Every year the El Yelmo International Air Festival colors the skies of the Sierra de Segura. The first weekend of June you can enjoy in Cortijos Nuevos, next to the landing of El Yelmo, first class air shows, flight fair, cinema, paragliding and paramotor concentration, music, etc. A packed schedule with activities during the day and night, for pilots and visitors, large and small. All are part of the great show that every year gives us the El Yelmo FIA.
The XIX El Yelmo International Air Festival was officially presented this weekend with an intense program of first class air shows, which has included Army exhibitions, acrobatic paragliding and paramotor shows, humor shows, music and the Andalusian Championship of Drones, in addition to a free concert that will be in charge of the band ‘Aurora and the Betrayers’.
This 2018 edition, started on Friday, June 1, under the tutelage of local, provincial and regional authorities, which highlighted the positive impact of the event on the local community and its good future prospects.
The programming of this 2018 included the Paramotor Freestyle, the eleventh edition of the motorized paragliding stunt competition; a mixture of competition and exhibition in which we could enjoy outstanding pilots of the Spanish National Team. Along with the presence of twenty outstanding pilots worldwide in charge of acrobatic exhibitions, including Horacio Llorens, Raúl Rodríguez, Nicola Donini, Thomas Migneaux, Ramón Morillas, Beatriz García, Manu and David Tejeiro, among others, in this nineteenth edition of the Festival the aerial exhibitions were boosted -one of the Air Force’s model aircraft patrol and another of a large AB 212 helicopter of the Navy, which conducted a rescue and flight training on the FIA’s premises.
This year, the French adventurer Antoine Girard was the guest of honor to leave his mark on the Paseo de las Estrellas of the flight in El Robledo, which pays homage to the leading figures of free flight worldwide. Girard also presented his film “Envol vers les 8000” at the Film Festival and spoke about his journey in the Himalayas where he broke the paragliding height record by climbing to more than 8000 meters.
Horacio Llorens, delighted the audience with a talk entitled “From Chinchilla to the Aurora Borealis” a story about his career from his beginnings in Albacete to adventures in the most unexpected places, such as flying in paramotor under the northern lights. On the other hand, César Canudas, presented a talk in which he revealed the different flights that are on this island of the Mediterranean, from coastal slopes to confluences or flights through the Sierra de Tramuntana.
The delegate of Culture, Tourism and Sports of Andalusia, Pilar Salazar, said that “the great achievement of this festival is to add a very interesting cultural and sports proposal to the magnificent enclave”. “The organizers have placed a strong bet on offering a sporting event of high quality, which attracts many participants and which has become the main free flight event in southern Europe,” she concluded.
The festival is always a place to find old and new friends, but this initiative will allow us to tighten the bonds between the flyers attending the event and generate a space where everyone is, we can see each other’s faces and have a good time together.