Georgii Schur
SkyMax Paramotors
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Dmitri Zyuzin
Iris Paramotor, LLC
Camano Island, WA, United States
Visionary, Designer, Manufacturing Specialist
Meet Georgii
Georgii worked as a Lead Director at a manufacturing plant managing around 100 employees in different departments. He was toying around with the idea of flying paragliders and paramotors with his boss (now business partner, Max) but there was never enough time. After his daughter was born, he realized that the nature of this work was occupying too much time and created an unacceptable amount of stress to be able to be there for his family. He decided to leave the plant in 2010.
After a couple of years Georgii called Max to see how the company was doing and Max offered for Georgii to take over a new project which involved building a new paramotor company from scratch. And so SkyMax was born with Georgii’s expertise and Max’s role as his advisor and mentor.
Georgii completed his paraglider and paramotor training in 2013 and quickly built a company that became one of the key players in the Russian market very quickly and sales became steady. The company had a plan to expand and grow rapidly, however, in 2014 Russia entered into a conflict with Ukraine for the first time which had a major impact on SkyMax and 2015 was a difficult year which resulted in difficulty making sales and required a major look at the company’s future. Around this time Georgii realized that they need to become a global company and introduced the SkyMax Expedition paramotor at Coupe Icare in 2017. Their company very quickly grew and they started making large amounts of sales all over Europe and developed and solidified their company name as a staple in the European paramotor market.
In 2018 the SkyMax Star was introduced to the world which is their most successful paramotor model which the company is most known for. Evgeny Stolyarov joined the team as the official test pilot which formed a solid foundation for Georgii to introduce his company and project in the US paramotor market at Endless Foot Drag in 2019. Since then they have successfully built a notable dealer network and became a prominent player in the US market with big plans to expand. Georgii has very ambitious goals and somehow manages to prove very resourceful in accomplishing them.
Recently (in 2022), Georgii moved SkyMax Paramotors has moved into a new larger facility and invested his time and money into more people and developing his production capabilities at SkyMax. Of course, in his downtime, as any real engineer, he likes to play with his new pet project: The Pulsar paramotor. We will be releasing more details soon but the Pulsar is basically ready for sale and we are excited to have some in the warehouse soon.
Georgii's Vision
The most important goals for paramotor design are weight reduction and simplicity, however, those characteristics alone are not enough to make a good paramotor. You cannot simply make the lightest paramotor possible (many have tried) because you sacrifice other important variables like strength and stiffness. When you try to make things too light, they start to break down.
The trick is to simplify and reduce weight without compromising strength. Georgii’s latest project (the Pulsar paramotor) has achieved a 20% weight reduction without notable compromise in rigidity. The Pulsar has become his pet project and is a perfect Symbol of what happens when you reduce something to its fundamental elements and create something simple and elegant but fully functional. This is an admirable achievement not many paramotor manufacturers are capable of.
Artist, Computer Specialist, Engineer.
Meet Dmitri
Dmitri is very difficult to place in a box. His whole life he had a hard time fitting in within the norm of society and would much rather spend time writing malicious programs and pulling very questionable pranks in school at the expense of receiving barely passable grades and getting expelled. However, a few classes in particular had a profound and long-lasting effect on the rest of his life. In particular, Material Science, Photoshop, Engineering and Wood Shop received Dmitri’s undivided attention and interest. Dmitri found interest in tinkering instead of just about everything else. He built sketchy homemade CNC machines, learned to program computers, got into music production and performed shows at festivals and clubs while in parallel pursued his art and sculpture. Over the years Dmitri became a master maker and built experience in just about every field of technology.
Around 2009 he got an opportunity to help a new startup engineering firm as a programmer and took on several large engineering projects as well. The firm did several complex installations for a military sub-contractor which involved high-voltage sensors, linear motion, 3d laser scanners and all sorts of other complex technology. In 2011 he started a new job at University of Washington at a small research department working with large databases, building servers and looking at traffic data.
In 2015 Dmitri bought his first house but rather than being normal like everyone else, he got a small cabin in the middle of a mountain in the Cascade Mountain foothills to pursue his art and music while working around 30 hours in the research lab. The move was symbolic more so than practical especially considering that the cabin was only snowmobile accessible during the entire winter season. It was a decision to follow his dreams.
Around this time he got into working on cars after buying a turbocharged Subaru WRX which developed a lot of the experience which ultimately led to building paramotors. Dmitri learned to build car engines, TIG welding, custom fabrication, performance tuning and essentially went on to built a race car in his gravel driveway.
All these symbiotic skills and experiences became aligned one day in one very specific moment. While driving home Dmitri remembered watching a paramotoring video a long time ago (yes, it was one of the old Tucker Gott videos) but at that time he dismissed the idea with the typical “it’s probably not for me, not at this time” thoughts. However, this time was different. There was a large open field in the community. There was a large mountain in the background. This was going to be the place he would learn to fly.
Dmitri started studying paramotors and with an engineer’s eye very closely analyzing different models that exist. It quickly became apparent that most units have made some very scary design decisions and there was not a single one that he could find that he wanted to buy so he decided to make his own. In 2017 Dmitri took his first flights, self-taught, on a modified farm equipment engine on a heavy frame (precisely the wrong way to get into this sport). He didn’t meet another pilot or see a paramotor in real life until almost a year later but eventually got certified in paragliding and paramotoring and started flying any wing and motor he can get his hands on and over the years becoming a very experienced pilots and getting his tandem certification and after multiple prototypes he realized that building paramotors is precisely what he was going to do for the rest of his life.
In winter 2018, the Iris Paramotor prototype was born and Dmitri sold his cabin and invested all of his extra money into a CNC machine and developed a series of paramotor accessories which were the foundation for the new company called Iris Paramotor which launched in 2021. The entire project was built to fund the development of his paramotors. For three years now the design has been refined, simplified and improved using modern engineering tools and technology. And so the Iris Infinity paramotor was born.
Dmitri's Vision
Technology has advanced in the recent years greatly. The majority of the paramotor industry didn’t. If you can’t adapt and learn new things, you will not survive in this industry. We have exceptional design tools at our finger tips. Tools that allow us to optimize designs for strength and predict how they will behave under load and in flight. There is no excuse in today’s world to built paramotors and without any real testing, send them out in the field to fail in flight under even light maneuvers. Too many manufacturers do this and too many paramotors fail putting the pilots at risk. I strive to engineer every critical paramotor part to withstand the conditions we face as pilots. I will continue doing extensive testing on every single part and striving to improve and advance paramotor technology into the next chapter instead of being stuck in the past.
The Westcoast Paramotors Project
SkyMax has made a really strong impression in the US market, developed a reputation through their dedicated dealer network and became an established player in our community. However, logistical problems with shipping times, unreliable deliveries and no central warehousing in the US created a less than perfect experience for some of the pilots. One of the biggest challenges was supplying engines for the paramotors and SkyMax realized that it is a problem that is very difficult to solve without help from someone within the US. Dmitri had similar challenges. Engines were fairly simple to get in the US but many brands were unreliable and most took a very long time to deliver at the shop to install on paramotors. For some time Georgii was looking to find a partner to work with in the US and around the same time Iris Paramotor started to grow as a company and working hard on the Iris Infinity paramotor project. It was not long before one of the SkyMax dealers connected Georgii and Dmitri and after almost a year of regular talks a new vision was formed!
It was an unexpected solution to many of our problems and over time we realized that together we can accomplish much more than we ever could by ourselves if we simply combine our resources and time and build a this new company. We worked together to partner up with Vittorazi to become one of the four main distributors in the United States. This project will not be easy and being a new company it will be very difficult to match the level of service that is offered by other fellow distributors such as SkySports, Glidersports and Aviator but we will work very hard to build a great company together and hire an amazing team to bring you some of the most innovative paramotors on the market while also offering exceptional service for Vittorazi engines and many other products.
