Parasailing is a fantastic and fun adventure sport. Choosing to go on a parasailing adventure will be something you won’t regret. This article looks at 10 paragliding facts you didn’t know.
• Parasailing is not considered a sports activity but rather a recreational activity. The intention is for it to be a fun ride and not to mix it up with the sporting counterpart that is paragliding.
• Youngest Parachutist: Three-year-old Aditya Pratap Singh Chauhan was recorded as the youngest to parasail for two minutes at Jammu Air Force Station, India, in 2002.
• Oldest Parasailer – NK Mahajan in Lonavala, India. He was 88 years old when he did this feat. He is the oldest parachutist recorded in the Indian Limca Book of Records.
• A paraglider landing is usually done in the water where the paraglider detaches from the paraglider and lands in the water. This process is called “splash”.
• Parasailing was accidentally discovered in the 1960s by Pierre Lamoigne, who attached a parachute to his moving car to help him train for safe landings.
• There are 3 methods used in paragliding:
a) Parasailing on the beach. This method is considered the most dangerous of the three when taking off from the beach.
b) Platform Method. In this method, the throw is similar to the beach method, but the direction instructions are not as necessary.
c) Paragliding on a boat with a winch. Considered the safest of all methods. Launch and recovery of the parasail begins and ends on the deck of the boat.
• Winch Boat Parasailing is the most popular of all parasailing methods. In this procedure, the skydiver does not land in the water but returns to the launch point which is the deck of the ship. A hydraulic winch is attached to the boat which allows the paraglider to be reeled back into the boat. The world’s first winch boat was tested under the supervision of Mark McCulloh in 1974 and patented on October 26, 1976, then commercially introduced in the mid-1980s.
• The ideal wind speed for paragliding is 12 to 27 MPH.
• Waterbird – The name of the first 16 gore canopy design made for the purpose of parasailing. Brian Gaskin designed, created and tested this revolutionary canopy design in early 1974, which allowed it to be used over water without much absorption of liquids. Given the success of his creation, Gaskin founded his company a year after naming it Waterbird Parakites and it is still in business today.
• Mark Mculloh, Miami, Florida was one of the top contributors to parasailing. His inventions, innovations and achievements were primarily focused on improving the safety of parasailing through equipment design. To this day, his inventions have set the standards in parasailing safety followed by most parasailers. McCulloh also formed the “Parasail Safety Council” in 1998 to educate and influence people about parasailing safety.