Visitors to Bright & Surrounds in January are rewarded with what is arguably our region’s most stunning event: a paragliding spectacle that transforms the skies over Bright into a confetti feast for the eyes.
Each year, one hundred paraglider pilots, including Australia’s best and top international competitors too, hit the skies above the town for eight days of intense competition at the Bright Open, the first leg of the Australian National Paragliding Championships.
The event is immensely challenging. Pilots must complete daily aerial cross-country tasks that see them traverse the Ovens and Kiewa Valleys, keeping them in the air for three to five hours.
“To get to the level where you’re even remotely competitive takes 10-plus years of flying,” says Wally Arcidiacono, the Chief Flight Instructor at Bright Flight and a competitor at this year’s event. He says it takes years to be able to skilfully interpret air, an element which is, of course, invisible.
“You can see evidence of wind in trees and on the ground and lakes and those things, and you’re interpreting that and then making decisions and trying to work with the air and the landscape to move your way through it,” Arcidiacono says.
The 2026 Bright Open runs from Friday 16 of January to Friday 23 January.
For the same reasons the National Championships are held here each year, Bright is also one of the premier places in Australia for the non-flyers among us to experience paragliding for ourselves.
Bright Flight is one of four paragliding schools in Bright & Surrounds, an area which is home to one of the best and most reliable launch pads in the Southern Hemisphere—Mystic Flight Park. The location’s reliable thermals and panoramic scenery make it a superb place for a tandem flight with a local expert, and the perfect town to complete a 9-day flight course to gain your own paragliding licence, allowing you to fly solo.
Tandem flights range from a quick 10-minute up and glide down ride to one-hour cross-country adventures, with the most popular option being the half-hour flight, which rides the thermals high into the atmosphere.
“You can be at 2,000 meters above the valley floor, overlooking the whole valley, and that’s a very holistic sort of experience,” says Arcidiacono. It’s a feeling he says provides a “mental release” from the daily grind.
Bright-based Bright Flight and Active Flight offer a range of tandem flight tours as well as pilot training, as does Mount Beauty-based Airology Paragliding. XCkms offers expert coaching clinics and pilot training.
For licenced pilots wanting to ride the amazing thermals solo, the source of all essential information is the wonderful North East Victoria Hang Gliding Club, which looks after eight launch sites in the area. Sites are free to use, with the exception of Mystic, which is located at the top of an active commercial pine plantation and requires a membership to access. You can purchase an access pass from the club’s website, priced at $10 for one day, $25 for two weeks, or $85 for a year.
January 2026