“Ready, go!” shouts Peter Nitsche, the man with the checkered shirt and a hat to protect him from the hot sun. Then, a trainee flyer with a black helmet runs forward a few steps. His paraglider spreads out. The hoist tow rope tightens and soon the pilot rises, gaining height rapidly. After a few seconds he is floating more than a hundred meters above the ground. “A little more to the right!” instructs the student by radio.
The man with the checkered shirt heads the paragliding school Flatland-Paragliding in Langenfeld, Rhineland. With his team, on this tropical day in Leverkusen, Peter Nitsche is preparing the students for their flights. “There is a lower and an upper sail, and between them are walls between cells. The whole thing is sewn together to create a profile like that of the airfoil on an airplane. It is guided with the steering ropes on each side. They hold on to the trailing edge and generate resistance,” explains the flight instructor about the structure of a paraglider.
Flying all over the world
Peter Nitsche knows about flying since he flies all types of sports aircraft, such as engine-powered and sail aircraft or ultralight aircraft. But “the paraglider fascinates me especially, since I fly through the air with a little piece of fabric and can even take it with me on vacation.” For almost 30 years he has been taking to the skies with the paraglider; he and his students travel more than 20 weeks out of the year. “My favorite places to fly in Europe are at Lac d’Annecy and in Slovenia. Lac d’Annecy is enchanting because of its beauty, and in Slovenia you can fly for good long distances. Outside of Europe he likes to go to South Africa, where he says it is gorgeous, especially in February and March.
Tepex for crossing the Alps
Peter Nitsche flies a paraglider with a speedbag and seated reclining harness. To guide the paraglider, the pilot must keep his body tense while shifting his weight. To do this he supports himself with his feet on the footboard of the harness. This plate may be exposed to extreme forces in extreme situations, such as sudden maneuvers before sheer rock walls—comparable to a passenger car brake pedal that is pressed all the way to the floor to avoid an accident. In such situations one must be able to rely on the material holding up. “The footboard must therefore be of high quality and especially stable. However, it also must not be too heavy, since it is at the lowest point and otherwise would interfere at takeoff and landing. In addition, it must have exactly the right size in order to give the pilot secure footing, but not interfere with the aerodynamics,” explains the flight instructor.
These are all properties that the composite material Tepex dynalite from the LANXESS subsidiary Bond-Laminates, fulfills. The continuous glass-fiber-reinforced high-performance composite, based on high-tech plastics, are used, for example, in the RANGE X-ALPS paraglider reclining harness from Skywalk GmbH & Co. KG. The footboard consists of a sandwich composite, only one centimeter thick, which is made from a thin cover layer of Tepex and a honeycomb core made of polypropylene from the firm EconCore N.V., each only half a millimeter in thickness. The harness was used in an alpine crossing in July 2015. In this event, the participants had to cover the distance from the Austrian city of Salzburg to Monaco alternately by foot and with the paraglider – 1038 kilometers through and over the Alps.
Anyone who wants to learn to fly a paraglider must be at least 16 years old and weigh 45 kilograms. Even 14-year-olds may participate with the consent of their parents. “As early as the first day, following instructions, you can take off. Here in the flatlands we first do half a day of running exercise on flat ground; in the afternoon the students fly very low over the meadow to the hoist. In the Alps we train on a training slope before gliding down, alone or in tandem,” as Peter Nitsche describes the training procedure.
More information available at:
www.bond-laminates.com
www.flatland-paragliding.de
