The Spin Doctor
BGD call the Epic Freestyle ‘The Spin Doctor’ I decided to put that to the test – Admin Jack
Unlike most of the team I’m in no way an Acro Pilot, but being involved with Rise gives me the opportunity to train as one, and as someone who promotes BGD wings the Epic Freestyle was the natural choice for me to start flying Acro.
Below you can see my path to Heli which spans a year, I’m not a committed Acro pilot in the off season and when in Turkey I only do one run a day – I’m old – progress could have been much faster but I’m in no rush. A rough estimate would be 8-10 training runs concentrating on Heli’s under instruction of Theo.
The main benefits that I’ve found from flying this wing are it’s benign stall behaviour and it’s very mild shoot when exiting manoeuvres, this has allowed me to make many mistakes with zero consequence, trust me the video below is very much cherry picked, each run would be around 8 attempts and most are far more messy.
An essential skill before moving on to any actual tricks is the stall, it’s your get out of jail card, with some historic experience of this with a very messy outcome I was extremely nervous of once again taking my wing out of it’s flying configuration. I needn’t of worried as it was a total non event and after some practice with instruction I could then easily take a run on my own and get the needed repetition gaining the muscle memory to be able to go straight to back-fly on demand.
With stalls out of the way we could move on to spins and spin to Heli. As you can see in the video my first attempts were a bit of a mess and it’s very evident that the wing was saving me.
Returning in October I could start to relax and get a feel for brake positions and pressure. As with everything Acro repetition is key and soon things were starting to look a fair bit tidier, I started to feel in control in both directions and was really happy with my progress.
On to May, a year on but not many Acro flights compared to the youngsters and it was time to work on my actual goal, direct entry via paracutal stall and clean direct exit. Although I felt some pressure due to it being my target it was a non event – thanks to the wing – and soon I was able to do multiple ‘real’ Heli’s in a run. With that in the bag at the end of this trip I was able to go a step past my goal – thanks to excellent instruction – and link Heli to SAT!
In conclusion and although I’m obviously biased I don’t believe there’s a better wing to start your Acro career, combine this with excellent instruction and youthful enthusiasm and you achieve what I have in a much shorter time span or maybe you’re an oldie like me and happy to take your time.
Next steps are working on my Misty’s, Heli-SAT-Heli and maybe Misty-Heli – roll on October.
