ISSUE 01 EDITORIAL
There are few things in life that excite me more than watching the sun rise through the crisp morning air as I make my final checks, top up my fuel tank, fire up the engine and ready myself for the first flight of the day. Paramotoring has been an all-absorbing passion for many years. It’s taken me around the world, introduced me to new friends, new places, and new perspectives. Although my background is in free flying, it is the ability to self-launch whenever and from wherever I want that I like about paramotoring. And I also love the sense of community and infectious energy that’s always simmering away at a busy field packed with pilots. As you hear the engines burst to life and watch the grins spread across the launching pilots’ faces, you can almost taste the excitement in the air.
The pace of development in our sport is equally exhilarating. Paramotoring, including paratrikes, is now one of the fastest expanding sectors of sport flying, and the choice of equipment is growing to reflect that. In 1990 when I first strapped a paramotor to my back it was a heavy, spluttering hunk of metal that barely had the power to force the basic paragliding wings we used off the ground. Seventeen years later and we are almost spoilt for choice of equipment, and the age of the quiet, clean running electric paramotor seems to be just around the corner. This exciting new avenue of motor development looks set to open many new doors to us. To get the low down on the latest developments, I’ve talked to some of the industry’s innovators to get a measure of how close we are to seeing a rechargeable electric paramotor on the market.
But machines are nothing without the people to pilot them, and no one pilots a paramotor quite like Mathieu Rouanet. With his audacious flying style and seemingly unassailable position on the top step of podiums around the world, Mathieu is one of the most unusual characters in the sport. Few would disagree that he is a worthy opening profile for our new magazine.
We’ve tried to pack the magazine with news, tips from top pilots, the latest on topical issues and also inspiring adventure stories and photography. But we wouldn’t be here without your support and enthusiasm, and we’d like to honour that by inviting you to help share your magazine’s future direction. Please do email me or make yourself heard at our forum at www.paramotormag.com.
The creation of Paramotor Magazine has been a team effort. It’s a privilege to be working alongside Bob Drury and Marcus King, Cross Country magazine’s editorial and design team. Their knowledge and experience from many years as free flying’s premier international publication have helped create the magazine you have in your hands. Our contributors, their words and images, have come from all four corners of the globe to help meld together a truly international magazine.
Paramotor Magazine is quarterly through 2007, and Issue 2 will be out first to subscribers, early in July. Meanwhile, thanks again for your support and enjoy the issue!
Happy flying
Michel Carnet
Editor@ParamotorMag.com
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
My first paramotoring flight was a spluttering, air bubble-interrupted lunge towards an electric pylon. After frantically pushing the kill switch and pulling a hook turn, I somehow landed unscathed. My second flight didn’t happen at all – I tripped and totalled the wooden propeller. It was an inauspicious introduction.
But I can still remember the excitement of that spring afternoon in 1996. I was standing in the field behind my friend’s house, cumulus clouds lining the horizon, knowing that in a few moments I’d be up there, thousands of feet in the air, playing in three-dimensional freedom, the pan-flat patchwork of East Anglia’s farmlands stretched out below me. The hedgerows that blocked my field of vision, the imprisoning flatness of everything around me… soon I’d rise above it all with this fantastic new engine I’d strapped on my back.
Eleven years on and the horizons have opened up way beyond what I might have ever thought possible back then as I staggered around cursing and yanking the start handle. We have fast, reflex-style wings that allow us to fly hundreds of miles on new adventures. We have incredibly light, sub-20 kg motors that we can use to get airborne like motor gliders. And, most excitingly of all, we have the prospect of silent motoring flight now barely out of all of our reaches: electric paramotors.
It’s exciting times, and I hope Paramotor Magazine captures some of the excitement of the possibilities that stretch ahead of us. Last year, when Michel Carnet came to me with the idea of creating what you’re holding now, I couldn’t think of a better-qualified man for the job. He’s one of the most successful paramotor competition pilots, having won the British and French nationals several times and coming second in the Worlds, and is also an experienced instructor, with over 25 years in hang gliding, paragliding and gliding.
Eventually I did get airborne on that spring day. It wasn’t the thermalling, XC day I’d imagined but a cool evening tour around the stately homes and cathedrals of Suffolk watching the colours drain from the sky. An ethereal flight I’d never experienced through free flying. I found my way to a friend’s house, and spent fifteen minutes waving at his Dad as he steadfastly mowed the lawn, refusing to look up at this airborne lunatic only a few hundred feet above his head. Some people just refuse to ever look up, I guess!
I hope you enjoy the magazine as much as we have enjoyed putting it together.
Hugh Miller
Publisher