Episodes

Ovcharov hails from Sofia, Bulgaria who's background is in acro but he's about as all-purpose as you can get in the realm of free flight. He's passionate about wing suit base jumping; he just competed in the UAE Hike and Fly Championships in Dubai; he won the overall XContest this year chasing huge distance in Brazil and around the world; he competed in this year's World Championships in Argentina and still holds the world record for Infiniti tumbling. We talk in detail about his amazing year, t...

World Cup Competition pilot Johanna Hamne had a very big year. She had a daughter, and when she was 8 months pregnant she broke the Nordic FAI record. That's not a mistype. She was 8 MONTHS pregnant when she flew the biggest triangle in the Nordic countries! You will love this story. But that's just the start. Johanna is a regular on the World Cup circuit and brings an always-smiling face to our sport. We delve into how risk tolerance changes (or doesn't) after you have a baby, competing after y...

Clemens Ciepek is an Austrian Sailplane pilot who lives in Boulder, Colorado. He's the president of one of the premiere gliding clubs in the world and runs a website dedicated to spreading knowledge and improving pilot ability called "Chess in the Air" that is filled with fantastic in-depth articles that cover the full gamut of flying. Why do some pilots improve very slowly and others get good really fast? Clemens says it's in the approach. We cover the value of using the Condor flying simulator...

Peter Zaccagnino is an aviation Hall of Fame pilot; 4 X Air Racing Gold Champion; has flown over 23,000 hours in more than 270 aircraft, flight tested more than 685 and even built three of his own. Peter's company, High Performance Aircraft Group manages several corporate jets, provides his clients with custom-tailored, high-intensity world tours, and performs flight test services for several manufacturers, including the U.S. and foreign militaries. He’s also the film producer of multiple Discov...

Hannah Jane Williams is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. For eight years she's been studying soaring birds across the spectrum to figure out why birds do what they do and when they do it in the air. For birds, soaring is a delicate game of balancing energy and reward. Flapping takes energy. Energy requires food and getting food has risk. Do birds practice? Do they every soar just to play? How often to birds make mistakes? How do they ...

This week we're doing something a little different. It has been proven that our minds don't know the difference between a real experience and visualizing an experience. Olympic athletes, race car drivers, elite ski racers, golfers- you name it, the best of the best across the sport gamut visualize themselves doing their thing. It takes practice, but the results are proven. Going out and flying to improve is still the best way to get currency, but if you're hurt, or the weather is bad, or you jus...

Kirsty Cameron has been a member of the British team many times. She's been flying high-end 2 line gliders for over 10 years and put a ton of energy and time into competition flying since she began flying in the late 90's. This year with travel being difficult and her 4 year old son vying for more her time Kirsty decided to dedicate her flying time to chasing big distance at home in the UK. She nabbed a couple records this year (see below for the links) and has found a new, super fun outlet for ...

Jonny Durand is a long-time Red Bull sponsored hang gliding pilot who's been ranked #1 in the world multiple times. We've all seen the incredible footage of Jonny flying the "tsunami" morning glory phenomenon that sets up in Northern Australia, but Jonny has been chasing the sky crack in many different ways since his early days more than 20 years ago. He's chased the world distance record in Texas and Brazil and came up just shy of the record from Zapata on that fateful day back in 2012 flying w...

Want to listen to some crazy stories? Eduardo Garza (Team Mex 1) competed in his second Red Bull X-Alps this year. Eduardo has also competed in two X-Pyr's, and he's done all of it while working full time in a very intense and demanding engineering job. Most X-Alps pilots are full time, sponsored professional athletes. Their work is flying paragliders. And most of those who do well in the race also live in and regularly compete in the Alps. How does Eduardo go about finding an edge against the b...

I've had my friend and mentor Bill Belcourt on my mind a lot lately. He managed to handily win the US XContest this season with a series of impressive, committing, deep flights in the Intermountain west while juggling two professional jobs and being a father and husband; and he won a task at the XRedRocks hike and fly race last month and nearly took 1st place overall, proving there is no need for a masters category even when races are extremely physical. For this show we went back to the archive...

Thad hails from Minnesota, just sold a successful musical production company and is addicted to flying. The holy grail in the US has been the 200 mile mark, a distance very few pilots have pulled off and Thad has chased it hard for years. His chase has taken him through the full arc of what you have to learn to send, an arc that of course never ends. This spring he pulled it off in the flats of the MidWest with a 228 mile (very cold) beauty. A little while after he pulled it off he sent me an em...

Burkhard Martens is one of the most-recognized names in the sport. His seminal work, "Thermal Flying", first published in 2005 is the world’s best-selling guide to the art of thermalling and XC flying. Cross Country’s team has been hard at work thoroughly revising and updating the text, line by line, and the design and photography has been refreshed to bring it bang up to date. I sat down with Burki a few weeks ago to talk about his new edition, what's changed since 2005, and the meat of the boo...

Veteran Gin test pilot, designer, European champion, and multiple-time German team member Torsten Siegel has been racing paragliders for nearly 30 years. He designed for UP Paragliders and then Swing before moving to Gin over a decade ago and has left an indelible mark on the sport since the early 90's. I spoke with Torsten immediately after this years Superfinal in Disentis, Switzerland to get his thoughts on the first superfinal that's been held in the mountains and to get his thoughts on all ...

I met Wally Arcidiacono on the comp circuit quite a few years back and have been trying to connect with him for awhile now for a show. Wally is a keen comp pilot, started a paragliding school in Bright, Australia back in 2010 and has turned a passion for flying into a way of life. What kind of headspace should we bring to competitions? How can we play this beautiful game with more aplomb? How should we approach the long game? What can we learn from the masters? Why does the local hero never take...

Justin Grisham is an emergency medical physician, wilderness medical expert, and search and rescue volunteer who wants to get our flying community better prepared for dealing with emergencies in the field. In this fascinating and note-worthy episode we brush up on some of Justin's free-flight first aid curriculum: medical decision making, common paragliding injuries (what you can fix, what you can't), the primary assessment, secondary assessment, heat and cold injuries, the use of narcotics and ...

My training took place during one of his SIV clinics with a bunch of very new students so I got to watch his team and his methods in action and came away super, duper impressed. In this episode Dilan shares why we don't have any kind of standardized training in the US and much of the world and why that needs to change; why so many pilots quit the sport too soon; why so many pilots choose the wrong wing during their progression; the dangers of "risk homeostasis", especially in free flight; why ha...

This year's Red Bull X-Alps, if you could put it in a word- scary. We didn't have a single "standard" day of flying with light wind, nice cumulus, and good base, unless you count the Prologue! We had incredible heat the first three days, low base, wind and stable conditions, then the thunderstorms started, strong Fohn from the South and North, window-breaking hail, severe lightning and really, really strong wind for the remainder of the race. Every athlete I spoke with at the awards at the end h...

I sat down for a special edition of the Cloudbase Mayhem directly after the Red Bull X-Alps Prologue yesterday with my Salewa teammates Paul Guschlbauer, Aaron Durogati, Markus Anders, Chrigel Maurer, Simon Oberrauner, and Tommy Friedrich to find out how they are feeling going into the race, what they are most concerned about with the course, how they take care of their body for 12 days of pounding, how they train, what they changed coming into this race, funny stories from previous editions, cr...

In this episode we discuss how Maxime approaches training (physical and mental), his thoughts on just making better decisions instead of doing SIV for pilots who don't have the money or time, how to manage your emotions, how to thermal and glide better, dealing with the "mental pain" that sometimes comes with flying, finding the opportunities from mistakes, the importance of visualization, and we look back at a couple key moves that made all the difference for Chrigel in the 2019 race.

Mitchell McAleer properly crashed a hang glider on literally his first flight in the early 70’s. But he shook it off and was in the right place at the right time and had the right mentors and right attitude and eventually became the winningest aerobatics pilot in history. Southern California was one of the true meccas of hang gliding in the 70’s and 80’s. It was the home of UP during their reign with the Comet, remains the home of Wills Wing and was where Mitch took on the sport in his teens and...

Jeff Longcor has been flying only a few years and has a full time job, which makes getting hours tough, but he's completely enamored with the sport and has been chasing it hard, sometimes too hard. Jeff has made some inexpensive mistakes, and a few expensive ones. They've all provided volumes of learning, and his desire for the sport is as high as it has ever been. In this show we dig into all the little things that add up to help us all become better pilots, and in the end- better people.

Matt Scutter is an Australian competition sailplane pilot and software engineer who leads a team that runs the popular global soaring forecast platform Skysight. Unlike other platforms that use existing weather models to produce interactive forecasts for free flight enthusiasts like Meteoparapente and XCSkies, SkySight uses their own supercomputing systems to gather a wide range of weather data to create their own daily models. Initially designed for sailplane forecasting SkySight is now a go-to...

Urs Haari has been at this game since the game began. He got several world records early in his career in South Africa in the early 90's, stood on the podium multiple times at World Championships, PWC's and at the European Championships and brought home champion titles at the Swiss, AND US Nationals. This past season he won the sport class in the Swiss Cup Championship for the remarkable 5th time, and is now the permanent holder of this coveted award. Given he only gets to go XC 4 to 6 times a y...

Where do you start with Robbie Whittall? He’s one of only three...