Paragliding from Plan Praz to the Mont Blanc

Byrichard

In this video we see someone paragliding from Plan Praz to the Mont Blanc. To do this the individual finds ascending air at a number of points going from 2800 metres up to 5000 meters before finally landing on the summit of the Mont Blanc.

This video gives you a practical example of how a good paragliding flight should go. When I flew at Les Diablerets last week I was surprised that we don’t feel the wind as much as we would expect when on a parapente and I was surprised that you do not feel when you are going up or down. In this video you hear a beep that increases in frequency and intensity as you ascend. The faster it beeps the faster you are climbing. There is another beep that we hear just once in the video that indicates that the parapente is going down.

It’s a shame that in this video we do not find out how long the flight lasts. We hear him at one moment speak about the need for patience as he looks for pockets of rising air to raise him to the desired altitude. We hear him comment about how certain people seem to struggle and we hear that his breathing is more laboured as he gets higher.

It would be nice to see them take off from the summit and head back down in to the valley. It must be nice to ascend the Mont Blanc in such a way. We seldom hear of people ascending the Mont Blanc by parapente so this video is interesting.

In this second video we see people hike up the Mont Blanc and take off from the summit. The view from there must be spectacular and the feeling must be pleasant. Many of us have seen the vista from the Aiguille Du Midi but imagine seeing it from a place as calm and quiet as below a parapente.

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Colin Furze and the 360 Swing

Byrichard

When you have lengths of pipe, a welder, a water container and a big enough garden you can get up to some mischief. Colin Furze and the 360 Swing are an interesting demonstration of this. In the first two videos you see him build the structure and in the next two videos you see him do some 360 swings with the structure.

He is a plumber by profession but makes some fun and entertaining videos for youtube in his free time. In these videos he has built a flame throwing guitar, magnetic shoes, built a bunker, created eccentric door bells and more. He also made a firework shooting bazooka and put a motor bike engine in a tuktuk.

The video above is a behind the scenes look at part of the discussions and includes some drone footage of the swing being used to successfully complete a few 360 rotations on the swing with and without the motor.

When you see him add the paramotor to the swing you see that he has taken the idea too far. By the end of the video he feels a little weaker as you’d expect. I don’t know how many Gs he put himself through. It was enough to make him feel unwell by the end of the clip.

I enjoy watching the building process of these eccentric contraptions because we see that safety is taken in to consideration. In either the first or the second video he says that he usually does two things. The first one is built off camera to make sure that he knows what he is doing and when he is confident he builds a component for the second time on camera. In this project we see that there is a reasonable amount of testing to make sure that everything behaves properly before moving on to the next step.

There are a number of videos like this on youtube that teach you about engineering and building eccentric machines. Colin Furze is just one of many youtube video makers to build things and then use them.