BZA Glider - a hang glider mod for DayZ

Chernarus is a long walk, and every road, coast and airfield on it is watched by somebody. The glider does not make the map smaller — it makes it a different map. Nothing here is found ready to fly: you gather the parts, you build it somewhere quiet, and you get it to open ground before anything can happen.

A still from the video: the view from the pilot's seat with the three instrument boards on the mast, the wing overhead and a runway ahead

The finished glider standing in a field at dusk: a camouflage delta wing on a mast above an open four-wheeled cart — Ten metres of wing over a cart made of pipe. Everything on it came out of ordinary loot.

The short version. Craft a Glider build kit from a pipe and a rope, put it on the ground, feed the stand thirteen slots of material, and finish it with a Pipe Wrench. Add four car wheels and a power generator. Roll to 60 km/h, pull back, and you are flying.

Crew: 2
Leaves the ground at: 60 km/h
Top speed on wheels: 65 km/h
Ceiling: 100 m above ground
Packed: 90 kg, both hands
Spawns in the world: Never

Everything it does

The complete list, with the page that explains each one. Nothing on it is planned or coming later — this is what is on the server.

What	How it works	Where
Getting one
Built, not found	A kit goes on the ground, thirteen slots of salvage go into it, a pipe wrench turns it into the machine in 30 seconds. No glider ever spawns on the map.	Build it
Taking the stand apart	Put it down in the wrong place and the wrench gives it back: your materials on the ground, the kit in your hands.	Build it
What bolts on
Four wheels	Any civilian car wheel. They go on and come off exactly like a car's — which also means anyone can steal them.	Fittings
An engine	A Power Generator with a spark plug in it, bolted to the frame and filled with petrol. It drives the rear wheels, so it launches the machine without a hill and without a car.	Fittings
Two luggage racks	A backpack each, and they may be full. You can pack them where they hang, and what is in them survives a server restart.	Fittings
A passenger	Second seat, back to back with the pilot, facing the tail. Get in from the right; the pilot gets in from the left.	Fittings
Moving it
Folds into a bag	20 seconds with the wrench and it is a 90 kg orange bundle you carry in both hands. It fits in no container in the game.	Fittings
Rides on a car roof	Strapped to the roof of any car, in one piece. The pilot sits in it up there while somebody drives.	Fittings
Flying
Three ways off the ground	Under its own engine on flat ground, down a slope with no engine at all, or off the roof of a moving car.	Fly it
Real air	The server's own wind carries you. Thermals depend on what is under you and die after a few minutes; slopes give ridge lift; night air is nearly dead.	Fly it
Three instrument boards	Height and airspeed, a wind profile of the sky above you, and a tilt card. Printed tin, no batteries, no HUD.	Fly it
Landings that count	Arrive gently and it costs nothing. Arrive hard and it costs the wing; fly it into the ground and it costs you as well.	Fly it

The three guides

1. Build it

The full shopping list with counts, where each material is found, the four steps from a pipe and a rope to a finished machine, and what you end up holding when the timer stops.

2. Fittings and the car launch

Wheels, the generator engine, fuel, the two backpack racks, the second seat, folding it into a bag — and how to put it on a car roof and take off from a moving car.

3. Fly it

Take-off, the controls, how to read the three boards, where lift comes from, how to stay up, and what a bad landing costs.

What it looks like

The glider from the front left, wing spread, standing on grass — Six pipes, a tarp sail and four car wheels. The sail is patched out of whatever fabric was to hand, which is why no two panels match.

The cart seen from the side under the wing, with a power generator bolted between the seats — The generator between the seats is the engine. Without it this is a glider that needs a hill.

The cart from behind, showing the seat, the mast and the rear wheels — The cart under the wing: two seats back to back, the mast between them, the fuel and the motor behind.

Close-up of the nose of the cart: a sheet-metal fairing with louvres cut into the bonnet — The nose: sheet metal over the front, louvres in the bonnet, and the part that meets the ground first when an approach goes wrong.

Close-up of the stencilled BZA marking on the side panel of the cart — Stencilled, chipped and rusted along the welds. It is meant to look like something that was built in a shed.

The three instrument boards seen from the pilot's seat in flight — The whole instrument panel: height and speed, the wind above you, and how level you are.

The glider strapped to the roof of a yellow sedan in a field — On a roof, ready to be driven somewhere with room. The pilot sits in it up there and lets go with SPACE.

What players actually use it for

Getting off the coast. The first hour of a life is the most watched hour on any server. A glider built inland skips it.
Loot runs to the north-west. Fly in high, land in the trees, walk the last few hundred metres. Getting back out is the hard part, which is the point.
Scouting a base before you commit. Height is information: who is home, where the gates are, what is parked.
Crossing water where there is no bridge.
Leaving. Folded, it rides on a car roof. Park, unfold, and go in a direction that has no road.
Two of you. One flies, one watches — and both racks land with a full pack on them.

What it is not

It is slow, it is loud on the ground, it is fragile on arrival, and everybody within a kilometre can see you in the air. There is no weapon on it and no way to fire from it. Used carelessly it is a flare that says here I am, held up for two minutes.

It has bugs

Said here rather than found out later: this is a flight model carried by an engine that has no aircraft in it, and it is still being worked on. The parts that work are the parts that were measured; the rest will surprise you. Expect rough edges, expect behaviour to change between updates, and expect an update to be needed after a DayZ patch.

Tell us what broke and it gets fixed — the BZA Discord is where the reports go, from players and server owners alike.

For server owners

No server-side setup is required. Subscribe on the Workshop, add @BzaGlider to your mod list, and the mod works. A glider despawns by itself after 24 hours of nobody flying it - that is the mod's own counter, it survives restarts, and it does not depend on your economy files. The kit, the build stand and the packed bag are ordinary items.

What it changes outside itself, stated plainly so nobody finds out from a player:

Every backpack in the game gains two attachment slots - the glider carries two on its luggage racks, and a bag on a rack keeps its contents across restarts. Any other mod that rewrites a backpack's inventorySlot[] will conflict with this by load order.
Civilian car wheels are told they also fit the glider, so any of them bolts on. Vanilla cars are not affected - a script guard keeps foreign wheels off the Hatchback_02 they borrow slots from.
The engine-stop action's 8 km/h speed limit is lifted for the glider only. Every other vehicle keeps the vanilla rule.

Optional: Central Economy entries. The mod does not need them - it manages the glider's lifetime itself - but if you want CE to track the four types, these are the entries this server runs. Nominal 0 because nothing spawns ready-made:

<type name="BZA_Glider">
    <nominal>0</nominal>
    <lifetime>86400</lifetime>
    <restock>0</restock>
    <min>0</min>
    <quantmin>-1</quantmin>
    <quantmax>-1</quantmax>
    <cost>100</cost>
    <flags count_in_cargo="0" count_in_hoarder="0" count_in_map="1" count_in_player="0" crafted="1" deloot="0"/>
    <category name="tools"/>
</type>
<type name="BZA_GliderKit">
    <nominal>0</nominal>
    <lifetime>43200</lifetime>
    <restock>0</restock>
    <min>0</min>
    <quantmin>-1</quantmin>
    <quantmax>-1</quantmax>
    <cost>100</cost>
    <flags count_in_cargo="0" count_in_hoarder="0" count_in_map="1" count_in_player="0" crafted="1" deloot="0"/>
    <category name="tools"/>
</type>
<type name="BZA_GliderStand">
    <nominal>0</nominal>
    <lifetime>43200</lifetime>
    <restock>0</restock>
    <min>0</min>
    <quantmin>-1</quantmin>
    <quantmax>-1</quantmax>
    <cost>100</cost>
    <flags count_in_cargo="0" count_in_hoarder="0" count_in_map="1" count_in_player="0" crafted="1" deloot="0"/>
    <category name="tools"/>
</type>
<type name="BZA_GliderBag">
    <nominal>0</nominal>
    <lifetime>43200</lifetime>
    <restock>0</restock>
    <min>0</min>
    <quantmin>-1</quantmin>
    <quantmax>-1</quantmax>
    <cost>100</cost>
    <flags count_in_cargo="0" count_in_hoarder="0" count_in_map="1" count_in_player="0" crafted="1" deloot="0"/>
    <category name="containers"/>
</type>

The mod was booted alongside a third-party vehicle mod before release with a clean physics channel and no script errors. It has not been tested next to DayZ-Expansion Vehicles.

Licence

The BZA Glider is free to run on any DayZ server that does not monetise. No permission request, nothing owed. Subscribe to it on the Workshop and put it on your server.

Monetised servers may not run it. That covers any server taking money from its players: shop, donation perks, priority queue or reserved slots, paid kits, currency, cosmetics, ranks or advantages, paid whitelist, subscription. There is no permission procedure for those.

It also may not be re-uploaded, repackaged, put in a mod pack, or stripped of its authorship. You may modify it for your own non-monetised server, but not hand the result on. There is no key check in the code: no mod can tell whether a server sells anything, so these terms are asked of your honesty.

Start with the build → How to join the server Workshop page