The First DVD from the SAT Team

The SAT DVD

This, the first DVD from the SAT team, features four of the team's most popular acro movies: La Maniobra, Attack, Republic and Elements.

Got all those? Well wait! There's a further nine videos (35 minutes) covering snowboarding, ballooning, base jumping, dunes, syncro and explosive acro action to keep you fired up on the non-flying days. All in all it's a total of 99 minutes of absolutely breath-taking flying and general lunacy!

Please note that this DVD is PAL only and will not work in North America NTSC formatted players. It works on most computer DVD players.

The SAT DVD
$44.95

The SAT DVD
Review by Hugh Miller

Now I’ve got absolutely no idea what lights your wick, but if you’ve got a beating heart and are remotely interested in flying then it’s a safe bet that the SAT boys’ new offing will come as an absolute flamethrower of a DVD.

It’s a safe bet that you will have heard of the SAT team. They’re the nuts that invented the SAT, their signature rodeo-spiral move, and have toured the world for the past five years throwing it down at acro events and festivals and converting the public to the excitement and drama of paragliding aerobatics. This DVD combines eight of their nine previous video releases with thirty-five minutes of fresh footage to make a whopping 99 minute long DVD.

In some ways The Sat DVD’s lower production values and occasionally shaky low-res footage make for a polar-opposite to Weismeier’s cutting-edge ‘The Race’ – but it all gels well into the overall loose vibe and latino lunacy of the film. The soundtrack is a well-selected smorgasbord of house, funk and breakbeats (that includes The Chemical Brothers, Macy Gray and The Prodigy) adding a huge amount of style to the sections. A favourite for me is the Midfield General’s ‘Reach Out’ over the Synchro segment– with Raul Rodriguez and Hernando Pitocco locked down into their spiral, occasionally bouncing leading edges as they wind in tighter and tighter until Raul’s leading edge breaks Hernando’s canopy in two, forcing him into a stall.

The SAT boys have earned their reputation through their progressive flying and continuous redefinition of paragliding’s physical boundaries, and this DVD is much more than a record of their achievements to date. The snowboard section is a total mind-blower. We see Raul tear up a ski resort, flying his 12 m glider like a snowkite at times, then launching and flying across to another slope, ollieing and riding his snowboard switch in the fresh powder. For anyone who’s experienced snowboarding and paragliding as separate magical experiences, watching this is like seeing a symbiosis of the two into one natural conclusion. At one point we see Raul fly serenely out, 500 ft above the mountain, the scenery slowing to a crawl with the height, his lines spread out like a spiderweb over the frame from the line-cam. He then spirals down tight before converting over a 10ft high fence, snowboards past several astonished skiers at mach 5, brakes hard to swoop over the piste’s opposite fence and then screeches to a halt in front of the ski station, spraying the outside diners with snow.

‘Como esta?’ asks a booming public address system.

‘Bien, bien!’ replies Raul.

I should coco.