Parajet Pilots Blog Latest Team News

It’s been a crazy month!

Posted on September 02, 2013 in Dean Eldridge   

This last month has been the busiest and most varied I think I have ever had since choosing paramotoring as a career but every second has been epic and I wouldn’t ever wish to change a thing. A very warm welcome was received by the flying folks in Brazil although the weather was the chilliest on record and a bit of a shock after leaving a heatwave in the UK, usually it’s the other way around…

After a few days the sun came through though and allowed us to make some jaw-dropping flights along the coasts around Santos, Saquarema and finally Rio de Janeiro and up to the ‘Christ-the Redeemer’ monument, 2000 feet above the city and above the planes coming into the International airport! Brazil is crazy and always exciting! The guys from Paramania were there also so we conducted some seminars and talks at various locations in between the flying which went down very well. It was great to see a strong presence of Parajet Zeniths there with just about every current engine option covered and colour combination too, all lined up together on the beach they looked amazing and attracted a lot of attention.

From the coast and beaches it was time for me to head north and start my filming duties again with EMI award winning director Sylvestre Campe for our series ‘Aerials’ for Brazilian TV (and maybe elsewhere for the future.) The destination for the first couple of episodes was the amazing Rio Xingu river that feeds into the Amazon, up in the lovely, hot, sweaty part of the country, right next to the Equator. The flying up here is tricky as it’s mostly jungle and river and the conditions become extremely thermic and turbulent by mid morning, sometimes settling in the late afternoon. There’s also a shortage of places to take off but every now and then there are small sand bars on the river, big enough for a beautifully back-dropped launch area. So early starts and extreme caution in preparing the flying equipment was paramount.

Once again the versatility of the Parajet Zenith chassis shone through being so easy to throw in the back of a pickup or or small boat and and then pack down into a suitcase afterwards for transportation to the next destination. And what a contrasting destination it was being the fjord laden, mountainous and relatively cool areas of northern Norway! Having before only read about and drooled over pictures of this Scandinavian delight, it was absolutely mind-scrambling arriving there and being able to view the absolute beauty of this place that only flying a paramotor can deliver. After skimming fyords and glaciers and flying in some of the most stunning and dramatic terrain, everything is now packed away again ready for the next destination where we will meet and fly with Parajet Team Pilot Xandi Mesush in his equally beautiful, lush country of Austria.

« Show All Blog Entries