They can fly 200 miles with no fuel. Here's how.

Rutland is the smallest historic county in England, about 25 kilometres across, and a good chunk of that is an artificial lake. I’m travelling through every county on my road trip, and trying to film something interesting in each of them… and I knew Rutland was always going to be difficult. You can pretty much fit all of it in one camera shot… as long as you put the camera in the right place. So today I’m going to learn how paragliders fly. I’m going to try and fit an entire county in one shot, and I’m going to make this noise... “Yaaaaargh!” (birds twittering) Which is why I was at a former Royal Air Force base, was escorted down a couple of the old runways, and met Mick, who used to be a pilot in the RAF and who’s now part of their Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association. -Tom, good morning! -Mick! Good morning! -Hello, hello. How’re you doing? -I’m good. Yourself? -Yeah, very good. Excited about this. -Good. Looking forward to this? -Yes! -So am I. First time. Yeah! (both laugh) Er, yeah, the weather’s looking good. What we’ve got to try and do is wait for this cloud to break so we can get some sunshine on the ground and hopefully then we’ll get a climb out. But first! ...the safety briefing, which mostly went over my head. Mick would be taking me up on a tandem flight. I wasn’t going to be in control, but there was one particular bit that I didn’t understand at the time… Yeah. (laughter) ‘Going XC’ is going Cross Country, perhaps hundreds of kilometres with no engine and no fuel. And the folks there who wanted to do that weren’t certain. They were tentatively raising their hands because the weather that day was just on the boundary of making that possible. XC wasn’t on the cards for me, though. I was just trying to get all of Rutland in one shot. As he went to set up, Mick explained where the lift for the flight comes from. Sunshine is coming through and we just need a little bit of solar energy to pop the whole thing off, and then we’ll start to get some thermals, so… So basically, the earth heats up a bit and the wind starts moving, or… -Correct. -I don’t know much about it. You get a spot, for example at this time of the year a really good spot is maybe a field that’s just been harvested so, all that nice kind of hard panned ground and you’ve got all those bits of wheat or whatever that are lying there, or maybe even straw bales. -Yeah. And that will heat up, and eventually it’ll heat up to a certain mass that will be either shifted by the wind onto some kind of a trigger like a building or a tree line that will force it upwards, and then it kind of goes, “Oh, hang on, I’m now warmer than the surrounding air,” and it’s going to continue to go upwards, and that bubble then releases and becomes a thermal. Sun heats up the ground. Ground heats up the air. Air moves, air hits something, air goes up, lifts anything that’s in it. And eventually, that lifting air will condense and become a cumulus cloud, those cotton-ball clouds that look like a cartoon in a blue sky. Paragliders can fly in other conditions sometimes, but that would be perfect weather for paragliding. On a good summer’s day, when you’ve got that cumulus cloud, maybe about half the sky is covered in cumulus clouds and the rest are blue... ...then you’ve got enough sun being continually on the ground so, they’ll spark off another thermal. A paraglider pilot’s job is to read the sky and the clouds, all the subtle signs of what everything is doing, and figure out where that altitude is going to come from. So a lot of it tends to be a little bit of luck. You just kind of go, "It should be good, let’s go and see." -Right. -And hopefully if you’ve got enough height you go, “That looks good, that looks good,” and you’ll have one or two choices. “That’s my first choice, that’s my second choice, and then I’m landing.” But hopefully that won’t be the case. One of them will kick off and you’ll be at the right time. I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a few air sports in my time making videos, and one thing that’s always been off-putting is the amount of physical equipment you have to lug and the mental workload required before you even get in the air. And yes, paragliding does involve some equipment and safety checks, of course… but it was far less than I’ve ever seen before. That can’t be an entire paraglider in one backpack, can it? That is the entire paraglider. So, you’ve got the harness set up, er, my harness and the passenger harness in front, and the paraglider, which… where has that gone to? -It’s over there, isn’t it? -Oh! Oh yes. He’s taken it out. A paraglider is just a big ol’ nylon wing, about 42 square metres for a tandem. Solo ones are quite a bit smaller. I love giving people the experience of flying because it’s just...it is phenomenal. -I love it. -Ooh! Sorry, I’m going to just move away from you for a moment there. We’ve got some parachutes up. Para… -Paragliders. Yep. -Paragliders up. There is an important difference, I’m guessing. There is an important difference, yes. A parachute is designed to fit in a small backpack so you can descend safely from high altitudes. A paraglider is designed to generate as much lift as possible. Its aspect ratio, the difference between its width and length, is much greater. That’s about a 6½:1, that one that’s going up at the moment. -But there’s no real structure. -There’s no structure to it. -It’s a sling with a chute over it. The structure is the air being rammed into the leading edge and those are the leading edge cells that you can see there. So, the air just rams in there and fills up the wing and gives us some structure. If we fly through some poor air and it may actually hit the leading edge in a downward force, it can actually collapse this and it ends up killing the actual opening. -And basically, no air goes in, and the thing collapses. -Yeah, I’m guessing that’s bad! The tandem is designed to reinflate. If you just went hands up and did no input, it should reinflate itself within three seconds. Wow, okay. But if it doesn’t, then I’ve got to take some action to go, this is the problem, this is what I think the corrective action is, and then correct it to get us back to normal flight. Mick checked the hundreds of metres of cords, made sure they were all untangled, did his pre-flight checks and inspections, which again were easier than on any aircraft I’ve ever seen. He also explained how he steers. This is what we use to control the wing. So, if I pull the right hand brake handle down, it will deflect the trailing edge of the wing. It'll literally pull it down into a kind of a curtain which just produces drag and it stops that side from flying or slows it down. That’s a really important safety thing, while you’re turning a paraglider or a parachute, you increase drag and increase your sink rate. One of the leading causes of injuries and deaths in air sports is turning too low. So, when we’re flying today, I don’t want to see your hands anywhere above this bar. Okay, that’s fine. I don’t want you going up here and kind of pulling on this. -No, absolutely not. -That would not be good. I can 100% promise you I’m going to follow that instruction. -Probably your hand will be here. -Oh, now... -Sorry, something’s…oh! In the background there is the first take-off of the day. He’s called Nick. -Yes, he’s got it. -He’s got it. And while it’s not obvious from that camera angle, he was attached to a winch that was pulling him forward, ’cos you might have noticed, there wasn’t much wind on the ground. So, the initial altitude and speed comes from a mechanical winch at the other end of the field. You’ll hear some radio calls later between the winch and the launch site. That winch cable has a little parachute on it, so, there’s not hundreds of metres of metal cable slamming to the ground after Nick gets to the top and detaches. So, he’ll get up to probably about 700 or 800 feet on the release. -Wow. -And similarly for us. He should be coming up to the top of the tow about now and you’ll just see the parachute drop off as he pulls the release. I think...there we go. That’s the parachute off now. -Yep. -Parachute opens. -And he’s free flying. -Free to go where he wants. Now hopefully he’ll find something and he’ll climb out and he’s gone for the day. The weather was starting to brighten up. We could start to see some individual clouds off in the distance, and more people were launching. So, how many times have you rigged up a chute like this now? Ah, it’s not a chute! How many times have you rigged up a glider like this? I corrected myself! I got myself there. -Paraglider. Paraglider. -Paraglider. Not a chute. -They’re obviously different. -Rigged this up? Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been a tandem pilot now for six or seven years so, I think I’ve done over 300 tandem flights and my own personal flight log is probably over a thousand launches. I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I’ve got just coming up to a thousand hours, but I’m also an ex-military pilot, so, I used to fly fast jets in the Air Force, so I am Maverick. -(laughter) -Tom Cruise. There’s no way…I’ve talked to a couple of RAF people. There’s no way your nickname was as cool as Maverick. No, it’s not, no, no, it’s not. -The one I met was Bog-Eye. -Bog-Eye, yeah, yeah. My nickname is, well, my surname is Roche, and my nickname is Cockroach. -Right, yep. -There you go. There’s Nick, just getting in. Nick came back in to land because the thermals weren’t quite good enough yet. So just not much up there today yet? Not yet, because we still have that cloud cover. We just need to get some clear bits of blue so, the sun can do its maximum. We’ve got to have a day like today. We’ve got to have a day where the wind is either nil to kind of light. If it starts to get moderate and too strong, we’re talking about maybe 12 to 15 knots of wind, then you can’t fly because it’s too strong. The wing cannot penetrate. If you were to get airborne, you’d end up pointing into wind and actually going backwards ’cos it’s just pushing you backwards. So, generally, it tends to be a nice summer’s day with a light wind. More paragliders started to take off. More clouds started to form in the sky and the day kept getting brighter. I had a chat to Josh, who was one of the folks trying to go cross-country. The beep-beep-beeping sound you can hear, that’s the variometer, the vario, and I’ll explain that when we’re up in the air. Potential for maybe a hundred-kilometre day, don’t know. As ever, get up there and find out. -Do you know which direction, or is it… -Er, so north-easterly. The wind’s coming from south-westerly so hopefully blowing us downwind in that direction, go with the thermals and see how far we go. 100 kilometres from here, that’s what, Skegness, somewhere like that, or...? -Mablethorpe, next one along. -Mablethorpe. How do you get back? -Er, that’s part of the adventure for me. -(chuckling) It’s sort of 50% adventure going out there, see what happens and then when you land and you meet all different people. I’ve landed in the middle of nowhere before and walked 200 yards and then got a lift 88k back... -...with a really nice farmer, and other times I’ve had to hike 15k and get a bus for five hours. -Alright, well... -So, it’s luck of the draw and that’s all part of the fun. Did he make it to Mablethorpe? I don’t know. I never found out. He certainly wasn’t back on the ground before I left. As we got lunch, blue sky started to come through, so pretty soon, it was time to go. I switched to my 360 camera, and suited up. While I'm doing that... One of the things I’m trying to do with this new series is to tell deeper and more detailed stories and to avoid the constant pull towards short-form clickbait or rage-bait "content". So when Ground News reached out to sponsor, I jumped at the chance, ’cos it feels like we’re trying to do similar things. Ground News’ platform pulls in thousands of articles from around the world and organizes them by story, to show you how the left, center, and right are framing the same story differently. Unlike some other platforms, they don’t push – or suppress – stories to influence your perception of the world. They simply collect all articles on the same story in one place, along with a lot of extra information that you don’t find in the standard media outlets, so readers can get to the truth more quickly. For example, when Meta and YouTube were found liable for a user’s social media addiction last week, Ground News pulled together over 700 sources, and sorted them by political bias, how factual they tend to be, and by who owns them. Normally that amount of information would be overwhelming, but with Ground News I could filter by any of those criteria. For that story, Ground News pointed out that left-wing sources tended to emphasise corporate negligence and talk about momentum for regulation. right-wing sources described it as a legal blow to Silicon Valley and talked about personal responsibility. With Ground News you can compare the headlines and the takes instead of what one outlet wants you to see. Is someone trying to enrage me here? What’s the context? Ground News also shows off "blindspots", where a story has mostly, or only, been reported/i by one side of the political aisle, which means you get to see stories that might be outside your bubble entirely. I downloaded the app, and I moved it to the same place where my thumb used to go to to reflexively browse social media. You can join me, and subscribe to Ground News right now with 40% off the Vantage plan by scanning the QR code, or going to ground.news/tom. During that break, I got fully suited up for the flight, ready to take off. Safety equipment. Several layers of clothes, because it’s gonna be cold up there. Gloves, in case I have to grab some wires. Helmet, and er, in case there are issues with the line snapping, these very fashionable shades. Looking cool. Backpack is your harness, your seat, your emergency pack, everything. Everything is all contained in there so, we’re all good to go. -Alright. -And if I was going cross-country, I’d have some food in there, some drink etc. But we’re not going to be up that long, so, there’s no need for any in-flight refreshments. We had the right weather, so, into the harness. Like with any tandem air sport, the passenger is on the front. Mick checked and double-checked everything, and then we walked to the winch. If you’re ready, we’ll just move to the middle... Yep. ...to where the parachute is. That’s where we’re going to position ourselves. I was going to have two responsibilities during the flight. First, shifting my arms and camera after take-off and before landing, and second, pulling the cable to detach us from the winch. Suddenly my heart’s going. I wasn’t nervous at all until this moment where someone is clipping me in and clipping us in. So that’s just connected to the winch, here, right? So, I will have to reach down at some point and I will grab the bottom of those two connection points. Yes, we’d like to do a practice release, please. -Okay, so there we go, so, we’ll have a bit of tension on it. It’ll be like that, down there somewhere. So, the commands will be then, ‘prepare to release’. So, locate the front. -Prepare to release. Release now! -Lovely. Perfect. That’s it. -Oh, simple as that. Okay. That easy. Let’s get ourselves hooked up and let’s do it. Ah! Okay. (laughs) Yeah, this went from zero to a hundred very quickly. So, when the line comes into tension, I’m going to say to you, “Walk forward,” and I want you to walk forward with purpose, and leaning forward, okay? -Don’t get… -Leaning forward, really…yeah. Yeah, leaning forward all the time. If we’re pulled back, just accept it but keep leaning forward. -Okay. -So, our last check then, let me just have a quick look at your harness. -Everything’s good, you’ve got that done up. You’ve got your gloves, you’ve got your glasses. -Let’s go and do it. -Oh... -Green line... -Oh, okay. -Okay, upslack when you’re ready, please. Take up slack on the green line. [radio] Upslack, green line. Right, so we can see our line of advance. The line will come in. -When I say walk, we’ll just walk forward. Ooh... -Happy? -Okay, good. -Yeah, well... (chuckling) -Okay, walk. -[radio] Tension. -Walking. -That’s it. -[radio] All out, all out, all out! -(laughs) -Nice. Nice, nice, nice. -Wow! -Just wait for it, just wait for it... And relax, please. So, arm, right arm behind. -Right arm behind. -Yeah. Get your camera. -Left arm behind. -Get the camera. Get it through that there. We’re good. (vario beeping) -Okay, so I can see there’s one guy here -Whoa! ...on our right-hand side who’s in the thermal. So, as soon as we come off, we’re gonna join him on the right-hand side. -Okay! -That’s the plan. I hope my joy is coming through the screen here, but what might not be obvious is that I’m not really sitting on anything. Like, there’s technically a seat in the harness, but it feels like just another layer of clothing. -I know I can’t fall out of here. -You cannot fall. -I cannot fall. -But I’m gonna just give you... -...a little bit of a push to get you a little bit more comfortable -Thank you. Yeah. -...into our business class seat. There we go. You can just see the other paraglider off to our right, although he’s just a few pixels on the camera. We were getting to the top of the tow, so it was time for me to pull the release cord. -Okay, Tom, prepare to release. -Preparing to release. Release now. Pull. Pull. -Lovely. We’re done. -Oh, my God! -Let go. We’re now free. Oh, wow! Oh! (gasping) And we’re off! Free as a bird. There was suddenly nothing between me and the ground. That winch had felt like a connection in my head, and I guess it was, but I was now flying in a way that I have never felt before, and it was staggering. There’s something just on our right here. -Here we go, it’s starting to chirp. -How can you tell? Here we go, there it is. We’re now in lifting air. But it’s very, very small. Let me explain the beeping from the variometer. It’s pretty simple, high-pitched beeping means you’re ascending, low pitched means you’re descending. The faster the beeps, the faster the climb…or the fall. There are no visual cues for rising or falling when you’re up there, so, after a while, you don’t really hear the beeps anymore. It just feels like you instinctively know, okay, this is what my altitude’s doing. Mick was now trying to find his way into a thermal, into an updraft of air. -He’s in lift so I’m gonna go to him. -I can see he’s climbing. -We’re gonna go to him. -Yes, I can see that! Now we’re gonna come left. I want you to put your right leg over your left please and lean on your left hand hip. -Ha! That’s it. Now we’re in lift and we’re still in lift. This is good. If we can get another circle in lift, we’ve now got the core of the thermal. -There we go. -Yes, we have. I can feel that! -You can feel it. You can feel it’s just being lifted up gently and we’re gonna try and outclimb that solo glider. Oh, yeah. -A tandem out-climbing a solo? -Here we go. Why not? It’s been done. -Oh, I can feel that! This is looking good, Thomas. We like. We like. Yep. We’re now going up, let me see, about one metre a second. So that’s good. I realise now I didn’t quite follow Mick’s instructions there. I didn’t put my right leg over the left, but the reason I’m holding that position and leaning is to alter both the drag and the centre of gravity so we can turn faster. Apologies if the shot is a bit dizzying, but there is a good reason, Mick is trying to keep us inside the thermal, inside this little patch of air that is going up so quickly and taking us along for the ride. Just a gentle lean on that side, that’s all. Ah, okay! That’s... Wow. -Nothing major. Just helps the efficiency. And we’re now going up at 1.8 metres per second and we’re passing 1,200 feet above the ground. And this is just a chimney of air going straight up. That’s it. Just a bubble of air which we are in the middle of, taking advantage of all this free, absolutely free, God-given lift. Oh, I’m just looking down at how, um, how small everyone looks down there. They’re gonna get much, much smaller, Tom. -Yeah? -Oh, hello! -And here’s the other guys joining us. ’Cos we’ve spotted the thermal and they’re coming to join us. Oh, wow. And note, he’s turning left ’cos we started it. -’Cos we’re turning left. -Yeah, and we’re at the top. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to avoid collisions when you’re all going the same way. -Oh, absolutely. Yep. There’s no risk of an oncoming paraglider. -Nope, nope. Here he is. Oh, we’re being outclimbed by the solo here. I know. So, he’s got a better part of the thermal, so we’re gonna move over towards his area. And we’ll join him. Alright, I’m gonna stop leaning to the left. The weather was near-perfect, and we just kept climbing. Two and a half metres every second. Two and a half metres a second up. That is genuinely, like, elevator speed. Yeah, we’ve gone out one side. So, we need to just extend slightly towards the lake, I think. Because I think it’s just a little bit more over on this side here. So that’s the town of Stamford you can see down there just past the big cement works. -Wait, that’s Stamford down there? -That’s Stamford down there, yeah. Oh! I’ll wave to Colin Furze. He’s down there somewhere no doubt. Mick read the sunlight, the other gliders, the feel of the wing and how we were moving about in the air, and he was able to find thermals through what seemed like magic. And what really surprised me was: it’s not a gradual change at the edge of a thermal. The lift doesn’t slowly go away over a few seconds. When you move out of a thermal, it feels like you’ve passed through some magic wall. You feel like you’re dropping down just because the updraft goes away like (snaps) that. And then you get back into the thermal and, hup, off you go. Find out exactly where the sweet spot is of the thermal. -To maximise our climb. -Oh, so we’ve just to go… -Oh, I felt that. Oh, we just got out the front. A little bit too far forward. I felt that, though, we… -Here we go, we’re back into it. Here we go, we’re back into it now. Then something happened that… (sighs) I hadn’t realised that there was something different from every other time I’ve been up in the air, every time I’ve been fortunate enough to do something like this. This is incredible! Wait, it’s quiet. Yeah, nothing. It is beautiful. I mean, there’s the vario going, there’s us talking to each other, I’m making the whole thing a bit loud. -Yeah, that’s it. But for a solo pilot up here, -That’s it. Nothing else. he was able to shout and ask how I’m doing and we heard him, from, you know, a good distance away. It was…quiet. There was just the rush of air and the beeping of the vario, and that was it. If you’re on your own up there, you’re just flying like a bird. This is now going up at three metres a second. -Three metres a second! -Free, gratis. No fuel used. -No fuel. -No. Just natural energy from the sun. We’re so high up. We’re now coming up to… we’re over 3,000 feet. 3,100 feet. -Ooh, hello! -Wheyy! What was that? We just got a collapse, though. We went out to the edge of the thermal and the… Right, and the wind just deserted us. -The…one side did. So, we’re gonna go forward now, 'cos we’re high enough. Yeah. (laughs) We’re gonna fall out the front of this thermal. -Not fall, but literally we’ll just fly out the front. -You’ll feel it going. It might get a little bit choppy. -Oh yeah, it will. -Oops. Whoa! Hohoho! I’m glad I’m not scared of stuff like that anymore. If this was five years ago, I’d be having a full-on panic. Three thousand feet up and no engine. And there you have it, all of Rutland in one shot. Although, as Rutland’s only about 25 kilometres across, if you do the maths, technically you could be on, like, the roof of a five-storey building and see all of it. I don’t think Rutland has many buildings that tall though. We’ll try and fly out of the cloud now, forward. -That will naturally put us into sinking air. And if it doesn’t sink, I’ve got techniques to get us down. -Like spiral dives. -Like what? The spiral dives will happen shortly. We weren’t going to do those at that altitude. But for every bit of air lifted up, another will be coming back down towards earth. -Little bit choppy. That’s because we’re now going into big sinking air. Going down at three metres a second now. -Oh, wow. I’ve said ‘wow’ so many times. I don’t have a better word for this. -This is incredible. -“Awesome! Awesome.” You’ve taken some Americans up before, then. This is a kind of, a general kind of height that you’re flying cross-country. You’d be up at the cloud base. The cloud base today, if we went up to the cloud base, would be about 4,500 feet. So you get up to cloud base... Wait, we’re closer to the clouds than the ground right now? Oh yeah, yeah, we are. And then we’d then set off on a glide and go downwind on a glide and then go back up to cloud base again, hopefully finding another thermal. And that’s the plan if you’re going cross-country. You go, sink a little, get some distance, find a thermal. Yeah, yeah. You want to spend as little time climbing, so, you ideally want to find a nice strong thermal. -Wait, we’re just going… -Whoops. -That felt like up. No, that’s just a little... (vario dipping) a little...too small a column. You wouldn’t be able to turn in that. That’s how they do it. Up in a thermal, up in a column of air, glide to the next one. For hours at a time, for hundreds of kilometres if the conditions are perfect. Which means there was only one thing left to do. If you really need to descend very quickly, there is the spiral dive. -Oh, wow! -Now we’re going. Oh, that’s some G-force! Aaaargh! Aaargh! Oh! -Oh, my word! -You okay? -All good! -And...coming back out. Oh! So, it turns out, whohoho! -When you pull what felt like 2G with a 360 camera on a very long stick… -(laughs) It was quite heavy. It’s quite heavy. I’ve got the wrist strap on, but, um, the audience will have an interesting shot there. What 2, 2½G that felt like? I’ll just do now one to the right here. -Coming down... -I’m gonna brace for this one. -And…cutting in. -Go for it. Aaaargh! Yaaaaargh! And...going out slowly... Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! -Excellent. As we came in to land, I thought, I want to do this. Much as I like flying, I’ve never learnt to parachute or fly a plane or do any air sports because it always seems like so much expense and so much effort. With a plane, you have to learn all the controls and equipment, you have to pay for fuel every single time. You have to do so many pre-flight checks. You have to maintain your flying hours. It’s so much. With a parachute, you get one jump, maybe a minute of free-fall, and a few minutes of coasting down to the ground, and then you have to repack everything and take the plane back up. It’s expensive. It’s hassle. The equipment for paragliding fits in two bags. I’m not gonna say it’s cheap, but it is far more accessible than basically any other air sport. Hundreds of kilometres and the fuel is free. So, I think I might have found myself a new hobby, because what a joy to be up there for as long as your skill and the weather allow you to be. I tucked my arms back through the harness and got ready to land and to run. Mick warned me about ground rush, the optical illusion of the ground rushing up to meet you as you realise how close it is. So, be ready, as the front foot hits the ground, it should already be running. -Rather than static, otherwise… Otherwise I’m gonna trip over and you’re going to trip over behind me. Correct. It’s all going to look very, very ugly. Oh, you’re right about ground rush. That’s, uh… Right, here we go. There’s going to be a lot more ground rush coming up. -So, just be ready for it. -But we should be fine. Should be fine, Lee! Here we go and I’ve got to accelerate now. -As we’re coming down. Just going to accelerate. Not that much. We’re going to start to slow down about now. -Here we go. And slowing down, slowing down, slowing down. And stand up. Stand up, stand up, stand up. And move forward, move forward, move forward. And let the wing come down to the left-hand side. Look at the wing. And we’ll just let it come down to the left hand side. Here it comes. Collapsing, collapsing, collapsing. And that’s it. We’re done. -Oh, thank you so much! -High five! Pleasure, Tom. -I nearly hit you in the face there! -Pleasure, pleasure. -Thank you so, so much. -That was perfect. -That was so good. We had a great climb out, and, you know, we got up to three grand which is just superb. Doesn’t get any better than that. (laughs) That’s a wrap. Thank you so much. Oh, my word... (gasps) Next time, or right now on Nebula: can you solve the mystery that I didn’t even notice?