Here’s a timelapse of one front arriving at the airfield. Prepared paperwork, and took the check-flight and so on to be able to fly theįew days we had some windy conditions, with gustfronts and duststorms everyĪfternoon. It’s been extremely little rain in the area the last years, the Lake Keepit dam is down to under 1% of it’s capacity, it looks like the surface of the moon in places.Īrrived late night/early morning at Keepit I got a few hours sleep and then The locals said it was especially bad this year due to the dry conditions, as the only place the kangaroos find a little green grass is along the road and they flock there every night. I hope I never have to drive those roads again at night, it was insane. But a big roo jumped out from behind a tree and landed in the grill of the car, damaging the grille and bonnet. I hit 5 or 6 kangaroos, most at walking speed or less, so they did no damage and the kangaroo just jumped off again. I slowed down to walking speed at some stages, and even then I could not avoid hitting roo’s that jumped out in front of the car. It was like driving through a slaughterhouse in some places where dead kangaroos littered the road every tens of meters. I’m not exaggerating when I say I saw thousands of kangaroos on that drive. I drove the shortest route via Texas – Warialda and down through Manilla, but in retrospect going the New England Highway through Armidale and Tamworth would probably have been better. I was aware that it would be risky, but I was not prepared for the infestation of kangaroos along the roads. The 6+ hours drive from Canungra to Lake Keepit meant that I would be driving at night when the kangaroos come out. I drove from Rainbow Beach just before noon and had a quick stop at Canungra to deliver gliders and gear back at Ollie’s place. Nikolay clearly has a really solid feel for space, constantly calculating where his subjects will be next and ensuring they’re safely framed up.After the days flying at Rainbow Beach I headed back south to Lake Keepit to fly XC in a glider again. Almost as much as we’re looking forward to the video. We hope to release our new quad design in the coming months. In order to capture these shots, I used a prototype fpv drone that I’ve been developing with my friend Zach Carrizales. Here’s what the YouTube description says:įrom loop de loops to spins, Ian Brubaker fearlessly defies gravity in his hang glider with an fpv drone several feet away. For the video we’re about to see, he’s flying a new prototype quad. In fact, he’s only looked ahead – figuring out the next challenge or build.
Basically he put in 60 dedicated hours on a simulator, made the transition, and hasn’t looked back. What’s amazing (and should give some of us hope) is that Nikolay only started flying in February 2020. We’ve seen a number of ace vids from him ( here’s the last one we wrote about), and there’s no denying his skill behind the sticks. But wow, you’d sure want a good FPV pilot as your wingman. But what if you could actually follow them through the sky with a First-Person-View drone? In theory, you’d wind up with a pretty dope video. We didn’t hit a pole.)Īnyway, those pilots generally record their own flights with action cams. (By the way, I did actually try a tandem flight using a ground-based towing system a couple of decades later. Well, maybe not quite like that, but with such skill that they make loops and spirals and dives look simply easy. Experienced hang-gliding pilots who can maneuver their kites like they’re piloting a fighter jet. You may well have seen some of this on YouTube already. But I was in very rough shape and blame that incident for occasional back problems that have dogged me sporadically ever since. It absorbed some of the shock, bending completely out of shape. I landed upside-down on my back, directly on that triangular bar used for controlling the kite. And so straight down I went, some 30-40 feet. You don’t flutter when you fall with a hang glider you just fall. At the last second, I pulled my legs out of the prone harness and tried to kick the pole and glance off it, thinking I could somehow redirect my flight. I became fixated on the target and – though I tried to turn away – kept heading directly for it. To make a long story short, I launched and was somehow soon heading directly for a pole that held lights for night skiing. Most were short hops, but on an exceedingly windy day we made the decision that I could launch from a high hill used for downhill skiing. When I was a teenager, a poster popped up in my high school. Because this involves hang gliders, I thought I’d give you a little backstory.
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