Three 'adventurers' are planning to fly over Mt. Everest with Paragliders.
These are essentially a glorified lawn-mower engine with propeller strapped to your back and a floppy cloth sail 'wing' above you. These do look like fun when you are a few hundred feet above a nice mellow piece of land but in a jetstream, above a mountain? Not for me thank you...
Here is the team website: GKN Mission Everest
and here is an interview of one of the insane people trying to pull this off -- from The Telegraph:
Over the topIf they pull this off, they will have some insane bragging rights -- this is something that no one else has done and no one else will be doing for a long long time.
Bear Grylls is a man of his word. When he vowed never to set foot on Mount Everest again, he really, really meant it. What he didn't mean was that he never intended to breathe its rarefied atmosphere again. And he certainly didn't say that he would never enter its death zone again in another test of endurance.
He may have renounced climbing the world's highest mountain, but he didn't promise not to fly over it with a motorised rucksack on his back and a very large parachute above his head.
That is exactly what the 32-year-old adventurer plans to do in May: para-motor over the howling summit with a friend, wearing a little flying machine that looks as if it would hardly propel him to the cloud base over his Wiltshire farmhouse on a nice day.
Many people have told Bear (full name Edward Michael Bear Grylls) that this bid to glide into the record books is not a good idea.
Explorers don't call the mountain the "ceiling of the impossible" for nothing. But Bear has been fascinated with Everest since he was a boy and in 1998, aged 23, he became the youngest Briton to reach the summit and survive. Everest still holds him in its magnetic field of attraction.
"Well, I am returning, but with a very definite aim not to set foot on it again," he says, feeding logs to the open fire in his farmhouse.
"If I end up on Everest this time, I'm going to die. We have to stay in the clear air well above it at 32,000ft. Even if you survive a crash on the mountain, you are only going to live as long as your oxygen lasts, which would be a couple of hours.
"It's a very different expedition from climbing Everest, when the prize sometimes goes not to the bravest or the fittest, but to the person who can just stick it out. This one involves not only planning and training, but developing technical paragliding skills and really good judgement. As my dad used to say: instinct is the nose of the mind."
