WHITE HEAVENS                                                                           an SF story by Graham Sutherland Visible thermals. who would have thought that the old skysailors dream would come to reality by simply using nature in a different way. We're cruising cross country with little chance of decking it, mostly staying up for as long as we please. And oh so beautiful. The world is all white. there are massive mountains and spires, little hills, all white, all in motion. The upward moving air is not only obvious but also beautiful in it's intricasy. Sometimes we fly under amazing flatlands. The flatlands at temperature inversions are fed by the white spires and mountains that touch the ceiling. If we get low we duck into a cloud and hook into the thermals re-energised by the release of heat as the cloud condenses. The invention of low cost compact personal radar integrated into moving map GPSs and radio beacons has allowed cloud flying to be legalised for suitably endorsed skysailors. Living in the sub-tropics used to be such a drag for the first few months of the year. Low cloud bases & frequent showers just weren't much fun. Now this time of low level instability has become the peak flying season. We lob off or tow up just as a cloud passes over and we're away. The air is so unstable and base so low that the cloud suck extends almost right to the ground. My siliconised fabric Epsilon 5 paraglider is a dream. It's CEN A classification means it's mega stable. No matter what happens inside a cloud I don't even need to hold the brakes, it should always recover and end up flying straight and level. all by itself. That's making pendular stability work for you. No pilot input required for low stress cloud flying. You can just settle back in the broard areas of relatively gentle lift and enjoy the mind blowing grey out...., or else play with the radar. We've got another handy little instrument that shows where the most light is coming from. Within cloud it shows where the closest clear air is likely to be. There's no need for an artificial horizon, it's built into the wing. The radar allows us to avoid rain and hard bits like other aircraft in the clouds. We can see rain as it is forming while still going up, long before it starts to fall. Anyway my wing has the new water drainage system in case I do get dumped on. Cloud base may be low but so are the tops. At 2 or 3 kilometers our world is in brilliant sun. We are often flying around white mountains and hills. Some magical days the thermals are short lived at cloudbase but there is a good lapse rate above. Such days the clouds are sparser and narrower, but forming white towers and bubbles that are our lifts up. Flying around them is awesome on the way back down. Below can be a bubbly white landscape with the occasional opening into another world, the underworld from which we come. The magical days, the world is laid out below us and there are the white columns all around us, obscuring the world of color with living white cotton wool. Flying in company around such giant vertical worms is like exploring an alien world. Now we are truely in the heavens. All white and bright blue with rainbows around our shadows on the clouds. Some days we don't even need to enter the white towers and mountains for our free rides as we can ridge soar up the sides of them. Other days, white canyons and streets of white highrise buildings and ridges extend downwind, and often crosswind above the regular little microfronts that move thru. We fly almost oblivios to how the underworld is moving below us. Our moving map shows us where we are so that we can avoid any big tiger country or high rocks from the hidden world below. We don't generally worry too much about tiger country though, because we can see how much lift is about just by reading the cloud sides and tops. The world has become a magical place and life is bliss.