Coupe Icare

For this years Dolomite/Germany tour we started at St. Hilare at the "Coupe Icare".
Wow, explains it all!!
Mik, Toni and Hannes from Nova organized tents and thermo-mats for us, and showed us around, showed us where to camp and gave us all the "inside" details of what to do and what was going, during our stay. Thanks again for all your help. The Coupe Icare is a must for every light aircraft pilot. I have never seen so many people attending a flying event. I heard that they had about 100.000 visitors. I am not sure if it is true, but the take off and landing sites were jam packed, traffic was blocked up for kilometers, and pilots of any kind were seen in the air for 3 days.
The flying expo was amazing and it was super interesting to see what the manufactures are offering and planning for the future. The parties in the evening were just awesome with some wild bands and performers. The evening light up was fantastic and we really loved the mini hot air balloons.
We also managed to get some flights in and the most amazing flight was in the early morning (with fog) flying around hot air balloons. See the video (from Mik) and pictures below.

paraglider meet hot-air ballons @ coupe icare 2012 from Mik Broschart on Vimeo.

Fall flying in the Rockies and in Europe

Fall is one of my favorite flying seasons. This is the time of the year to give lessons as the conditions are mellow and way more relaxed then during the spring and summer season and great for "hike & fly" as it is not to hot for hiking and still having good conditions for nice x-country flights.

So far August and September (until mid September) just was a "blur" with all the activities we did. Besides flying, we did a lot like camping in the west Kootenays, Stand-up paddle boarding, multi-day canoe trip down the Columbia River, fishing, hiking, exploring, partying and so on.

Now we are getting ready for our "Fly the Alps" tour. This will be very exciting and fun. Penny and I will travel with a couple Canadians to St. Hilare to the Coupe Icare and then we will be guiding for www.BlueSky.at in the Dolomite's.
After the Dolomite tour, we will be traveling to Achensee to visit Nova  to check out what they are working on and fly at their flying sites. After the Achensee we are traveling to the German Alps to fly over the fairy tale castle Neuschwanstein (see pictures and more info at http://www.flyingmax.com/dolomite-tour/). This tour will be finished off with a visit at the October Fest in Munich.
After this I will be doing another Dolomite tour (also with some Canadian's) for www.BlueSky.at and right after this I will participating at SIV course at Gardasee.

A day after the SIV, Steve Nash (UK xAlps pilot) and I will be holding a xAlps workshop for Nova junior pilots from Mt. Blanc following one of the xAlps routes.
The following weekend will be the Nova pilots meet in Austria to finish off the European trip.
All this will be jam-packed into a 5 week period.

I will be posting pictures and posts during the trip.