While looking for Pilots for North Dakota I found a Facebook Group called “North Dakota Paramotor Pilots Community”. Through this group, I connected with Wade Stine and made arrangements to call him.
The next morning, we spoke by phone and he invited me up to Leonard, ND no far from Fargo and within an hour I was packed up and ready to roll. Several hours later after one fuel stop, I arrived at his home and was quickly situated with water and power.
After chatting for a while over a bear he decided we should give his motor a whirl since it hadn’t been started since the fall.
While I had tried one of these on before, this time I did a hang test and got feel how it responded to weight shifting. 2 pulls and the engine fired right up and ran perfectly. While for me this 312 had a fair amount of weight, for a talk strong guy like Wade it probably felt lighter than my own machine.
Wade then treated me to a homegrown T-Bone steak and excellent whiskey for dinner where we further chatted about paramotoring and wing handling before we turned in early so get an early start to fly in the morning with a small weather window.
Bright and early I unhooked my camper and we made the 20-minute journey to Casselton Robert Miller Regional Airport. There we secured additional witnesses and I quickly completed two flights so we could capture photographic and video evidence confirming the flight.
After completing the flight we traveled to the Leonard Firehouse where I would get to see the Fire Truck which had some history dating back to the Pentagon for 911-2001.
We were also met by Jan Russel who is a Cass County Reporter who interviewed me for a story that would be printed in the next edition.
Ultimately I produced three videos for Dakota. Make sure you watch the Sky Haven one and chasing the train.
