Flying Like A Red-tailed Hawk

An interview with paraglider Mario Manzo
​By Jessica Rath

From November 8, 2023: the red rocks south of Ghost Ranch, 2,000 feet above ground. Image credit: Mario Manzo.

Abiquiú News regulars will recognize Mario's name from the beautiful photos that regularly grace the home page.  And if you’re an attentive reader, you may have learned from a recent article that Mario is not only a photographer, but pursues another adventure sport, namely, paragliding.  This sounded fascinating enough to merit another interview, and Mario graciously agreed to tell me all about it.  
 
It all began with hang gliding, in 1974, when he still lived in Dayton, Ohio. This was actually the city where Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who are credited with inventing, building, and flying the first successful airplane, lived, as Mario pointed out. Maybe it’s easy to be passionate about flying in such an environment!

About 15 years ago, Mario switched to paragliding. At first it was out of curiosity and because of the stories some people who were flying paragliders told him.   But there was a very convincing advantage compared to hang gliders: the weight of the equipment and its amazing portability.
“Being able to actually have a flying kit that's light enough to carry was very intriguing,” Mario told me. “My entire kit including some drinking water, instruments, clothing, and the wing harness all fit into a backpack. It all weighs just under 30 pounds. I'm in good physical shape for my age, I can carry that for an hour or two and boost myself up to a high place to launch. And I love that part of it.”
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Although current hang gliders use the most lightweight materials available, they still weigh up to 80 pounds and are 15 to 20 feet long folded, Mario explained. Typically, they’re transported on the roof of a car.

Flying at San Antonio Mountain with a friend. “Flying together is more fun. That's one of my best friends who lives near Taos. When you're flying with two or three people, we all watch out for each other and we need to know where everyone is. That’s why the radio is very useful, you can communicate about conditions at your particular location, or your intention to fly away. Some people like cross country flying, which means they land someplace else. And it can be quite far from where you started. So, to be able to communicate helps a lot.” Image credit: Mario Manzo.

He lives off Highway 285, and 10 miles south of the Colorado border is a large, freestanding mountain, the San Antonio Mountain. It’s a volcanic dome located at the southern end of the San Luis Valley, with an elevation of 10,908 feet and standing about 2,500 feet above the mesa below. When Mario discovered it, he had a glorious vision: how wonderful would it be to walk up this big, brown mound and fly from there?

And that’s what he did. He bought equipment light enough to carry, and the hike itself has become an important part of Mario’s paragliding experience. It is great physical exercise (I was quite impressed when I learned he is in his 70s), and it is a meditative preparation for the upcoming flight: “You're in the environment and you're feeling what the air is actually doing during this time  (we never really know  100% what the weather situation is going to be, even when the forecasts sound good)”, Mario explained.

This brought up a question: Does one need any instruments when paragliding? To measure the strength of the winds, for example?

“Yes. One of the main instruments is a variometer”, Mario clarified. “It’s a very sensitive rate-of-climb indicator.  For me as a recreational pilot, it’s  mostly needed when the lift is modest. In that case, it's not easy to feel whether you are sustaining your altitude or you’re slowly climbing. When you fly into a thermal, a column of rising air, it's absolutely necessary that  you know it. When the lift is modest, you may not feel it, so that's when the variometer comes in handy. Also, it has a couple of altimeters which measure my altitude. The one that I have  has a GPS connection to satellites, so it can give me my ground speed, but it can also give me my wind speed. It doesn't take a very strong breeze to negate my ground speed, meaning I’m not moving forward. And you definitely need to know when that's happening, or if the wind sort of blows you backwards,  and you don't notice it.”

View of Taos Mountains, San Cristobal. “The foothills are cascading to the right. That's the west side, we're looking south. My friend John lives in Arroyo Hondo and I’ve been flying with him at this site a dozen times in the last couple of years. And he just discovered this open meadow, a hard 45 minute walk but it's a fairly nice launch. It's not an easy site to fly because below it's full of scrub oak and eroded land, it's not flat. One has to be quite careful. This time I finally got it. The reason I would drive up there and do the hard walk was to experience this kind of flying. It was fantastic. I'm at approximately 14,000 feet above sea level, and so the high peaks which are 10,000, even 13,000 feet, like Wheeler Peak, are below me. That’s only possible when the winds are not too strong.” Image credit: Mario Manzo.

“So if you look at the picture above, it shows a lot of altitude. It’s just north of Taos, and I'm at 14,000 feet. The mountain tops around us are 12,000 feet, right? You cannot be drawn back over the mountain. In that situation, having an instrument which tells you that you're making some slow forward progress makes a lot of difference in keeping you calm, so that you are operating properly. If you're being drawn back by strong conditions, you need to get forward and get down, because you're going to be thrown back over the mountain into adverse conditions. At 14,000 feet  you can end up in a very inconvenient place. Think about it – how long does it take to walk five miles in the mountains? It gets serious when you're at high altitudes, because the distance melts away very quickly.  You can end up far away from your vehicle. That’s why the variometer is so important.”
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What kind of speeds are we talking about? I wanted to know. When does it become dangerous?
“The paraglider is an interesting machine compared to a hang glider. It's set up and dedicated for hands-off operation. So when you're hands off, you're not having any input. The inputs are fairly basic, but hands off, the paraglider flies at about 25 miles an hour. That's the air speed. Air speed and ground speed are separate, that’s one of the things that we learn. So, if you're flying at 25 miles an hour air speed, and you have a 15 mile an hour headwind, your ground speed is going to be 10 miles an hour.”

View of Pedernal from East, Trike Flight.  “This was taken from a hang glider. I have an ultralight system that’s called a trike. It is a tricycle with a seat and an engine. It has a steerable front wheel with a brake, and it has a mast that attaches to the hang glider center tube and gives you two axes of motion so that the hang rider can be controlled by weight shifting. You basically have an ultralight aircraft which can do things like  get you to higher altitude. This picture was the best that I took on this flight. Not long after I took this photo, I had an incident where I suffered a fractured propeller. I lost half of one blade of a two-bladed propeller. The system still works, but I didn't have any power because the vibration now is horrendous, and I wasn't able to kill the engine either, because  of another problem. The vibration was horrendous. I had gotten quite far from my launch point, like eight miles or so. I tried  to go ahead and use a less obstructed roadway as a landing strip.
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But this is a pretty nice picture, it shows the Pedernal and has all of its colored cliffs and bluffs. I had a safe emergency landing in the canyon“. Image credit: Mario Manzo.
 
Listening to Mario made my head spin, I didn’t imagine that one had to take so many different components into consideration. To drift a few thousand feet above ground, sitting in a chair with a bit of plastic and some strings holding you up – that sounds scary enough. But then you also have to pay attention to several instruments, air speed and ground speed, moderate thermals, possible lifts, and whatnot. On the other hand, the experience must be absolutely exhilarating: soaring like an eagle, or like a hawk, the wind in your face, no noise, an incomparable view. I can’t imagine a better natural high.

Back to the speed:  “It becomes important when you’re landing, because if you have an airflow, you want to fly towards it, so that your ground speed is negated or minimized,” Mario continued to explain.  “That's very important. When it's breezy, at 15 miles an hour, should you land with 15 miles an hour on your backside? When you land, you're going to take a tumble, right? So it's very important to know the wind speed and the direction. But 40 miles an hour is the approximate. It also depends on the loading of the glider and the design. But a paraglider can do 35 mph of airspeed, if it's loaded heavily enough and is a high performance design. There are some variations. I fly a high, but not the highest, performance wing, which means going 35 miles an hour.”

Eagle Nest. “This was one of those times where the flying was pretty hard and the thermal activity was relatively intense. So there was quite a bit of turbulence. If the thermals are strong, the turbulence can be quite strong too. When I fly out of a thermal, I'm going to get bumped around because there's turbulence on that edge, too. So this was one of those days.” Image credit: Mario Manzo.

This led me to ask Mario, “Did you ever get into a dangerous situation where you got really  nervous?”

“I had an ankle injury near the dam about three years ago. Right by Highway 96 there's a parking area that people use when they go cliff diving, at the part of the lake where the Cañones  Creek flows into the lake. There are some little finger ridges that jut out into the water,  and people jump from 20, 30, or 50 feet above the water. And we used to land in the parking area. I had flown there one afternoon and was attempting to land down there. But I got caught up in a downdraft that pulled me down to the surface. I tried to get  into the clearing away from the juniper trees, but I had a lot of vertical speed because of this pocket of air that I was caught up in. And I used my right foot to catch myself on top of a stone. As it turned out, it wasn't very tall, but it was flat, and I was fortunate that I didn't twist my ankle or break it, but it was serious, and I was debilitated for a couple of months. So the potential is high for injury, you cannot make big errors.”

With Mario’s friend John, Santa Clara Canyon, Santa Clara Peak. Image credit: Mario Manzo.

“The site for launching/landing is an important thing”, Mario continued.  “It's a place that you get used to, you learn what to avoid, and you learn what works.”
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This brought me to another question:  “Were you ever surprised by bad weather and ended up in some scary adventure?”

Sure enough, Mario had a story to tell:
“Okay, let me tell you about two of those kinds of situations. It happened twice. Both times, the wind speed would magnify as I'm flying. And there were two situations where I could not land where I wanted because the wind  was too strong. I could have landed there if I had changed my approach, but because I tried my normal approach, I found that I wasn’t able to get forward. While I was still 500 feet above my landing area, I chose to not land there, because I didn't think I could make it. But the problem was that if I go further back, like over 150 yards, the area turns into woodland, so it's not open territory. So then I turned downwind and I flew down to the Dollar Store and the Sierra Negra Restaurant because there are open spaces.”

Mario continued:  “I did that twice. I got 2,000 feet above the mesa, and then I realized that I didn't have the stomach for trying to figure out how to get down and land on this hillside in so much lift. If you're trying to get down when the lift is very strong, it's not an easy task, there's a lot of turbulence involved, a lot of hard, fast flying, which is not the norm. The norm is just cruising around and flying at 25 miles an hour. If you have to get down, you have to spiral and there are other techniques. But I decided to go down into the valley, and I just turned my back on the wind.”

​Back to the Reservoir, Chama Valley. “The mesa that is kind of jutting out towards the reservoir is what I call the Dam Mesa. But on that day I could not launch, the wind was too strong. I had to walk down, but it worked out. I landed down below there in that green area. I landed fairly close to the Elementary School and a paragliding friend that happened to come by drove me back to my car.” Image credit: Mario Manzo.

“There was a venturi[1] that had set up above the dam. Imagine there's this big Mesa blocking the wind, but over here it's open and streams down. So this big venturi of air set up there, and I'm flying, but now I'm not going anywhere but  down, down, down. I got down to where I'm still a  bit above the Mesa level, and then I managed to turn back and climb up a couple of 1000 feet.  And then I headed more to the west and went over the lake and went all around the venturi, still high up.  I flew over the valley, and I landed far away from the air disturbances.  It’s like water flowing over rocks, it creates waves and turbulence –  the same with air. So I wanted to be in a big, open space to feel safe to land, and eventually it  worked out beautifully. I even got a ride back to my car which was parked near the Elementary School. From where I had landed I walked to the road and  tried to hitchhike, but it didn’t work. But a friend of mine  and his wife –  they live in Pagosa Springs and they just happened to come along. He recognized me, pulled up, and drove me to where my car was.”
 
So that was lucky, and a happy ending to a scary situation!

This is a view looking north from near the Abiquiu Inn, bathed in golden light. For some reason, the Abiquiú Land Grant Board asked Mario not to fly there. and he complied. Image credit: Mario Manzo.

What an absolutely fascinating hobby. Actually, it’s much more than that – it is also quite strenuous physical exercise, it requires strong mental focus, and takes the paraglider into a calm, meditative state – if there’s no turbulence. Thank you, Mario, for sharing these extraordinary experiences with us.

[1] The Venturi effect describes how wind speeds up as it flows through narrow passages or over obstacles. This phenomenon can significantly impact flying conditions, creating stronger lift in narrow areas but also potentially dangerous situations if the wind becomes too strong or turbulent. Recognizing areas where the Venturi effect might occur helps pilots anticipate changes in wind speed and direction. (Paragliding Meteorology)