Paragliding events

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This beautiful portugese vulcanic island on the Atlantic-ocean (700 km west from the coasts of Marocco) is a perfect paragliding destination. Thanks to its mild and stable climate the temperature is warm all year round (between 19-25C). Due to the passat winds the north side is often cloudy and rainy whilst the south of the island is well protected, dry and sunny with great soaring and thermalling conditions up to 900-1200 meters. Beside more than 70 take-off places, Madeira offers friendly hospitality, a 500 years old history, unforgetable gastronomy and unnumerous outdoor activities...

Like every year since 1973, at the end of the season the small mountain village of St. Hilaire du Touvet hosts the biggest freeflying event, the Coupe Icare festival! During 4 days the great audience could see everything that files...the well known masquerade competition, paragliding and hanggliding acro, D-Bag jumps from helicopter, paramotor show, sky diving and wingsuit demos, hot air balloons, speedflying, autogyro, and all the rest you can (or can't) imagine!

From wednesday to sunday the 7th International Air Games Festival was held in Türkey, celebrating the last days of the season in Ölüdeniz. A week before it was raining very strong, but during the festival luckily the weather was sunny and hot every day, but up to the Babadag mountain it was already necessery to take some warm clothes and flying suit.

The 33rd edition of Coupe Icare, the biggest paragliding event will be held this week from 21st to 24th of September in St. Hillaire, France. This is a grandiose festival with exhibition of all the paragliding companies, fancy dressed pilots, all kind of flying machines, film festival, big parties...and of course, acro shows!

For us it will be the first time to visit this event so we are very excited and hopefully there will be nice sunny autumn weather at this weekend.

Hope to see you there!

The final stage of the Eagle XC romanian cross country competition was held in Poiana last weekend (organized by George Marinescu). This place is a nice ski resort few kilometers away from Brashov up on the mountains. Just as in the previous years, there was also an acro show to impress the puclic, composed of mostly paraglider pilots. They invited two synchro teams, Against The Grain (Xandi and Bernd) and Soft Landing (Gábor and me)). On saturday we jumped two times from helicopter.

Just one day after Vertigo 20 of the best acro pilots from all around the world travelled to Türkey for one week to impress the public of Ölüdeniz at the 1st AcroX festival.

This great event was organized by Cem Karakas (SkyExtreme) and for the next year his plan is to improve it to a competition and a grandiose show with about 100 participants, included paraglider pilots, sky divers etc...

Cem, in the name of all pilots thank you very much for the great hospitality and this amazing week we had in the sunny Ölüdeniz! Hope to see you at Coupe Icare!