Hi Mark. The answer is they are not as good as ascending in person to 7000m but we will be climbing daily out there as part of our routine (and probably paragliding down to base camp each day as well to start the days work!) and we will be living and working at 4000m anyway. But the hypoxicators are our best solution to acclimatise us as high as possible, safely from our base camp allowing us still to work, test kit, modify stuff and fly. We will also be sleeping in a modified hypoxicator taking us up each night to 6500m and doing IHT (interval hypoxic trg) daily for 90mins at up to 7500m. We will have as many attempts as we need and the weather will allow- it is not uncommon to five or six clear summit days in a season...God willing.

Yes we will be trialling in the Alps- three aims: 1 test all the clothing, comms and oxygen. 2- go as high as the jet stream will allow us there. 3- undertake final extreme wetaher turbulence handling of the canopies. This is an adapted SIV style course. (Basically advanced paragliding manoeuvres.)

Hi Kathey, yes we have a parachute!...It is this paragliding canopy that keeps us airborne. The engine only provides us with the thrust to gain altitude under this canopy. Plus we have an emergency skydiving rig attached to us that would enable us to drop out of the entire paramotor if need be (if caught in hurricane force winds or major malfunction)- we would then freefall down until out of the jetstream and at an altitude where we can deploy the emergency chute and land at a survivable altitude...so the plan goes!