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Planning your trip

The parts that go wrong before you reach a launch.

Entry

Kazakhstan operates a visa-free regime for a long list of nationalities, and Almaty (ALA) has direct flights from most of Europe, Turkey, the Gulf, China and Russia. We are not going to print a day count here as a fact: entry rules in this region changed twice in the last two years and the only source worth trusting is your own foreign ministry. Check it before you buy flights, and check Kyrgyzstan separately if you are taking the two-country trip — its visa-free window was cut to 30 days within any 60-day period at the end of 2025.

Insurance — the sentence that matters

Ordinary travel insurance excludes free flight, usually in a clause listing "hang gliding, paragliding, parachuting". You need a policy that names paragliding as covered and covers helicopter evacuation and repatriation. Almaty is better placed than anywhere else in the region for trauma care — proper hospitals within 40 minutes of the main launch — but an evacuation from the Assy plateau or from a gorge is still a helicopter charter, not a public ambulance.

Airspace and the AIP

This is the single most important paragraph on the page. You will be flying next to a major international airport, and Kazakh airspace is not in the app you use at home. The Kazakh AIP is the authoritative document. We brief boundaries every morning as we understand them and we mark what we are unsure about — that is a service and not a clearance, and a busted airspace next to an international approach is a category of problem that a good retrieval driver cannot fix.

Getting the wing here

Almaty (ALA) with connections through Istanbul, Dubai, Frankfurt, Seoul and Urumqi. Declare the bag as sports equipment, do not hide it, and travel with the reserve packed in the bag rather than in the cabin. We move bags between Almaty, the launches and the Kyrgyz border for the two-country trip.

Heat and altitude

Almaty is 35 °C+ in July, the launch is 10 °C cooler, and the air above 3,500 m is another matter again. The practical consequence is that summer flying happens in the morning and the middle of the day belongs to the shade. If you are arriving from sea level, plan the first two days low.

Language

Russian works everywhere; Kazakh is the state language and is increasingly present. Almost no ground staff in this industry speak fluent English — which is precisely why an English-speaking operator is worth something here, and why the flying-sites table above exists in English at all.