Although he was born in Fort Worth, it's his first year to hit Texas skies, which is surprising considering the local weather for hang gliding is considered among the best in the world. The 32-year-old left for college in Colorado in 1994 and never came back.
“I'm really into skiing and mountain-biking, and I've got a good business,” he said. He got into hang gliding five years ago by pure convenience and is now hooked.
“I was going to get my private pilot's license, but it was too expensive. But for this, once you get trained it's pretty cheap. All you need is gas to drive to the top of the mountain or aerotow if you're down in Texas where it's flat, and then you can just fly for hours and hours and hours — and it's free because you're not burning gas in the air. It's addicting too, because you never know when you're going to get a thermal. You can climb 10,000 feet in a thermal. Last week, I climbed a mile in one thermal in five minutes.”
A thermal is a column of rising air caused by the uneven heating of the earth. When you think about a bird catching a breeze to rise higher, they’re really catching a thermal. Thermals are a hang glider’s fuel.
One reason Herring is so excited about the flying conditions in Texas is that they enabled him to reach a personal best of 180 miles Sunday, beating his former 101 miles. “I was stoked,” he said, grinning.
He arrived in Big Spring Friday, began flying Sunday and has already accumulated around 14 hours of flying. He came down from Colorado with two others: Jim Yocum, a fellow hang glider, and Tim Collard, who was involved in an ultralight crash Monday.
“The ultralight that crashed was our dragonfly that we had just got running in Colorado. We were excited to get it going, but now we're out until next spring,” said Herring. “There were really strong conditions, and a dust devil was probably breaking up.”
During the discussion of the crash, David Glover, one of the event’s organizers, could be heard in the background going around trying to get everyone to sign a card for Collard.
“Has everybody signed Tim's card? If you haven't signed it yet, sign it right now,” Glover yelled.
Herring said he flies a lot in Colorado, but he's also flown in California, Utah and Arizona—whenever he goes on vacation. The farthest place he's traveled to hang glide is Peru.
“Usually we can hook up with the locals. The hang gliding community is really tight. So when I went to Peru, I looked up a local hang glider on the Internet, and all of a sudden, you might as well be brothers,” Herring said. “They put you in their house even though they've never met you before, and then you even end up borrowing their car. It's really cool. It's almost like Texas hospitality. I grew up here, so I know how friendly everybody is. It's almost an extension of that. You end up having hang glider buddies in almost every state. I just call them up and we go flying.”
The hang gliders are allowed to get to 17, 999 feet (around 3.5 miles). According to Herring, he hits the limit quite often in Colorado. Flying over 14,000 foot mountains, which would be alarming to some people, is just another fun part of his favorite hobby.
“Hang gliding is addicting. It's like gambling because when you don't know if you're going to win the money, it keeps you coming back hoping you'll get it next time. That's what thermals are like. Because you can't see them, you hope if you go a little farther, you'll get one. And the longer you fly, the better you get at finding them.”
But he's not just here for the weather that led Big Spring to host the hang gliding world competition last year.
“There are some really good people who come to Big Spring for this event,” he said, gesturing to the group of pilots nearby who were waiting in the terminal for the meeting before launching later that afternoon. “We've got such talented pilots down here. Which is why I'm here: to learn. Being a five-year pilot, I'm still young. I've done all the things I want to do, like get high, go far and all that. But there is so much you can do to get better, and all of these guys will help you. We're all so passionate about it, and we love to share our passion with everyone else. We want nothing more than to spend the entire day talking about hang gliding, so for about nine days straight, that's pretty much all we do.”
Speaking of addiction, Herring said that the pilots have to keep their hang gliding balanced with everything else going on in life, which sometimes proves difficult.
“They call hang gliding AIDS because a lot of the pilots are divorced, and they call it Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome. It's ends up taking over your life—it's that amazing,” he said.
“Everyone would tell me, 'You've got to try the flying down here,' but I never had. I had no idea how cool it was. I figure I'll be back every year from now on because this place is just, well, epic. ”
