Parajet Pilots Blog Latest Team News

Family time and factory days!

Posted on June 06, 2013 in Dean Eldridge   

After our success last month in France it’s been a busy and varied couple of weeks with training, attending a foreign flying show, arranging future events and working in the Parajet factory!

The El Yelmo flying festival in the olive growing region of Southern Spain was a spectacular event with various paragliding acro displays and a small but raucous paramotor display/comp with all the top Spanish pilots attending and buzzing manically over the enthusiastic crowd. Loads of fun, zero ‘health-and-safety!’ Brilliant!

With favourable gaps in between the British showers afterwards, I was able to make some tandem flights for friends and family, one of whom is my 14 year old nephew Lewis who also demonstrated some superb ground handling skills after just a handful of hours with the wing. He’s now going to get some special attention to his training from his uncle so watch this space!

I also had a birthday on the 1st of June, I’m not going to let on which one but there’s lots of candles on the cake these days!! Actually my lovely partner, Nicky made the most fantastic chocolate and Guinness cake that was consumed with much gusto with half the Parajet boys after a great evening of flying. On said day, I also received my NPPL(M) Powered Parachute licence from the CAA so decided to convert an old trike I had lying around at the Parajet factory, to take my Volution Macro chassis. As I had to call on the services of ‘Ian the welder’ to fix all the pieces together, I returned the favour by helping out in the factory which I like to do on occasion. All the guys are great at the factory, like a big family and help me out so much when I need some machinery or something fixing in a hurry. They are also very passionate about their work but it’s not until you start working alongside them that you get an impression of how much effort and care goes into each machine. Whenever I spend time here I have an added appreciation of all the elements and processes that constitute the end result that so many of us take for granted. Hopefully we’ll get some favourable weather conditions this week for training so that the lads here that are not yet up to flying standard get their first steps into the air. Because they don’t just like building the them here, they like to be able to fly the things too…

« Show All Blog Entries