Showing posts with label paraglider. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paraglider. Show all posts

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Adrenaline junky

Time for fun. Speed riding uses a very small paraglider-with-skis combination that just about glides but does it at a very high speed. The point is to scream down impossibly sloped mountains, jump/flying over rocks, crevasses and obstacles. Antoine Montant, flies over a huge avalanche on the North face of Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. This sequence has been awarded the Best P.O.V (point of view) Award in Aspen in the latest Powder Video Awards.
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Sunday, 14 June 2009

Stuff - not too sustainable yet, but maybe, just maybe?

Hot air ballooning used to have an image of strawberries and champagne in the wicker basket, whilst watching the (switch on Noel Coward accent) terribly, terribly English countryside drift by. In just the same way that snowboarding attracts a somewhat different crowd to the "skiing in Klosters" types, so too does one-man hot air ballooning, or "cloudhopping" (click for website).

Once upon a time I got a Private Pilots Licence(group D) for Microlights. I was somewhat surprised to see that it also licenced me to fly hot air balloons, although I didn't ever fly one because no-one ever got me a "round tuit".


I think it will be harder to get people to vote for a sustainable society if there’s no fun in it! Although these things use fossil fuel (propane gas cylinders) to fly and the canopy is made from oil derived polyurethane coated rip stop fabric (near enough the same as paragliders are made of today, and hang gliders used to be made of 35 years ago, when I started flying) I still think there will be a future for "toys" like these "leap a building in a single bound" cloudhoppers.



Don't quote me but I imagine that cylinders of methane gas could substitute for the propane - methane can be generated in one's backyard by anaerobic decomposition of organic waste.

Jersey has been generating methane industrially from sewage waste for many years (and using the gas to generate electricity which partially runs the waste treatment plant). There are smaller domestic size systems which can generate your own gas from food waste, like this one from India.

Here’s a link to a good website on anaerobic digestion.

The balloon seat, harness and supporting structure are mostly made of stainless steel so few problems there, but what about the balloon fabric, I hear you cry. Well, how about this company that recycles, or repurposes, this type of fabric and turns it into neat, lightweight backpacks, gym bags, laptop covers and wallets, among other things. Click for Baumm's website.

Treehugger.com did an article about them (click link here)



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Friday, 27 March 2009

Power kites, Kitegen and oodles of green energy




I love hang gliding and, as second best, I like paragliding too. I'm also very keen on innovative renewable energy concepts. The development shown in (click to watch - sorry I can't "embed" it) this video sort of combines the two. It shows some Dutch scientists using a kite about the same size as the power kites that they use down in St Ouen's bay for kite surfing like this pic here.
From a 10sq metre kite of this type they can generate 10kw using a computer controlled auto-pilot to fly a figure of eight pattern in the sky. There are much larger versions that are being worked on and the cost per unit is projected to be cheaper than that from coal fired stations.

Here is a video, about this type of power generation, in somewhat more depth from one of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks that feature radical far-sighted people. This is by Saul Griffith who runs Makani Power (amongst other things).


An objection that can be raised is that these kite systems take up some airspace, but someone calculated that the airspace above nuclear power stations (which are no-fly zones) is big enough to generate just as much electricity as the nuke station can below, cheaper and with no waste either! Get rid of the nukes and just keep the no-fly zones...

I am just about convinced that power kites will be a very significant development for renewable energy and will be much better than conventional wind turbines, onshore or offshore.

Here's a few links:

Makani power Griffiths' outfit has had a second grant from Google

Kitegen in Italy This outfit is thinking really big

The MAGENN system Probably not so flexible and certainly more expensive but gets around the "no wind days" problem differently because it's a sort of tethered airship and does not need to be reeled back in.