Flying
Saturday was a perfect day
for my first powered parachute orientation flight.
This is a picture of me
looking down from a cruising altitude of 420 feet.
I first read about these
contraptions over 20 years ago in the classified section of Popular
Science and have dreamed about flying in one ever since.
It was awesome!
My fortune cookie at the Chinese buffet afterwards seemed to be
synchronized with the day.
The guy you see in the
picture below is Jim Mac Leay. He's the super nice instructor and
powered parachute owner that did most of the flying until he gave
control over to me.
You pull back on the throttle
to go higher, push on it to go down, and steer either left or right
with your feet. It's just that easy. It doesn't go faster than 35 miles
per hour and feels sort of like a golf cart in the sky.
The view up there is amazing!
I took a 2 and a half minute video that will be up on ClinchTrails.com next week.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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In the past I've done both parasailing and ultralight flying. This sounds like a fun combination of the two. If only those engines weren't so incredibly loud!
Just remember that you can't outrun the weather in one of these! When I was doing the parasailing course, the wind up-valley was picking up on one of my longer flights. I had to go to the centre of the valley and do a wild corkscrew spiral to get down in time to prevent me from being blown over the top of the mountain and getting caught in a downdraft. That was kinda scary.