I hate it when things aren't properly described. I mean, the other day, I heard that a light plane had crashed somewhere. Terrible, of course, but irritating. I mean, I've seen planes. Been on a few. Even the small ones - they're not light. They're made of metal. A car with a garage door sticking out from each side - that's not light.
Feathers. They're light. A feather knows how to fall out the sky without exploding. Why? Because it's proper light - not heavy light.
Kites - they're light, but they're only powered by the wind. That's just not good enough. Because the wind, as a source of power, is unreliable. The wind, ironically enough, is flighty. Use it to spin a turbine by all means, but when the wind stops, as a rule, a turbine doesn't fall out of the sky.
It's why I think anyone who's prepared to run off the side of a cliff on a hang-glider - basically a tarpaulin strapped to a fishing rod - has got more loose screws than Bunnings. Glide? Pfft. It's plummeting. Nothing that plummets enjoys the experience of the plummet coming to an end.
I wonder if those who hang-glide try to fuel up anyway. By eating as many cans of baked beans as they can stomach the night before the plummet. Yeah, a bit of weight added, but at least if the wind dropped, they could try to bust out a succession of emergency farts to try and propel themselves to safety.
Badly named things. They lead to problems. But I guess it would be hard to market to market a hang-gliding as splat-plummeting. Mind you, maybe the mis-labelling helps thin the herd, so to speak. Something to think about, I guess.
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