Close to Izmail in the South of Odessa region, hang-gliders opened the season.

The first to fly into the air was the 65-year-old pilot Evgeny Ivanovich Dyachenko. He reached a height of 184 meters. Dyachenko lives in the city of Reni, and for the start on a hang glider he chose the farm fields between the villages of Loshchinovka and Safiany.

For this sport you need a car with a trained person at the wheel, who will pull the aircraft until it reaches the desired altitude. This means that it is impossible to organise a flight alone. This time, Evgeny was assisted by a fellow hang glider from the village of Ozernoe, Alexander Stepanenko, and a former pilot from Izmail, Fyodor Arseni. In general, the team is quite old: Dyachenko himself turned 65 this year, and Alexander Stepanenko 70.

Evgeny Dyachenko has a forty years hang-glider practice, since the first flight. Over the past decades, the athlete has gained big experience, having made about 400 take-offs and spent about 250 hours in the air in total.

Evgeny Ivanovich "got sick" with the sky during his military service, when he watched the work of parachutists and hang-gliders training near his military unit.

I got my first skills in the hang-gliding club "Pelican" in Vulcanesti, there was an excellent slope where you could easily climb, catching the air currents. In the magazine "Tekhnika Molodoi" I found an article with drawings, thanks to which I made my first aircraft (such were used at the dawn of hang-gliding) and independently learned to fly on it.

Evgeny Ivanovich Dyachenko

Today, he uses an Eros hang-glider. A new one of this kind costs about 3.5 thousand euros. The device is designed for a pilot weighing 45-70 kg. The wingspan is 10 m, and the area is 10.4 square metres.

This year, Evgeny Dyachenko will have many more flights, because he tries to fly in the sky at least once or twice a month. For this he even travels to Kalinovka and Chervony Kut, which is near Odessa.