Hey, I am looking for a paragliding instructor. I have flown a few times in Canada but nothing formal. Looking for some info. Have checked out the sights in Wanli and Ping Dong but I am not expericenced enough and don’t have equipment yet. I checked Wings Taiwan but I didn’t see any contact information for the dude who is a registered instructor. Any help on this topic would be appreciated.
Yo, that’d be me. Mail address is ‘here’.
Or, you can call me on 0928 315215 and chat.
I’m not running beginner courses anymore because I don’t think Taiwan is a suitable place to learn to fly. What I would recommend is either take this up when you get back home, or to travel to a country nearby that offers suitable conditions and training. Only dodgy, uncertified instructors are available here, and ‘instruction’ is only carried out on dodgy sites.
The sites in use here are either too advanced for students to fly safely, or the conditions are too unreliable, or they are too crowded to fly, especially when conditions are mild enough for beginners.
There is no program for training instructors, reviewing them, or disciplining them. There is no culture of safety at the popular sites.
The problem:
An ideal place to learn would have constant smooth winds to practice inflation and ground handling, and a small shallow hill facing into that wind to take short flights from. All such places in Taiwan have factories or apartment buildings on them. Both Wanli and Saichia are flawed sites for beginners since they have no intermediate launch for the student to gain confidence or pratice skills from. It’s either the flat area at the bottom or the top of the big hill with the big dogs. This can be done, but the conditions have to perfect. That means a lot of parawaiting for the wind to fall into that smooth 8~12kph breeze from the right direction. At Saichia this will only really happen in late fall and Wanli hasn’t seen a day like that in two summers 
When you do get a nice day at Wanli every pilot in north Taiwan goes up there and the traffic in the airspace there makes me think of the area around Sogo on a Sunday, when they’re giving away free pop stars. Not what you’d want to be in as a nervous novice.
This brings us to the next problem, which is the level of your peers, and the people who taught them. Unfortunately there is no international association of professional paragliding instructors like PADI for dive coaches. Instead, each country has a national aerosports council (NAC) which is authorized by the CAA and also affiliated to the FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale), which in turn authorizes a hanggliding and/or paragliding association, which then sets it’s own standards for instructor and student training and certification based on international norms. Taiwan currently has no NAC and is unable to join the FAI as such. Training in Taiwan is completely informal and falls far short of international standards. Sometimes I would say it falls into the realm of the sublimely stupid, and willfully dangerous. At best you’ll find someone with no training, who’s just doing his best, even though he doesn’t know what he’s doing. At worst you’ll find someone who’s planning to gouge you and hopes you quit as soon as you’ve paid tuition and bought a bunch of expensive gear off of him. If the reason you quit is an injury, well never mind, onto the next sucker. No official licensing body exists to monitor or control this, and any ‘licenses’ handed out here are utterly worthless overseas. The majority of local pilots fly as erratically as taxi drivers, and some of them are just as belligerent.
Sounds pretty bleak, huh?
The best answer:
My very best suggestion is to travel to Bali in July or August for training there with Australian instructors who come up every year. Bali sits in the trade winds which blow smooth and consistent all day every day. The chief instructor (a good friend of mine) has been running a reputable school for 15 years and trains a huge number of students under HGFA guidelines. Bali is cheap and there’s other fun stuff to do when not flying. Because the conditions are so consistent it’s possible to complete a course in a week or 10 days that would take months in Taiwan. You can get 8 hour flights in Bali!