Paraglider flies 143 kilometers
ANTALYA - Demirören News Agency
A 32-year-old Turkish paraglider has flown around 143 kilometers from the Aegean province of Muğla to the Mediterranean province of Antalya.
Akif Emre Gürer, who took off from Muğla’s Mt. Babadağ at an altitude of 1,965 meters, completed his 143-kilometer flight on the Konyaaltı coast in Antalya and captured those moments with a GoPro camera.
“I am happy to reach my destination. My flight was extremely difficult, because the flight route has not been tried before,” said Gürer, adding that the flight took 6.5 hours.
Having different wind conditions in various regions and altitudes, severe turbulence in some places, and the lack of places in the mountains where emergency landings are required were the risky aspects of the flight, according to Gürer.
Gürer also pointed out that the most important detail of a long flight is to raise the altitude of his parachute by catching the rising hot air currents called “thermals.” “We use the thermals like birds on our long-distance flights.”
“With the help of the thermal I found on [Mt.] Beydağları, whose peak is 3,000 meters, I took my parachute to 3,900 meters,” Gürer said.
Noting that he had made two attempts on the same route in previous years but made an emergency landing due to bad weather conditions, Gürer, who discovered paragliding while he was studying at Istanbul’s Yıldız Technical University and has been participating in flights for 13 years as a professional instructor, said, “The knowledge we gained in the two flights we made in the previous two years has been very useful this season.”
The world record in long-distance paragliding belongs to Sebastien Kayrouz from the U.S. with a 613-kilometer flight in Texas, while the record holders in Türkiye are Hüseyin Tanrıverdi and Serdar Tur, who flew 368 kilometers from the capital Ankara to the southern province of Mersin.
