What Is Paramotoring? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Paramotoring?

parajet.com

24 pointstta22 comments

> You’ll be in complete control and smiling so big your cheeks hurt. It’s your childhood fantasy come to life.

Until the parawing folds from a gust of wind.

Happened right in front of me. The person fell with a terrible thump sound I cannot forget. The weight of the engine almost on top of them.

They didn’t lose consciousness on the spot and were probably in shock and they were talking with us. The ambulance came pretty quickly. To this day I wonder what happened to them, I hope they survived and recovered.

I learned about and became enthralled by this hobby in 2018. I also know that I will not do the maintenance/upkeep that’s required after every 10 hours of flight for a two-stroke gasoline-powered paramotor. Electric is much simpler.

I’m holding onto hope that battery tech improvements make electric paramotors more worthwhile in the next 5-10 years. The last time I looked, a gas engine gets you around 50 minutes of flight, and an electric motor around 30 minutes.

There’s an airport somewhat close to me that offers training. Probably not worth getting trained unless I’m up for buying and maintaining my own rig though. Wing + motor + trailer + place to keep them in is pushing $15k at the very least, not counting upkeep and training (or an emergency chute). If I had the dough to throw, it’d be an easy decision. As it stands, I’m just hoping that the tech catches up to my desires before I’m too old to try it out.

The premise is wonderful though. Launch from any park or field and freely explore the surrounding area from the sky, without much more than an overgrown child-safety seat with a propeller on the back and a wing that beats the Huffman encoding when stored away. No instrument panel, no yokes or levers; just a throttle and two handfuls of strings and some know-how.

  not counting upkeep and training (or an emergency chute)

AND an emergency chute.

All training/certification providers state a reserve chute as a requirement (more than one when engaged in acrobatic activity/drills).

Yes, I agree. Applying Boolean negation logic is something I do regularly, I just don’t usually hold forum posts to the same standard :) it should have been an AND.

If I do manage to buy and use a flying rig, an emergency chute will be a part of it. I’ve seen enough videos to warn me against not having one. (Have fun parsing THAT expression!)

I fly mostly unpowered paragliders (AMA), but I do have a silly little electric paramotor that I've flown with a couple of times.

It's also worth distinguishing paramotoring (using a relatively-high-performance paraglider wing) from powered parachutes (using higher-internal-pressure, lower performance wings).

I'm the founder of https://ayvri.com - is it safe to say you're a user?

Hang glider and paraglider pilot here. Surprised to see paramotoring being brought up on HN. Even more surprised to see the founder of ayvri posting in the same thread! And yes, I'm a user, though not OP :p

I've been hang-gliding and paragliding only once. But the platform was obviously adopted by the paragliding community.

One of those interesting stories where we were working on the tech, not realizing that paragliders would be a user (and knowing nothing about paragliding at the time).

Not actually a user; I've mostly kept tech and flying separate so far. I'll take a look though!

> I've mostly kept tech and flying separate so far.

Don't you upload your tracks to something like xcontest or similar to analyse your flights?

Rarely? When I'm on a trip (Colombia, Macedonia, Valle) I'll do so over beers to chat things over with other pilots; when it's more casual or local flying, I'm doing it for the experience and the joy, not the retrospective analysis.

How long does your silly little electric paramotor fly before it runs out? Is it a one-prop, or a four- or six-prop model?

Four-prop. With two 12-lb batteries (which is the comfort level for my knees -- the whole unit with these batteries is around 42 lbs, so still competitive with even a low power gas unit) I can run for about 8 minutes, which gets me to about 3200 ft, and gives me ~12 minutes to find a thermal. (Worth noting I weigh significantly more than average, and fly with a moderately high wing loading.)

I spent some serious time designing a two-prop counter-rotating unit using low-inductance ironless motors and a GaN inverter, but never got around to building it. Maybe next life.

You’re far more gracious than I. If someone were to call something I’m clearly passionate about “silly” I don’t think I’d respond genially.

To be fair, he was quoting me exactly -- my original description used that word.

Yes, I would not have described it as such otherwise. I’d love to have a silly little electric paramotor, because then I’d have a paramotor.

I prefer a silly little electric paramotor over a big honking gas-powered paramotor, because I know what I’m willing to maintain. My question was solely about flight time, but reading it without the thread context does make me look like a jerk.

No harm, no foul.

The weight you’ve achieved sounds pretty good! But the runtime does not—I’ve never used a paraglider, and although I love the idea of finding and riding thermals, I know that I lack the experience to do so. What I really want is to be on par with gasoline engines in the brute-force dept, but with batteries. We are not there yet, but I hope we will be.

Thanks for sharing details! If you are fairly confident in your two-prop design, it might be worth reaching out to one or two paramotor companies to gauge their interest in it. Torque-steer from one big prop is something that all one-prop harness builders are always fighting against, whether electric or not. (I know nothing about building or flying any of these things, or much about business and IP, so disregard at will.). A two-prop engine seems like it’d be much nicer on the eardrums when compared to four. I’ve watched some videos…with the sound turned way down.

Having been in the aviation community for some time and having seen more than a few accidents with these things, it's worth to mention that they are way more dangerous than they appear. The thing to look out for is "collapsing" the wing, which is likely fatal at the kind of low altitudes normally flown. That "wing" always needs a positive loading. Downdrafts at the perimeter of a thermal, orthographic winds, rotors, fronts, convergence lines, other causes of turbulence and vertical drafts - there is a reason why you often see paramotors in the calm of the evening, when you can cut the air like butter. If you like flying, a more safe hobby would be gliding.

I... disagree with much of this.

Collapses of a paraglider are a normal operation and a normal occurrence, and can be recovered with much less than 50 ft of altitude loss. With a wing designed for fast recovery (rather than maximum performance), think closer to five feet under normal conditions.

I also fly sailplanes (and, for that matter, powered planes) and I find it hard to compare the safety directly. Paragliding definitely has a higher incident rate; but the incidents happen at so much lower energy due to the speed that you're dominantly concerned about things like twisted ankles. I will say that I feel much safer paragliding than downhill skiing due to the lower kinetic energy and higher allowable reaction time.

> and can be recovered with much less than 50 ft of altitude loss.

What if a gust of wind blows when you’re closer to the ground. Falling 50ft with a large engine strapped to one’s back sounds like would lead to more than a twisted ankle.

I mostly fly unpowered, so engine weight is something I don't have as much experience with. Terminal velocity with 300 ft^2 of fabric above you, even if it isn't a functional wing, is pretty low; but yes, a collapse near the ground below recovery height and below reserve parachute height is a worst-case scenario. In general, flying below reserve height for any length of time isn't a great idea.

You're overstating the risk of wing collapse.

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