I am standing in an airport hall holding a camera and through a dusty viewfinder I see a German family posing in front of me. Mum and kids are smiling and looking for the nice trip, dad looks quite pissed of already. He probably did not want to go to Turkey for a holiday, not talking about the sea. They did not stand well, their heads will look too small, and the colours will go greenish. The release is very tough - click! I am giving back the buzzing camera with a relief. They say "danke sen" and smile again. Not at all liebe frau - the photo will be dreadful. And I am sure that on top of that dad will get a tongue lashing for his grumpy face on the picture.

    After almost two hour's flight is a little shore of the European part of Turkey looming under the wing of a huge aircraft. This part of Turkey is separated from the Asian part by the channel Bosporus and Dardanelle. There somewhere near the Dardanelle is lying the city of Troya about which people fought for ten years. It is largely known that is was fault of Helen, the most beautiful woman of the world [probable analogy to today's Miss World]. Helene was runing away to Troya with Paris, the son of the king Priam and she left her poor husband Menelaus for good. Some few know that they took the whole regal treasure as well, and therefore it is apprehensible that Menelaus got very angry. He called upon his brother Agamemnon to set up an army of great men to destroy Troy at once. So it looks quite possible that 3300 years ago in the case of big conflicts all they went for were money, just as now. Unfortunately the greatest heroes of all time paid their life for it - Achilles on the Greek side and Hector as the head of the Trojan's defenders. Even the canny Odysseus who came up with a well known finesse with the horse trying to win the war finally for the Greeks, did not end up very well. He wandered in the Mediterranean Sea for a great number of years before he managed to get home to Ithaca to his faithful wife Penelope. But who knows how many years of the faithfulness Homer thought up …



    "This is a sweltering hot" says one of the Czechs and the sun is shining so much as last time. The locals did not chew the fat and the temperature is even higher than this time last year. It is hardly to believe that it was raining few days ago.

    The registration from the yesterday's afternoon continues this morning as well and after its completion you can count 241 names from a total of 26 different countries on the list. The names are beautifully maimed; it shows as almost impossible to decode the pilot's hand written data from the application forms. There are not as many Czechs as last year; more pilots came from Netherlands this year. Maybe it is due to a new complication with a Turkish visa, as now you have to apply for it in advance in Prague. But it is possible to make a deal with one of the travel agencies and get the visa with their help for a small fee. Than you don't have to take the entire journey to Prague and than wait for another two days to get the visa.




    After the previous windy days we have got - on the top of the mountain Babadag in the altitude of 1995m - very weak northern wind today. After the festival's official start is a window to the short flight disciplines with two turning points opened shortly after the noon. The pilots in the "A" category will fly 20km and the ones in the "B" category only 17km.

    The acrobatic competition admitted some changes in organisation this year. The first entry qualification is set up for 4 o'clock pm and it will be continued tomorrow with semi-final lap and the final one will come up the day after tomorrow. The following days are left as alternates for the case of foulness. It is probably edification from last year when the finals were passing on in a rather problematic weather conditions.

    Tomas Lednik is not in the acrobatic competition this year, he is taking part in others, more attractive disciplines for the audience. Before two o'clock in the afternoon he is - quite low in the beach - loosing from his canopy and landing on another paraglide - the abandoned canopy is disappearing in the sea waves without the pilot.

    "Look up at that crazy Czech!" comes from the speakers on the beach and all people's heads are looking up the sky. Tomáš is jumping out in a special overall this - time for a change from a motor hang glider and in the height of 3000m he is showing free glide flight with a speed of 100km per hour with a help from something like "floating membranes" tense in his armpits and between the legs. Just a few hundred metres above the earth he opens up his paraglide and lands on the beach. The audience gaping at it is applauding as on Karel Gott´s concert and some of them forgot to shut their mouths.







    We missed him last year, but this time Viktor Procházka and his company WalkerJet and the load of a motor paramotors came and on the first day has already been showing his typical flights low above the sea surface. As every year we have also got a captive balloon and therefore not flying tourist has got a chance to look at the beach from the height of several tens of metres. The real curiosity is this year first Czech hang glider pilot who got here with a group of friends and with a hang glider on his car's roof from somewhere from Prachatice.