Blackhat SEO – Esrun

It has always seemed to me that pretty much anything you wanted to know could be found on the interent, this was of course until I tried to find information on learning to paraglide! I have always enjoyed playing around with powerkites and kite surfing so paragliding seemed like a good route to take for a challenge.

After failing to find any useful info on the basics of paragliding I decided that I’d work on imitation and set about watching as many videos as I could find on the subject, thanks youtube!

Since I have only just relaunched this blog, I have a couple of weeks worth of attempted paragliding to document. Just to give you a heads up, I now have a proper paraglider.

We started by using a 3.5 meter power kite which had 25 meter lines and terminated to a bar rather than handles as many people use. Since we have experienced flight using this kite in high winds, we decided to draw out a technical diagram of our initial idea:

Now to start with, we drove to the local airport which has a lot of back roads with reasonably long run ways and found a road which allowed us to drive against the direction of the wind which means the kite shape wouldn’t get disrupted by cross winds and end up folding inside out or such like.

I have a fair bit of experience with power kites and in winds of 20+mph a 3.5m kite is able to lift a person if pulled through the power zone(main bit of wind). Now the way i saw it was that if you were to drive at 20mph then you’re not only supplying a 20mph wind but its constant which means the kite should keep a strong high position and be able to lift a person.

The first test was to let the kite out on about 5 meters of line and have my friend sit in the open boot holding onto the bar. Then I drove forward at a max of about 10mph while he tested how controlled it was and the force that was put on his arms. Control of the kite was quite erratic but no worse than I expected with such short line let out. The force put on his arms holding the bar was very strong(Excellent!).

After driving around for an hour or so looking for a more suitable place to do the next test (grass!) we ended up back at our start point for the next test, concrete

For this, we again let off about 5 meters of line but this time secured the bar in the boot and closed the lid to hold it in place. A quick test drive forward proved that the kite was being kept tense and acting as a parachute brake for the car. Excellent.

So the next test was for my friend to jump in the car and drive while I held onto the thicker bits of rope/string where the lines connect to the actual kite, my friend then drove forward while I ran behind the car holding onto the kite, waiting for it to get enough wind hitting it to raise and hopefully lift me up with it. We got up to about 20mph with me still running behind the car so I shout for my friend to stop, expecting him to gradually slow down but what does he do? Slams the bloomin brakes on and I nearly run into the back of the car!

Disappointing, it didn’t feel like it had anywhere near enough lift to take me up with it. Meaning faster speeds are required and/or a larger kite. The obvious problem with the faster speeds is that there are obviously limits to how fast I can run! So we’d require some kind of dragging to occur which I don’t fancy doing on concrete!

This was the end of our initial tests.