Off Topic: Paragliding – Performance Training in Ölüdeniz, Turkey (Mount Babadag)

This post will be totally SharePoint unrelated but it was so amazing that I will briefly tell you about me last week in Ölüdeniz, Turkey - with lots of pictures! So please read on if you are not afraid of great heights.

Paragliding

1.5 years ago I started to learn how to use a Paraglider - and I enjoyed every minute in the air since then! It is an awesome, thrilling but still very relaxing sport - and not as dangerous as you might think. But it requires a lot of practicing and lots of technical gimmicks - an ideal sport for me. In order to improve my technique (I am still a beginner) I booked a paragliding tour with my flight school - a so called performance training - with my buddy Sebastian and traveled to Turkey (2.5 hours flight from Munich) - and we had a blast from 10/10/15 to 10/17/15.

Babadag, 1700 meters above sea level - close to heaven!

I must say, I am totally impressed of the city Ölüdeniz - it almosted seems like the whole city is built for paragliders, but i am most likely not objective! Every day you can see paragliders flying closely above the city - and we landed next to the beach on the pavement. The “normal” tourists are warned with signs like this one:

I could not imagine that in Germany - here you need a certified launch and landing site to prevent accidents. In Ölüdeniz it more looked like an airport for paragliders:

A typical launch looks like this - here is a tandem (2 persons) start:

Performance Training

So what do paragliders learn in a performance training? From start to landing I got advise from my flight school - and we practiced extreme maneuvers to better handle a glider in extreme situations like a collapse - it is totally amazing to me that you can still fly with 50 percent of your glider and it was fun to destroy the glider mid-flight (and above water) to simulate this behavior. Or a so called B-Stall - where you pull down some lines to decrease the glider surface - and loose height. In my case I went down with notable 8m/s. Good fun! The most exciting and thrilling exercise tho was the spiral - during this you pull one break until the glider spirals down with extreme speed and g-force - that pressure and sound was totally new for me and at first scared the sh** out of me to be honest 🙂 Peter did it amazingly fast and recorded it with two cams - one attached below the glider and one on his helmet:

The sound still gives me heebie-jeebies 🙂

Relaxing above the sea

Pictures tell more than thousand words - here we go:

Closing

Okay thats it - I learned a lot, had lots of fun, met new paragliding friends and had 9 happy landings that sums up to more than 15.000 height meters - and I am very thankful to my always patient flight trainers Wolf and Markus from Bayrische Drachen + Gleitschirmschule.

My friend Sebastian created a nice video that sums up all the experience in just 3 minutes - awesome!

You have questions? Drop a comment and I am happy to help!