Oleg and Saadi at Lake Huron
Picture by Eric Brent.

Pedro Pedersen at Mount Woodside, BC

Picture by Eric Brent.
The new Safety Standard Operating Procedure, developed by Bastien Dufour, who holds the Safety Portfolio on the Board of Directors, was approved by the Board. It can be found here: SOP 400 Flight Safety
We offer a unique opportunity to learn how to fly on the simplest and lightest forms of aviation in Drayton Valley Alberta, at only 1 hour 15 minutes west of Edmonton or 3 hours North of Calgary. Free fly with a Paraglider or power your way up with a Paramotor (Powered Parachute). Add extra power and speed to come aboard of an ultralight Trike or feel like in a James Bond movie aboard our Gyroplane. Our aircrafts are insured and instructors are certified by Transport Canada and the Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association of Canada.
Air Adventure Flight School was established in 2016 but our Paragliding Senior instructor had been flying since 1992 and teaching since 1994. Our Novice Paraglider courses are 6 days long, thanks to the hydraulic winch and golf carts we use for the training. We are proud to be direct importers for some of the best paragliding equipment manufacturers in Canada.
The school has a classroom, clubhouse, kitchen, bridge, BBQ, clean bathroom and shower with hot water in a heated cabin, camping area with electrical hookups, swimming pond, fire pit, picnic tables and recreation area. You can not only come to learn to fly but bring the family along and all have a good time.
We are passionate about flying so we teach 7 days a week including weekends and holidays during the flying season, May to October. You can book your course anytime as long as we have the days available, there are no set days or need to join a group for the Paragliding course.
Take a look and see what sets us apart from other schools. In the video presentation you will get a better idea of our facilities and the activities we have to offer.
info.airadventure@gmail.com
School video https://youtu.be/1-s6cY3LqQY
Claudio Mota, Senior Instructor, HPAC/ACVL
Brett Yeates, long time paraglider pilot in Cranbrook, BC, is conducting an informal survey worldwide about pilots’ encounters with terrestrial wildlife and any formal studies on this topic that may be out there, in particular ungulates.
Read MoreWinner of the Solid Ground Award Trevor MacMurray, with Norm Krcmar, owner of Paraglide Canada in Vernon (on left) and Glenn Derouin, HPAC Senior Instructor at Paraglide Canada (on right), for Trevor’s development of weather stations throughout the Okanagan region of BC.
After 27 years of enjoying paragliding flights in different corners of the world, I felt it was time to give back.
Together with my wife Sigi, who is a long time pilot as well, we developed a new flying site in 2008 named ‘El Nido’ in our little adventurous town of Clearwater BC where I offer Tandem flights for locals and travellers from around the world.
For the last 13 years we have been hosting the ‘El Nido fly-in’. An event that has seen steady growth with a record 44 pilots attending in 2020. The smiles from guests after a tandem flight or the stoked stories of pilots after a good flight from El Nido is what keeps me going.
Sharing my knowledge and enthusiasm with new P1 and P2 students is a joy. A safe approach for a fun experience is my focus every day.
You are all welcome to come and fly El Nido from May till October.
Submitted by Willy Rens
Many members have raised questions regarding the status of our new websites (HPAC and ACVL) and the Membership Management System connected with them, due to a lack of information or misinformation.
This newsletter is dedicated entirely to this topic and we hope members will take a few moments to inform themselves with the facts on this important topic.
As a member, you see the website front end, but only a little of the MMS back end (your pilot profile, current member list, membership renewal, and some membership statistics). Only the Administrator and an authorized Board member have full access to all details in the membership records. The treasurer, authorized committee chairs and instructors have special access to only the information they need to perform their functions.
Here is how the development of the overall project breaks down.
After an unfortunate start by the then-Board back in 2009, with a failed delivery of a replacement for the current websites and data management systems, which led to legal action by the then-Board, and the relationship with that developer was permanently severed in 2012. The Board then made the decision to start over:
Under the leadership of Dom Juretic as President, the then Board of Directors initiated an Organizational Renewal of the entire Association, its governance, all of its programs, and its communications. In particular this included updating the Bylaws to be in compliance with the new federal not-for-profit corporation act, reviewing and updating all SOP’s, creation of a Council of Senior Instructors, reviewing and updating pilot ratings, insurance updates, and development of a new e-newsletter; in short, a review of everything that HPAC did. The final piece would be the websites and member management system, since both were dependent on all of the other material.
For the websites, the options were
The Board of the day determined to go with Option 2.
The current front-end websites would have to be entirely reorganized and mostly rewritten from scratch, given the organizational changes that had taken place, (e.g. overhauled Standard Operating Procedures governing the Association), the changing needs of pilots to retrieve information (e.g. access by mobile devices), new constituencies who seek out the website (e.g. landowners), pruning outdated information from the current website, and reorganizing information to optimize for quick access.
The current back-end membership management system was tightly integrated with the front-end websites, and incorporated website content management functionality. Furthermore, the back-end had been expanded, patched and tweaked over many years and unfortunately no documentation was available that described the database structure or associations between the various tables in the database.
The existing database served us very well for many years; however, the database structure was in need of an update to:
As a result, the entire database had to be reverse-engineered by the developers, and an application created to migrate the data from the old structure to the new one, and significant testing done to ensure no pilot data would be lost – a hugely complex and time-consuming process.
This has been a 5 year Organizational Renewal project for, long yes, but not unusually long, given the experience of several of our sister organizations in other countries. Many also have paid much much more for the level of web site that HPAC/ACVL will have.
Although a contract was created in May of 2016, the new Developers were not able to start until fall of 2016 to work on the new websites, after all content for the WordPress sites had be newly written by HPAC, and decisions made about the required functionalities for the back end. The developers have therefore been working (part time) for just over 1 year.
The front end WordPress sites are 98% complete, in both English and French, the Association has taken delivery of them and they are on our servers. Pictures are still being changed, small bits of content are still being added, and the links to the MMS application (your member card, join/renew, membership statistics, pilot list), will be added when the MMS is complete and online.
The MMS application is 75% complete and is also on our servers and the source code is in our possession. Development and testing are ongoing and we are working towards deployment as quickly as possible.
Both developers are highly experienced professionals working full-time in the industry: One is a senior developer for an international marketing system in Vancouver and the other a senior developer at one of the largest international e-commerce platforms, working out of Toronto.
The highest priority is to get the whole system up and functioning. We will then be able to add additional content to the WordPress sites and expand the functionality in the MMS as needed going forward. Since we are using open platforms for all development, we will have the flexibility to use the same or different developers for future work, depending on our cost/schedule needs.
HAVE A LOOK and please give us feedback at admin@hpac.ca; it is your Association and these are your sites:
Until the MMS is online, the new websites are available at beta.hpac.ca and beta.acvl.ca.
Thank you.
Margit Nance, Executive Director, HPAC
Nick Jones, Vice President, HPAC and Website Project Board of Directors Liaison
Request to Instructors and pilots: Once ratings have been earned by pilots, they should be submitted and recorded within one month of completion by the pilot. Instructors, please submit your students’ ratings promptly, and pilots, if you do not see your ratings credited to your file on the HPAC/ACVL website, please contact your instructor to ask that they be submitted.