Hi everyone, I have spent the past 5 years on and off kiting because of college and moving to a new state, and made a commitment this year to start kiting again now that thing are settled down. Unfortunately, I have been cooped up at home for 2 months because I injured some tendons in my arm at a a paragliding acro course down in Florida. Going to the doctor on Monday to get it checked and hopefully I get the all clear to start flying and kiting again.

But, I figured I would share my best run of the course with you here since some of you may be interested. I'm not very good, and this 2 day course was my first time ever doing any of these moves. There are people way better than me all over the internet. Anyway, here is the video. I added time stamps below with what is going on at each moment

https://youtu.be/3oUgaXC9E34


0:00 - I am in what is know as tailslide. It is very similar to pulling too much brake on a kite and having it fly backwards. This is a safety position when doing acro and I go back to this position when things go wrong.
0:08 - I exit tailslide and go back to normal flight, there is a strong forward shooting motion that i must brake or the glider will collapse
0:24 - I begin entering a spiral to gain energy for a move known as a SAT, which is a spiral where the point of rotation is moves between a the pilot and the canopy and the pilot is actually flying backwards. It looks rather unimpressive but is a big gateway move in the acro progression.
0:28 - I enter the SAT. The glider hinges up to around 30-45 degrees to the horizion. The brakes are very hard to pull and I keep trying to pull more brake to increase the gliders angle. I thing this is what messed up my tendons.
0:35 - I exit the SAT and have a small collapse on the left wing tip from not appling enough brake. It's a beginner mistake that is pretty benign.
0:38 - a full minute a repositioning myself in "the box", which is an imaginary boundary you stay within while performing acro. It is so if anything goes wring and I come down under the rescue parachute, I will land in a safe area
1:33 - I perform a full stall and go into tailside. I don't have a ton of practice on this glider so I keep too much brake applied which causes the the glider to thrash around. I eventually get it stabilized
1:43 - I attempt a move called a helicopter where you descend vertically and rotate around the yaw axis. This is my first attempt ever and it pretty bad. I retreat to tailslide and have a good exit.
2:04 - I try for another heli, this time entering from normal flight. Reviewing the video, I am not sure why I chickened out and went back to tailslide as it was going well
2:22 - I attempt from tailslide again. I do a much better job stabilizing in tailslide this time and and actually get one rotation in before it goes downhill. I return to tailslide and exit
2:53 - I enter tailslide to try again and I don't feel comfortable with what the glider is doing so I exit.
3:15 - My instructor tells me I am too low to try another heli and lets me do whatever I want as long as I make it back to shore. I do a move called a spinover which is a 180 degree spin rotation. You can hear him yell "I knew you were going to do that!" into the radio. We had practiced these earlier and I had told him that I really liked them.
3:20 - I go for a misty flip, a perfect 360 during an upwards pitch and then an shooting exit. AND I SOME HOW NAIL IT!!! That was my first real attempt at this move ever and I did it on my own. This is the move I have dreamed about doing before I ever even started flying.
3:33 - Me celebrating by waving my arms and legs and yelling. The people on the ground are laughing because they can hear the strange noised I am making.

You are certifiably mad!

Where was this? I used to fly my hang glider at Wallaby Ranch (and a couple times over the water with a pontoon glider in Biscayne Bay). What sort of tow do you get - truck, winch?

I have to say, aerobatics was never my thing, good on you. I would do stalls and wingovers just to keep in practice (falling out of thermals with the vario pegged 2-3k down you want to know what to do, and more importantly what NOT to do).

I'm all for more vids of your flights :D As long as you land on the beach directly into a buggy and keep going.

RedSky - Ehhh I wouldn't say so. There is a this thought that acro is this really dangerous thing (and it can be) and a that all the people that do it must be adrenaline junkies. It isn't reality, and is actually one of the safest freeflight disciplines. All the pilots are very good at recovering from crazy situations (like at 1:47 in the video when I was in freefall for a second) while others tend to panic and make it worse. Most of the gliders acro pilots fly gliders that are very benign rather than the really efficient gliders that turn into spaghetti when things go wrong. They also have a 15G rating rather than the 8G most gliders carry and have 2 rescue parachutes and are familiar with how to use them. We also do this super high in the air, my minimum altitude limit is 1000ft. All of this leads to one of the lowest fatality rates in paragliding, rivaling riding a motorcycle in fatalities per participant per year.

The certified mad people are the ones that don't follow the progression. There are a few tricks that are that need to be mastered before progressing. They also hit a wall and don't progress very far because they can't learn harder tricks because they don't have good fundamentals. There is also some rather easy tricks that a high FU potential that require a lot of skill to exit when things go bad, but not to enter. The people that gravitate towards those don't tend to last long in acro... Usually they scare themselves bad enough to quit. I had a rather knarly situation which is one of the big reasons I took this course

Jeff - This was at Lake Kissimmee. We got towed up by a moddified bass boat with a payout winch to about 5000ft. We did more than acro, mostly how to recoveries from when it but that isn't nearly as fun to watch.

And like I was alluding to in my reply to RedSky, I am not into acro for the pure craziness of it. It is a really technical sport and has virtually unlimited potential for growth. The best guys in the world are still inventing new tricks and connections that require insane precision. I did BMX and skating, then it was kite jumping, and now it is paragliding aerobatics. All technical sports that have you up in the air. And I think acro has the lowest potential for injury out of all of those, so I have been leaning towards that the past year. That being said, I am trying to get back into the kites, just maybe not the insane winds and jumps I used to do.

wow...so many uncomfortable moments there for me
but you have fun there buddy

That was pretty amazing - though I don't think I could ever get used to seeing a collapsed canopy above me.

Had my canopy (speed 5 12m) collapse on me yesterday after a botched jump. I was happy to be in the water and not 2500 up :D
Though backup chutes these days are waaaaaaay nicer than the old circular ones we used to use. Even with ballistics they seemed to take way longer than they should to open.

Abkayak - My mother said the same thing :D

B-Roc - This definitely isn't for everyone. It gets less scary the more times you do it and survive. But in reality, The wing I was flying has gone through a certification process and has been tested to automatically fix itself when it collapses. I could do nothing and it would start flying on its own again.

Jeff - I'd rather be at 2500ft. Altitude = time to fix problems. And the chutes are definitely way better today, there are even BASE systems that disconnect you from the glider and pull out a skydiving canopy while only losing about 100ft.