Paragliders at Cooks Terrace

A few months back I fortuitously discovered the existence of paragliding spots along Sydney's Northern Beaches. Today my wife and I were celebrating the end of winter by spending a Sunday afternoon at Bongin Bongin Bay when suddenly a big rectangular shadow swept across the beach. I looked up and here they were, big colourful paragliders in the Sydney sky!

These paragliders were taking off from a point at the top of the cliff known as Cooks Terrace and described as suitable for novice pilots on the Sydney paragliding and Handgliding Club web site.

I was amazed at how long they could stay in the air. They would fly from one end of the cliff to the other and back and didn't seem to loose any altitude. As can be seen from the windsock on the photo below, we had a nice steady sea breeze throughout most of the afternoon. Wind blowing from the sea rises over the cliff and creates ideal conditions for soaring.

Cooks Terrace is the cliff on the right-hand side of the photo below. Other paragliders can be seen in the distance on the left-hand side, this is the Warriewood paragliding side. Under the right conditions, paragliders can go from Warriewood to Cooks Terrace and back.

Seen from the beach it always looked like the paragliders just cleared the cliff edge, but that's clearly just an optical illusion.

The good thing with coastal soaring is the landing on the beach is almost always a backup option if one cannot land on top of the headland.

The paragliders fly a sort of circuit around this headland with one leg along the ridge and the return leg further out at sea.

My wife commented that only an aviation tragic like me can spend a day at the beach looking upward and taking photos of paragliders and not a single time point the camera in the direction of the surfing girls in bikinis right in front of us. I had not even noticed the surf babes.

Paragliding Sydney's Northern Beaches

Aeronautical information published by Airservices Australia goes through four amendment cycles every year: information contained in the AIP book, DAP and ERSA is updated with each amendment cycle, while charts are only updated every other amendment cycle.

This is why VFR pilots need to buy a new VTC (Visual Terminal Chart) every six months. The other reason is the constant folding, unfolding, marking tracks, erasing tracks and using the Tasman Sea area for writing clearances and the ATIS. There's only so much abuse a chart can take. I just added two bits of tape to my current VTC and it has to last me till June. And I didn't fly that much. Charts seem to be designed for self-destruction when no longer current.

Now, what happens when a chart needs urgent updating that cannot wait for the next amendment cycle? That's when NOTAMS come in, such as this one found in the FIR section of the NOTAMs for Area 21:

AMEND HANG GLIDER SYMBOLS ON AIP SYDNEY VTC AS FLW:
ADD JOINING RED LINE BTN THE SYMBOLS AT NEWPORT (S33 40.0 E151 20.0)
AND NARRABEEN TO INDICATE THAT HANG GLIDER OPS OCCUR AT OTHER POINTS
BETWEEN.
FROM 12 142123 TO PERM

Clearly, if pilots expect hand gliders only at these two points while they can in fact be found anywhere in-between, this is a safety issue. So I took my nicest red pen and joined the two points with a nice, thick and conspicuous red line.

After patting myself on the back for having read the NOTAMs in full and spotted this one, I was left wondering where those hand gliders on the Northern Beaches would launch from. The roof of the Bahá'í Temple? The top of the lighthouse at Barrenjoey Head? Or are we talking about parasailing? It's all relatively flat out there, and I couldn't remember seeing nice cliffs such as those found near Stanwell Park.

Thanks again to the Almighty Internet, I discovered the Northern Beaches Hand Glider Club. They launch both hand gliders and paragliders from a number of locations along the aforementioned red line: Newport, Mona Vale, Cooks Terrace, Warriewood, Turimetta, and all the way south to Long Reef.

Most of the launch sites have an elevation of about 100 feet. My guess is that they use a combination of thermals and ridge soaring to stay up in the air, otherwise that's a very short glide down to the beach. Pretty impressive. A pity they do not offer joyflights or instruction, those sites are much closer to my house than Bankstown airport.