|
God, I wish there were paragliding options in my area. One city over there's a flight school, but they only do hang-gliders, as far as I can tell. There's a more local one that does ultralights, but only powered flight (trikes and small closed-cockpit affairs) -- I've done a few trike flights and they were amazing, but it would be nice to have more compact equipment and no motor. The nearest place I can find that actually does paragliding training is an hour and a half south of here. It probably doesn't help that things are relatively flat -- I mean, it feels really hilly when you're biking around, but there's no nice mountains and little in the way of ridgelines or steep hills. The hang-glider schools seem to really favour tow launches (hydraulic or aero), with the one operating out of YKF describing an aero tow as "the only way to get serious airtime in Ontario". 
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2021 00:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 12:58 |
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2021 23:48
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2021 16:05
|
|