In-Flight Line Tuners for Paragliders - BANDARRA 

thanks Ari!

As the only non squeamish paraglider payload, in the world, this is going to kill. If you have your hands out of the brakes while you were playing with those lines to the extent required to install this, you will have a tremendously high collapse rate compared to a person who's looking through a telescope with his brakes stowed. I saw a guy in a carvat. I'm honored to fly the same air as he does. Somehow one of his strings had gotten caught on his gear on something the size of my thumb nail. Never did he panic the entire flight to the ground he was popping and wheeling and doing everything he could to get that tip to come back out and it would not. He was good to go my hero he wrestled this problem all the way to 30 ft above the ground and somebody could see the string was caught and turned loose while the other pilot was watching him fight this fight all the way to The bitter end. Now you are going to add all of these things to snag? In the case of our hero only one line was out of adjustment a long ways the one that was snagged in this case you've all tweaked the adjustment on every line while you were doing it you caused the collapse something got tangled while everything was loose and you will spiral into the ground at best. You realize of course that I am going to a class and pay money to fly through the air and get a little sticker that says I can be insured if I don't get any fatter than I am now when I go flying because one more kilogram and it's too much for a human being to be expected to land safe every time set down that fork. I'm not getting a license to do something like brain surgery or drive the truck or anything it just says that they'll ensure the damage is my body causes when I slam into somebody else's property. Fundamentally we are saying that within these boundaries of numbers we have enough margin for contingencies that this guy won't fly into the ground It doesn't matter if it's me or it's Ari. If you put us both on my pairing in my harness at the same weight and bumped it 10 times 20 lbs every run. Ari my silly beloved inspiration, it's going to fly down that mountain with hard mean eyes holding on to the only line that possibly had any hope of flying this if the wind didn't screw him. If you're bumping 20 lb every run you're going to have a pretty clear-cut definition of where you just can't fly it down through here no matter how good you are no matter how brave you are no matter who you are it won't. You have consumed the entire safety margin. It's likely the potato in this competition has hit the ground pretty good several times and either has been incapacitated or is online crying and moan and as he crawls up the hill to take one more pass. There's no sense beating up your joints like that Ari. You can do the same thing if we get to wings and we keep taking a millimeter off the A lines and make another run. Beloved Ari I know when you made your landing you'd be feeling it all the way to the soles of your feet every hair on your head feeling the wind and that Wing it's just sick it doesn't feel quite right there's just something not right here I'm getting that feeling man I got to get out of here man I got to get and you've landed I believe in you. Sooner or later with this idea you will make an adjustment in the sky that it would not launch with. The sequence if it will launch it will fly if it will fly it will land is a one-sided test or goes one direction. I love the mathematicians that work at everyone of these companies. Did you know the mathematician at the advance company looks just like me. He is sitting at his desk and he is crying over the guy that used to own my epsilon 9. They never listen. I'm not a gangster I just play one at a math job. The roll axis is your end of the job. Stow your brakes bring your telescope try to land and not hit anything don't even worry about stopping. He missed the swoop landing. They sold his gear for a cheap price just enough to cover his head stone. I love the picture me sitting in my wing crying with my hands up. It keeps playing in my mind over and over. The epsilon 9 will fly better in turbulence if you put your hands up and keep them up however we recommend active flying. I like to sit here in my chair crying thinking about the engineer at advance. Sometimes I think about crying because I'm telling the guy I'm too stupid to do the active flying and sometimes I like to think about me being an Irish gangster and he can kiss my ass. I paid for this to fly itself. Active flying my ass. Is this collapses and I fall I'm going to be so pissed I'm going to go talk to that guy that designed it. When I see you suggest you're going to sell this to people so they can change their wing and find out it won't fly in mid-flight I want to cry. I love both of you and I don't want to lose you. I would suggest if you never shorten the a line in flight. There's only two ways it can fail either it won't fly at all and you'll spiral to the ground uncontrollably, or you'll take a collapse of some sort probably close to the ground where the air is on the gradient for speed and there's all that turbulence . I would not be afraid to come out there with a bicycle helmet and a mouth piece and flyer trim speed with the brakes stored on my epsilon nine. And land on that sand. If you adjusted more than one string in flight you might fly down there and have a weird characteristic, stall or collapse. This might be a good tool but should not be sold to the general public.I am begging you don't sell anything to adjust the basic nature of the wing while it is flying to the general public. If you do that project is you want at least try and make the ends very rounded and smooth so the lines and everything will slip off pass them if you come slack and then a loop forms and all them pieces together on the strings catch less. But being a gangster flying the dead guys wing, if you do this I'll bet $100 the first fatality is a tangle.

I love you both and when you are an aviation there's a rule written in blood make one change make one flight make one change make one flight. This adjusting all these strings in flight is going to cause a crash because you don't know if it would have launched and that means you don't know if it would have landed and that means you don't know if it would fly. If you get out of kilter with this on purpose it probably screws up your insurance

I'm not so sure you understand the concept of tuning and d tuning because if you made the adjustment a little bit the wrong way it might spiral into the ground. I don't think these wings are All that "adjustable" an in-flight error could cause a fatality. You see people flying too deep in the brakes once in awhile and it doesn't pay it's a bad ending. If you put this adjustment in and it is incorrect how many feet of altitude will it take to take the adjuster back out? If you take up the slack on one side without your hands in the brakes and then you go to the other side to take up slack on the same line will it spiral? As humans go we make mistakes and it won't be too long before somebody has the adjuster on the port side on one line and the starboard side on the other. This is a bad idea and they're going to be many people hurt if they put this out in the public

That’s awesome, thank you so much Richard

Trial and error is a bad thing in aviation. All of these complexities are going to kill somebody if you don't keep them in the hands of a few people flying over water testing prototypes this is not for a person to run at home.

Obrigado Nuno, um abraço!

Thanks for the comment, didn't think of that potential use

You're taking out the safety Factor because if you could adjust those lines you would have people flying it to the failure point you might have a zipper effect if you have old lines and you wrap them around the device. This should never get to the public.

@@markmcgoveran6811 too late. Camping tent teather line tensioners similar to this have been around for years. The marriage of that "technology" with PG however required Mr. Banderra's tenacity, maybe a touch of genius. With a far less fatalistic view than you however, I think the average user would likely pull a little more tension in the suspect line, while watching wing shape first... before installing this device. Personal experience is that, INDIVIDUAL line lengths are not quite as critical as you seem to indicate on your many posts here. I do however share your concern if a recreational pilot is using more than 2 or 3 of these at a time. Alternatively, I highly doubt a factory test pilot, trying to optimize line lengths on a hot new design...will be using more than a few of these at once. Maybe I'm wrong, but computer modeling should be able to generate line lengths for a given/desired wing shape prior to flight testing . Again relying on personal experience, critical line lengths seem far more important for low wind inflation characteristics, than inflight wing control where wing pressure is higher.

@@markmcgoveran6811 It's this guy throwing shade again. I don;t mind calling him out.

@@VARocketry I don't really have anything to say about throwing shade or calling anybody out it just looks like the mathematics of the situation suggest a disaster. You put one in so you've got an asymmetry while you're trying to put the other side in.

Valeu Ricardo!

Cheers Chris! And nice to hear from you

I don't see how you can say that this is a disaster on the way. If it will launch it will fly. It will land. You might have made an adjustment in the sky that caused it to land hard one time in 10.

Final glide angle will play a huge part even after the adjustment to the lines so a hard landing or not is merely a function of the pilot's skill.

@@suyashvaidy yeah it looks like to me you fly up into the air you make an adjustment and now it stops flying and you can't get it out in time before you hit the ground. I've already seen people with brakes applied flying 100 ft above the ground make a mistake and spiral in the last hundred feet and they can't do anything. If you made an adjustment in flight on the nature of this wing and you were wrong you will not be able to correct it while you're going through the air. Do you think this is going to cause fatalities if it gets out to the public?

​@@markmcgoveran6811its not designed for the public, its designed for wing designers and testers to adjust prototypes wings before production. They are flying an unproven wing so they are ready to throw the reserve.

@@niconico3907 I believe he said "I can sell these things on my website" in less than 60 seconds. He may have added to their competitors but I don't think there are enough competitors in the wing manufacturing business to need a website to reach them all. I'm not a gangster but I play one in a small town and if you think that I believe for one minute you need the world wide Web to pitch this idea to test pilots so they can go Google and look up and see if there's a line tuner available, you didn't do well in marketing class. One of my favorite things about this sport is I have developed my own set of safety rules I try to promote them and then when I watch things like this I tell everybody guys come on think it through think it through and then later on when somebody hits the ground hard it's somebody that has a lot more money than I do and wouldn't listen to me I've had that all my life I've watched so many of them. So go ahead and jump on me and tell me that these are only for test pilots but they'll be available on the website if anybody wants one just to adjust their kite string at home but not on their paraglider when they're flying. I only drink whiskey so some kid won't get it. It's only on the website in case some test pilot wants to buy it. If you keep lying to yourself about aviation safety you might fly right into the side of a mountain or something. If it'll launch it'll fly if it'll fly it'll land. All this thing can do is burn up a whole lot of safety margin safety Factor clearances for untoward events and land you hard on the ground. Even if you get all the way to the ground that last 30 ft of flying in ground effect is a special mathematical condition and you have changed things on a wing. It will take off before you change it but we don't know if it will take off after you adjust that string.

You really think that you need to adjust the flying characteristics of the wing in flight? You really think you need to take your hands out of the loops on the brakes and start pulling on the strings to wind them up with the adjuster here one at a time so you do the left hand one and then you lean which way and hope that you didn't take out too much adjustment and it won't spiral into the ground?

I was just looking for a good inflight way to adjust only break lines a couple cm to figure out exactly how much shorter I would want to retie them. If you know anything about paragliding, you know that a couple cm is not a spiral inducing change. Also, I PPG, so hands off flying is safer as we usually fly in nicer conditions. If you do fly, I wish you safe landings

@@SkyHikerMike yeah if you know anything about math then you can know something about paragliders but if you don't know anything about math you don't know anything about anything. How much can you take out of the a line, and still not induce a collapse when you fly into the ground effect zone. I'm only a Buddhist but I'm not the Buddha so I'm having trouble seeing how you're going to put it one side first then the other without having some kind of turn because you've got one side out of symmetry. The tolerances on string length and things like that are major portion of the safety Factor available. Are you sure you want to detune in mid-air? So you want to change a couple of centimeters and the tolerance is 12 mm on some wings? I'm glad you're sure it won't spend it won't crash it won't do anything but fly exactly like I like it because when I adjusted the strings I intended for it to fly right and it will. You can bet your life on it and we can all talk about you later because if they get this broad spread wide out there's going to be a lot of big red greasy spots on the ground where somebody too stupid to go to engineering college got a pilot license.

Your talking to someone who studied aerospace engineering, I’ve done more math then most people know exist. Your can cool your jets. I’m also a paramotor instructor, so I have pleantly of experience. Again…. I was looking to adjust break lines only…. If you don’t know what those are or how they work, then maybe you should cool off. Also, your really are not sounding very Buddhist with the way you are responding. Again, if you do fly, I wish you safe landings.

@@SkyHikerMike I'm happy for you and I'm glad the two of us are both mathematically savvy enough to break out the set of lines and the set of lines that could be possibly adjusted with this safely that would be the brake lines. The main difficulty between you and I is experience I worked on a tugboat for 12 years a blood stained tugboat that killed people at the company. I had to take a lot of the math sophistication out of my teaching and examples of the craft. I am absolutely certain someone will read this and miss the point about brake lines. I'm not squeamish I just realized that this format is very sugar-coated and people will Bragg up their high level skills to people who cannot comprehend the amount of details. I did a lot of safety engineering and this is a good forum for getting the ideas out for public debate. So are you saying I'm correct and you would limit this to the brake lines only because you may be modifying the fundamental airfoil when you put it in one side and you have to turn to the other? You wouldn't want to agree with me mathematically that it would be more difficult to put the second one in because the wing is now detuned? I don't really mean on the brake lines I mean the rest of the lines where this person could possibly misinterpret what you said because he lacks your education and aerospace engineering and mathematics and put that on one of the other lines. Would you agree that if you put that in the wrong place you might create some problems in mid-air? I love to look at all the crash videos over and over and try and figure out what I can tell everybody that might send somebody home and I would get no credit for it because I'm not an aerospace engineer.I studied a lot of operations research and safety engineering and I would offer the idea that you should either take your harness all the way off or put your harness all the way on never stand around with your leg straps undone because the wind could grab you up in the air and dumped you out of your harness. Would you agree that that's not a bad rule mathematically or would you tell people that they can just go ahead and plan on getting right in the middle of their routine and rebuilding those straps when the dust devil rolls through? I used to get the straight shot red hot moonshine and the other guys had to buy water down moonshine because the guy that was making it didn't want to take a chance on somebody snorting down a half a gallon and falling over. Just because you know better than to try and tweak your wing mid-air on one of the other lines besides the brakes, does it mean we aren't in a world full of idiots with money that buy wings and hit the ground hard.

Me too. I want to clip it just to check its clipiness.

Yeah super simple and elegant. The entire design is just perfect simplicity.

I think the safety factor is ignored here in aviation we make one change we make one flight we make one change because we don't know if we change something is basic is this mid-flight that takes as long as it does to take out of the system if we are going to crash. I wouldn't use this unless it was a prototyping test pilot situation they were over water and it was the new guy that I didn't like.

@@markmcgoveran6811 that's right. it is a good tool for designer and test pilot

@@Crimea-paraplan I think the line of reasoning here is very clear. Will launch implies will fly will fly implies will land. If we change our configuration mid-flight in this fundamental fashion we may find something that will not fly or will not it would not launch but we don't know that do we? I saw a very experienced power paraglider pilot who was flying 100 lb over Max weight. They found him and the intellectually deficient model of cause and effect is not a closed set. When he was that far overweight, he consumed the entire safety margin. Still that mathematician at his desk was a good man following his directions to fly in the weight range, grants you a huge safety margin. The trouble this fellow ran into was some of his lines stretched 12mm. The line stretch "detuned" the profile. A little bit each time he flew heavy he cursed himself he accumulated the last little problem that would be the end of him. With that much weight every time he turned he dove into a hole. The faster he went the farther he swung out to bank. At that bank angle he has a trigonometry problem his extra Force has a downward component. With that much overweight and horse power the wing flew wonderfully. At some point the line stretch far enough the profile would not pull out of a spiral with that much weight. I just am extremely adverse to making this kind of an adjustment to a wing on the fly. Definitely over water only. I'm pretty sure this is going to be fatal if it gets out very far and wide.

@@Crimea-paraplan it will be a real money maker of a tool if they sell it to everybody because these people are going to be going to the hospital with broken bones. If it will launch it will fly if it will fly it will land. If it will launch and you adjust it I don't know if it will fly or not it might it might not. It might fly 99 times out of 123 times. It already takes 4 seconds of swinging around to get your brakes to work. How long do you have when you were flying in the air to twist and untwist these adjusters

Paraglider aerodynamics is not that brittle, as to ruin it catastrophically just by shrinking a line by an inch. Rather, only an expert will even be able to notice the difference. And it is a great bonus that he can do and undo such subtle adjustments on the go.

Nice to hear from you Olaf! I've talked to Hannes before but not sure if I did about these tuners. It's never a bad thing to put feelers out there :)

Obrigado mermão! tamo junto

I haven't flown with them yet but I've tried with different line tensions, 2kg, 5kg, 8kgs and it's not too bad. Also the spirals have way to channel the line into the groove so they are kind of nice to use. From my measurements, the average tension on lines are around A 10kg, B 6kg, C 1.5kg. Almost all of the trimming is done on the C lines anyway according to Ozone.

@@AndreBandarra1makes sense; thank you!

Definitely not for the average pilot or the general public, this is a tool for professionals, manufacturers that trim prototypes for a living. Will not be selling thousands of these! As for datum, almost all the tuning happens on the C lines as I understand it. so you can increase the AoA by shortening the Cs or decrease it by shortening the As.

Great question! A long time ago I bought a used wing from an estate sale. It was like new but had a bunch of wierd knots tied in the A lines. With no manual to reference, I removed the knots, but found the inflation characteristics to be horrible. I took the wing to a fly-in (wings over winter in 2017) and continued to struggle with kiting it. Matt Minyard suggested he could trim the wing better by adding loops at the malions (a science in itself). After several hours of fiddling with it, much better wing shape, kiting/inflation resulted. It was part trial and error, but Matt had an eye for it that I still have not developed...

Something something PLA is not food safe

If you want it to be permanent I think loops on the maillons are a much better option

Yes, the outer diameter is the same on all the tuners, what changes is the inner spiral

Yeah for sure, some good ideas there, thanks!

It could be a sort of cage, not to be flown in cage mode, but carrying measure instruments for lines, there should be a mechanical system for action on each lines row. And of course each line would be attached by a simple setting system... That seems a bit complicated but could be fun too

The first step to a paraglider autopilot 🤔 😊