The time I stopped traffic with my paramotor! - My top 10 launches

[Applause] [Music] Oh welcome back to some more quarantined content as much as I would love to be flying around outside in the sky right now the weather sucks today and I figured I'd film a video that I've been wanting to do for a while fits the quarantine content vibe perfectly and that is my top 10 most extreme launches and a warning there's not just ten but I threw in an extra bonus we're gonna go for 11 even though the title says 10 I couldn't pick one of these 11 to get rid of to make it an even number so bonus round some of them are based around the most skill or the sketchiest launch others are just really cool locations all the links for each of these videos will be in the description so if you want to go back reminisce watch the full episode more than welcome to do that and if you want to support this channel if you like what we're doing here check the first link in the description for our risky biscuits comarch we've got hats we've got shirts just like this one we've got the blueprint design we've got the limited do not report Tucker got to the fa design so let's start out with technically number 11 and I kind of sorted these from the most mild going up to the most extreme so stick around to the end for the most extreme in this video technically para vlog number 11 my car was in the shop for some reason I don't know why but it was a beautiful afternoon and I wanted to go flying but without a car I couldn't transport my motor to the park or the airport or anything so I got all my gear and I walked down the street and found an area that looked suitable to take off from this was a pipeline like where they run underground gas lines but there was a nice mowed section and it wasn't in the tightest area but at the time about four years ago I definitely didn't have as much skill so it was quite a bit more of a challenge to me so I gave it a good full power run up I hit it hard got the wing up and just barely got off the ground before I biffed it into the weeds [Applause] I was a little wonky wonky now I don't know why but somewhere in this video I had cut out there's actually power lines that go across this narrow channel of trees so right after launch I had to get myself up over the power lines and then drop back down and I can nicely fly in this little narrow canyon of trees out into the valley below let's go to number 10 this was back when I had the Black Hawk 125 before I really started getting into making YouTube videos and it was just a beautiful morning in the valley I had gone out explored it was one of those mornings where the air was perfectly calm but about halfway through my flight I started to realize that there was something wrong with my engine I could get just about cruise power out of it but nothing more so I could maintain level flight but I couldn't climb and I was far enough away from the area I took off from that I didn't think it was safe to milk it all the way back home so I found a nice Street and I put it down right in the middle of the street I checked traffic there were no powerlines and I landed here I took all my gear off and at the time and still to this day I carry a little tool pouch and in that tool pouch I had a screwdriver and an allen wrench which is pretty much all I needed to take my carburetor off I checked the carburetor diagnosed that there was a whole bunch of lint in a little screen in my carburetor so I blew that out nobody really stopped bunch of cars went by put everything back together and got ready to take off again as I'm setting up to take off of course my wings laid out in the middle of the street and I had to pick it up move it for a car that guy goes by and then I'm about ready to go and I had to stop traffic and I have no idea what was going through these people's minds some random guy with a fan on his back in the middle of the street starts running towards them [Applause] [Music] so let's go down to number nine and now this was from one of our van life adventures and when we're going around the country scoping out cool places to fly finding a suitable launch site is always a challenge some spots are a lot better than others some are a bit sketchy and this one in order to fly the Superstition Mountains I had found this almost coldest AK thing on a dirt road and I had a really girthy fence around the whole area so I'll show you guys the Google Maps view so here's the Superstition Mountain Range beautiful mountain range and this is where I decided to launch from now the wind was kind of coming from this direction so I set up over here in this corner I ended up taking off in this direction but somewhere along the line turned about 90 degrees and I went down the road almost hit the guardrail and some of this was just poor wing control on my part I was kind of all over the place I was stumbling I was letting the wing surge too much and I pulled it off but I was on and off power I almost tripped I almost hit the fence that's a little bit better I'm gonna go for it [Music] [Applause] [Music] today oh holy alright let's go down to number eight and this was from the Icarus race if you haven't caught this series it's one of my favorite series the Icarus race was a twelve hundred mile unsupported paramotor race that I participated in and actually won and the end unsupported means I had to carry all the gear to support myself which I put in a big car heart duffel bag it probably weighed 30 to 40 pounds I had sleeping bag water some food a whole bunch of survival stuff as well as I had about a two gallon bladder of gasoline on my chest so in addition to the weight of the paramotor on my back I had a whole bunch of weight on the front and my whole set of gear was really really heavy and on to that I was wearing about two different jackets because it was cold really thick gloves which makes it harder to launch I had boots multiple layers of pants I was just bundled up add on to that I was at high altitude and in this particular launch I had zero wind and I was very unfamiliar with this whole setup launching with a ton of gear I was lucky enough that my very first launch of the Icarus race I had a decent bit of wind so it wasn't that bad but fast forward to my first stop I needed to get gas I come in for a landing like an idiot I freaking clip a tree and I fall down oh yeah dad turns out I broke like three spars on my paramotor I had to hike to a gas station with all my gear tons of weight I go inside buy some superglue buy some duct tape and I kind of get my gear back in one piece again luckily a nice guy in a truck offered me a ride to his farm field that was just down the street this is the gas station where I filled up and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to land right here and it would have been a good idea had I not cut it too close to this pine tree caught my wingtip and kind of crashed right here the guy in the truck gave me a ride from the gas station down to this filled here after I got everything all suited up again all my gear back on which takes a long time to prepare it's a process I was ready to go and these poor fellows that had loaned me a ride were watching me try to take off in their farm field I get everything hooked up my fuel bladder my gloves my bag everything there's zero wind I was kicking the grass trying to stir up a little bit of dust to see if I had anything to help me and I didn't I go for the launch and I remember just feeling the lift of the wing disappear on my run my legs just couldn't handle it I knew I was gonna fall and it was just the slow motion trying to keep up on my feet but I knew I couldn't as I'm aborting and I ended up having to just faceplant fall on my face and slide out [Applause] oh good I act like that's just supposed to happen every time and fortunately the second run I took off my gloves to try to get a little bit more feeling in my fingers I waited for the slightest bit of wind I was like meditating on this launch so I stood there for a long time waiting till I found like a hint of wind and I went for it and that launch went so much better I was thrilled to be in the air again [Applause] yeah Oh God I am so relieved to get the air you don't even know alright let's go on to our next clip so this one was semi recently May 21st 2019 and this is when we were down in the Bahamas with the guys from Team fly halo doing all kinds of crazy Bahamas shenanigans with boats and midair refueling this particular case was when we were trying to do the midair refuel both to paramotor bladder pickup mission and on Google Maps I took off somewhere over here on elbow key I took off from there and flew all the way across this huge stretch of water I had the boat within gliding distance the whole time as my safety net and the idea was that I was gonna land somewhere on the opposite shore as the boat got in position to take off again and then fly over and pick up my bladder of fuel that I would need to make it back home so I had picked this random spot on Google Maps and as you can see the resolution is pretty garbage so I didn't really know what I was working with until I got there and I scoped it out I looked at the site a bit and decided I could probably pull it off there was a bit of wind that is always a huge help but the problem was this launch site was kind of in a little bowl there was a lot of obstructions trees little sand dunes that made the wind really variable the landing was not that big of a deal I put it down nice and easy but then I go to launch after investigating this area and that road are just whipping around from everywhere made it pretty difficult come on baby all right so this next clip was actually from the summer of 2016 I had posted the actual video the summer after in 2017 this was when we flew in the world's largest airshow EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh with the paradigm team for the paradigm teams very first show but the thing with this launch was the setup was not difficult we were in the middle of an open field we had a little bit of wind there was nothing challenging about the launch itself aside from the fact that probably a couple hundred thousand people were watching us and the pressure was just enormous like all of us that was the vibe we were all like this is scary we don't want to mess this up and if we did mess it up we would look like the biggest idiots as we're trying to lay out our wing again and get someone to pull start us and take off again as we're on this professional airshow stage luckily the anticipation like a lot of things was much worse than the actual nervousness in the moment as soon as things started to roll I felt a lot better the nerves kind of went away to a degree but there was still a lot of pressure [Music] [Applause] alright so the next clip is from January 24th 2017 and this was the first time I decided to try to launch on skis now ski launching is pretty sketchy I feel like it's not even something that people do often it's just like one of those cool tricks that you can pull off every so often part of my problem here was that like the grass was literally poking through the snow here in New Jersey so I didn't have like even thick enough snow to get a turn going on it felt quite a bit janky the inflation itself felt good like the wing just came up and I started to move forward and taxi but as I got some more speed there comes a time where like you're getting enough speed that you're getting lift which is good because it's taking the pressure off of the skis but adds that higher speed on the skis it feels really unstable and sketchy like if you catch an edge you're just gonna hit the ground and explode your propeller but luckily I pulled it off the first time with zero issues and I was freaking stoked [Applause] yeah [Music] alright next clip is another one with the paradigm team and this was in Evansville Indiana this was a kind of urban air show that we did while all the other performers in airplanes took off from a nearby airport flew over the Ohio River on kind of the show line set up there we took off at show center which turned out to be this tiny little sidewalk looking thing right next to the water now once again like the actual launch itself wasn't that challenging the wind was coming from the right direction we had enough room for the launch and there was actually a little bit of a downhill ramp going on but this one was just super cool because it was like an urban launch it was one of those situations where like in a normal situation it would be completely illegal the police would be called if you just took off from there but this was an airshow it was all certified and Tiye fard and all those things that legal stuff and the FAA so we were good but looking back after taking off and were just over the Ohio River with this tiny little strip on the side about as wide as a two-lane Street for us to land in it was an incredible experience so after having launched on skis a few times I wanted to kind of one-up that and I thought I would launch on ice skates and in this particular situation I was not expecting it to even work I kind of figured that this was gonna be a fail video I was gonna run up my motor I was gonna you know fall off my ice skates hopefully not damage any equipment but at least it would be a good entertaining video of me falling on the ice I am NOT an ice skater like I've maybe ice skated five times in my whole life so first I had to practice ice skating without a paramotor to try to figure out how to do it again and the ice we were on was like a frozen pond it wasn't even flat to my surprise it actually worked perfect we just like the ski launch as I got speed things started to get a little wobbly but luckily I had just enough speed that I kind of picked up my feet and then I just flew away [Music] so nearing the end here this one was September 27th 2018 and this was flying tandem with my mom and now there's a couple things that made this particular launch extra challenging at the time I had gotten my tandem ratings so I went through the course and I had flown my dad and Jacqueline a few times tandem but I was still relatively new tandem pilot I knew what I was doing but I wasn't seasoned I didn't have a ton of experience doing this sort of thing and in that we were launching in zero wind which with any team the passenger a zero wind launch foot launched tandem is incredibly difficult add on to that my mother who's a trooper has two bad knees she's had a surgery on both of her knees which means she can't really run that well and she's precious cargo to me and I really didn't want to hurt her so this was a level of pressure and required a whole lot of skill to be able to pull it off if you watch this launch back we are running so hard trying our best I got the brakes down to my ass trying to get enough lift to take off and if we had to run like another ten feet I don't know if we would have made it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right final video and this is my all-time favorite launch and this was part of the Icarus race day 3 I had diverted off course all the way over to jackpot Nevada there's this big old airport here and the night prior to when this video starts I had landed at this Airport turns out the airport shut down everything was locked up there were no people around and I had to get my gear through a gate I called a local hotel and I asked them for a strange favor if they had anyone with a pickup truck that could come pick up a guy at the airport and luckily they did I was extremely thankful and they showed up in this pickup truck I loaded all my gear in the back and I actually rode in the back of this guy's truck over to the hotel that night I was up super late walking down to the gas station fueled up the paramotor in my hotel room and then i went to some casino for dinner I remember going all out I ordered chicken wings and a hamburger and some like waffle fries or something end up going to bed really late in this little hotel here now the next morning I didn't want to ask these guys for another favor to transport me back to the airport so I decided that I was just gonna try to take off from the hotel somehow initially I wanted to take off on this driveway and I had a nice wide-open amount of room and it was downhill which would have really helped but there was the most faint tiny bit of wind and unfortunately it was coming from the south which meant that I would have had a crosswind on this launch and I decided between those two different options going into the wind was better in this case so I scoped it out there were a lot of hazards there were light poles cars trucks and then at the end of the parking lot which wasn't that long was a huge drop-off maybe a 50 foot cliff and then below that there was a building and there were power lines a lot of different hazards and so many different ways that this could go wrong and on top of that just like my other Icarus launch I and all my gear tons of heavyweight and once again I just sat here with everything clipped in taking deep breaths thinking about how this could go right I went for it no vehicles pulled out in front of me I got lift and I flew off the edge of the cliff for like an insane visual [Applause] Oh to this day I think that's the most insane most fun launch I've ever done and the most challenging so that's my top 10 plus one bonus favorite take offs if you guys enjoyed this video drop a like and let me know if you want to see top ten landings I know this is a long one I hope you enjoyed it for some good quarantine content and like I said if you want to go back and watch any of these videos they're all linked down below I appreciate all your guys support on all these recent quarantine videos just sitting here chillin reliving old memories hopefully very very soon things will start to change the weather is gonna be getting better and we'll be back out to flying like the good old days until then I will see you guys peace [Music]

Channel: Tucker Gott

Views: 641,413

Rating: 4.9431682 out of 5

Keywords: paramotor, tucker, gott, tucker gott, paramotor crash, paramotor accident, paramotor training, adventure, gopro, flying, airplane, paragliding, pilot, aviation, flying to mcdonald's, mcdonald's, flying to mcdonald's on my paramotor

Id: jGEPkifPlek

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020