Website relocation and video-page restyling went well !
It has been a very busy period for me due to study and training, so there were not that lot of updates on my website. For a while it 'll stay somwhat quiet here too, because I'm currently in another country for my training and education. But even though I'm not able to do a lot of paragliding at this moment, I'm still thinking back, for example about the great time Jason and I had in Oludeniz. Our movie AirDrenaline has been watched over YouTube for over 5500 times by now and almost as many uploads from my InAir website. We even got in the picture of BMW-marketing campain: 1tensity! (link). They approached us if they could use our AirDrenaline video, and make a short re-edit for their campain which actually was being used. It makes us even more proud about our movie and we're definately planning to make a sequel when there is more time for me to fly.

Also... due to higher costs, I decided to change my webhosting. With the appearance of YouTube, it won't be neccessary to have big bandwith hosting contracts for video's anymore which saves me hundreds of euro's each year, knowing this is a non-commercial, hobby website of course. The transition between the webhosters went well, so my page is visible again at the www !

Also the video-page has been re-arranged by now to accomodate my movies embedded as YouTube video's.

Well that's it for now, I'll watch fora like paraglidingforum.com and the Dutch E-lijn.nl page and when there is news, it'll be posted !!

GreetZ!

Arjan

AirDrenaline Trailer ready !
With already a little bit of material we decided to make a teaser for the clip we finally want to produce. Check it out here: AirDrenaline TRAILER

Back from Oludeniz 2006 !
My English flying buddy Jason Andrews and I teamed up to go to Oludeniz, Turkey, again in october 2006. We've had some bad weather, but that didn't prevent us to have a lot of fun. We met with acro-star and U-Turn Team pilot Michael Knipping who was more than willen to help us out with questions about tricks. I finally found out I was braking too much when fullstalling my wing, so I could adapt to this and fullstalling is no problem anymore !! Since Jason and I both like to capture our low-level acro adventures on tape, we shot a lot of material that will be editted into a movie the next months. Michael Knipping was really enthousiastic to carry our cam on his knee for a spectacular acro-flight with him doing left and right Tumbles, Rithmic SAT's, Helicopters and an awesome groundspiral !!! Of course those images will be present in our final clip ! Thanks to Micki !! We also met with Pal Takats and his synchro teammate Gabor Kezi. Those guys can FLY ! Everybody was stunned when Pal performed his Mistyflip to Infinity trick... such a powerfull manoeuver ! Well... I'd better start editting : )

Finally some updates !
It has been a while ago that I was able to give a little update in this section, but now is a good time. Last autumn I bought my own U-Turn FreeForce 22 in the black-yellow-red colour scheme. I've written some comments on this wing based on relatively short towing flights in my Gear section on this website, but overall I really like the wing a lot.

At the end of July I joined the people of Dutch paraglidingschool Action Air Sports on a trip to St. Hilaire du Touvet. Needless to say I had a great time with the team for almost 20 days and we enjoyed ourselves big time ! This trip finally gave me an opportunity to get to know my wing under mountain conditions. The first couple of times I flew it in thermic conditions, I really had to adapt to it's behavior. I was used to a very dampened Swing-Arcus-loading-middle-of-the-weightrange-low-end-DHV1-2-wing. I mean... the FF22 loaded at 110% with it's own dynamic characteristics was a whole different ballgame !

The first significant thermal made it instantly clear it was of no use to keep my cheststrap at the widest 60cm setting. My SupAir Acro2 harness, in combination with the FF22 felt so bumpy, I was rolled all over the place from left to right. It was hard to keep myself in a stable flying position. But get alive: It's an acro wing with an acro harness ! So I closed the cheststrap to about 50cm and that made a noticable difference. It became a lot more controlable, but still very agile and sensitive. During thermalling it turned out to be a nice machine to work yourself up... but that marks a spot for me to do a little confession: I'm not that kind of a thermalling guy... I think... I mean, I know how to work it, but I lack the patience and motivation to do so. What I want to do, is geting in the air and throw the damn thing around... I guess a little bit more of an all-round attitude would definately serve me when altitude isn't for grabs : ) Anyway...

Gradually I went to build up my feeling with this new wing. I'm a very enthousiastic pilot with dynamic ambitions, but I'm really aware of the fact I'm a low-airtime pilot. For people who at this moment expect to read a do-or-die hardcore acro-adventure... I'm sorry, I'm just not in a geographic, economic and days-off-at-work position to make that happen ; ) So that explains why I'm expanding my acro-ambitions on a step-by-step basis, because I definately want to live to tell !! But I love it ! : )) When I arrived at a good piece of airspace for my free-style related stuff, I released my cheststrap again to its maximum width of 60cm for best weighshift. Testing my wing for asymetric deflations surprised me a little, because it was pretty vicious, compared to my former wing (which is quite logical by the way). I guess the diving tendency was amplified significantly by the fact I load the wing between 105 and 110kgs, knowing it's certified DHV-2 until 95kgs all-in weight. Even at hands-up trimspeed I noticed a rather loud windnoise in my ears and someone estimated my trimspeed now is probably around 43-45 km/h, so that's quite a difference compared to normal trimspeed (38-39) which is already higher than I was used to. Control in deflations was no problem at all because for example it was really easy to go with the roll and just roll it out again. Also countersteering proved to be no problem.

I also found one moment to fullstall the wing. Breaking was much lighter than I expected and I was able to pull it all through in one motion. I noticed the wing didn't really get into a stable fullstall instantly, something I'd expected, based on other pilots experiences. It just kept going in some kind of left-to-right motion, instead of a forward-backward motion. I'm still thinking about what caused it. It might have had to do with the fact I didn't take a wrap to fullstall the wing (don't want to need a wrap) or maybe, though I can hardly believe it, I've pulled it a little bit asymetricly even when I thought I didn't. Soon I'll be going for Oludeniz again and I will explore how it will behave when I can do more fullstalls instead of just one. Finally I could tame the wing down and lead it out. The canopy sped forward, but this dive was easily manageble by a little jab on the brakes.

Doing SAT's wasn't that hard. Because I wanted to prevent spinning my glider in this phase of exploring, still being in my getting-to-know-eachother-phase with my wing, I was a little conservative when pulling SAT's. They worked out pretty well, you really get the feel for the wing, but it was evident for me I should pull way earlier to really get the wing on it's tip. My SAT's were all slightly too fast in rotating with a too low wing angle. That's something I'm gonna work on when in Turkey again. What annoyed me somewhat, was the fact the inner tip collapsed a little bit when leading the SAT out. My Arcus always kept rock-solid during lead-out, so why didn't this wing ? I've tried all kind of things to prevent it, but besides reducing it, I couldn't get it gone. It could have been related to a higher rotationspeed, because the SAT wasn't that 'vertical' yet... But I also read the jury-instructions for the Red Bull Vertigo where, about the SAT specificly is said "...there is no collapse penalty for tip collapse during exit..." So that made me think it could be a typical SAT-thing with certain wings ?... Well anyhow, I'm going to try to prevent it as much as possible.

Doing wingovers and asymetric spirals still is a dream with a wing like this... It has so much energy to give back to you if you just get the technical thing and timing right. They've made one really beautiful photograph of me in a pretty high wingover, which can be seen at my gallery page soon (thanks for Ronald & Angélique for that one !).

Looking back I can say it was a fantastic trip and I've flown at about 5 or 6 new sites, so that was interesting. I had a real moment to remember when I flew with Theo, Lizette and Luc at Montaud and a sailplane passed straight under me... I could almost see the pilot work the rudder with his feet... stunning !! Also the area around St. Hilaire provides for a lot of alternatives to deal with different weather conditions. Couple of sites we visited: St. Hillaire du Touvet; La Scia; Montaud; Aiguebelette; Mt. Lambert; Allevard (didn't fly there this time though); Les Sept Laux (explored but not flown yet due to conditions).

A new trip is already planned for October when I'll be flying again in Oludeniz Turkey. I hope to team up with my friend Jason Andrews again to do some training together. He's as much of an acro-enthousiast as I am and he's also really into filming, which can be seen at his brother Mark Andrews website (see links page). Also I will meet up again with the Action Air Sports team for one week and a group of other Dutch pilots will be doing their elementary training over there. I'm really looking forward to this trip and can hardly wait to go !

Major webhosting upgrade !
At last I decided to upgrade my webhosting account to accomodate all movie downloads. Especially when a new movie was released, I had to shut down my downloads due to excessive bandwidth consumtion. Also my storage space became insufficient for all files. Since March 2006 I upgraded my webhosting account to a stunning 350GB a month bandwidth and 15 GB online storage capacity ! That will do the trick for the near future !!

Test flying the U-Turn FreeForce22
Finally I was able to test-fly the U-Turn FreeForce acro-wing. It was STUNNING !! Read more about it at my gear section !

A Little More Action Movie !!
When I stayed in Oludeniz I met a great group of people from Zermatt (CH) and when there was flying, there were about 4 cams in the air !! All of this material from the Zermatt Team was sorted out by Alex Hale and he produced a great movie with BIG FUN written all over it. A nice holiday story from my Zermatt friends, definately a must-see !

External free-hosting during bandwidth-limit
I have uploaded some of my files at rapidshare hosting. This way I can provide some mirrors when my own webaccount is overloaded. You can find them under the movie animations. Downloading this way requires some more actions for you to take. You can not choose 'Safe target as...' but just have to click the video-link. Possibly you'll have to wait a little when you are at the rapidshare site. You will see: "Download ticket reserved" and seconds counting away before the download starts. But anyway: it's better than no downloads at all !

 

OLUDENIZ ACRO MOVIE now 40 MB
Due to big-time downloading, I had to downgrade the compression-rate of the Acroludeniz movie. This way I can keep it online a little bit longer before I hit my bandwidth ceiling. In a couple of months the original 100MB file will be online again !

NEW OLUDENIZ ACRO MOVIE
It took some time for me before I had the opportunity to work on my little movie. Finally it's there and ready for everyone to enjoy !! You'll see there is much to learn for me, but I'm working hard on it ; ) It's an about 100MB file, so you can watch it with some decent quality. It might be possible I'll have to take it offline again due to too much traffic, exceeding my webhost-limit. In that case it'll be online again at the beginning of the next month, when the counter starts all over again.

Have fun, just like I did !

more than 12.000 movie downloads !!
It gets harder and harder to estimate how much movies are downloaded by now, due to different sizes, but we're definately over 12.000 by now !! Great !

Acro wing and harness
While flying some beginners-acro in Turkey last May, I found out I was reaching the limitations of my Swing Arcus. It just didn't have enough energy to fullfill all my needs. So I did some research and decided to buy myself an U-Turn FreeForce 22. This is a wing especially for beginning acro-pilots. The wing is ordered and I'll be able to testfly it soon before I will close the deal. Because an important part of the agility in flight is achieved by the harness you use, I also ordered the new Sup'Air Acro2 harness. With low hangpoints, a double reserve-pocket and acro-aimed seating position, this is the harness that will probably suit me best. I'm very exited about this and can't wait to get airborne and proceed in my acro-ambitions.

Back from Oludeniz
About a week ago I came back from 16 days of wonderfull flying in Oludeniz. I did SAT's, full-stalls but also wingover-dropin SAT's, helicopters and transitions (loops). Some of them went very well and some of them need some more training of course. But above all I had a superb time flying together with a very nice group of people from Zermatt (Swiss) - thanks guys !! At this moment I'm quite busy with my education and work, but I couldn't resist to already make a short trailer of my experiences. Check the video-area to download it !

Trip to Oludeniz Turkey for some debut-acro !!
It has been almost a year since I was in Oludeniz to do the SIV-training with Jocky Sanderson (see my Safety-page). This year I'm going back for another two weeks of flying and trying. I'll be there to practice a lot the first week (14th May) and getting back into all the moves I did last year. The second week I'll be joining Jocky for the second time. Besides repeating the normal SIV-exercizes he'll teach me some more about acro-moves like SATs, transits (loops) from both spiral drop-in and wing-overs and if everything goes well we'll try a helicopter and who knows what... Of course I'll be filming all this extensively so you can look forward to a stunning new movie when I'm back !

Server space grown to 350MB.
Since more movies (see above) are on their way, I've increased my webspace to 350MB to get you as high quality pictures as possible.

more than 7500 movie downloads !!
So nice to see how many people around the world are downloading my paragliding movies. We're going to 10.000 downloads and more is on it's way !

5000 movie downloads !!
A milestone is reached, more than 5000 times you've taken a movie from my site and it ain't over yet. In May I'll be in Turkey again, but this time with my cams so a really kick-ass movie is planned !

Links page finished
Finally I've found some time to complete my links page. Take a look.

4500 movie downloads !!
Almost unbelievable: 5000 downloads are within reach

Over 4000 movie downloads !!
Visitors from more than 50 different countries came to this website and there have been more than 4000 movie downloads (>160GB) from my site. Most popular: Red Bull Vertigo - Welcome2004 - Airwave and Farewell ! Way to go !!

Over 2000 movie downloads !!
Based on a mean (increased) filesize of 40MB for each movie, there have been more than 2000 downloads from my site !!

All the video's in HQ back online.
Because of my data bandwith-increase, I'm able to put my movies in high quality and bigger filesize back online again. Enjoy them !!

More webspace and data bandwidth.
I decided to get me some more webspace and a larger data bandwidth to accomodate all the download requests. The webspace is now 250MB and the data-limit is set on 50GB a month. That's a big increase coming from 7,5 to 50 GB a month ! So I hope this will be sufficient to give everybody the opportunity to download and view my movies.

Welcome video renewed.
This was actually my first ever paragliding video featuring myself. Because I couldn't wait until I had my high-performance computer, I made it on my old (slow) PC with Windows Movie Maker. Now I've renewed it in high-quality and with some 2004 footage added. Take a look at it in my video-gallery.

Red Bull Vertigo and Dynamic video available in better quality.
Speaking for myself I like my videos best in DV-quality, but thats not possible online. So I've increased the quality (and doubled MB's) of the Red Bull Vertigo and Dynamic video which are available for download now on my video-page.

Server space grown to 200MB.
Due to great populairity of this site and the video-section (thanks to Michel for promoting it) I've bought myself some extra server space from 100 to 200MB. This way I'll be able to put some extra home-made movies online. Also my bandwidth increased from 4 GB/month to 7,5 GB/month. I hope it 'll be enough...

Red Bull Vertigo 2004 video is ready and online.
Recently I came back from Villeneuve (CH) and had a nice time watching the best acro-pilots in the world perform their tricks. I was able to shoot some nice footage and you can judge the resulting movie by yourself on my video-page.

Red Bull Vertigo 2004 photo album.
During the acro-competition I've made some pictures which you can see in the photo gallery.

New InAir Paragliding Page online !!!
It was time for a face-lift so I've completely restyled my homepage to new standards. Because of all kinds of little maintenance issues and other obligations, the Sites and Links pages will not be available yet. I'm trying to complete the page as soon as I can. Also the links at 'Other Subjects' will not be ready yet. They'll be added when I've got some more time to spend on it.