Bob69bob
- Device
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- None of the above
Funnily enough, I have a significant fear of heights. However, I can assure you that it’s an absolute hoot to fly. The vast majority of the time, you’re flying between 500 and 1500 ft AGL. Apart from O₂ issues, height limitations aren’t an issue as long as you remain outside CTA (flying below 500ft requires a low level endorsement and you must have permission of the land owner). You can see how open the whole thing is where you are essentially sitting on a small bench seat with only the framework around you. There are 2x 4 point harnesses holding you in nice and snug so you never feel like there’s any chance of falling out. The only time that I’ve ever had that “micro-second moment” where I’ve questioned my sanity, is when I climbed up to around 4000 feet, looked over the edge and thought, “holy crap, there is virtually nothing between me and the the ground, way down below😳”. Although completely safe, I wasn’t game to try steep turns up there as the vehicle itself swings out like a pendulum. Cruising along with gravity acting in a ꜜ direction is fine, but yanking it into a turn and pulling Gs in a ➘ direction (along with the change in seating angle) wasn‘t really doing it for me 😬🤪.
The greatest fun, by far, is actually getting down really low and throwing it around - those angles are a lot more fun down low. The beach area in the video was a fair distance from most civilisation and there‘s only a few odd die-hard fisherman that have gone to great lengths to get out there. I do the right thing and give them a wide berth and a friendly wave as I go past and usually get a smile and a wave in return. You can see the “WTF?” expression on many of the faces, which is more than enough satisfaction for me to not want to scare the crap out of them by getting too close 😄. If there’s nobody ahead of me, I’m zipping along at around 45kts (~90km/h or 50mph) which is a really sedate speed above a few hundred feet, but a real buzz when only at 2 to 3 ft and the waves are breaking just underneath you. The speed would be reasonable in a land vehicle but feels even faster when you’re constantly fine tuning control of the third dimension, height. With just a (normally insignificant) slight breeze of around 5kts, I was surprised by the amped up rush on the return leg. It made sense when I crunched the numbers. The first run along the beach was into the wind, so ground speed would have been around 40kts and it wasn’t until I swung it around and came back the other way (now 50kts over the ground) that I appreciated I had just given myself a 20% boost 😆.
Dizzy
Nayeon
