range, pod harness, around 100 hours, flying inland UK ridges. As you cross 200 hours and start flying mountains or coast, the amber band will stretch a little wider. For now, kindly stick to these numbers - they are designed to keep you out of trouble, not to maximise your airtime.

The ten indicators

All values come from the morning weather workflow in Section 02. The source of each indicator is shown on the tile.

Today's report card

Fill this in with the actual numbers from your morning check. Print this page or write in the journal. The empty version of this card is the most useful page of the entire runbook.

Each step uses a different forecast model. Because no model is perfect, the magic is in cross-checking: when three independent sources agree, you can trust the day. When they disagree, the day is uncertain, and uncertainty itself is a reason to be conservative. Kindly do all six steps even on days that look obvious - habits are what save you on the days that look obvious but actually are not.

This section has four parts. First, your four home sites in detail. Second, a wider net of sites within roughly two hours' drive when the home sites do not work. Third, a comparison of site types - flat, inland ridge, mountain, coast - because the same wind speed means very different things at different sites. And fourth, a short workflow for assessing any new hill using PeakVisor and FreeMapTools.

The home four - Chiltern Hills

Casting wider - sites within ~ 2 hours' drive

When the four home sites are out of direction, weather window, or club limit (e.g. Dunstable closed for the day, you want to fly without the airspace stress), here is your secondary net. Each of these has its own club, its own rules, and its own briefing - kindly do the homework before turning up.

Site types - same wind, different worlds

A 25 km/h southwesterly is a perfect Dunstable day, a mediocre Welsh ridge day, a marginal mountain day, and possibly a no-go coastal day. Each terrain type behaves differently. Here is what changes:

Assessing a new site - the 6-step workflow

One day you will travel for a holiday and want to fly somewhere new. Or your mate will rave about a fresh site. Before you launch from anywhere unfamiliar, run this short workflow - it has saved many pilots from a stupid first flight at a site they did not understand.

End of Part A · Decision Phase. The next part of the runbook covers what happens once you arrive at the hill - site reading, daily inspection, pre-flight checks, the launch decision tree, and the first hour at the launch. Until then, kindly trust the dashboard, walk the workflow, and pick the right hill.

Your morning forecast was a hypothesis. The site itself is the evidence. Most marginal accidents in the UK happen because the pilot drove for two hours, opened the car door, saw a few wings in the sky, and rushed to launch in twelve minutes flat - without ever reading the actual conditions in front of them. Kindly resist that itself. Sit on a rock, drink some water, and watch.

Reading the wind without instruments

Your eyes and ears are better than most anemometers, because they sample everywhere, not just one point. Walk along the launch ridge and read these six signals in this order:

Reading the wind with instruments

Once your eyes have given you a baseline, take measurements. Cross-checking instrument readings against what you have already seen prevents two common errors: trusting a device that is malfunctioning, and ignoring a quiet anomaly the instruments cannot capture.

Watch the other pilots - they are your free experiment

If wings are already in the air, congratulations - you have a live experiment running. Watch for two minutes before deciding anything yourself:

Walk the launch · check the landing

The forecast vs reality check

Before unpacking the wing, do this final reconciliation. Pull out the report card you filled in this morning (Section 01) and update it with the live numbers. Three patterns to recognise:

The Epsilon 9 is a forgiving wing, but it is also a 47-celled aerofoil with roughly 350 metres of internal Dyneema - there are a thousand small things that can go wrong, and only a hundred of them will be obvious during the launch run. Most equipment failures could have been caught on the ground if the pilot had taken three extra minutes. Kindly do the needful.

The Daily Inspection - six zones

Spread the wing on the ground first, in the wind, with risers attached to harness. This lets you DI the glider and harness as one connected system rather than two separate piles of fabric.

The Pre-Flight check - done before every launch

The DI is done once, when you arrive. The pre-flight is done every single time you stand up to launch - including the second flight of the day, the bottom-to-top relaunch, the practice ground-handling session that turns into a real launch. The acronym used in UK BHPA training is AFTERS. Touch each item and say it out loud - the verbal confirmation matters.

The hangcheck

Before AFTERS, while still at the back of the launch area, sit in your harness with the wing weighted (someone else holds the riser, or hook to a fence). Lift your feet - does everything sit comfortably? Are the brake-line lengths correct (handles at jaw level, not shoulder)? Does the seat-board sit flat under you? Reserve handle still where you can grab it?

This hangcheck takes 20 seconds and is the single best way to catch a riser-twist or brake-line problem before you are airborne. Many pilots skip it after the DI because "I would have noticed" - but you would not have noticed a twisted A-riser caught in the bottom of the speedbar pulley until you tried to push the bar.

A flight plan is not a paper document - it is a 60-second verbal contract you make with yourself. It anchors the brain to specific decisions made on the ground, when oxygen and adrenaline are both at normal levels. Once airborne, your decision-making degrades - every plan made in the air is worse than a plan made before launch.

The eight elements

Walk through these eight elements every time, in this order. The whole script is roughly 60 seconds when you have the rhythm. The diagram below shows what each element looks like for a typical SW day at Dunstable - the pattern transfers to any site.

The 60-second verbal template

Memorise this script and adapt the bracketed sections each flight. Mutter it under your breath while you are clipping in - by the time the karabiners click, the plan is in your working memory.

When the plan changes mid-flight

Plans often need amending. The conditions change, you find lift in an unexpected place, the cloud builds faster than forecast. The rule is simple - when amending, do it explicitly:

• Out loud, on the radio if needed: "I am changing plan - going to climb to ceiling here instead of going to the bowl."
• Conservatively: any in-flight change should make the plan safer, not more ambitious. "I am going to land early" is a fine amendment. "I am going to push for the next ridge" is a dangerous one.
• With a new bail-out: if you change the plan, you need a new bail-out for the new plan. No bail-out = no change.

Three techniques cover almost every UK day: forward, reverse, and the strong-wind variants (cobra, snake, or anchored). At your experience level, the first two are your daily bread; the third is for graduating into and best learnt under instruction. The decision is made by the windsock - not by personal preference, not by what the pilot next to you is doing.

The decision tree

The three techniques · in detail

The abort decision · the most important skill in launching

The hands-down most important launch skill is the willingness to abort. A bad inflation that you committed to becomes a tangled mess hanging in trees. The same bad inflation that you aborted becomes a 30-second reset and a perfect launch on attempt two.

End of Part B · Pre-Launch Phase. Once your feet leave the ground, Part C takes over - active piloting, thermalling, ridge soaring, descent techniques, danger recognition, and the landing approach itself. Until then, kindly trust the windsock, run the AFTERS, and abort early.

Active piloting is the difference between flying a wing and being flown by a wing. The Epsilon 9 is forgiving enough that it will mostly fly itself in calm air - but the moment you hit a thermal edge, a gust front, or a wind gradient, passive flying becomes asymmetric collapses, surges, and the kind of stories you do not want to tell.

The wing-pilot system as a pendulum

You are hanging 7-8 metres below a wing on Dyneema lines. The whole system behaves like an upside-down pendulum - energy moves between the wing and you constantly. When the wing surges forward, you swing back; when the wing falls back, you swing forward. Your job is to damp these swings before they become collapses.

The four channels of control

The Epsilon 9 specific feel

Your wing is at the top of its weight range, which gives it a distinct character that you should cultivate awareness of:

• Solid in turbulence - high wing-loading means more pressure inside the cells, which makes asymmetric collapses less likely than for a lighter pilot on the same wing.
• Faster recovery from pitch oscillations - but also a slightly steeper dive after a surge. Catch the surge earlier (smaller brake input, faster).
• Higher trim speed - about 1-2 km/h faster than the same wing at mid-range. This means you penetrate wind better but also need a longer landing flare.
• Crisper turn entry - the wing responds sharply to weight shift and inside brake. Use less input than you think.

Thermals are how you stay up after the ridge lift fades, how you climb to cloudbase, and how you eventually go cross-country. For your first thermal flights, focus on three things in order: spotting them before you fly into one, entering them without getting tipped over, and centering the climb so you stay in lift instead of drifting out.

Spotting thermals before they hit you

Thermals leave a trail of clues - at the ground where they trigger, in the sky where they break the inversion, and in the behaviour of any bird or wing already finding them.

Entering a thermal - the first three seconds

You will know you have entered a thermal because one wingtip will lift before the other, your harness pressure will spike, and the vario will start beeping. The next three seconds decide whether you climb out of it or get spat out the side.

Centering the climb · the listening turn

Once you are turning, the thermal is rarely centred under you. You need to find the core - the strongest part - and adjust your circle to keep it under the wing. This is done by listening to the beeps:

The "drift with the thermal" rule

If the wind is 15 km/h, the thermal is also moving at 15 km/h with the wind. Your turning circle must drift with the thermal - fight the drift and you fall out of the back of the column. Beginners often try to stay over a fixed ground point; that is the wrong reference. Drift with the air, not against it. Cloudbase will be downwind of where you started climbing.

When to leave

• Approaching cloudbase (200 m below for safety, 100 m below to stay legal) - leave by gliding upwind, not downwind into the cloud
• Climb rate weakening below half of what it was - the thermal is dying, drift to the next trigger
• Drifted too far downwind from your retrieve plan - better to take a half-climb and stay reachable than a full climb that strands you
• Conditions changing - overdevelopment, gust front, cloud street collapsing - get down before the air changes character

Ridge soaring is the bread-and-butter of UK paragliding and the foundation of your home four sites. The lift is reliable, the patterns are predictable, and the danger is mainly in the etiquette - eight pilots in the same lift band, all turning, all watching each other, is where most mid-air close calls happen.

The lift band - where it works, where it does not

The ridge rules · who has right of way

These are international rules, learned in your CP training, but they are the most-broken rules in UK soaring on a busy day. Memorise them and apply them before the close call.

Beating the ridge - the figure-of-eight pattern

The classic ridge-soaring pattern is a figure-of-eight along the lift band. Fly along the ridge in one direction until the ridge ends or the lift weakens, turn out (away from the ridge), fly back the other direction, repeat. On a 5 km ridge like Chinnor, one beat takes about 5-7 minutes.

• Stay in the lift band - keep your altitude above the ridge crest by 50-100 m for sustainable lift, or 150-200 m if conditions allow
• Turn away from the ridge at each end, into clear air
• Use thermals when they pass through the ridge band - these come through cyclically and let you climb above the ridge top
• Mind the masts and pylons - every UK ridge has at least one. Know where they are before launching
• Bottom-land if blown back - never try to "fight" your way back over the ridge if the wind picks up; land in the bottom field and walk up

The warnings in this section come from the air itself, from the clouds, from the ground, from other pilots, and from your own body. Each one is a "land now, debrief later" trigger - there is no upside to investigating. The pilots who fly long careers all share one habit: they retreat early and feel slightly silly about it for thirty minutes, then feel grateful for the rest of the day.

The eight live warnings

The "I do not like this" feeling

The most underrated warning is the one that has no name - the vague unease that something is off. The wing feels different. The air smells different. The sky has gone quiet in a way you cannot articulate. Beginners often suppress this feeling because they cannot justify it; experienced pilots have learnt that the unconscious mind processes patterns the conscious mind has not caught up with yet.

Cross-checking with other pilots

If you see warning signs but other pilots are still flying, do not assume they are right and you are wrong. Often the early-warning pilot is the one who survives. Conversely, if other experienced pilots are landing while you are still up, that is data - start your own descent.

For your experience level on an Epsilon 9, four descent techniques exist; only the first two should be in your daily kit. The others require coaching before solo use, and the spiral dive is genuinely not yet for you. Each technique has a specific use case - pick the right one for the situation.

The descent techniques · ranked by safety

The Epsilon 9 at your wing-loading penetrates wind reasonably well, but penetration only takes you so far - at some point the wind exceeds your trim speed and you start going backwards. Recognising that point before you cannot reach the LZ is the entire game.

Recognising strong wind in flight

• Ground track speed dropping - landmarks below moving slower than usual when flying upwind. If your shadow looks like it has stopped moving forward, the wind is matching your trim speed
• Drift downwind on every thermal happening faster than usual
• Wing pressure increasing - risers and brakes feeling "buzzy" with more pressure
• Other pilots being blown back over the ridge or sinking out fast
• Windsock at LZ looking horizontal and steady (if you can see it)

Flying technique in strong wind

The "cannot make ground" rule

The single most important strong-wind decision: if you are flying upwind on full bar and your ground track shows you moving backwards or holding stationary, do not persist. The situation only gets worse - wind tends to increase as cloudbase lowers. Immediate actions:

1. Turn 90° across the wind - you stop being blown backwards
2. Pick the nearest safe field - even if it is not your planned LZ
3. Land into wind - short ground roll is safer than missing the field
4. Keep the wing controlled after touch-down - turn around immediately, brake-stall, run forward to collapse the wing before it drags you

For your home Chiltern sites, true XC is constrained by airspace - Luton CTR caps Dunstable at 1500 ft AMSL, the London TMA caps Chinnor at 2500 ft. Real XC distances start when you visit Long Mynd, Brecon, or the South Downs. The principles below apply to all of them.

The XC cycle · climb, glide, climb, glide

The eight rules of beginner XC

The standard UK landing approach is the aircraft pattern: downwind leg, base leg, final approach into wind. It works because it gives you constant visual reference of the LZ and lets you adjust altitude before committing to the final.

The approach pattern

The flare · timing is everything

The flare converts forward speed into a brief moment of zero sink, dropping you onto your feet from walking pace instead of trim speed. Done early, you balloon up, lose lift, drop hard. Done late, you arrive at trim speed and run hard or fall.

Top-landing · only when ready

Top-landing (returning to the launch field) is an advanced skill. For your home sites, it is regularly done at Dunstable (open field) and Sharpenhoe (small) but rare at Chinnor (one-flight site). At your hours, the right approach is:

• Watch experienced pilots top-land for several flying days before attempting
• First top-landing should be on a calm day, with a club coach or experienced pilot watching from the ground
• The approach pattern is the same as bottom-landing, just smaller - the difference is the consequences of misjudgement (rocks, fences, vehicles right next to the LZ)
• Bail-out plan: if the top-landing approach goes wrong, immediately fly out front to the bottom field - never try to "fix" a bad top-landing approach

Most pilots learn fastest in the first 50 hours, then plateau. The plateau is not because the air becomes less interesting - it is because they stop debriefing. Five minutes of reflection after every flight, written down somewhere, compounds over a flying career into the difference between a careful pilot and a great one.

Asymmetric collapse

Cravat (wingtip caught in lines)

Spin · stall · twist

Reserve deployment

Landing in the wrong place

Numbers to memorise

For your home sites · nearest A&E

End of Part C · End of the runbook series. From morning weather to safe landing, the journey is now documented. Edit, annotate, and update as your hours grow - this should change with you.