I understand that this will be a very challenging project to do, and I will definately get myself trained up before flying with an expensive plane and camera.

The shots will not involve actually tracking the bikers, but flying over them at a high altitude to get a view of the field and the bikers going through the trail on it (i.e. ariel shots).

I mentioned in my first post that a wireless video sender will send the video from the camera to a monitor on the ground, so the second person that is controlling the pan and tilt (if I decide to go that route now) can see exactly what the camera is seeing.

The rig will have to be transported between 3 countries (Germany, Switzerland, and France), but I assume the wings can be removed for transport and in all cases we will take a train or car to get from country to country. Once in the area we will take cable cars up to the top of the mountain, and my plan was then to re-assemble the plane (wings, etc.) and get shooting. There will be runways (flat patches of land) to take off from.

CGRetired, we're talking about downhill mountain biking (bicycle) here, where speeds of up to 50mph are quite easily reachable. It's going flat out down a mountain for a few kilometers and with a few hundred metres elevation difference between the start and finish points. Hard to believe, but very real.

Some of you have been mentioning that electric power would not be the best option for this project. Wouldn't using nitro make it much more complicated though (wÃ*th the tuning, fuel I need to carry around, maintenance, etc.)? I've never used petrol / gas before so I can't really comment on that, but I have heard that it's easier to tune and maintain...