How to Choose Paragliding Accessories

Video Transcript

"CHAD BASTIAN: Hi. This is Chad Bastian. Welcome to Expert Village. We're here to talk about the trike buggy and PPG triking with paragliders. Okay. In this segment, we're going to talk about some of the peripheral accessories, the gear you might want as a powered paraglider pilot or a PPG trike pilot. One thing is--the motor is--any of these motors make noise. The prop make noise as it goes around the unit. You could get the motor totally quiet. The prop, when it's at full RPM makes a bit of noise and we want to protect our hearing. And these helmets allow us to protect our ears and also communicate with other pilots via our radio. We have a little push button talk here; we can talk to the other pilots on these helmets. So, these are good. They protect our heads. I think there's a lot of controversy out there as to do with helmets and I know a lot of PPG pilots fly with no helmet. But I, again, don't think it's a really good idea. I think that it's not too much penalty to fly with it and if you ever did hit your head, it's a pretty big--this would protect you pretty well. Some of the other instruments we might use would be a variometer which tells us not only when we're going up but how high we are and what are sink rate or our climb rate is as we're going up and down. One of my favorite pieces of equipment is the GPS; it tells us our ground speed, also gives us a pretty accurate view of our altitude as well. GPS is great too if you get out there and get lost and you need someone to find you, you can give 'em your coordinates. Hopefully, you have a radio; either a two-meter radio or a--a lot of powered paraglider pilots use the family band radios which are just fine. They don't have as good of range, but they're pretty good. Just find one that uses--to find one that you can use that other pilots are using. You'll find in different areas of the country, they'll use different things that work really well. Gloves might be a really good thing to have when you're flying. It's--your hands are always up and then blood kinda drains out of your hands. We have an accessory for the trike buggy that allows us to steer the glider with our feet so you can actually let go of the brakes and steer the glider in calm conditions with your feet. It's called the intuitive foot steering system and it's really nice because you can bring your hands down and use a hand warmer on a long cross country flight. It really makes the difference between comfort and frozen hands. "