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DuckConference posted:It wouldn’t fit with your “no motor” requirement, but if you’re surrounded by farm country, paramotor (powered paragliding) could be a good option. You can still foot launch and fly a paragliding wing, just with the addition of a butt fan! Yeah, that's something I've also considered -- I am surrounded by farm country (including a few farms ~10 minutes away that have grass airstrips cut into their fields for ultralight pilots, and at least one that uses their second barn as a hangar) so it wouldn't be hard to find places to take off. And a paramotor rig is still small enough to fit in the trunk of a car or perhaps even a bike trailer. The motor really puts me off, though. Like, it's already really loving loud on a trike ultralight, I imagine it's even worse with the motor strapped to your back with no intervening aircraft structure. It also means that if you gently caress up the landing you can easily obliterate a few thousand dollars worth of motor in addition to whatever damage you do to yourself. I guess you can always shut off the motor and glide once you're at altitude or catch a nice thermal or something...unless the motor adds enough weight that the unpowered glide characteristics are unfavourable? And as far as training goes, it doesn't look like there's any PPG places closer than unpowered, although at least it would give me more takeoff options. On the plus side, this has gotten me poking at unpowered flight options more generally again, and my wife is interested to try out rigid-frame hang-gliding at some point, so perhaps next summer we can head over to YKF and do some intro flights.
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Jul 15, 2021 23:48
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 22:26 |
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ToxicFrog posted:I guess you can always shut off the motor and glide once you're at altitude or catch a nice thermal or something...unless the motor adds enough weight that the unpowered glide characteristics are unfavourable? I haven’t done PPG (yet) but I understand that cutting the engine off and gliding down is pretty common. Usually PPGs avoid thermic air I think but I’ve heard of people doing it. As for noise and vibration, electric paramotors are starting to be a thing, although since a lot of the noise and vibration is coming from the prop it might not be a huge improvement. Figure out what the most practical way is for you to get into the air and go from there!
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Jul 16, 2021 21:41
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On the flat lands there might also be tow launching - there's some clubs around the Chicago area that do that and manage big days. I've never done it though, can't really point you in the right direction unfortunately.
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Jul 16, 2021 23:55
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DuckConference posted:I haven’t done PPG (yet) but I understand that cutting the engine off and gliding down is pretty common. Usually PPGs avoid thermic air I think but I’ve heard of people doing it. As for noise and vibration, electric paramotors are starting to be a thing, although since a lot of the noise and vibration is coming from the prop it might not be a huge improvement. Yeah, I ended up falling down a research rabbithole about PPGs in general and electric PPGs specifically, and it looks like the main takeaway is that modern EPPGs are comparable in cost and performance to gasoline PPGs, and while the prop is still noisy, the motor itself is a lot quieter and can throttle down a lot further, so they're quieter overall. The tradeoff is that you only get 40-60 minutes powered flight time instead of 2-3 hours. On the plus side, they're air-restartable, unlike gasoline PPGs, so you can take off using them, then shut them off completely and ride the thermals, turning the motor back on again as needed to gain altitude or distance (whether to the next thermal or to your landing site). There's even stuff like the E-Glider which is designed specifically for that, with a prop that folds up when not spinning to minimize drag -- although I can't figure out how much it costs or even if it's possible to buy one. The main drawback is that even with low-profile designs like that, it does increase both weight and drag, which noticeably decreases your glide ratio. All that said, whether I do unpowered or powered paragliding, the most immediate obstacle is that the nearest places that actually do paraglider training (Air Vision Adventures does both, Powered Paragliding Ontario only does paramotoring) are an hour+ away, potentially more like 2 hours depending on traffic. Meanwhile, hang-gliding lessons at YKF and trike ultralight lessons at Gibson Field are both <20 minutes away...but less appealing to me.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:05
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Yeah, not living near a training park is one big difficulty for getting into the sport. Some people who get a taste for it (they take a tandem and go "holy poo poo, you mean I can learn how to do this?") have gone to crazy lengths to fly. I know a guy who got his first flight in, then went and lived out of an RV in Santa Barbara CA for three weeks to take a P2 course, fly every day, and now he's an instructor. Life takes you strange places! Here's an article (starting page 18-19) that Chris Garcia wrote about how flying sort of took over his life, and he became one of the lucky few who are able to actually make a living doing this thing. https://issuu.com/us_hang_gliding_paragliding/docs/pilot2101__issuu
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Jul 30, 2021 18:17
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I live very near a training park and I've been saving money over the last year to get into it but... I'm not sure that I want to try paragliding anymore. The brother of a buddy of mine from high school died while paragliding at the same training park this morning and I inadvertently saw video of it. It wasn't graphic or anything but jeez, it hits a bit differently when it's somebody you know.
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Aug 6, 2021 03:25
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Yeah, Paragliding is a weird sport. Sometimes it's lazily soaring on the coast, feeling utterly care free, sometimes it's being sucked up into the sky riding a bucking bronco in a strong thermal... it is an extreme sport, and people do get hurt doing it. I don't want to be up in this thread going "Ah! it's totally safe, try it!". (Edit: I have realized this idea is completely opposed to the thread title. Oops!) Everyone has to gauge their own risk acceptance, and it's especially difficult in paragliding. My normal analogy is motorcycles - motorcycles are something you can have a sort of starting point with: if you ride bicycles, you already know how countersteering works. If you already drive a manual transmission car, you know how changing gears with a clutch works. But paragliding - unless you come from kite surfing or something similar you really don't know what it feels like, you're building a whole entirely new muscle memory based on things like feeling the inflation of the wing, and how much pressure you need to put on the brakes in order to slow it down, but not too much. It can be difficult to learn, because in order to find the limits of what you know, you have to get to the edge and surpass them safely in order to learn something new. That's why training parks exist, and things like SIV courses to simulate incidents in flight. Still though, folks get hurt. Someone at the training hill this last spring was a very advanced pilot, knew what they were doing, and launched in strong winds hoping to find lift. They got picked up, their wing deflated, and slammed back into the ground from about 30 feet up, breaking their pelvis, back, and both legs. It's dangerous! One of our popular phrases is "Launching is optional, landing is mandatory". Taking a step back and considering whether the sport is for you is a smart choice, because once you try it, you're going to have to come down eventually. mad.radhu fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 17:48
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mad.radhu posted:(Edit: I have realized this idea is completely opposed to the thread title. Oops!) I fixed it for you
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Aug 6, 2021 22:41
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Safety Dance posted:I fixed it for you Thank you doctor I got an intro at Mission Peak this weekend, where the first sustained hang gliding flight was back in 1972. It was neat, but smokey and there wasn't much lift. One of the coolest things about flying there is that it's a public hiking park primarily, so you get to land next to hikers going "Whoa! Wow!"
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Aug 8, 2021 23:59
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I like that the title has chilled a bit. I hiked the 1750 foot launch at Ed, and though it was tiring it wasn't ruinous or anything so I'll probably do it again sometime. Although I also need to do some more laps of the lower launches because my launches and landings have been a little messy lately. Also here's an altitude (that seems to be offset a few hundred meters) track of hiking up, chilling at the top, and then flying down.
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Aug 24, 2021 02:16
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I have a ton of footage and pictures from Red Rocks that i'm gonna post here, holy poo poo was it beautiful 
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Oct 5, 2021 15:47
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Here's a little mini-documentary I made out of 250gb of gopro/insta360/phone footage from the trip, it's kinda neat but on the long side. Maybe you'll like it, try it out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_LY4C1xMSM
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Oct 12, 2021 17:44
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Is it worth getting lessons if a full set of equipment isn't in the cards? Are rentals much of a thing at paragliding hubs?
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Nov 5, 2021 02:33
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I don't think rental gear is really a thing, really. Some hubs might have test gear around, but it isn't normally up for rent. That being said, if your barrier is cost used gear can normally be found for a lot cheaper than new.
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Nov 5, 2021 21:05
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I recently had the chance to fly near Tapalpa, Mexico. It was loving cool, here is a small clip from that trip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xfBlhPkw_c
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Feb 2, 2022 21:34
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What does the beeping tell you?
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Feb 9, 2022 05:10
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It indicates your sink or climb rate.
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Feb 9, 2022 16:35
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Safety Dance posted:It indicates your sink or climb rate. yup - it's an audible way to tell if you're going up or down, or drifting in neutral air. That particular one is tuned to give maximum response, it'll beep at me if I gain as little as two feet. On that flight I experienced an absolutely abhorrent sink rate where I was falling half a foot for every foot I traveled forward and it was screaming at me that I was basically falling out of the sky.
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Feb 9, 2022 22:31
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 22:26 |
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The forum got stickied so a little update - Still flying and enjoying it. I haven't been progressing super fast but I did finally get my intermediate rating after recently passing 20 hours of airtime.
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Jun 14, 2023 01:23
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