HelloIm interested in Simulating Paragliders. and because Flight gear is open source I thought it to be the best to start with it. I have tried some of the so called paragliders that you get for some flight simulators. And they dont even come close to a realistic feeling.I will now have raise some topics which seem important to me. And I hope some of you experienced guys have at least an Idea how difficult the realisation of this ideas would be. FLIGHT DYNAMICS MODEL: A Paraglider has several differences to a normal Airplane: There es a very big distance between the center of gravity and the point where the Air forces are applied. And as far as I know, this distance is assumed to be small in the normal models.The aileron can change size suddenly. When an airplane would have negative lift, then the airfoil will flap asymetrically, Which leads to rotation,...The pilot can twist relativly to the Paraglider. There are special maneuvers like "small ears", B-Stall, Spiral, .....As far as I habe read about jsbsim this is not possible out of the box, so I would have to write a completely new fdm.ATMOSPHERE: Upwashs are very important. Best thing would be to calculate the local wind directly from the scenery, a global wind direction (for the dynamical upwash) and the location of the sun (for the Thermal upwash). I think there of something like a BEM that is solved before a simulation. SCENERY: The gobal model with a Pixelsize of 4 km is nice when xou fly mach 2, but with a Paraglider you stay a long time nearly at the same place. I'd prefer a Scenery that is perhaps only 10x20 km but which has a resolution of lets say 12 cm per Pixel. In Switzerland you can get Data with a map resolution of 12 cm per Pixel and hight map with a resolution of (not perfectly sure) 25 m per Pixel. I'd like to develop something in this direction: I have a rather good understanding in flight dynamics (especially paragliders) but I'm not a very experienced Programer. So what do you think? Am I crazzy? Are you interestet in Participating?greetings Hemmi7

Hi Hemmi7,I am no FlightGear developer but a user like you. Therefore don't take my words too serious.You mentioned a lot of things which really *could* be implemented in FlightGear *if* someone would do the work. This person should have good knowledge of FlightGear, the C++ programming language and much time. It is obvious that you don't have the requiered skills *now* but you could learn over the time.Or you simply wait until someone else is interested in modelling better Paragliders who has the necessary knowledge and you could partizipate with your (practical?) flight dynamics knowhow. The chance that this happens gets much bigger the more attractive FlightGear will become. Therefore, if you are really interested, start with some other work which is much easier to learn and do.What FG needs is an improvement of scenery by different custom and generic objects, ie. buildings, more different trees, other objects.Why not starting with 3D-modelling, doing some objects of your homeland and set it into your local scenery? Or creating some better European textures, especially of your mountaineous landscape?Then flying with airwaveXtreme150 or the paraglider http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/aircraft/index.shtml(what I have not tried untilnow) could be some joy until there are better models.We really need people who do some basic work for FlightGear, you mustn't start with the complicated things (as I did not).RegardsGeorg EDDW

There is a paraglider model available, but the FDM is just a quick hack I made in order to get the paraglider 3D model flying. You can make adjustments to the FDM by altering the forces specified therein (the configuration files are written in XML, so it's not that hard to make the changes yourself). The tricky part is in the flight controls I think.Let us know if you make any progress.As far as thermals go, they are available in FlightGear. The FlightGear thermals are cylindrical only, and don't lean downwind. You can place them anywhere you want. The Schweizer 2-32 model puts one over the tower at KSFO.Dave Culp