Paragliders flight dynamics

Abstract

Paragliding has become popular in the last three decades, and the development of modern paragliders has shown considerable improvements on performance and safety. However, due to the sportivepurpose of paragliders, scientific studies on this subject are still rare. The achievements on paragliders design are mostly originated from industry, and, although there are many manufactures with years of experience designing paragliders, it cannot be found in the available literature worksdedicated on paragliders design theory. Taking in account the lack of specific information about paragliders engineering, a dedicate work inapplied flight mechanics has been developed with the purpose of explain paragliders flight, and specially the relations between flight characteristics and design parameters. The main aspects of flight dynamics as performance, stability, and controllability, are addressed applying the concepts from classical aeronautical engineering adapted to the specificity of these aircrafts. In this work, a complete theoretical assessment of paragliders flight dynamics is provided. This is supposed to provide a base for future developments using flight test data, and a first focused material in order to incentivize the international aeronautical engineering community to dedicate some attention to this particular branch.