Flying RIB ride; photos of NW Corsica, France

[Bojangles]

40mph on actual touch and it drops speed quite rapidly

I would certainly like to try it, looks like fun.

 

[kcrane]

Is it a Rotax engine? Seeing the second video there must be one on the market somewhere ever so slightly full of salt water

 

[jfm]

Yup Rotax
There are at least 2 that are as wet as that one - youtube reveals lots though the one below looks just a mess!


I'm not balancing this weel with my happy flight and 2 crash vids. The man Leo isn't a dunker - he was a cool dude driving that thing as you can see in my vid above. Just to be clear: there are loads of youtube vids where the thing doesn't crash!

 

[BlueSkyNick]

A couple of years ago, I attended a superb talk at our Sailing Club by Neil McGrigor who led an expedition up to the source of the Nile.

They took two RIBs including the necessary gear to fly them around some waterfalls.

This National Geographic article refers.

 

[jfm]

Thanks Nick. That was quite a read. (Not wishing to take anything away from their courage, I'm perplexed as to why the Nile source question isn't determined by satellite photography)

 

[paultallett]

Yup, see exactly your point, but it's a wide open bit of water with no runway so you'd land into the wind. Cross winds shouldn't come into it.

With the high up weight of second passenger and wing the thing must be tippy if you get into any kind of swerve

Exactly..... Makes you wonder if he knew he was crabbing slightly why he didn't just open up and go around??

Unless its diffucult to judge surface wind direction without a windsock?? I guess they judge by what the waves are doing?? ..... Then again they don't always give true wind direction......

Face plant it is!!

 

[jimmy_the_builder]

You may have seen or heard of these Wacky Races/Inspector Gadget style flying RIBs by Polaris of Italy. Well, a guy has one for rent at St Florent beach, NW Corsica, so I had a go last week. It was loads of fun and highly recommended if you get the chance to go on one of these - fantastic weather, 300-600m altitude mostly and 45-50kts airspeed, and a long time hang glider/parachutist/moutaineer etc etc French dude called Leo driving. His business is www.altore.com.

A video I shot is below. St Florent and the NW coast of Corsica are so fantastic I'll also try to dig out some stills and post a bit of a cruise report later too. The big beach midway through the Youtube is Saleccia beach which is one of the best in the Med. I've posted pics of it before on here. It is always fairly quiet becuase there are no roads to it - see the completely uninhabited landscape for 10miles behind it, and also the googlemaps link above shows the absence of roads. Jimmy le Builder take note of this and the other beaches - 3.5 hours from Antibes and you haven't blasted over to them yet . The squadron 58 anchored in centre frame at 0:33 of the movie is A+K's; it's the 4th last one ever built and is a fantastic boat. They kindly let me use it for this holiday - thanks guys



We also shot video using a camera on the wingtip looking at the flying machine, but the SD card shows a "file error" when i try to view it. There is a 550Mb .mov Quicktime file on the SD card, but it seems to have a small fault, even though the 5 second clip we shot just as a test immediately before is ok. Anyone have any ideas/expertise to fix a slightly busted .mov file?

Sorry I'm a bit late to this thread, I've had a bit of an intense week down here in the SoF (I'll post something about what's been going on here a bit later) ... but I have to say, regardless of the two crash videos, jfm I thought your landing did look a bit scary, that's a very rapid deceleration on an uncertain surface with a very top-heavy aircraft. Interesting to see though, and while I completely take your point about the attractions of Corsica, I don't think the FIB is for me.

Cheers
Jimmy