XTRM Rally Flight — Explained

Seven stages. Around 200 km each. Across central Argentina, from the Río Paraná to the foothills of the Andes. ‍

No closed circuits. No repeats. No moving-map GPS in the cockpit.

Just you, your wing, a topographic map, and the decisions you make every hour you're airborne.

This is what you're signing up for.

The Format

Seven consecutive stages, point-to-point. A different Departure Aerodrome every morning. A different Arrival Aerodrome every afternoon.

Concordia (Entre Ríos) at the start, Mendoza at the finish — roughly 1,400 km of real cross-country flight running west across the country.

It's an FAI Category 2 championship, run under the FAI Sporting Code Section 10 and its 2026 Annex 4. Three classes are recognised:

PF1 — Foot-launched paramotor, solo — open class

‍PF1f — Foot-launched paramotor, solo — female sub-class

‍PL1 — Wheel-launched paramotor, solo

The Twist — Self-Sufficiency

This isn't a GPS-driven race against a virtual line.

The competition tablet you carry shows you the topographic map and route. It does not display your live position.

You navigate the way pilots navigated before glass cockpits: map in hand, ground features below, dead reckoning, and the judgment built up over years in the air.

Your phone is sealed by marshals before takeoff. Personal GPS, smart watches with nav, two-way radios — all prohibited. No coaching from the ground. No weather feeds in flight.

No information exchange of any kind during the stage.

You plan the route. You read the weather. You manage the fuel. You decide whether to push or to bank energy. You decide whether to continue or to land out.

Every stage, every decision is yours. That's the discipline.

Safety is layered in the background: live tracking runs to the safety desk, you carry an SOS button, the sealed phone is right there for genuine emergencies.

The seal exists for sporting integrity — never at the cost of safety.

What You're Scored On

Every stage day produces two scored tasks in the air — Navigation and Economy — plus optional Precision tasks on the ground in the afternoon.

There is no per-stage combined score. Each task scores independently and contributes directly to your Championship Total.

NAV — Navigation (0–1000 per stage)

The brain task. One per stage, chosen by the Competition Director from five FAI Category A formats and revealed in the daily briefing:

• 3.A1 Pure Navigation — "Turnpoint Hunt." Collect as many TPs as you can with limited fuel and time. Strategy decides this one.
• 3.A2 Precision Route — array of turn points, time-limited. Accuracy and collection both score. The ideal pace is rarely the fastest pace.
• 3.A4 Declaration Task — pre-declare your arrival times in quarantine. Fly your plan as accurately as possible. Self-knowledge of your aircraft is tested as hard as navigation.
• 3.A6 Snake — fly a defined corridor faithfully. Hidden gates score it. Pure stick discipline.
• 3.A7 Unknown Legs — search for ground features from briefing photos to unlock each next leg. Map-to-ground correlation under pressure.

ECO — Economy (0–1000 per stage) — The IEV

This is where XTRM Rally Flight does something new.

Most economy tasks reward whoever stays aloft longest on a tank — which in practice favours the pilot who can shut the engine off and thermal best. That tests free-flight skill, not paramotor performance.

The Flight Efficiency Index (IEV) measures something honest: the integrated rate at which your engine-wing combination converts fuel into useful cross-country progress.

IEV = (km flown / kg fuel burned) × (km flown / hours airborne)

Three measurements: the distance you actually flew (your real GPS track, detours included), time airborne, and fuel mass consumed — paramotor weighed at the DA Weight Station before takeoff and at the AA Weight Station the moment you land.

Best IEV in your class on the stage scores 1000. Everyone else is normalised against you.

The strategic tension: pure speed burns fuel disproportionately. Pure economy bleeds your time score. There's a personal optimum somewhere in the middle — specific to your engine, your wing, and the stage conditions.

Only you can find yours. That's the central decision of every stage.

PRE — Precision (250–500 per task)

Standalone events at the AA in the afternoon. At least three are run across the Championship, drawn from four FAI Category C formats:

• 3.C1 Precision Take-Off & Landing — clean takeoff bonus, then engine-off spot landing on a 25 cm bullseye.
• 3.C12 Bowling Landing — engine off, glide ≥ 60 s, knock down five foam pins on touchdown.
• 3.C14 Precision Wing Control — kick stick, land, kill the wing dead, relaunch, kick stick. Fastest time wins.
• 3.C15 Wing Control + Ground Handling — same idea, harder. 200 m course with mandatory ground-handling demo.

Short, sharp, public. Where wing craft earns its place.

How It Adds Up

Total = Σ NAV + Σ ECO + Σ PRE

Across the seven stages, the theoretical maximum from in-flight tasks is around 14,000 points (7 × NAV + 7 × ECO, up to 1000 each). Add roughly 750–1,500 points from the PRE programme.

Highest Championship Total in each valid class wins. The title is awarded if at least three stages have been completed with both NAV and ECO scored.

Who Wins

Not the fastest pilot.Not the most economical pilot.Not the slickest landing technician.

The pilot who can navigate without a moving map, find their personal speed-economy optimum every day, stick a 25 cm bullseye in front of a crowd in the afternoon, and do it again tomorrow — across seven days, across a continent.

If that's the kind of flying you want to do — the door is open. Register.

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