The 2010 – South African Paramotor Flight Challenge

Event Report

This exciting national challenge ran over a period of three months from March – May 2010

In short the purpose of the challenge was as follows

• A fun challenge intended to boost confidence & skill levels of pilots by exploring new fields, doing flight planning & navigation.
• See how many kilometers and how many different sites you can fly to by PPG over a period of three months.

Measured against these goals the challenge was a huge success, with a total of 3250 km covered in 68 submitted flights. 88 Take offs from 42 different fields were logged.

Amongst these flights there were some astounding achievements.

Tony Gibson flew a 100km closed circuit flight for which he achieved a new world speed record (still to be ratified by FAI). He achieved an astounding average speed of 76 km/h over 100km out & return flight, beating the previous record of Michel Carne uf the UK by 30%. This was done on a Dudek Plasma wing with a Nirvana Instinct motor.

Hendrik Theron & Riaan Marais flew together in loose formation to claim the longest flight by Paramotor to date in South Africa. They covered the distance of 232km, both flying their Dudek Synthesis wings with Simonini motors. Hendrik on a Castelluttio Easy trike and Riaan on a Fly Products Max 130.

Mias De Klerk flying his JoJo Wing, Speedy with a Solo 210 motor managed to visit 14 different sites in his 8 submitted flights, doing landings & take offs from remote fields not only in the Lowveld, Mpumalanga but also along the Mozambique coast.

Mathew Erasmus took top honors with his 563km total distance flown during the challenge also ending up with the top score.

Also worth a mention is Colin Tapson’s effort winning the Novice category. He has not participated in any previous competitions and still managed a 7^th position overall, flying from 7 different sites.

Scooping up the balance of the prizes were Anton Naude & Ray Hartman for the top 5 flight average scores and Adriaan Booyens as runner up on the Novice category.

A huge thank you to our sponsors. Please support them, they support us!