Norman Surplus has flown half-way around the world to the Philippines from Ireland but is now stuck there waiting for permission to land in Taiwan. Hopefully the CAA will relent and allow this pioneer to complete his circumnavigation.

Lukas from the Czech Republic is leaving Taiwan and would like to sell the following gear:

I have the harness CARPOFLY MYSTIC2 in good shape and rescue skyspare system, newone never used.
glider: Gradient GOLDEN2/ORBIT2 category: DHV 1-2
parameters: http://www.gradient.cx/en-old_gliders-golden2-13
1 year old, flying time about 30hours, no tear, no rip, like new, viz foto.

Lukas can be reached on 0928 097545.

The Golden is a nice glider, safe but responsive. I haven’t seen it but it’s probably worth a look if you are looking for a used entry-level glider.

After an intensive and demanding development process the flight tests for two of the four sizes of Omega8 were completed this week. Thomas Ripplinger’s development and test team are now fully concentrated on finishing the others.

Production will start in the next few days with first deliveries to follow in mid-June 2010.

The new Omega will be available in 23, 25, 27 and 29m2 sizes with new exclusive color schemes. The wing will be available in three color combinations – palm, orange and white.

The 8th generation Omega sets a new standard for performance and handling: with an aspect ratio of 6.8 and a useable top speed of 59 km/h the Omega8 is the best performer in its class. An EN/LTF D classification is expected for all sizes. Like it’s predecessors the Omega8 is intended for experienced and frequent-flying cross-country pilots. You can find more information on www.advance.ch

New to paragliding, though an old hand in Taiwan is Jez Tombs. Jez just got back from New Zealand with a fresh novice license and shiny new glider, so look out for him on the hill. I took him down to Saichia last week for an introductory flight and am glad to say he not only survived the experience but even wants to do it again.
Weather pre-duststorm was quite blustery and the base wind quite strong. Jaco stole his buddy Peter’s glider for the day in a maneuver so smooth I think he’d been practicing it. In that much wind and with an oversized glider, not even Jaco could sink out. Those of us without bones stood by until 5pm when the wind dropped to a perfect 20km and an hour of glassy smooth soaring was to be had.
Jez went off first for his first taste of Taiwan’s humid air and interesting traffic patterns. I landed at 6pm for a well-earned beer. Jez lives in Taipei but will be trying to get some hours in before the season starts at Green Bay.

The foot of the mountains of Dakeng is a new development area, number 11. It’s currently in that strange limbo phase where there are roads and street furniture, but almost no buildings. The way it works is this; Someone in the city government plans to develop a new area. It doesn’t matter if there is already a glut in housing. He encourages his buddies to buy up the land there while it’s still zoned for agriculture and thus cheap. The city then rezones the land for development and spends a lot money laying out a plan and putting roads down. In Taiwan, planning permission is granted on the basis of how wide the roads are around a property. The wider the road, the higher you can build, and therefore the more the land is worth. The buddies sell the land to developers and get filthy stinking rich.
There are a couple of rivers that run through this area and the city has oh-so thoughtfully added some cycle / pedestrian bridges across them. As a mechanical engineer I immediately notice the strange structure of this bridge. Basically, all the steel above the bridge deck is superfluous. The bridge is supported at both ends and by a pier in the middle, plenty enough to hold it’s weight plus a few cyclists. All the ’suspension’ steelwork is pointless decoration. Expensive decoration I’m sure.

Close-up, you can see the design is even more bizarre than first meets the eye. The bridge deck crosses the retaining wall at about 2m above the ground and juts out right to the edge of the sidewalk. This is a huge mistake on the part of the designer. How are pedestrians or cyclists supposed to get up to the bridge deck?

You can see that the city has recognized the problem and the contractor has come up with a cheap solution… build four steel ramps to connect the original sidewalk to the bridge. It’s obvious to me that this is a patch, a makeshift solution. You can see the brackets on the retaining wall for the street lights which are now blocked by the ramps, and that the concrete blocks that form the jacks for the bridge ends do not in any way allow for the ramps to connect to them. The ramps are literally a last-minute addition, tacked onto the bridge supports and the sidewalk in a ramshackle sort of way.

Note also that the steel plate surface of the ramp offers barely enough traction to a bicycle tire at the best of times and in the wet will be lethally slippery. Since the ramp completely covers the original sidewalk, any traffic not planning to cross the bridge will either have to climb and descend the ramps, or hop off the curb and onto the road to go around it, mixing pedestrians, cyclist and motorized vehicles on the road. Given that this is a new development area, I’d have hoped the mistakes in the center of town, which force pedestrians onto the road, wouldn’t have been repeated here.

Given the rumored price tag of this bridge was NT$39,000,000 and the construction is both pointlessly expensive and poorly executed, I was quite surprised to see that someone claims credit for this monument to government waste in the form of this stone plaque.
Personally I’d have tried to hide any and all involvement with this white elephant!

Bruce Goldsmith is joining the Advance R&D team after 10 years at Airwave.

The 2007 World Paraglider Champion will be reinforcing the Advance team of Chief designer Thomas Ripplinger and Advance test pilots Kari Eisenhut (former European Champion and World Cup Winner), Chrigel Maurer (multiple World Cup and X-Alps winner), World Champion Andy Aebi and European Champion Greg Blondeau with work on the development of serial and competition wings.
Bruce Goldsmith ranks as a true founding father of the paraglider business. The 49-year-old Briton, originally a civil engineer, became the paraglider face of Airwave as well as a founder member of Ozone. For the last ten years he has again been working as the Airwave designer. Bruce will continue to live with his wife and three children in the south of France.

While some of the Airwave designs in the last ten years have not really approached the level of innovation as earlier models like the XMX or XXX, Bruce is one of the early pioneers in glider design as well as an incredible competition pilot, so he brings with him a vast reserve of experience.

Interesting post about this Japanese WWII airbase in Ilan, used at the end of the war for kamikaze missions against Allied naval targets. Worth a read.

While the north airfield was reserved almost exclusively for aircraft parking, the south airfield was used extensively during the war as a launch point for Kamikaze pilots attacking allied fleets and it proved to be a sound target for allied aircraft. The airfield was bombed extensively during the war.
Scattered around the airfield perimeter are hardened aircraft shelters designed to be camouflaged with grass and trees. These were difficult to spot from the air. They still do a great job of blending in to the landscape as it took me a long time to find just a couple.
There were 14 of these shelters in all, and many of them survive. At least 4 are on the live side of the base.

Read the whole post here.

Most of those who paraglide here will at some point get to see soaring birds in the sky, and even share a thermal with one of them. Taiwan is home to some indigenous raptors and also a migration route for sun-followers. Most of the paraglider pilots here are known to us by name, or from post-flight conversation over a beer in the landing area. Since the pilots with feathers only pass us in the air and usually don’t talk, this page attempts to put names to the faces.
I personally have a bit of a love-hate relationship with these animals. On the one hand I marvel at the hollow-bones which act as their built-in varios, their fantastic eyesight with which they can spot debris and insects rising in thermals literally from kilometers away. Then of course there is the speed and glide which make the paraglider pilot weep.
On the other hand it seems unfair that they can use motor power (flap) when they make a bad decision, and land in tree without damaging themselves or suffering any embarrassment at all.
There are a pair of birds that live in the hills around my house and every sunny day they cruise around, themaling and gliding their way around their territory, and calling out their piercing song along the valley. To me it sounds like a call from a friend to come flying. To a mouse it probably sounds like the end of the world. Maybe we are both right.

Black Kite (Milvans Migrans) The Latin name means migrating raptor, though the ones you see in Taiwan are resident, not migratory. The Black Kite is a medium-sized bird of prey in the family Accipitridae which also includes many other diurnal raptors such as eagles, buzzards, and harriers.

This kite is probably the most common of all the raptors and especially widespread throughout the temperate and tropical parts of Eurasia and parts of Australasia. European and central Asian birds are migratory, moving to the tropics in winter, but species from warmer regions such as the Indian Pariah Kite or the Australasian Fork-tailed Kite, are resident.

Black Kites will take small live prey as well as fish, household garbage and carrion. They are well adapted to living in cities and can be seen even over densely populated areas. They are attracted to fires and smoke where they hunt insects dragged aloft by thermal lift. Large numbers may be seen soaring in thermals over cities, hoping to feast on some hapless bugs. In some places they will readily swoop to take to food offered by humans, their habit of swooping to pick up dead rodents from roads often leads to them being hit by vehicles. They are also a major nuisance at some airports where they are considered important birdstrike hazards.

The Black Kite can be distinguished from the Red Kite by its slightly smaller size, less forked tail and generally dark plumage without any rufous. They nest in forest trees, often close to other kites. A smart paraglider pilot knows birds may be leading him not to the next thermal, but to his home.

Though these birds are resident to Taiwan they are not usually aggressively territorial. I’ve only once been chased out of ‘restricted airspace’ by Kites, presumably near a nest. Usually they calmly fly around and past you, barely seeming to notice your clumsy presence.

In terms of flight performance it’s noted that this bird has a minimum sink rate in glide of about 0.5m/s, vmax of about 16m/s and a best glide of about 15:1 at about 9m/s, falling off rapidly after that. He has quite poor performance compared to vultures or condors, though he does quite well compared to a hang glider, and beats a paraglider hands down.

Grey-Faced Buzzard (Butastur Indicus) A medium sized raptor with a grayish head and face, a white throat with a dark mesial streak and a white supercilium. The back and upper breast are brown, the lower underparts are whitish barred with brown. The tail bears three wide black bands. The iris, cere, legs and feet are yellow. Juveniles are generally paler and are streaked brown on the breast. In other words, they are quite a bit more colorful than the Black Kite, as well as a bit smaller.

This species feeds mainly on frogs, reptiles and rodents, the preferred habitat being low mountains, hills and foothills. They breed in eastern China, eastern Russia and Japan, and winter mainly in Indochina, Malaysia and the Philippines. In Taiwan they are a common spring and summer migrant, and a few remain for the winter on Lanyu Island. As with most buzzards, these birds thermal and fly great distances by soaring during migration. Taiwan lies on a major migration route for this species, and large numbers may be seen moving southward in October along the Hengchun Peninsula, and northward in late March and early April along the terraced mountains of Taichung and Changhua.

The species breeds in Japan, Korea, Manchuria and Eastern Siberia. Their winter range includes Southern China, SE Asia, the Philippines, Celebes and New Guinea. There appear to be two populations. The first population group being found on Japan and the second on mainland Asia. The Japanese population migrates through the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan to winter in the Philippines. The second population moves south into Southern China and SE Asia to winter. There is some indication that small numbers of Russian and Manchurian birds also use the island route to winter in the Philippines. Current estimates are that the Japanese population totals about 32,000 pairs with their young of the year.

As the Japanese population moves south in the fall, they enter Taiwan in large flocks in the NE part of the island and follow the eastern side of the central mountain range. They fly south following the ridges and roosting in river valleys. At the southern tip of Taiwan they pass through the Hengchun Peninsula in large numbers in the second week of October and often roost close to Manzhou Village. In the spring they tend to follow the western foothills of the central mountain range northwards in small groups and gather in fairly large numbers from mid to late March in the Baguashan area in Changhua County.

Some of the above text was borrowed from various places.