Tell me smart ass, how long have you been flying, and which technique are you using for "backward starts", and why that one and not a other? And since your reading prowess apparently didn't allow you to grasp it, I never wrote of danger. I'm surprised you are allowed to use a computer, let alone a paraglider. I'd rather not come anywhere near you.

Do you refer to my post or Theo's original one?

Life is inherently dangerous & unstable... maybe you have never ridden a bicycle surrounded by cars & trucks

Maybe you have never been on a big lake in a canoe, when the wind comes on

Maybe you live where there is no ice to slip on

One should probably have a lot more kiting skills than just being able to grab the correct brakes before doing toss inflations at the edge of a cliff, wouldn't you think? Theo could go off backwards with no toggles in his hands and fly just fine.

@@Logan4661 I'm well aware how accomplished Theo is. As to your assessment, if it was true he wouldn't have to give that pronounced brake input, wouldn't you think? So my question remains.

@@zaphod333 I think you should spend a lot more time kiting, and not just inflating, keeping it up for 15 seconds, doing a little happy dance and calling it day. Spend hundreds of hours working deliberately on skills so you can kite with brakes in either hand, switch back and forth until it doesn't matter, keep the toggles stowed and use the other lines for control (I had the toggles on one of my practice gliders zip tied for a year), inflate and kite with no hands. I can do that stuff all day and even at night... in the dark, but even in my wildest dreams, I'll never be as good as Theo. So when you say that something as simple as switching brake hands causes you grief, it tells me that you do not, in fact, have any real idea of just how good he is. As far as how much brake he gave it? He gave it what HE wanted to until he was ready to fly. Another drill to work on is to kill the wing behind you and then reinflate forward, without looking, repeatedly. Along the way to acheiving mastery at this, you should become familiar with how much you have to pull and how long you have to hold it to get the wing to drop. When you figure it out come back and we'll chat about how much brake is "too much."

@@Logan4661 I have the utmost respect for both your and Theo's paragliding abilities. So there is absolutely no necessity to be condescending. You are making a lot of assumptions there. Neither do I "grieve" about switching brake hands, nor do I say anything about "too much brake". You are, however, absolutely correct that I would benefit from loads of more groundhandling. Alas, it won't happen due to circumstances. But this all doesn't have anything to do with my rather innocent question. Surely Theo is capable of performing any kind of backwards launch technique, with or without hand switch. So why does he choose the former when it implies the tiniest interval of less than perfect control? What are the benefits that outweigh the drawbacks? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, too.