The wind was evidently even stronger, because when I wanted to turn over the town square and turned the parachute against the wind, with surprise I found out that my otherwise rather fast-flying "Limit" is backing up with a speed at which it usually flies forward, while braking only slightly. And that was with the brakes completely off, the motor just idling, and 15 kg overweight. I often hear among pilots, "Flying in the wind is a piece of cake for you, ... you just add throttle and push through". But unfortunately, the opposite is true. When you add throttle, the propeller creates pressure, pushing the pilot forward, while the parachute backs up, the angle of inclination increases thus slowing it down. So in a strong wind it can happen that the parachute rises, but doesn't fly forward at all, in some cases even backs up and only upon easing off on the throttle to idle does it slowly start flying forward. But no normal person would fly in such conditions.

    And now back over Vitkov. The wind speed was excellent; the wind by my guess had to be blowing at 15 m/s. But despite that the air was absolutely calm, no turbulence, nothing. What made us happy was that near the ground, there was no wind at all. The trees were still, smoke from smokestacks stayed low and let itself be casually taken off by a weak south-westerly wind, so that we didn't have to worry about landing in a strong wind. We left the parachutes turned against the wind and looked over the town that slowly stayed in front of us.



    When we finished backing up all the way past the city, we turned into the wind direction. The Vikstejn castle was nearing with dizzying speed, and when we reached it, we turned over the valley through which the Moaravice River flows and continued on to Hradec.



    The forests below us showed, in the most gorgeous colors that autumn can conjure up. The sun was already quite low and the entire valley with the river was hidden in shadow. Only in the forests above the valley, which were drenched in the afternoon sunlight, the leave glowed goldenly and the conifers together with the deciduous trees created beautiful pictures.



    Although Hradec was not directly windward, we flew there prettily quickly. We headed right over the chateau and its park with beautifully colored trees.

    I dropped down a little and wanted to circle the chateau, but I noticed how much the wind was blowing. No matter what I did, I kept flying in the same direction, either quicker forward or slower backwards. Nothing remained but to give it up and continue on. Only one segment of the flight remained. Opava slowly began to appear in the distance and somewhere in the fields in front of Opava it was necessary to find the small airfield on which we wanted to land. It's actually just a strip of concrete in a meadow by the road. When the weather is nice flying enthusiasts, from model makers to UltraLight pilots, gather here.

    Behind us on the left we'd passed Branka by Opava, and as we flew over Chvalikovice, the airfield appeared below us. Above it, full of joy that our flight went well, we turned several spirals downward and shortly were just above the ground. The wind near the ground was blowing at about 1/2 m/s and so landing was a breeze. I landed first so that I could photograph Kamil as he came down.





    He flew in about a minute after me and about two meters above the ground he ran out of gas. It was just so. I had about a liter left. Shortly after we landed a car pulled up, a guy got out and said he'd seen us flying and so followed us out here. He asked a few questions, tried the backpack to see how heavy it was, said goodbye and left. The next day he called me and said he wanted to fly too. I guess it's contagious.





    Kamil wanted to call Michal to come get us. He got out his cell phone, which he'd had in his overall pocket, and realized that during the flight he'd accidentally hit some buttons and been calling and calling. Those he called must have only heard the roar of the motor and probably wondered what was going on.

    Before we'd packed up the parachutes, the sun set and it rapidly grew darker. After a while, Michal drove up who had been following us in the car, but over Vitkov, where the road gets windy, we lost him. He said that when he'd stopped the car on an upper plain to look out for us, the wind had been blowing so hard it had almost ripped his car door off and blew him away. At that moment he's lost hope that he would see us again today. Fortunately his expectation didn't pan out and all ended well.

    It was a super trip. We were so hyped up by it that back in the car we immediately started planning other routes we would fly, and Kamil got the idea of exchanging our five-liter gas tanks for ten liter ones. What if next time it didn't work out like it had today? And primarily because then we could fly longer routes.

    And for closing, a few technical details. Flight length was 38.5 km, flight time 65 minutes; altitude was 150 m to 300 m over the terrain. We flew with parameters model Mach-3, with motors Solo 210, the propellers were 94 cm, we had Gradient Limit 24 and Jojo Wing Easy 27 parachutes, which proved to be very reliable for motorized flying.


    So good flying and happy landings !