Getting A Bird’s-Eye View Of Newtown

 

By Shannon Hicks

A power parachute looks like a go-cart with the fan of a swamp boat attached to the back and a parachute over the top.

Residents are slowly becoming acquainted with these gadgets now that Newtown resident Brendan Baker has one and has been flying anytime the wind allows him to go up. Mr Baker’s machine boasts a red, white, and blue parachute and since purchasing the flying machine a few months ago he has been making regular rounds over Newtown and surrounding towns, sight-seeing and doing a lot of photography.

Invented during the early 1980s, makers of power parachutes, or PPCs as they are referred to by their owners and enthusiasts, tout them as both an affordable way to fly and one of the safest. They are also celebrated as the ultimate personal flying machine. They can fly fairly slowly just above treetops or up to 10,000 feet, all safely and comfortably. (PPCs can actually go above 10,000 feet above sea level, but it is recommended that pilots stay below 12,000 feet, Mr Baker points out on his website, www.NewtownFromTheAir.com. Most powered parachute pilots, he continued, fly between 300 and 1,000 feet above ground level.)

Maintenance is pretty simple, with most jobs able to be handled by the machine’s owner. Storage can be done in a one-car garage, and towing can be done with a basic trailer.

Would-be pilots can learn how to fly in as little as two hours. Instruction is mandatory but flying power parachutes does not require a pilot’s license

Taking off can be done once the parachute is laid out behind the body of the machine and all lines are checked to make sure they are not tangled. The engine –– and fan –– is fired up, which inflates the parachute while the machine begins rolling forward. Takeoff is achieved once the forward motion of the machine creates lift in the ‘chute. Steering is done by manipulating feet bars –– push your right foot out to turn right, and the left foot to turn left. PPCs are nearly impossible to stall because the engine keeps it flying at a steady 26 miles per hour, a speed that also restricts pilots from flipping or rolling in the air.

Mr Baker purchased his power parachute from the Harmony, N.J.-based company Chute The Breeze. He was surfing the Internet one night, came across some sites about the machines, and started reading. Soon after that, on May 12, he purchased his PPC, before even having tried one in person. It is a Destiny 2000 two-seat model, which carries a price tag of about $16,000.

“I’m impulsive,” he said recently.

 “I had looked originally at backpack versions, PPCs that actually fold up completely, but then saw this two-seater,” he said. “This is the Cadillac of the PPC.”

Mr Baker took one lesson with an instructor, Ron Drake, one of two owners of Chute The Breeze. Mr Drake had the controls during the training flight, but Mr Baker had the controls by midflight and handled the landing that afternoon. From there he has been flying as often as weather allows.

Mr Baker is fine on his own these days but before he can take any passengers up with him, he needs to put in flight time and take an instructor’s test.

“In order to legally take someone else with you on a flight, you must become an instructor,” he wrote for his website. “This only requires that you complete the initial training, accumulate 25 hours of solo flight time, and then get back with your instructor to be given a test. Once you are a qualified instructor, you may train other people in the second seat.”

Other legal parameters include maintaining a minimum of 500 feet above the highest obstacle or open air assembly. PPCs (or any private pilots) must also keep a distance from airports. For the municipal airports in Bridgeport, Danbury, and Oxford, the minimum is five miles.

Mr Baker and his wife Micheline moved into Newtown about five years ago. Mr Baker says his latest excursions have given him a new view of his current hometown.

“The town looks a lot different from the air,” he said recently. “I’ve found many shortcuts, roadwise, as well as a lot of nice rural areas of the town I did not know about before. The amount of farms is kind of amazing, and you would never notice it until you are airborne but they are everywhere.

“You get a much different perspective of the geometry of various buildings in town,” he continued. “For instance, Fairfield Hills… from the ground it looks kind of run down, but from the air it has an impressive symmetry. Even Garner Prison looks nice from the air.”

In addition to all the personal sightseeing he has been doing, Mr Baker has been taking a lot of photos during his fights. His PPC is equipped with a GPS, which helps with navigating as well as the photography. Mr Baker has been known to look at a location from the ground and punch in the satellite location, and then let the GPS relocate the site once in the air.

His PPC also carries a chute bag and a cell phone, “just in case I have to make an emergency landing.”

His trips are not carefully planned out. Usually he will take off and see what the wind is doing, and then decide which direction he will take. He has done a lot of flying over Newtown, but has also been over Bantam, Bethel, Bethlehem, Bridgewater, Easton, Monroe, Morris, and of course all spots in between. The two-seater PPCs carry ten-gallon fuel cells, which allow between two and three hours of flight time.

Newtown From The Air

With all of this flying and all of these photos taken, Mr Baker launched a website shortly after this new adventure of his began. He flies with an Olympus 3030Z, a 3.1 megapixels digital camera with a 64 meg card that allows 81 shots.

“I always fill [the card] as I tend to take three to five shots of everything since the machine isn’t a very stable platform,” Mr Baker said, “so about 30 percent of my shots come out blurry.

“I end up wasting a lot of memory for the redundant shots,” he conceded, “but I’m also able to delete bad shots while in flight.” His next purchase will be a 128 meg card for his digital camera, which will allow 160 shots per flight.

NewtownFromTheAir.com shares each step of Mr Baker’s new hobby with the world. The website offers a little bit of information about Mr Baker including his contact information, an FAQ section that concerns the basics of PPCs, and of course a series of Galleries.

Inside his Galleries section, Mr Baker has set up links for most of his flights. Visitors can go along a list of choices by date (with short descriptions after most of the dates) and click there to see thumbnail versions, and clicking on the thumbnails pulls up full images taken during his flights. The galleries are predominantly full of Newtown and Sandy Hook images, but there are plenty of views of surrounding towns.

Mr Baker also shows that he is just as capable of taking “oops” photos as anyone on the ground. Within some of the galleries are shots with his thumb partially over the camera’s viewfinder (which only happened once, in an early flight), poorly composed shots, and even shots that look like they were taken when the shutter was accidentally bumped.

The site will eventually include Fight Maps and Places of Interest. These links are set up, but their content is still under construction.

This week’s flying has been mixed. Monday was a perfect night for flying –– very little, if any, wind in the air meant Mr Baker was able to stay up until just after 8 pm. Tuesday’s light winds, however, meant he was back on the ground early.

“The landing was a little bumpy,” he admitted that night. “It was a little scary, but that’s going to happen on occasion. You just have to expect it.”

Mr Baker expects to continue taking advantage of his PPC as often as possible. He really is like a child with a new toy, and people on the ground are beginning to take notice. People have seen him flying overhead, and sometimes they find printouts of their property in their mailboxes a day or two after he may have flown overhead.

“I try to be courteous about flyovers. Kids love it, but sometimes adults don’t like the machine,” he said. This week he found himself flying over a Babe Ruth championship game one night, and a free public concert the following night. He may be hundreds of feet up in the air but he can tell when people are staring up at him, trying to figure out what that unfamiliar machine is buzzing overhead.

“If you hear something that sounds like a lawnmower in the air over Newtown, look up. Chances are it’s me.”