About Patu

The district of Patu is located in the mountain region of Rio Grande do Norte, an area of small scale subsitence farming, that initially was linked to the 'Ciclo dos Currais' in the 17th century. The first settlers of the area were the Cariri Indians.

Due to the historian Câmara Cascudo the name Patu means 'place of highlands' in the native language Tupi which is mainly used by the Cariri indians.

Why Patu?

Some time ago Fernando Pradi hit on an article in the "Air Magazine" that was about a 1.070km flight over the northeastern dry lands on a sailplane. This flight was made by Thomas Milko, who took off from Currais/RN and landed at Balsas/MA, obtaining the new Brazilian record for a declared distance flight.

This article caught Fernando's attention so he started to research flight peaks around the region and began to develop the idea of a record setting expedition. The first action was to get in touch with Thomas to obtain more data about the flight region and its topography. During the conversation Thomas mentioned the mountains of 'Serra do Martins', which he had flown over, and where he suspected there were some good spots for the practice of free flight.

The second step was to browse through the internet looking for information about the area, southwest of the state of Rio Grande do Norte as well as on other nearby regions such as the south of Ceará and the central part of Piauí which also seemed to present favorable weather characteristics for such an adventure. Analyzing all this material he came across the name Patu, which isn't located exactly in the 'Serra do Martins' mountain range area but presented good weather conditions for flying.

Finally Fernando had access to a North American study which showed the massive evaporation that happens around this area, one of the highest of Brazil. Evaporation is the basic principle for free flying because it is the evaporation that forms the thermals, ascending masses of hot air that sustain flight. It was the missing information that he needed to be sure that Patu was the ideal region to host the expedition.