The Free Flight Physiology Project is led by Dr Matt Wilkes, University of Portsmouth.
The group was founded by doctor and paraglider pilot Dr Matt Wilkes and physiological ecologist Dr Lucy Hawkes (University of Exeter) in 2015. They decided to fuse Matt’s work in altitude and remote medicine with Lucy’s experience of studying extreme animal migrations to investigate the beautiful and fascinating world of free flight.
A huge number of generous and talented individuals and organisations have been involved in the research so far, including the Aerospace Medical Association, BHPA (Dave Thompson), RAF Centre for Aviation Medicine (Dr Pete Hodkinson), Cloudbase Mayhem (Gavin McClurg), Cranfield University (Dr Rebecca Charles), Cross Country Magazine (Ed Ewing), DHV, Escape Paragliding (Jocky Sanderson and Chris White), Flugschule Hochries (Jessi Barlow), Flybubble, Flyeo (Malin Lobb and Fabien Blanco), Flymaster, Free Flight Research Lab (Michael Vergalla), Hexoskin, Lanarkshire and Lothian Soaring Club, McMaster University (Prof Martin MacInnis), Outdoors Company, Ozone Chabre Open, Rab Equipment, Paraflysim, Royal Aeronautical Society, Scottish Hang gliding and Paragliding Federation, SEARCH Projects (Tom de Dorlodot and Horacio Llorens), Stoward Scientific, Summit Oxygen, Sup’Air Paragliding, Thames Valley Hang gliding and Paragliding Club, University of Exeter (Dr Lucy Hawkes), University of Portsmouth (Professor Mike Tipton, Dr Heather Massey, Dr Clare Eglin, Geoff Long), Verbier Summits, VuAir (Andre Bandara).
How the project is put together
The Free Flight Physiology Project has never had a payroll, an office or a department of its own. It works because a small number of people carry a piece of it alongside their day jobs, and because a much larger number of pilots, clubs and academics lend time, equipment and expertise when a study needs them. That structure has obvious drawbacks — things move slowly, and a field campaign lives or dies on whether four people can get the same fortnight off — but it has one great advantage: nobody involved is doing this for a career reason, so the questions we chase are the ones pilots actually ask.
Day to day, the work divides into roughly four kinds of role: clinical and physiological expertise, instrumentation and data handling, the pilots who volunteer as participants, and the people on the ground who make a field day possible at all. Almost everyone does more than one of them.
Pilot cohorts and field volunteers
The project would be impossible without the paraglider and hang glider pilots who volunteer as research participants. They fly with chest straps, data loggers, finger-mounted pulse oximeters and, on the harder studies, a metabolic mask that nobody would choose to wear. They fly in competitions, on guided trips and on ordinary club days, and they accept that a proportion of their flights will be spoiled by an instrument fault or a calibration that has to be redone.
Field volunteers fill the essential non-flying roles. On a typical project day a small ground team coordinates launches, watches the weather window and records flight times. Retrieve drivers cover a great deal of ground for no scientific glory at all. Local club members supply the launch and landing site knowledge that no map provides, and safety marshals keep landing areas clear while a distracted, heavily instrumented pilot comes in.
- Pilots wearing physiological sensors during normal, unmodified flights
- Retrieve drivers and ground support crews
- Weather observers and launch marshals
- Local club contacts helping with site access and permissions
Students and academic collaborators
A good deal of the analysis is done by postgraduate and undergraduate students, for whom this work is a first real dataset rather than a tidy teaching exercise. Field physiology data is noisy, incomplete and awkward, and learning to handle it honestly — including deciding what to throw away and saying so — is a large part of the education. Several of the questions we now consider settled were first opened up by a student who noticed something odd in a tracklog.
Academic collaborators bring the laboratory half of the picture. Controlled environmental chambers, validated cognitive test batteries, near-infrared spectroscopy and human factors methods all come from partner institutions, and they let us check field observations against conditions we can actually hold still. That combination — a messy real flight and a clean laboratory simulation of the same stressor — is the strongest tool the project has.
Safety review and oversight
Research protocols are reviewed before any field campaign begins. Every study is run under the ethical approval of the collaborating institution, participants give informed consent and can withdraw at any point, and data is de-identified before analysis. Instrumentation is checked so that nothing we ask a pilot to wear or carry can foul a riser, block a reserve handle or interfere with a normal launch.
Oversight also covers the obvious tension in this kind of work: we are studying a sport by asking people to fly it while we watch. If a study design would push a pilot to fly beyond their normal limits, or in conditions they would otherwise decline, the design is wrong and gets changed. No dataset is worth an accident, and the project has abandoned planned sessions on exactly those grounds.
A lot of our work is self-funded: we are passionate about free flight, good science and safety. We have been helped by small grants from the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Universities of Portsmouth and Exeter, and support from Cross Country Magazine and Sup’Air. We would be incredibly grateful for any donations to help us with the cost of our research. Information on how to support us can be found here.