Invasion of the Third Generation – Antoine Laurens The Movie

Antoine Laurens – Filmmaker, recounts:

It was in 2006/07, speed riding was just starting in the Alps. Antoine Boisselier had recently introduced it with a small production called “Attack at Powpow land”. Where I live in the South of France there is no snow… but we still wanted to ride. We had been speed riding in the Alps already and were looking for something a little bit more suitable for the kind of terrain we had around Millau : “flat top mountains, deep gorges and lots of high wind”.

We started exploring possibilities with these incredible new machines. Speed flying was born

‘Mini’ wings were just appearing on the market and the Dudek was one of the brands making a name for itself, with different sizes of the their “Zakospeed”. We got hold of a couple of 14m2, a 16 and 12 m2 and started exploring the boundaries of these incredible little gliders. Speed flying was born: Speed, reactivity and especially the impressive flair capability just like a parachute … The idea came from that and we immediately thought of speed flying through the gorges, under bridges and to end it all with a big flair in the water…. All the places we weren’t able to go with a regular glider; too sensitive, too fragile… That would be our signature and at Millau which was mainly a town full of retired people, this gave us the title of the film “Attack à Pepe Land” (“pépé” in French means Grandpa)!

Go-Pro! What Go-Pro?

There were no Go-Pro’s at that time and I was either flying with my camera strapped to the end of a long pole or taped to the side of my helmet. It was so heavy I had to strap a rock to the opposite side to get an even balance to stable the image!

Now this is the funny part

We got hauled up by the Chief Constable over the part where we rolled the bridge. He arrested us and took us away in his ‘beast’ of a car – a super souped-up Suburu !

Who should turn up a few months later but the very same same Police Officer. He’d contacted us to fly a tandem flight and thanked us, proudly showing the movie to his work colleagues nup until the moment where the camera had still been filming from the backseat of the car! Uh Oh! But he was chilled out about it had a great tandem flight anyway.

Antoine Laurens – Film maker

Pilotes : Jeff Thurel, Antoine Laurens, Denis Deltour, Sachit from Flying Babas.