You arrive at Taucho take-off with your heart racing with anticipation. The wind brushes your face, the Atlantic glitters below, and almost by instinct your hand reaches for your phone or that GoPro you brought from home so you don’t miss a second. It’s a completely understandable reaction, you want to keep this moment forever. But at Brisa we’ve spent more than 25 years accompanying first-time passengers into the air, and there’s something we learnt early on: the best memory of your paragliding flight is created when your hands are free and your attention is complete.
That’s why, when you book with us, we carry the camera. And it’s not just a rule: it’s the reason you’ll land with a genuine smile and a video that’s truly worth sharing.
Flight safety: the reason that admits no exceptions
A tandem paraglider flies with total peace of mind because every item attached to the harness is certified and properly secured. An action camera fixed to a selfie stick or a loose phone in a pocket breaks that guarantee. At several hundred metres up, any object that comes loose falls at high speed, and neither your pilot-instructor nor the team can predict where it will land: on the canopy, on another flight, or on a home in Costa Adeje.
What’s more, the Third-Party Liability Insurance that covers every flight, which at Brisa we always include at no extra cost to you, protects the certified equipment and official flight protocols. An external accessory isn’t part of that protocol, so it falls outside that cover. It’s a matter of consistency: if we boast a 5/5 star safety rating, we can’t make exceptions for what goes up into the air.
That’s why cameras, phones and selfie sticks brought by passengers aren’t permitted during the flight. It’s a condition designed to make your experience, quite simply, flawless.
Hands free, mind on the flight
Paragliding is, above all, a sensory experience. As you gain height from Taucho, silence takes centre stage: just the wind, the gentle rustle of the canopy and your own breathing. If at that moment you’re trying to frame a shot with your arm outstretched, turning your head to check the angle, or gripping your phone tightly so it doesn’t slip, you’re missing exactly what you came here to experience.
With your hands free, you can stretch your arms out as if flying like a bird, feel the air between your fingers and fix your gaze on the horizon. That’s the difference between recording your flight and living it.
Home video versus professional footage
Let’s be honest, a video recorded by the passenger themselves usually ends up with crooked shots, a finger covering half the image, excessive shake from the harness moving about, and often, whole minutes showing nothing but sky or the back of the helmet.
Your pilot-instructor, on the other hand, knows the terrain, the light and the exact moment for every manoeuvre. They know when to turn so that Mount Teide dominates the horizon behind you, when to approach the edge of the Barranco del Infierno and how to frame the moment your feet touch the sand at Playa de la Enramada with the Atlantic behind you. We use the latest generation GoPro cameras, with certified safety mounts and image stabilisation, to deliver a 4K result ready to share directly to your phone as soon as the flight ends.