Paramotor or Powered Paraglider PPG

I was reading on the EAA or experimental aircraft website https://www.aeroeducate.org/ when I thought of parameters after seeing a picture of a young woman who operates one! Powered paraglider's are the smallest, lightest & least expensive powered aircraft.

These "backpack" style engine fans weigh 45-90 lbs (20-41kg) and are typically powered by a single cylinder two stroke engine directly connected by gearing to a large caged propeller, and are able to fly at 15-50 mph (24-80km/h) at up 18,000 feet (5500m) & have a range limited by the typical small low mass fuel tank & fuel load, around 2.5 gallons or 10 liters. Some of the newest Para-motor combine electric motor, controller, & LiPO batteries to make battery electric powered paraglider technology, like the short range super quiet EXOMO from France :) 

The soft fabric aerofoil surface can be disturbed by high winds, turbulent air, intense thermal activities & as such are risky for inexperienced pilots to operate in anything by clear calm conditions. Increasing the handheld throttle causes the paramotor to pitch-up and climb without increasing speed. Brake dongles complies roll control or turning & adjust airspeed. To take off, the pilot runs such that the prevailing wind air flow inflates the wing, and once the wing inflated producing lift, the pilot sits into the fan motor harness. The pilot & fan motor harness dangle as a pendulum suspend from rigging lines connected to the inflated wing.

Mineral oil has to be mixed with the gasoline at a 30:1 ratio, to lubricate the engine, which makes a ton of nasty exhaust smoke emissions as a result of burning the oil & the range limited because of the low thermal efficiency of the two-stoke engine, which also have a short useful life before teardown rebuilding or replacement & the propellers can break too. 

The paramotor hobby starts at about $10,000, when you consider the vehicle needed to move it around, a larger van, or pulling a trailer, plus the cost of the paramotor, spare parts, flight gear, the fabric glider wing, connectors & all the fittings & other operating equipment you carry. 

Paramotor operating costs are low & there are no special licensing requirements due to the low mass & slow speeds they are able to travel. Where you can legally fly a paramotor very restricted, think rural areas no where near large cities or urban areas or even suburban areas.

It gets really cold as you go up further into the atmosphere, especially with wind chill. Even low speeds through cool air can strip heat from your body amazingly quickly, 600x faster if you are wet from flying in light rain & your gear gets water logged. Think nylon & Gortex or similar waterproof & windproof flight clothing if you plan on flying in anything other than warm sunny summer weather. 

Flight does not have be done with an engine, hang-gliding & paragliding done all the time nearby, when people wear these backpack flight devices & hike up Poo Poo Point, where they unwrap their fabric wing backpack paraglider kits, pulling them into the wind so the wing inflates, then running off the edge of the cliff to achieve unpowered flight, using thermal uplift or thermals to gain altitude. 

Roadways illuminated by sunlight warm up & produce a rising column of heated air known as a thermal. If a paraglider flys over the thermal they can gain altitude, and by circling around into and out of the thermal, they can cork-screw fly higher & higher. Some of these people fly around for hours before landing in a grass field below the forested steep hiking trail. The parking lot nearly always very busy, cars spilling out & parked along the nearby connector that travels from downtown Issaquah to Renton. 

From wikipedia we can learn more about paramotoring! 

Neither a license nor specific training is required in the U.S., U.K. or many other countries. Where there is no specific regulation (Mexico), paramotor flying is tolerated provided the pilots cooperate with local officials when appropriate. In countries where specific regulation exists, such as Canada, France, Italy, and South Africa, pilots must be trained, both in flying theory and practice, by licensed instructors. Some countries that require formal certification frequently do so through non-government ultralight aviation organizations. Regardless of regulations, powered paragliding can be dangerous when practiced without proper training.

For a pilot to get through most organizations' full pilot syllabus requires between 5 and 15 days which, due to weather, may include far more calendar time. A number of techniques are employed for teaching, although most include getting the student familiar with handling the wing either on the ground, via towing, small hills, or on tandem flights. With special gear, it is possible to take a passenger (tandem), but most countries, including the U.S., require some form of certification to do so.

In most countries, paramotor pilots operate under simple rules that spare them certification requirements for pilot and gear. Those laws, however, limit where they can fly—specifying that pilots avoid areas of urban/suburban population and larger airports to minimize risk to other people or aircraft. U.S. pilots operate under Federal Aviation Administration regulation Part 103. As powered heavier-than-air flying vehicles with wings, paramotors are technically a type of airplane, but in legal circles they are not typically classified as such.

In the United Kingdom, paramotors are regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority, are classified as self-propelled hang-gliders, and can be flown without registration or a license as long as they weigh less than 70 kg, have a stall speed not exceeding 35 knots, and are foot-launched.  Wheel-launched paramotors are allowed under the additional conditions that they do not carry passengers, and have a stall speed of 20 knots or less, but may weigh up to 75 kg if they carry a reserve parachute.

In the U.S., the sport is represented primarily by the US Powered Paragliding Association (USPPA) which also holds an exemption allowing two-place training by appropriately certified tandem instructors. The US Ultralight Association (USUA) and Aero Sports Connections (ASC) also offer some support. nstructors in the U.S. are primarily represented and certified by the United States Powered Paragliding Association (USPPA). In the United Kingdom, the sport is represented by the British Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association.

Electric Self-Leveling Backpack Helicopter

There are other small light wearable electric aircraft, like those offered by https://copterpack.com.au/ / Gravity sells a wearable turbine flight suit for $250,000+, since you have to be trained at their manufacturing facility to learn how to use it. Many emergent vehicle platforms will enable autonomous passenger flight, like the Ehang 184 VTOL. Passenger drones will enable battery electric transportation in the sky, within a city or at airports. Battery limitations limit the range & performance of aircraft. As batteries improve, so will the performance characteristics of electric aircraft. Its really battery technology that is limiting electric vehicles,  robots, & other mobile electrical systems like directed energy weapons. 

The human body a lot of water weight to lift, people are also fragile to thermal extremes, pressure extremes, acceleration & deceleration extremes, as our brain can crash into our skull and our metabolic ability to heat or cool the body relatively limited by food calorie energy liberation rates limited by gastric digestive processes that are calorically intensive, slow & subject to all kinds of dysfunction. Birds for example are able to generate much higher power per unit of body mass with a greatly enhanced 3 chamber continual breathing system that has superior performance to the human inhale exhale tidal breathing, especially in terms of oxygen / CO2 respiration exchange, that also loses water faster with hotter dryer air breathed. 0.2vdc & 500amps a typical energy generating level of a human body, thus about 100 watts, which can scale to several hundred watts during intense activities like exercise, heavy manual labor, or athletic performance, when people are moving with maximum intensity, bicycling riding up a very steep hill or mountain for example, or running up a steep hiking trail. This make it costly to send humans to outer space, the mass & fragility of the human body, requirements for food, air, and water complicating space access even more. Humans are so fragile that the airfare is slowly phasing out manned aircraft & replacing human fighter pilots with remotely piloted drones that have much better performance characteristics, better stealth, better pitch, roll & yaw rates, faster takeoff, faster landings on shorter runways, lower mass, better fuel economy, better range, etc etc. 

Persian Carpet Paradox 

Even if someone gave you a paramotor, a way to transport it around freely, free training & free fuel, where would you go with it ? Why? What purpose would it serve & what problem would it solve. Would you be working for it or would it be working to make your life better or to solve another problems. Flights of fancy or frivolous activity can include many other wastes of time, but imagine a world where 8 billion people are flying around aimlessly using Paramotor or powered gliders. Would that be a safer or better world? Would that improve air quality? Would that enable people to get where they are going to go grocery shopping or commuting to work or school? 

Do personal flying vehicles PFV even make logical sense? Especially if you cannot operate them legally where you live! Think about it! Why do you want to fly? What desire in the human psyche causes people to want to fly? Well people have dreamed of flying since antiquity. 

It is a natural human trail to want to fly around. Even as a small young pre-verbal child I had an innate desire to be able to fly around & was frustrated by not being able to do so naturally. I remember this distinct feeling & thought, "Why am I not flying, this is not working, I know I can, what can I not effortlessly fly forward, up and down, side to side & backward." It was more of a feeling than thinking, since my 2 year old brain was not fluent with language like that yet. It felt like I had a memory of being able to fly before entering my human body, like I existed before my body became alive on Earth, as if my soul existed before my body, giving me memories of what it was like before living, unlimited, in the energetic dimensional level where time & spacetime have less meaning, where reality made of energy & information, unleashed such that effortless traveling possible & knowing anything possible, being able to see better than any space telescope was normal, there was no pain, no death, God was nearby glowing a calming peaceful radiant super intelligent energy that was warm & enjoyable endlessly.