Apr 17/14 – PPG course day 6 – am

Given the cold in the mornings we have decided to meet little bit later. At 7:30 AM wind was already up to 20 km/h per hour coming directly from east. East winds are absolutely terrible in this area, they are always turbulent and quite dangerous. Normally I do not test fly first thing in the morning but today it needed to be done. I have set up paramotor for reverse launch and as soon as I inflated the paraglider I knew that it’s going to be bad. The glider was twitching above my head and it was tricky to control it. I have taken off and quickly determined that there is a great amount turbulence in the air. So much so, that I have decided to pull big ears to safely come down through the doggy height below 200 feet. The winds were very unpredictable in fact I landed cross wind and ended up on my knees. I don’t even remember last time I did something like that…

It was clear that students will not be flying this morning we’ve done little bit of the ground handling with the promoters on and since both students were interested in my tandem unit I took them to Peaks to take a look at it. We got it out of the storage, dusted it off then started it so they could check it out.

Off to the field now. Forecast is good.