So I work behind a bar and i spend a lot of time explaining to people what paragliding is. Most of the time I do not talk to people long enough to paint a good enough picture for them, so now I just tell people I am a hang glider pilot. I flew hang gliders with Tammy Burcar on two separate days before taking on the art that is paragliding. Both sports are two separate beasts, and hang gliding makes a lot more sense in terms of how you fly than does paragliding.
I still want to take up hang gliding eventually, am waiting until I have enough money to afford it and have a truck that is good for doing that and retrieving (F-250, Diesel, 4x4, long bed, camper shell, and ladder rack). Anywho, I have had the benefit of having taken flying lessons in a Cessna 150 and sailing a 16' sailboat with a centerboard way back when I was a younger person, and there is a couple maneuvers I learned back then that I use every time I fly, subconsciously. The maneuver with the sailboat is simply that a sailboat cannot penetrate the wind by pointing the boat directly into the wind. This has to apply to paragliding. The more I think about my landing near the river bottom after flying the Nuthouse, the more appreciative I not pointing my wing straight into the wind and waiting til my feet touch the ground. I have control of relative wind on my wing so long as I am pointed at any given angle into the wind. For those of you who are familiar with sailboats, I know you are familiar with how the sail on the boat works and what it takes to sail upwind. Now I do not have a formula in front of me for calculating how that relates to paragliding, I do know there is some kind of relationship. Being pointed into the wind means you have fluctuating amount of forward momentum determined the character of the air you are in, where as if you are off center, your momentum is not determined by the velocity of the wind solely.
Comparing a paraglider to an airplane is very difficult, what I do that is similar to an airplane is a maneuver called a "side slip." Ben H knows what this is because he has to use one almost every single time he lands the Citabria at the flight school he goes to. This maneuver is a combination of pitch, yaw, and roll inputs all being done at the same time. For a paraglider this means maintaining a heading while giving opposing yaw and roll inputs, the only way to control pitch on a paraglider is a combination of velocity (or momentum) and break pressure. Roll and yaw control is done using weight shift and the brake ailerons. I like to think yaw is accomplished using weight shift and roll involves applying brake on one side or the other.
Any other thoughts on this?