We are passionate about free flight, good science and safety. A lot of our work is self-funded, done for a love of life in the sky, so we would be incredibly grateful for any donations to help us with the cost of our research. We believe in what we are doing, and hope that it will be of help to our community of free fliers.
If you would like to help, the simplest way is to get in touch through this site and tell us what you have in mind. Money is useful, but so are loaned equipment, a hill to test on, statistical help, translation, and pilots willing to fly instrumented.
We would also love to hear from you if you wanted to discuss other ways of supporting the project.
Where Your Contribution Goes
We are often asked what a donation actually pays for, and the answer is a mix of small but essential running costs. A typical month involves maintaining our network of weather stations at remote launch sites, replacing worn-out anemometer cups and wind vanes, and keeping the data loggers powered and calibrated. We also have to pay for server space to store and back up the flight tracks, meteorological data and safety reports that our community shares with us. Without this infrastructure, the research would simply stop.
Whenever possible, we publish our findings in open-access journals so that everyone can read them, and those publication fees are not insignificant. A single paper can cost several hundred pounds in article processing charges. Donations also help us buy consumables such as cable ties, batteries, tape and repair materials for our test wings. To give you a better idea, here are a few examples of what different levels of support can cover:
- Covers a replacement windsock and the mounting hardware for one launch site.
- Pays for a full year of cloud storage and off-site backup for our flight data archive.
- Contributes towards the purchase of a new GPS vario for instrumented flight testing.
We keep a simple spreadsheet of income and expenditure, and we are happy to share a summary with any donor who asks. Full transparency is important to us, because we know that trust is earned, not assumed.
Volunteering Your Time and Skills
Money is not the only way to help. We are a small, part-time team, and there are many tasks that we simply cannot get to every week. If you have skills in data analysis, programming, meteorology or technical writing, your time could be just as valuable as a financial donation. For example, we often need help cleaning and validating large sets of GPS flight logs, checking them for sensor errors or missing timestamps before they can be used in our models.
You do not need to be a scientist to make a difference. Practical help with maintaining our equipment is always welcome, whether that means repainting a weather station mast, sewing a repair on a test harness or testing a new radio at your local hill. We can provide clear instructions and remote support, and many of these tasks can be done from your own home. Every hour of volunteer time frees up our own hours for the core research work, and it brings more people into the project in a meaningful way.
If you would like to offer your time, please get in touch using the contact email above and tell us a little about what you enjoy doing. We will do our best to match you with a task that suits your skills, your available time and your interest in free flight.
Donating Equipment or Materials
We are always on the lookout for used but serviceable equipment that can be repurposed for research or field testing. Old variometers, GPS units, radios, anemometers and even complete paragliders that are no longer safe for regular flying can be extremely useful to us. A wing that has lost its porosity for a pilot can still be used on the ground to test line measurements, harness geometry or deployment systems, without ever leaving the workshop.
Rescue parachutes past their repack date are another example. We use them for drop tests and deployment studies, which teach us a great deal about how opening characteristics change with age and packing technique. Scrap metal tube, stainless steel cable, carabiners and pulley blocks are all recycled into mounting brackets and test rigs. If you are clearing out your garage or your club's storage room, please think of us before throwing anything away.
We are also grateful for consumables such as zip ties, duct tape, heat-shrink tubing, batteries and paracord. These small items are used constantly and cost more than you might think over a year. If you have a box of odds and ends that might be useful, send us a photo and we will let you know if we can put it to work.
Participating in Our Research
The most valuable contribution of all is often your own flight data. Every flight you log on a GPS vario contains a wealth of information about air movements, thermal strength, wind gradients and pilot decision-making. If you are willing to share your IGC track logs with us, even anonymously, you are directly helping to build the datasets that underpin our safety recommendations. We are particularly interested in flights from sites that are under-represented in our current data, such as coastal soaring sites and high alpine launches.
We also run occasional surveys about incidents, near misses and equipment failures. These are short, anonymous questionnaires that take only a few minutes to complete, but the aggregated answers give us a much clearer picture of the real risks in free flight. Your honest account of a scraped landing or a collapsed wing is not just useful — it is essential. Without data from the community, we would be guessing, and guesses do not save lives.
For pilots who are interested in going a step further, we sometimes need volunteers to act as test pilots for new safety equipment or revised procedures. This always happens under controlled conditions, with full briefings, and at your own pace. If you would like to be added to our list of potential test pilots, or if you have a story to share, please reach out. The sky is a shared space, and the science behind it belongs to all of us.