moving pictures
Always fly on sight
France, Chamonix Valley, Brevant Powerlines Takeoff....clouds and and light snowfall - sounds fine to me :-)
Sometimes its flyable even if its not ....
PS: If you try this, do your homework.... I know that mountain by heart from numerous flights, we had confirmation via radio that the valleyfloor was clear, so limited visibility and flying close to the rocks to avoid a white out in the top section was reasonable safe for us and of corse great fun...not that often do you get a chance to cloudsurf close to rocky ridges under a 11sqm canopy ,-)
3D elevator ride
You just completed that 1400hm climb, soaked up the view, the shades of the night start to crawl up the valleys and its time for a long and cold downclimb.
Did you ever fantasize of a magic elevator that would get you down to the valley floor in just a few minutes without any physical effort at all ?
...well .... my gravity powered 3D Panorama Elevator is always in my backpack...
...time 2 push the Ground Level Button...
PS: If you plan to perform a dropdown launch like the one shown in the video, make sure you have tested that your wingload / wing combo tolerates this. If not you will end up in a horseshoe frontal and will most likely find yourself on the bottom of the rockwall neatly wrapped in a colorful nylon bodybag...
Speedflyer Mathematics
300m cliff + 30 seconds = 9.5 sqm
time to (mis)use my 9.5 sqm fluid Speedrider for footlaunching
nowind to slight tailwind at the landing zone, almost no thermal activity on the rockface + a tiny breeze at takoff = ready for the first attempt !
If i would not have known from numerous skilandings with this wing that it can be flared down to 25 kph I most likely would have soiled my pants when I blasted out of the final turn and cought myself thinking "hmmm... that might be a little too fast for a footlanding..."
Seems i wasn't too wrong as later on the final approach speed showed to be in the 140 kph range (measured by my gps so most likely +/- 20% inaccurate) - I am sure it would be great fun to flare past a radar box in this setup ,-)
Thanks to sufficient routine from using it with skis the flare went perfect, but I messed up the last few steps of the runout by not fully aligning with some tractor tracks and subsequently stumbled over the upper track that was hidden in the grass - i was already very slow so i luckily did not hurt myself.
The 9.5 worked surprisingly well for this kind of application but in the end it is very questionable if the extra speed and maneuverability justifies the multiplied risk and absolutely zero error margin compared to 11 - 15sqm wings.