Acro World

On the 22nd of November the JHV (the main meeting of the german paragliding association) was held and the issue of legalizing acro in Gemany came up for discussion (in the moment roll- and pitch angles above 90 degrees are not allowed) Nearly 10 person spoke in front of the public - included Toni Bender and Karl Slezak, the DHV's safety consultant - and said that the complete legalisation is very urgent. The petition was accepted by nearly 100% of the people who were present on the meeting.

However, there already has been once a working group in 2002 which discussed the possibility of legalizing acro flying in Germany. The main reason why that did not go ahead is still valid today: aerobatics flight with paragliders is prohibited by the law, whereas LuftVO §8(1) prohibits aerobatics flight with "Luftsportgeräten", a class which comprises mostly ultralights, paragliders, hanggliders, parachutes. This ordinance can only be changed by the Luftfahrtbundesamt (LBA), the highest German aviation administration.

Now a new working group will be formed to proceed this petition further though the LBA and change the law to let the growing german acro community train and live their passion in a legal way!
Good luck!

Further infomations about the legalization process can be found here
and in the DHV Forum (in german)

A new Paragliding Brand is born: Raul Rodriguez Acro Wings

"The austrian paraglider company NOVA is proud to announce a cooperation deal with Raul Rodriguez, multiple world champion and one of the world’s most famous acro pilots. The agreement will be signed on Friday, the 19h of September, at the “Coupe Icare” flying festival. The collaboration includes the introduction of special acro paragliders under the new brand "Raul Rodriguez Acro Wings". They will be developed, produced and distributed by NOVA. Raul Rodriguez holds the trademark and is in charge of all flying tests and the image of the new brand.

He promised and he did it! On Sunday Chrigel Maurer world class XC and acro pilot broke his own unofficial Infinity record, as he announced it a few days earlier in the local newspapers. Before the start of the first task of the Paragliding World Cup in Grindenwald, Switzerland, he jumped out of a helicopter at 2400m over the ground and performed 198 revolutions in front of the Eiger's North Face and the eyes of the world's best cross county pilots. He spent 5 minutes and 50 seconds in the neverending trip.
Despite the tricky weather conditions a short but nice task was set where he arrived 4th in the goal, which was in center of Interlaken. As he said in his interview earlier, this is the only World Cup that he takes part this year, since it is his real home playground.
Congratz!

www.chrigelmaurer.ch

Stands on Niviuk's website:

"Raul Rodriguez, a new destination

We announce, by mutual agreement, the end of the engagement of Raul Rodriguez towards Niviuk Gliders. The complete Niviuk staff thanks Raul for these 3 years of collaboration with many big sensations and pictures."

Info: Niviuk.com

Chrigel Maurer - despite his young age - is without doubt one of the best XC pilots since many years, winning the world cup series one after the other...But not everybody knows that behind the scenes he is also a rising acro star! Flying acro in his free time, just for his own entertaining step by step he learned all the figures and arrived to a world class level. On 19th of March he took-off at Jungfraujoch in Switzerland, soar up the three famous mountains of the Alps - Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger - then flew over the valley of Grindenwald and made 158 Infinity turns with his Advance prototype (current official record 120 turns by Antoine Montant by jumping from helicopter).
We catched him for a short interview just after he became father, his son was born this Monday!

Name: Chrigel Maurer

Age: 25 years old

Place of home: Wilderswil, Interlaken

Started to fly paraglider in 1998

Started to fly XC competitions in 1999

Overall PWC winner in 2005, 2006 and 2007

European XC record holder, 323 km (in 2004)

Website: chrigelmaurer.ch

justACRO: You are a real competitor character and for several years you were participating in all the cross county World Cups, this is actually your main profession?

Chrigel Maurer: Yes, my first PWC was in 2001 - when I was 19- and I won the series overall in the last 3 years.

jA: Beside focusing so much on XC how is your relation with acro flying?

Chrigel: I love the fascination of the maneuvers...

I can't find the words...such a great loss...The always-smiling Mathias Roten, world class paraglider pilot left this world on Friday by a speedflying accident. He went out riding alone to Lötschental, not so far from his hometown (Thun) in Switzerland. He flew a small sky-diving parachute with not so good take-off ability - as he said earlier. Nobody knows exactly what happened, because as far as we know there are no witnesses of the accident. He attempted to take-off close to the peak of Hockenhorn at 3000 meter from the top of a cliff, but probably his glider did not inflate properly and he fell down 100 meter from the rock and died immediately...Soon after a rescue helicopter came for him, but they couldn't help anymore.

He was not only one of the best paragliding acro pilots with his unique, agressive style (1st in synchro overall world cup in 2005 with Dominique Steffen), but a very expert cross country pilot as well (1st team in overall world cup in 2004 and 2005 ). Despite these great successes he never took the stress of the competitions, only flew for fun and the results were not really important for him. In 2007 he also mastered Infinity Tumbling and expressed himself in speedflying (he also run the biggest speed-flying site on the web)
He had incredible talent and enthusiastic passion to everything he touched: he was kitesurf and ski instructor, test-pilot, sky-diver, speedrider and probably the best drum player I've ever heared. He stopped paragliding competitions 2 years ago and his attention turned to film-making. At the end of 2007 with some of his friends they released the Play Gravity movie, a masterpiece of extreme sport cinematography created by the ideas of Mathias.

He was truly the artist of life...a great person and friend...

We will miss you so much!!! :-(