A V I O M E T R I C S

What we measure, and how we know it's right.

This page is for the people who need to look at our methodology before they take us seriously — test houses, certification bodies, university aero groups, journalists, and pilots verifying that the instrument they're being asked to fly is built on real physics. You won't find selling copy here. The rest of the site does that. This page is the working layer.

What we measure, and how

I instrument the wing for internal pressure — the air inside the canopy, sampled at the rate the canopy actually changes. The signal you get from that is direct. It moves before the wing moves. It moves before the harness moves. By the time a pilot feels a collapse beginning through the brakes, the pressure trace has been telling that story for tenths of a second already.

The hard part isn't reading pressure. The hard part is reading it while the wing is loaded asymmetrically, while the air around the canopy is changing faster than a barometer wants to update, while the pilot is moving, and while the sensors themselves are riding a fabric that flexes. We solved most of that in firmware. The rest we solved by flying it ourselves, in conditions we wouldn't have asked anyone else to fly in, and rebuilding it until the trace held up against video and against the pilot's own account of what the wing did.

Sensor positions and the structure of the certification dummy are held under NDA. We disclose them after a mutual non-disclosure is in place. Everything else on this page is public.

Founder profile

I'm a physicist. PhD in physics, postdoctoral background in IoT and sensor systems, and a paragliding pilot long enough to have packed a reserve I haven't thrown and to know which ridge I won't fly in the wrong wind. I built the first version of ParaBaro on my workshop bench in Belfast because the question I had — what is my wing actually doing in the seconds before it stops doing what I want — wasn't a question my vario could answer. It still isn't, on any vario you can buy.

The cross-section between physicist and pilot is not a marketing line. It changes what gets built. A physicist building this without flying would solve the wrong problem cleanly. A pilot building this without the physics would solve the right problem badly. The instrument exists because the same person had to live with both halves of it.

If you want to talk about the methodology, the open standards work, or a research collaboration, the route is at the bottom of this page.

Publications and conference talks

Content to follow as papers and talks land.

Patent pending — what's filed, what's public

A patent application has been filed covering the core measurement method. Publication is on the standard timeline, which means the application becomes publicly readable through the patent office in due course. Until then, the filing is real and the priority date is locked.

What that means in plain English: I can describe what ParaBaro does, what it measures, and why that matters. I cannot, on a public page, describe exactly where the sensors sit or how the certification dummy is structured. Those details are in the application and in our NDA-gated technical brief. If you need the technical brief, the path is through the Contact section below — research collaboration, not commercial.

We'll update this page with the publication number and a link to the published application as soon as it's available.

Contact for collaboration

This is not the sales address. The sales conversation lives on /partnerships. This route is for:

• Test houses and certification bodies interested in the methodology.
• University aero, aero-elasticity, and atmospheric science groups looking for industry collaboration or PhD studentship co-funding.
• Journalists working on technical paragliding pieces who want to see real traces and ask real questions.
• Researchers in adjacent fields — kite, parafoil, parachute, sail — who want to compare notes.