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My brother David has offspring at Hatch Elementary school and asked
me to do a demo for the school. The principal has to be one of the
world's coolest people because she was all over it, even getting
permission to use the adjoining park. That meant I could actually fly
instead of just kite like I did last year.
But this is, by no means, a large park. It's little bigger than a
soccer field. Now I've flown in more confined areas but not surrounded
by 40 foot trees. This place is completely surrounded and, of course,
there are soccer posts. Go figure. So I took this as an opportunity to
both do the demo and get footage for Mast PPG. There's a bit on both the
launch video (2) and landing video (4) about dealing with confined
areas. So I had one camera on the ground and another on my frame. The
footage came out great! The ground launch shot didn't work (wrong
button) but the landing shot is spot on. I shut off the motor while it
was at cruise power just to make it more clear that "hey, his motor just
quit." Then I landed crosswind just in front of them with a nice, long
slide. Oh man is that stuff fun!
Afterwards we did about a half-hour of questions and answers which
seemed to go pretty good. There were no shortage of questions and, to
answer a couple of them, I strapped into a kiting harness and did some
stuff with the wing. Judging from their reactions it was quite well
received. I can hardly imagine my own reaction had something like that
been done at my elementary school. Figure that I was only two grades
beyond these guys when I soloed a glider (I was 14 years old).
Overall it was a blast to fly, fun to see the smile, and fun to spend
some time with my brother and sister-in-law.
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Hatch Elementary
School enjoyed a PPG demo May 20 at Taylor Park field near Chicago, IL. It's
just big enough and just outside ORD's B airspace. I had to
spiral out and spiral back in but it worked great. They seemed to love
it. The police did show up but we had all the permissions. And of course
cameras were rolling so it will also be part of the confined area launch
material for Master PPG 2 (Mastering the Launch) and 4 (Mastering
Landing)
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