31. Russ Ogden, a Masters Class in Paragliding - Russ Ogden

Well happy holidays everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. This one took us weeks to put together. As always, huge thanks to Miles Connolly for helping me edit these before we get into this truly fantastic master's class in paragliding with the great Russ Ogden. A few housekeeping items that I wanted to bring up. First of all, it's near the end of the year and your donations go a long ways to making this possible. So consider giving us a few bucks, which is tax deductible. You'll find that link on the cloudbasemayhem.com where you can send us those donations. Those of you that are donating, thank you so much. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. If you're not in a position to donate, just spread the word.

For those of you who listened to the Larry Tudor podcast, that was our most successful downloads yet. I think we had about 7,500 downloads, which is nearly double what we typically do. So yeah, spread the word. Get this out there. That's why I'm doing this podcast and there's so much great advice here from so many incredible pilots. So tell your friends to fly and give us a rating on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play or however you get your podcasts. Those kind of things go a long way. But yes, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And yeah, like I said, consider giving us a donation here before the end of the year and get a little tax write-off. A few episodes back, we talked about a rescue we had here in Sun Valley back in August.

And I put out some information about insurance, which I have learned wasn't quite accurate. Most of us these days are flying with a DeLorme or Spot. DeLorme has just been taken over by Garmin a few months ago. So that's actually going to change here in the next few months. It's going to be a Garmin device. But through both of those, companies, they offer GEOS SAR and then GEOS Medivac. We had learned that Medivac covered paragliding, but that's actually not correct. Neither of those cover accidents and paragliding. So if you're using these devices and expect a rescue from a paragliding or flying accident, skydiving, base jumping, that will not work with either of those.

So they're kind of useless to us. What you need, and these are not offered directly, from either the Spot or the DeLorme websites, is what's called, it's still a GEOS service, GEOS service, but it's called the High Risk Search and Rescue Benefit. You can find that online. I have promised that I'll put up a blog post about this. So basically what you need is just to make sure you're covered. But you can get that service and then add it to your DeLorme or Spot. So I'm actually working with DeLorme right now to make that just available through their website. So you can just buy it directly. And then you can get that service and then add it to your DeLorme or Spot. But until that time, make sure you have the right one. For those of you in the US and Canada, make sure you also have a supplement through like Life Flight. It's only 60 bucks a year here where I live. Fantastic thing to have.

Comes in very, very handy if you need a helivac rescue. And then also when you're traveling internationally, you need something like Seven Corners. You can get that also through my website. I'll be providing a link for that. So wanted to get you up to speed on that. Just be careful. You've got the right, the right thing. We are also still taking questions from you, our audience, for Bill Belcourt. I'm going to be driving down to Salt Lake here soon. I've got a bunch of great questions already in the can. But if you've got a question for the Yoda of the sky, please send them over to me either through the website or whatever. Facebook, Instagram, however you want to reach out is fine. I've got those in a folder and I'll get those down to Bill. And let's see, this talk, Russ Ogden, test pilot for Ozone.

Many, many, many time crusher in the world cups. Just an amazing pilot is actually the, he was the inspiration for this podcast after listening to a couple of talks he gave here back during the world cup in 2012 here in sun Valley, just an inspirational dude and amazing pilot and amazing human. He's been with Ozone for a long time. This is probably the most information dense podcast we have yet put out there. I implore you to stick through. The whole thing. And because it's the holidays, what we did with this one is Russ and I sat down for a good length of time about a month ago and did a recording. And then the next morning I got an email and said, Hey man, I think I can answer a couple of those questions better.

So we got back together a couple of weeks later. And in that time, I fielded a bunch of questions that came through pot through Facebook from you that were really terrific. So rather than string that all together as one podcast, what I've done, is we've kept the main, the first talk is the kind of the main podcast, the main talk. And then you'll hear me come in and say, thank you for listening and goodbye, goodbye. And then there's going to be a little Christmas bonus about another 45 minutes that goes into all those questions. And in that one, I really implore you to stick through that because in that one, we kind of revisit what he was talking about with the one class and CCC class. We revisit talks about the Zeno, their new two liner.

We talk about square versus round reserves. We talk about how to throw them. We talk about eliminating the biggest mistakes from your game, the importance of learning wing overs, the importance of stalls, the importance of SIV and dealing with fear, the difference between seat boards and not seat boards. Are they better? Are they worse? We talk about the Nova Phantom, Nova's new wing. We talk about flapping the land and all kinds of other things aspect of the wing and two liners and recoveries. So that part of the talk is really super critical. But I just implore you to stick with this one all the way through. The first talk's about an hour and 15 minutes. The bonus is 45 minutes. I hope you enjoy this on this most excellent holiday season.

Thank you 2016. You were really terrific. You were a little bit tumultuous, of course, here in the States. But without further ado, please enjoy this most terrific conversation with our new wing. the great Russ Ogden.

Russ, awesome to have you on the show. I think you've come up, we just put up, I think our 28th episode. I've got a couple in the can, but you've come up in just about every single one of these. And you were actually the impetus to creating this whole thing. I don't know if you knew that or not, but when you were here in 2012, and I was, I think, participating in the second comp I'd ever done. And we didn't have the best weather after the PWC. You got up and gave this insane talk that went, I don't know if you know this either, but it went incredibly viral that I just happened to be recording. I got really lucky and recorded it. And yeah, so that's what started the cloud-based man. Thank you.

Well, it's good to be here, Gavin. It's good to be here. And it's an honor to be here. And that whole episode that we did in Sun Valley was, yeah, totally unexpected and great fun. I was a little bit unprepared for it, really. I didn't really expect it to be videoed or to be on YouTube or whatever. And I was really hung over that day as well, because it was the day after we found Guy. That's right. And so I was a bit hung over, but I've covered up by the end of it, I think.

Yeah, no, it was a great talk. And I'd love to get into some of that, you know, two-liner talk here at some point. And actually, you know, by the way, I don't know if you've heard that one, Guy, on the show, I don't know, maybe a month and a half ago. And it was so awesome listening to his recollection of those days. Because, you know, when we found him, when you found him, and he went to the hospital, we never saw him again, for the most part. And so, you know, I saw him later on at the Superfinal after he'd healed up and stuff. But yeah, really amazing story. And so cool how that all came out.

Yeah, it was an inspiration for all of us, really. And a really amazing experience all around, I'd say. And yeah, memories that I will never, ever forget, that's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, but it was, you know, I mean, you say I found him, I did not find him. I think the whole community of Sun Valley found him. You know, there was so much, so much energy and force that went into that search. And I really don't think it could have happened in any other part of the world. And have so many people just give up. So freely and spend so much time and effort on finding someone. And, you know, as the days went by, I fully expected, as I think we all did, you know, just to be picking up a body and to find him alive was just incredible. Incredible. I'll never forget us both being in tears, flying back in the helicopter. But yeah, no, no, very special memories, actually.

Yeah, that's the bonus thing of being in a small town. You know, the town still talks about it. That was quite an event and just the happiest of endings. Russ, for those who don't know, who have had their head in the sand for the last maybe 20 years in paragliding, can you tell our audience, just can you give us the Russ Ogden brief, you know, catch us up to, you know, how it all started for you way back in the day. And, you know, I don't want to put you on the hot spot, but I'd love to hear, you know,

what you think about it. You know,

about some of your resorts. Yeah. Yeah. Can we give the, can we get the two minute life story?

Two minute life story. I guess for me, my whole love affair with the air and the sky started through my dad, who was, who was in the parachute regiment in the UK and did a lot of early of the early sport parachuting, early free fall stuff back in the sixties. And he even dabbled a little bit with hang gliders back in the day as well, but they decided it was just too dangerous back in the 60s. So my first route into the air was, was through parachuting. And I did a handful of jumps when I was 16 or 17. And then I started, and then my brother started paragliding when I was at university. And as soon as I left university, I knew that's just, I have to do that. And I did a course after I left university, I did my course and moved to the area where it was flyable and became an instructor.

And I did a course after I left university, I did my course and moved to the area where it was flyable and became an instructor. And then I taught paragliding with Sussex hang gliding and paragliding down in Brighton for, for 10 years before I moved over to France and worked with Ozone as a test pilot. And that brings us all up to date.

Well, there's, there's a little bit more in there. There's a whole bunch of years on the British team and a lot of incredible results. We could get into that a little bit, but we, I put up a, I put up a little, a little post on Facebook about an hour ago on cloud-based man that said I was going to be speaking to you. And does anybody have any questions? So let me ask the first one. You live in France and is it, you just told me the name of the town before we got on, but it's near Gruoliere. Is that right?

Yeah, we live in Barcelona, which is the same, it's the same town, same village that the Ozone office is based in. So I'm just five, 10 minutes from work.

And your, is your test site, is that right?

Yeah, we mostly fly at Gordons or Gruoliere or Col de Blaine. We were flying at Col de Blaine today. And La Chaine, sometimes we go to Roquebrune in Monaco, but mostly it's in Gordons. Okay. Pretty much every day in Gordons.

Okay. A very cool site. And it's one I flew quite a few years back.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a great site because it's, it's flyable all year round. And it's thermic pretty much all year round. And it's also very good for us because the air is, well, it's a double-edged sword actually, but the air is very rarely calm in Gordons. It's always quite choppy. It's moving all the time. So it gives us a good, a good air mass to check the behavior of the wings, to check the feel of the wings, the solidity of the wings and so on in moving air. On the other hand, sometimes we prefer if it was a little bit calmer so that we can get good proper testing done in, in calm air because when you're testing in very turbulent air, then you're, you're, you're having to filter out the movements of the wing and the movements of the air. So that complicates things slightly.

So take, Russ, take me through that a little bit. I was going to ask you something completely different, but let's stick with that theme for a bit. You're, you've been a test pilot for Ozone for how long?

11 years now, 11 or 12 years.

And without, without giving any away any of the secrets, you gave a really good talk here in Sun Valley about kind of how wing is built. And again, I'm not asking you to give away any secrets of how you guys take that through, but you know, what, what's your role there? How does that, how does that work? How does a, how does a new wing come to life? From

the old one, from the wing that it's replacing, you can think of paragliding development as a continuous line. It's a continuous stream from, from model to, from each version of each wing to the next. So for example, with the Delta, you, you, we start with the, we started with the addict and the Vulcan and then that evolved into the, the Vulcan evolved into the addict and the addict evolved into the Delta and the Delta one evolved into the Delta two and the two will eventually evolve into the three. So it's a long continuous stream. And so we basically, when we start a new wing, we know the type of wing that we want to make. We know the type of pilot that this wing is

so we don't really start from a clean sheet each time. We start from the last prototype, which is the final version that gets sold. And then it's, it's down to the designers, Luke, David, and Fred, who do the design work and they create designs. We normally would, would start with three or four different routes, three or four different designs with slightly different parameters, slightly different ways to go to try and experiment new things. And we will then work on those different lines of prototypes and eventually whittle it down to, to the, to the one that we want and that, or that are certainly that type, that family of, of, of prototypes that we, is the most interesting, achieves most of the things that we're trying to achieve.

And from there, we then refine, refine and optimize it. And so we get to something that we're, we're happy with and is passing the tests and is performing better and is good fun to fly and has good flight. And then we're ready with a finished product. Sometimes it happens quite fast. Other times it takes longer than we'd want.

And is there, is there kind of a, do you, do you have a baseline? Okay. We, the, this, this prototype, you know, going from the Enzo two to the three or the Delta two to the three, is that going to take 10 prototypes, 50 prototypes? You know, is it, is it how does it just totally depend on what, what class? No,

I think, well, it's, there's no hard and fast rule, but as a, as a basic rule, the more basic the wing is, the harder it is. And the more high performance it is, the easier it is. That's been the rule probably over the last 10 years. I think now it's changing somewhat whereby all the wings are getting more difficult to replace because all the wings are getting better and better. So the, to make improvements becomes, harder and harder. But no, we, we've always dreamt about the one prototype wing, the one prototype product, but I don't think it's ever happened. Certainly not since I've been with Enzo.

And what's your opinion on things like the, the one class? I know that, you know, things have changed pretty radically at the testing end of things in the last few years. CCC is going through some changes, I guess. You know, what's your, what's your opinion on that? Should we all be flying bees and racing and remove the, and remove this kind of, God, you have got to be on the best wing or you don't have a chance or are these great wings just way too rad to be given up on?

That's a tough one, Gavin. There's different, there's different opinions out there. My personal opinion, I used to be quite an advocate of, of the serial class. I thought it was the right way to go. I think with hindsight, and with hindsight, it was probably not the best way to go. And there's just so many, there's so much pressure in the competition world to make the wings good, that you always end up compromising something, which is not necessarily good for everyone else. My, my, my, my feeling now is that, that we should go back to open. Okay. I think, I think for the, for the World Cup level, for the World Championship,...type level....I think these, these, for the, for the really good pilots, it's, it's better

on open class wings and it allows more freedom for manufacturers to develop. It allows, things to move on a bit faster as well,

Is it,...less

restriction and less pressure on the lower classes.

Would it though, would it allow,

enough manufacturers into the game, I mean, is it, I mean, what I'm getting at here is that, you know, there, there really, you know, right now, there are three companies that are able to kind of work in this space obviously you guys are dominating that in a huge way right now how much of your resources and time go into that level of wing versus the wings that make money and and then tie that back to you know does it

probably a lot less than you would imagine or a lot less than most people imagine um for us the core the core um work is with our enbs our encs um they're our core gliders the rushes the buzzes the deltas they're the most important wings for us the mantra as well uh the enzo is is is our flagship it's it's the uh it's it's very much for the elite pilots and uh consequently we we don't get as much time as we would like to work on those but we're we're fortunate because we have you know we have luke who's really impassioned about it he's really into um making the best wings that he possibly can and passion drives us forward in that department um

but this year we this year we've been you know really concentrating on the delta um and but we've had the last and the xeno as well but we've had the last three the last couple of months where we've also been able to focus a little bit more on the delta and we've had the on the on the enzo but now that we've got a slightly larger team well there's five of us we can we can split our resources slightly and uh some can work on on some wings and others can work on other projects as well how

important is it um for a company to to have pilots kind of dominating or doing really well uh on the world cup does that do you see a direct correlation with with selling wings down the line and that's a good question i think it's a good question i this talk i i don't want to get us too skewed into just the wing side of things and ozone i really want to talk about you and flying and competitions but i think people find that interesting like does that is there is there a pretty close correlation because you see i've seen the argument two ways you know that if you're if you're not developing enzo and wings then that you know doesn't get passed down through the brand versus you know a company like nova that doesn't play in the competition side of things yeah exactly

and they're doing

they're doing pretty well in the b and c's

yeah they did extremely well because they've got good products in the other range no i think it all depends on the on the on your core products i think having a having a um good competition scene uh or a good competition reputation is is helpful and it certainly helped ozone take a step up that's for sure but it's not the be all and end all because the be all and end all is is on the product that you sell at the end of the day and if you've got a good competition you've got a good competition you've got a good competition you've got good product then you will sell and the more time you can spend on working on those core gliders the better you can make them so i think what makes a company successful or not comes down to the the the design team and and the gliders that you can actually produce if you see in the past you know many manufacturers have been very successful for short periods of time or periods of time and then their success wanes slightly and then comes back again with another good range or another good glider um and so every company has its ups and its downs and ozone in the last couple of years the last few years have been on certainly on the up that's for sure the difficulty and the key is to be able to maintain that and that comes down to making good gliders and replacing good gliders with better ones which is which is not always easy right

sure russ i'm going to take us completely sideways because i've got a question here that just came in on facebook and if i keep this up it's going to keep making noise and stuff and driving us crazy so uh here's a question from uh andre ferreira uh well actually it's for me he and it sounds like his wife first question from him uh being a new pilot with 70 ish hours and only a couple of 50 60k flights in the uk uh what's the best what's the best thing to work on through the winter months and next season to maybe get to get into his first comp in 2018 the

uk the best thing to work on in the winter is to fly every day that you can every day that is absolutely flyable that you're on the hill and you're doing it you practice your ground handling you get as good as you can at ground handling you get uh you try and get yourself to the top of the stack and you try and spend time on top of the stack and then once you're bored of being top of the top of the stack you then punt out in front of the hill as far as you can and

and get yourself back up again to the top of the stack and you repeat that also what you can do is practice ridge soaring with a bit of speed bar pushing the bar along the ridges and uh not nothing too crazy too fast too low but just getting comfortable using the speed bar i think that i think for most intermediate pilots the best thing they can do is actually get more comfortable with using the speed bar because now with the performance that we have on our wings using the speed bar for cross country is the way that you're going to maximize your speed bar so maximize your your days and extend the 50 60k flights and break the 100k barrier i'd

be interested to hear um your thoughts on speed to fly because we had uh josh cone had some really interesting thoughts on and i just interviewed kelly farina and his about his new book uh mastering paragliding he he had a kind of a nice thought but what what are your what can you pass along from that because i think especially when you're when you're at the PWC end of things uh very very good use of speed bars is totally critical um but i'd love to hear your thoughts on on speed to fly and then i've got to get off facebook because this thing's going to keep dinging i got one more question for me i think it would fail

out well i like to keep things extremely very simple when it comes to speed to fly i don't really use instruments per se to to to tell me my macready settings or anything like that i don't put my polar curves into instruments personally i don't think it actually means it makes any difference whatsoever um speed to fly is simple is if the day is on if it's good you should be flying at least half bar um if this is just normal cross country flying from the top of your thermal you should be at least half bar going towards your next thermal at least and then when you know there's a thermal in front of you for example you've got gliders or birds or something climbing or you've got a cubeless falling and growing and you're and you're and you're really you're

going to be flying at least

relatively high in the sky and you're certain you're going to get another thermal then you need to be going at least three-quarters speed bar um if you're on a high performance wing an end wing or a top end enc type wing then you should be going full bar and um and if you're if you're really trying to maximize glide then if you're going into wind i try and always match my normal ground speed which is 38 40k an hour if i can if i if i'm covering the ground at 38k an hour into wind then i'm going to be flying at least half bar going towards the top of your thermal you know i'm roughly doing about right and uh any any more complex than that and your it doesn't matter because what's important is rather than looking at your the speed to fly in your instrument is you should be sniffing out the the nice lines through the air that's much more important than than focusing too much on your instrument so i'm not a big instrument fan i don't use instruments a great deal and um most of the occasionally it inhibits me slightly but

85 percent of the time it allows me to free my mind and open my eyes a little bit to the sky and try and sniff out the good lines always trying to getting the good line through the sky the minimum amount of sink is is far better than worrying about the correct speed to be flying it i've

often heard um and i certainly have noticed this in my own flying i think the genius of somebody like a creagle is is exactly what you're talking about is the gliding um matt beachner talked quite a bit about gliding in his his podcast um i think as we get better we realize that thermaling is is pretty easy and gliding is very difficult and is very hard to teach um but do you have some words on on gliding you know it seems to me like you know the the really really elite pilots find those lines you're talking about more often than not um they're they're finding those seams stay in them um you know i for one i i have trouble with certainly feeling that seam when i'm using a lot of bar because i'm you know my hands are a little bit heavy and the bees and uh that's that's something i've been working on talk about that a little bit

no i again i keep it quite simple you the sniffing out the life if you get a good line then it's sometimes it's relatively easy to stay on it as long as you can because you know the lines kind of align themselves up or down um the trick to to is when you're not in the good line is to be able to get yourself back in a good line now sometimes you're in heavy sink and you're in heavy sink because you're just about to hit a thermal or you're just in a really sinky line and the key is to be able to recognize the difference between the two and i guess that comes with experience and just hours in the air um but often if i'm on a really bad line um i don't do a great deal of flying on my own so

normally flying in the competition so i've normally got uh when i'm flying you know cross country i'm normally in a competition so i've normally got 50 60 pilots around me so you've got a much better idea of of what the good line is and what the bad lines are and uh you can see it visually so if i'm on a bad line and i can see other people 100 meters or so to my right or left on a better line then i'll shift over there quite quickly so there's a lot of snaking around you you shift one way and actually yeah it gets worse and you have to go back the other way so there's there there is inefficiency to find the maximum efficiency you have to be slightly inefficient it's like with you know with climbing you say climbing's easy but i think climbing's the hard part climbing to be able to climb really well like the really good guys is not easy and it requires you to sometimes be inefficient to be efficient by which mean by what i mean is sometimes you're in the core and you think you're in the core and you think you're climbing great but actually there's a stronger bit just

50 meters away but the only way you're going to get there is by always having a little sniff always having a little search changing your circle slightly now changing your circle slightly often makes you lose height as well so there is inefficiencies in in having that search but uh you have to accept the inefficiencies to to gain on the efficiencies so you have to take that risk you have to take that gamble and how gliding is is a similar thing you know you have to if you're on a good line try and stay on it um and if you know you're on a bad line then you have to assess whether you're about to go into a thermal or you're just on a bad line in which case the best idea is normally to fly in on a 45 degree line from your given track and that way you're you're still covering the ground in roughly the direction you want to go to but you're just changing your position in the ms

um russ you you uh a bit of advice at the i believe it's 2012 at the Superfinal down in columbia that has really stuck with me and i know you've given it to other people as well because you talked about it in sun valley but um your concept of discipline um can you tell the audience what you're uh what you're talking about

discipline is about it's all-encompassing really probably a better word is application but it's a disciplined application we all know the same stuff we've all read kelly's all the books and if you haven't then you should do you know but everyone basically has the information what most people don't actually realize is that the vast majority of pilots out there that have been flying for two or three years they know exactly the same as Chrigel for example um they think they don't think they do but actually they know exactly what he knows it's just that Chrigel is much better at applying what he knows and he has a discipline to always apply what he knows the rest of us we make mistakes we make our up we make we we sometimes think we're cleverer and uh we try and over complicate matters but discipline is about applying everything that you know for example speed to fly if there's a good time in front of you you know you should be flying at full speed not a half speed

you may be going half speed because you're not too sure you're not so certain you might not reach it just in time but you should just be flying full speed you may not be full flying full speed because you're not confident under your glider which means that you need to work on your gliding on your flying skills and so on but i think discipline is about being um for me personally it depends on the different pilots some pilots are naturally extremely cautious when they fly cross countries and others are a little bit gung-ho and push on a little bit too hard so for me discipline was normally holding myself back with a lot of discipline and i think that's a really good thing to do is normally if i'm at the top of a climb on top of the lead gaggle or something like that i used to just go a good friend of mine waggle watts was brilliant at that he used to be he used to always get himself and he was such he's such a good pilot he climbed so well he'd get himself to the top of the stack 100 meters above everyone else in the gaggle and boom off he goes we all kind of saunter up to the top of the climb after him and watch him go on a death glide and we just glide from a slightly different line get better and better and better and better and boom he lands and off we go now i used to do that quite a lot wagger does that quite a lot and there's there's lots of pilots that do that quite a lot all at the top level and eventually you learn actually sometimes the best thing to do especially if you're in the second thermal of a long race is to be disciplined just allow the others to come with you and then you glide with them and try and win the race at the end of the race not the beginning of the race so for me discipline is about apply applying everything that you know at every stage of the flight and not trying to shoot your load too early

russ tell me about you guys all went down to texas for the world record in cam and a couple years ago and i know you have plans doing that again i haven't been um but i've heard you know i've heard this is not the greatest place in the world to uh spend your time and you know flatland everyone

what are you talking about hebronville is the most wonderful place i think i've ever been they had a subway and uh they had a gas station and uh and then a subway yeah we had subway and i think they had yeah we had subway pretty much every day i think we had and so it's heaven from that point of view but but inhabited by wonderful lovely kind friendly people and um we had a really nice time and we had a really nice time and we had a really nice time and we had a really nice time we met some really awesome people and uh the flying there we were a bit unlucky with the weather we were there over um the end of june early july so it's the best time to be there but we didn't really get the the good flying conditions um but we managed to crack out some pretty good flights we did four four flights in the 10 days or so that we were there um the first day was and we died in fact none of us i don't think maybe david had done a tow before but luke hadn't done one and i certainly hadn't done one fred hadn't done one and um so yeah we had to tow up from this airfield and uh that was the most horrific terrifying experience of my life the first tow we ever did we'd uh it was super wind i mean it was limit okay on the runway to be able to you you hoik the glider up and you got hoiked off the ground and whip round and then get pulled by this metal thing or by a car along the runway and

all i remember from my first tie was just being ripped up with the glider right behind me and the air was choppy i mean proper turbulent i was having to stop collapses whilst being pulled along with the glider right behind me and um i was absolutely crapping myself and all i remember was uh was being told that whatever you do don't don't let the car get to the end of the runway because then the car has to slow down the line goes slack then you've got more chance of getting stuck on the line and that's all i could remember other than keeping it on line so come the point where the car's coming to the end of the runway i was like oh my god and i couldn't let go of the brakes because i was having to keep the brakes i was having to keep the brakes in my hands to keep the glider open it was that turbulent

and um in the end i had to pull the release toggle which was down by my my lap somewhere whilst i had the brake in my hand because i was just too scared to go the brake so i pinged off in the end i pinged off this toe in a sort of tight steep spiral at the time the glider was really banged over but the feeling of of relief just to be in crazy choppy turbulent air but not being pulled along by something was was incredible and that first day we flew we flew 20k or something to the main road and landed backwards

i landed right by what i thought was a gas station but it was a border patrol point and uh yeah that started the the theme for the next few days but the next few days we didn't get the very good conditions we had quite relatively light winds and quite blue conditions and um and the first day uh luke flew 465k and i flew 425k and um a little bit annoyed i i really messed up that day because i i took one of the early launches and luke was half an hour at least behind us i think he he missed the launch or had to relaunch or something i can't remember what happened but uh he was a good 40 minutes or so behind us um and ended up flying 465 and so i had a half an hour good jump on him um but it was just survival in the blue the first part of each day in fact we were just quite low just hanging on to whatever we could we were just quite low and we were just quite low and we were just hanging on to whatever we could we were just quite low and we were just quite low and we were just trying to eke out until we got into the good part of the day um and that first day i was looking at this amazing sky over to my right about probably 10 15k to to the north of me and um all day i was there thinking i really want to be over there but i've never made the effort to get over there and just plowed on my whole way and it was just one of those days that i found extremely frustrating i'd see a cumulus form and i'd

get there as fast as i could and i'd arrive and i'd have a one and a half meter climb and it took until about four in the afternoon so i eventually got something like a three meter and something really good and and then at the end of the day five o 'clock onwards it just got better and better and um well when you think wow this is the last climb you oh no there's another one and then you think rather that definitely was the last time and nope there's another one and it just kept on going and going and going and i actually my feet touched the ground just did the sun just touch the horizon it was it was incredible i mean did that i did that three days in a row just flying the entire day which i've never done before in my life i've always landed earlier than the end of the day but um absolutely epic flying absolutely epic flying but the the the the real motivation to not land was was that the ground beneath you was just horrific there was no roads it was 50 degrees heat or something there was rattlesnakes cactus

everything down there wanted to eat you or hurt you some way we've been warned about mini pigs as well so there was there was there was nothing particularly friendly on the ground and um but the worst thing was the roads was the lack of roads there was one point where actually i don't know which is the closest direction the road is in and um there was some dirt tracks and so on and little old one of those little nodding donkey things where they pull oil out of the ground just little random ones in in weird places and just amazing amazing terrain and but very very quite gripping scary fortunately on the on the days that we did the long cross country flights the air wasn't too turbulent because i think if the air had been super turbulent then it would be quite a full-on experience but something definitely i'd like to do again i

was just gonna say will you do it again and um tell me about like the the the kind of the reason for for chasing these world records like that i mean is it is it uh really more driven by this would be a great thing for ozone to have or is this a great excuse to get together with friends and go flying yeah

no idea yeah i think it was it was more of an excuse to get together and go flying and and and meet some friends and you know bill was there and nick was there and there's a handful of parties and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and it was just it was it was just um a really really lovely few days and um and to to to have got a world record would have been nice but for well i can't speak for the others but for me personally it's not it's not a massive driving factor for me i mean i loved what these guys have been doing in brazil um but after doing those few days in hebronville i would like to go back and try again um and if i didn't get a world record but did some good flying over a few days and i'd be really happy with it

yeah but the the the whole chasing the world record thing is for me personally is not really your

your stories of of towing or i i i spent a month down in australia a couple years ago a year year before charles and seiko did their big flights last year um towing and it's oh i i find it very disconcerting on some level but i think it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's

it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's

it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's

it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's

it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's Well, certainly that bottom layer that we towed through was just, for me, it was horrible. It was scary. In fact, it was probably one of my scariest flying experiences.

Yeah, and I wasn't in a huge hurry to go back. I know there's people that go every year back to Australia, but it's, yeah, long drives home with kangaroos all over the roads. And, you know, it's a pretty serious undertaking. It

is, yeah. No, it's great. It is a serious undertaking. But, you know, when it pales into comparison to what you and Dave did this summer, it pales into comparison to that. I'm really looking forward to seeing your film, Gavin, because the stories I've heard from Dave and from you are just awe-inspiring. And it just shows what can be done by the right people. It's not free. It's not for everyone, what you do, eh? But for the people that have, you know, like Dave, so much experience in the mountains, and, well, both of you are crazy kind of mountain pilot men anyway. You know, for qualified people like yourself to do something,

I'm really looking forward to the story in full.

Well, I'll send it to you. As soon as we hang up here, you'll be one of the first to see it. I'd be happy to. I'd love to get your feedback.

Russ, where does your passion for, for paragliding live these days? Is it, is it competitions? Is it testing? What kind of, you said, you said most of your flying cross country is done in competitions. Yeah. Maybe not so much in free flight, but where, where do you, you know, after all these years, are you still really passionate about it? Is it still really turning you on? And if so, what, what, what aspects?

I think it, I think, yeah, my, my relationship with flying over the years has changed. It is like a relationship. It has. As it's ups and downs, you know, some days I, I, I, I'm not interested in paragliding. Some days I'm, I'm just, I'm not into it at all. And then other days I'm really fired up and I'm passionate about it. And, um, the, the flying I enjoy doing the most is, is I really enjoy the testing work. I really enjoy stalling, spinning, collapsing, and doing all of that. I do genuinely really enjoy that. Um, uh, but it's probably competition flying, uh, more than cross country flying. I haven't done a huge amount of cross country flights. I, I, uh, um, I did, I did, uh, some pretty long flights in Texas a few years back, like you mentioned, and back in the UK this year as well.

In the North South Cup, I went back to the weekend and we had, uh, just classic conditions for the weekend. I mean, when I booked the flights back to the UK, I was, I was, I was thinking, well, I'd be lucky if I get the glider out of the pack. And, uh, the first day we flew 210 K from Scotland down the middle of England, down into Yorkshire somewhere. And then on the second day we flew from pretty much the English Welsh border, um, all the way down towards Brighton. So I, and then I got on a flight and came home and I, I still pinched myself over that because I, because before then I'd never even flown a hundred K in the UK and to, and to, to come back after a weekend, after flying 350 K in a weekend, uh, completely made up. So I, but I think I get very few opportunities to fly cross country and I'm not super, super motivated to go cross country just on my own to, to just to fly, you know, I've

been flying long enough to that. I don't need to do that anymore. Um, unless maybe it was a really, really classic, even this year, you know, when, when Luke and Ono were making those big, big flights, I was quite happy just to be here working and testing, uh, testing here over Gordon. I was, yeah, no, it didn't put me out at all, but, but I'd say competition, competition is, is, is, is, is fun. I love that. The most, but I, I don't, I don't, again, I don't do a huge amount of that anymore. I just do one or two comps a year.

And you, but you seem to stay, um, really current with that. Uh, you know, you know, the, the kind of, I think what we would typically hear is, you know, to get really good, you've got to fly a ton, but you know, like somebody like Josh Cohn, I think he flies like 75 hours a year, Pepe, maybe the same. Um, sounds like you're not flying a ton of comps now. You're the, it sounds like you're flying a lot, but maybe not a ton of comps. Is that just, is that the bike thing?

I do a lot of flying. I mean, we fly, we fly a lot down here. It's just, I don't do a lot of cross country flights. I might, but I do notice it recently in the last few years, I noticed that when I go to a competition, the first task or so I'm, I'm all over the place a little bit. My, my head's not in the right place. I'm not, I'm, I'm indecisive and, uh, I'm not that, that great. So that's something for sure. No, to, to be good. I think you need to be current on your cross country flying and people like Pepe do a lot of flying, but it's all in competitions, but they'll do five or six competitions a year. Um, I don't do that anymore, but what I do do is I fly every day. So when I get to a competition, I'm not rusty at all.

I'm, I take off, I'm fine. I climb okay. Cause I'm just, I'm, I'm pretty much in tune with, with my flying. I don't feel rusty. But, uh, I think my decision-making, um, there's certainly what I've noticed in the last couple of years is my decision-making at comps hasn't been that, that brilliant.

You and I were talking about this down, I have somewhere, uh, I think it was Columbia. Um, and I, I don't at all know the complete history of your, you know, your world cup results. Um, but I remember you were, you and I were kind of having a laugh about, uh, I think you got second that year and you said, you'd said to me that you had a whole lot of seconds. Um, and you were kind of cracking up about maybe being too reserved in the last thermal to a little bit, little bit too careful, uh, and not quite enough cowboy. Uh, I don't know. I don't even know if that's correct. Is that correct? And if so, would you like to comment on it?

Yeah. I've, uh, yeah. As Craig Morgan once said, you know, I was the king of mediocrity and, um, never before. Yeah. Brilliant. I'm the achiever. Um, I've been second and third in the super five. I've been third in the European championships and I've been second in the super fund twice, I think. And, um, uh, but I did win a world cup once, an individual world cup once. Okay. Um, uh, yes, I think I, um, I'm just ill disciplined, you know, I didn't apply myself well enough when, when, when the position, when the opportunity arose. I probably didn't apply myself well enough, which is the reason why I wouldn't have won or failing that someone just did it much better than I did, which is normally the case.

Um, I think winning is, is to be able to, to win all the time is very difficult. That's what, which makes people like on a really, really impressive because his, his win rate is super, super high. And even when he does badly, he doesn't even do that badly. Um, I, it's, it depends what you want to say. You know, I mean, I really respect people like Julian, uh, Yuri Vidich and, and, and guys like that, but it just so consistently up there and the Chevy Bonet people just boom, they just put their second and third and occasional win. But if they do badly, they're in fourth place. You know, those pilots for me are just, just awesome. And there's a, there's so many good pilots out there at the moment, but there's a, there are a handful that, that stand out for their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, for their magnificent consistency at the very top level.

And, um, I would, I think, I think for me personally, I need to do a bit more competitions to be able to maintain that, that, that level. Now I'm, I'm probably a little bit more hit and miss. I'm going to do the, the world cup. I'm going to do the Superfinal in Governor Door in January and, and, and possibly the world next year. Um, but, uh, and I'll train, I'll train as much as I can for that as well.

Um, um, again, that question of, you know, is there something definitive that separates the, the Wurtzes and the Bonets and, you know, these guys that are so consistent? Well,

they make less mistakes than the rest of everyone else. You know, they're not making the mistakes. They're, they're, they're, they're holding their position. They climb, they all climb very well. They will climb very well. They will glide very well. And they make good gaggle decision-making. They dominate the gaggles. They, um, it's something we'll be doing this, um, training, uh, British team training camp for the next generation of British pilots. We did our first boot camp this, this year, Guy, Guy Anderson and myself. And, um, we, uh, we, we were trying to instill onto the new young pilots, up and coming pilots, the importance of, of being able to dominate the gaggle, to be able to sit on top of everyone, to be able to always have markers in front of you gliding so that you can glide on the good lines.

And the importance of actually not making too many cross country decisions in when you race. Um, I think maybe the winners have a, it depends on the competition. Some competitions are won by someone who's able to, to do all the dominance, do all the dominance, do all the dominance, and then make a good killer cross country decision make, uh, cross country decision to actually win the task or win the competition. But often the guys like, uh, Julian. And these guys Chevy will, will, will do extremely well just by dominating, by not actually making too many cross country decision making, but just always sticking it over the goal line within a minute or so of the leader.

And you do that on a daily basis on a regular basis, which is easier said than done. Hmm, the only way you can achieve that is by climbing extremely well gliding extremely well, applying and being really disciplined, right?

And, and fail. And

there's very few pilots in the world that can do that on a daily, daily basis. Every dog has his day. Everyone can do it on their day. But at the top of the world class level, it's being able to do it every day.

Let's say you were in a year where you were really chasing the world championship or you were going to do a whole bunch of PDBCs. Take me back to a time when you were doing that. Is there a training regimen? Is there a preparation kind of protocol that you go through? Is there a headspace that you try to find? And is there a way to repeatedly find it? Because I hear about this from quite a lot of pilots that they have found, often through trial and error, that they'll just suddenly have a really, really good comp. And when they look back on it, it's because they were either a little bit tired

or they didn't really care too much or they were just flying a ton. I mean, for everybody, it's been a little bit different. But can you share with us, like, do you approach comps like that or do you just kind of go into them and have a go?

The first World Cup I ever went to was in January. This is when I was living back in the UK and we don't fly in the winter that much in the UK. And, uh, but this comp was in Argentina and I think it was in January. So I had no training whatsoever, but I bought this book, Psyched to Win. And it was all about sports psychology and so on. But it was before I'd done any competitions. So it was of absolutely no use to me whatsoever. And so I read this book, Psyched to Win, and I think I came almost last in that competition.

So every time

I go to a competition...

Super psyched and super slow. Yeah. Every time I go to a competition now, Kath, my wife, says I have to win. I have to win as I leave the door. And so that's my regime, I guess. But no, I don't. I don't have a regime. I go to a comp and I just go flying. I've tried the lucky socks. I've tried the lucky pants. I've tried the being super motivated. I've tried it all and it makes absolutely, for me, it makes zero difference whatsoever. For me, the best thing to do is to wake up in the morning and go flying. And don't treat it... There's any more than that. And then when you can do that and you're relaxed enough to do that and you can retain your discipline, you have to be focused and disciplined for sure.

But otherwise, it doesn't help putting external pressure on myself or being too hard on yourself either. I think that's the most important thing as well is to be able to deal with a defeat in a mature manner and accept it. It's part of our sport. You know, it's a really demoralizing sport at times because even you can do just, you know, the right things and you get a bit of bad luck, you get a bad cycle, you miss the bottom of the climb

and although you feel like you've flown really well, you can do really badly. Whereas other days, you could be feeling not very well, making mistakes, blundering around the sky, catching a nice cycle which is stronger than everyone else had and, oh, you've won the day. You know? It's a little bit random like that. But that's why I try and keep it simple and just, no, I just stay relaxed and go flying.

So, Russ, rewinding to your 2012 talk that we grabbed on YouTube,

I think there was a lot of kind of shocked people in the room about how you spoke very eloquently about recovering a two-line glider and not allowing it to, I mean, obviously, we have frontals, but we, you know, not allowing it to frontal. And if it does frontal, you know, what the proper reaction to that was, I think that, and you were quite surprised that what you said was received. So, do you want to just kind of take us back to that talk?

I was quite surprised. I was quite surprised that what I was saying wasn't common knowledge. You know, because it was something that had been, it was techniques that had been used and taught for many years by many pilots, not just me. And a good friend of mine said he tormented himself by putting him through that talk, by listening to it on YouTube, because he'd been to so many of my SRV courses and heard the same shit over and over and over again. And I didn't give any new information. So, it did surprise me that a lot of people, a lot of people commented on how new some of that information was to them. And I think now, looking back from what I've said,

I think most of it still stands. I have seen different behaviour in gliders. I have seen some gliders now where hands up is possibly the best thing to do after a frontal. But I will still stand by the fact that most gliders, irrespective of their class, irrespective of whether they're two-line, three-line, whatever, if the glider starts to deflate and you start getting a frontal, the first thing that you should do is hit the brakes quite sharpish and get the nose open and then keep the hands up to let the glider fly. And certainly for the two-liners, if they do start to collapse, is to immediately hit the brakes. And if you over-hit the brake and you end up in a little stall, a bit of a parachute stall, that's no problem.

You just put your hands up. And you fly away from it. If you're flying a two-liner,

then you should have the skills to be able to stall hesitation

any time, really, and be able to fly away from it.

I think one of the things that was quite impactful for me, and I was flying my first two-liner at that World Cup, so that was pretty new for me anyway, was also just how powerful, well, how much practice, you needed on the badger bar, on the Bs, that so much of the wing could be held open with the Bs while staying on bar. I think you mentioned that if you start to put those two things together quite well, reasons that in the past were reasons to get off the speed, go to the brakes, weren't there if you were using those correctly, that you could literally power through quite turbulent air,

on the Bs, using the Bs well.

Absolutely, yeah. Because you can pull enough Bs to bring it back to trim speed with the bar still fully on, can't you? So you can abruptly change the angle of attack, which is normally what it takes to keep the wing open. It's just an abrupt change in angle of attack to keep the nose open.

Yeah, but there does come a point where the air gets turbulent enough where you have to come off the bar and go back on the brakes. There is always that point. And I guess the way to move through the air efficiently and as fast as you can is to know those limits and to know when to, okay, come on, and deal with the glider as it is. But these things take time to learn, don't they? Paragliders are not easy machines to fly. That's the problem. You know, part of the danger is that they're so easy to fly that your grandmother can fly them. But their difficulty lies in the, the detail of how to fly them in turbulent air. And the only way to really get that training is by doing acro training, is by doing SOV, and it's by flying in turbulent air.

So in order to learn the skills that you need, you have to put yourself in risk in a way. And that's the beauty of our sport because, you know, we're always learning, we're always improving. There's always something that you can do better. There's always something that you're not doing as well as you could do. And that's the beautiful thing about our sport. And that's why there's so much longevity in it. But that's also what makes it dangerous.

You said in that talk that you'd never thrown your reserve. Is that still the case? And are you still accident-free?

No, I've had a few accidents over the years. I think I've landed in pretty much every bush on the south downs in the UK.

No, I've had my first... I've landed under my reserve, but I've never thrown it. I actually had... I was flying in Gordon last year, just after coming back from the World Cup in India. And I was flying some... I think it was when we just started some new Enzo protos. And I took off, flew around for a good 10, 15 minutes, scratching along the cliffs, going over the gorge. I was super low, couldn't get up. Eventually... I got a climb, got up above the mountain. I just got to cloud base. And then someone started pulling my shoulders. I was like, what the hell? I actually even turned around and looked to see who or what it was.

And boom, my parachute just popped out. And I... So I haven't thrown my reserve, but I've landed under it now.

Yeah, when you first said that, I was like, wait, I think I'm going to have to ask for a clarification. What?

I was just totally unexpected, 10 minutes into a flight. But again, it was, you know, basic errors. And I didn't check my pin before I took off. And even after 20 years of flying, and I'm pretty good at checking my stuff because, you know, doing the job that I do and that we do on a daily basis, you have to be strict. You have to... You cannot afford to really have errors. And so... I was pretty hard on myself about that because it was a bad mistake to not check my pin. But I was just fortunate enough to be all held in for that length of time because I didn't come out at any other stage when I was scratching along because it's all rocks down here. It's all rocks and cliffs and it's not pleasant land

to be throwing your reserve on. And certainly not nice to have an inadvertent deployment when you're along a cliff. So I was actually very... I was very lucky to have come away from that. And I landed absolutely fine. I landed on some flat ground and walked away from it with no problem whatsoever.

But no, I've never thrown my reserve in anger. But I guess I don't push it too hard. I know my limits.

When you think back to your career, you've certainly seen a lot of accidents. And I don't want to make this a dark thing, but it's one of the kind of common themes. I like to talk about safety. Because we've got a lot of listeners who are pretty low-hour pilots. Or we just did one with Cedar Wright, who's firmly in the grasp of intermediate syndrome. He's only been flying for a year and a half. So I think there could be some good... Oh, great. Yeah. Some good passing along, some good advice from you in terms of, are there some common and very avoidable mistakes that you see happen? And you're mostly seeing... You're mostly going to PWCs and seeing... And there's plenty of accidents with those. So... So, you know, maybe you could share a little bit about what you've seen.

Pass along some advice for those people coming up and trying to be safe.

Well, I've got the old cliches. I mean, the common stuff is on the ground. Certainly for intermediate pilots, it's on the ground. It's making mistakes, trying to launch in strong conditions. I think what's changed over the years as well is with the gliders now, we fly in air that just... We wouldn't even consider flying back in the early 90s. The wings weren't fast enough. They were too unstable. And there was a fine line between being able to stay in the air and getting blown back. And, you know, we were always taught from day one, if it's gusting from 5 mile an hour to 15 mile an hour, then maybe it's a bit too strong and so on. 5 mile an hour to 15 mile an hour nowadays is a good day. So we're flying in stronger...

Even though the gliders are safer and better, because we're flying in much stronger conditions, I don't think the sport... It's really safer than it used to be. But I think the most important thing for most intermediates is the ground handling, the ground control, and being able to do everything on the ground with the glider. That way, when you're in situations in the air, you'll be able to deal with the glider collapsing or doing whatever it's doing much better. Well, in fact, the only thing the air can do to your glider is collapse it. So as long as you can deal with a frontal or a side collapse,

then the air can't do anything more to you. Anything else that happens in a cascading event, the spiral, the auto-rotation, all of those type of things, are kind of not self-induced, but they're all preventable with the correct input. What's been good over the last few years, I think, is there's been a healthy attitude now towards SIV, towards actually learning how to fly the glider. And I've certainly seen it at the top level, and hopefully it will filter down everywhere. But a few years ago, you'd see in the PWC, you'd see someone take a 60%, 70 % side collapse, and they'd end up throwing their reserve. And you'd think, well, why on earth can that happen? And it used to be quite a regular occurrence. People were too late, too aggressive, or whatever on the inputs of the wing.

And there was plenty of completely avoidable accidents down to pure poor piloting. And I think now, with the new attitude towards, I think the overall standard of pilots has really improved at the World Cup level. They're the ones that I see flying the most now. And I think there's less reserve rides and less incidents now in the World Cup. And even if the pilot quality is slightly lower in terms of their cross country flying skills, but I think piloting skills, especially with the new generation coming through as well, which are forcing the old generation to get better, I think that's a good thing. Yeah, the top level, I think the piloting is definitely improving.

Speaking of wings, Luke, I think, bears the responsibility or the credit for the Sharknose technology. And if I'm wrong, let me know. But 2009, we had this incredible jump in what paragliders could do. And it is allowing us to fly lines like Dave and I did in Alaska. Just looking at the map in completely different ways. Is there another, do you see another, I asked Bill Belcourt this question when we were interviewing him for 500 Miles to Nowhere, and he said, you know, that he stopped trying to make predictions on where the sport is going because he's been wrong every time. It's always just gotten better and better.

Is there that kind of a jump available still, do you think, in paragliders? Well, I don't know. I mean, we

were, like Bill was saying, I remember back in 1996, people saying, well, that's it. Yeah. That's it. With the diagonal ribs, that's it. We're never going any further.

Very definite gains to be made. For sure, there's gains to be made. I think the gains are getting harder to come by, that's for sure. But we can, there's still, if you look at the sail, if you look at wing, there's still plenty of creases all over it. If we can manufacture the wings somehow better, so we can get rid of all the wrinkles and creases and really make them into these tight, drum-type structure on the skin, then I think we've got gains to be made there.

Line drag, I don't want to say because I'll probably be wrong, but we're not far off from what is strength

and in terms of supporting the structure.

So, but I think, yeah, no, I think there are gains to be made in.

You mentioned Honoren, and I'm, I'm probably, I know I'm not saying his name right, I never do, but he, Honoren, Honoren, okay. One of your pilots who just had an unbelievable year,

what separates, and he's pretty young, which is kind of cool. You know, you see, that's what I love about this sport is it doesn't seem like age makes a huge difference. You know, you see older guys just crushing it, but he's pretty young and I don't want to take Luke out of it as well because Luke was part of those big flights in Southern France, but what separates somebody like him from other good and great pilots? Very

good question. I think, I think Honore is, is you can put him in the same bracket as Chrigel, whereas they, they, they're young, they're mature, and they've got the, they've got the good balance between having the, the geeky kind of technical side of flying, along with the surfer kind of type attitude towards it. It's a, it's a really nice balance and Chrigel and Honore have always impressed me with, with, with that, you know, they're, they're totally, totally, totally wrapped up in flying and they treat it as a very, as their profession and, and what they want to do and they're, they're into every facet of it. So Honore has, has done incredibly well.

I mean, he's only 25 years old now and he's an awesome pilot. He's a, he's a very mature pilot as well.

And it's great to see, it's great to see and I'm sure there's a lot more to come from him as well. I don't think he's, he's not peaking at the moment, which is the scary thing. He's only going to get better. He's only going to get better and I think he's got better in the last year flying every day with us as well. And certainly his, his test flying has come on really, really well and I think, I think he's only going to get better. Yeah.

If you could rewind the clock, Russ, this is a question I ask of everybody that people seem to really like. Back to your 50-hour self, what advice do you either wish you would have heeded that you got or advice that you wish you would have gotten? You're just coming out of the blocks in the end of your first year, going into your second year. It's

a very good question. That's a very good question. I don't know. I don't know. I think, you know, the intermediate syndrome like you touched on earlier is, is, is, is the difficult part and if there was some magical way to get through that, if there was some magical way to get through the, I would say up to 500 hours is the, is up to the intermediate level and if there was a magical way to be able to get through that whole process, progress and develop really well without injuring yourself, then, then that would be the, the wonderful thing. But if I could put back the clock, what would I do? I would certainly not be teaching, paragliding on the south downs of the UK. Much as I love that and it's a really, really special part of my life,

it's not the easiest place to be able, to be able to progress because it's very difficult flying. It's very difficult to go cross country. The opportunities are quite few and far between and when, when living here where we, where I can just go flying any day and if the sun's out, I catch a thermal, then that, that would be the, yeah, probably my, my, if I could turn back the clock, we would move to a better place to go flying.

That, that leads perfectly into a, a question that just came through on, on Facebook from Gemma. Hope I'm saying that right. She's a four-hour pilot and she wanted to stress, stress that. She's brand new. She wants to go, she wants to know where you would send her best place in the world to, to learn safely and avoid the ground suck crowd.

The ground suck crowd, I think they probably exist on, every hill in the world as far as I know.

And some of them are wise and some of them are negative. Yeah, no, you have to be able to filter that. The best place in the world to go? I don't know. I don't know, to be honest. I would guess with four hours, it's somewhere where you've got grass, somewhere that doesn't, isn't particularly rocky. So it's a bit more forgiving. Somewhere with trees, which are generally quite good. They're generally forgiving.

So, yeah, you need somewhere like maybe Columbia or somewhere or, or somewhere in, there are areas in France, Jun de Pilar, the Pilar, these sort of places. These are quite good. But I don't really, I haven't, my, my traveling has all been going to sort of full on places to go cross country racing and so on. So I don't really know where all those places are. The UK, the South Downs is actually a very good place for that when the weather's good, because it's a, it's a very forgiving place to fly. And it's a good place to, to learn the skills. And I think it's why quite a few good pilots have come out of the UK because it teaches you to have, you have to be efficient in order to fly well in the UK, to be able to get away from some of the hills, certainly in the South of England,

different up North. It's easy, it's easy for the Northerners to go cross country, but for the Southerners, it's not necessarily easy.

Okay. One more that just came through from our friend, Matt Beechinor, farmer. He wants to know, because I think he's looking at this wing, how solid is the leading edge of the Enzo II versus the Zeno?

What does he want that in grams per square inch or what?

I don't

know. It's the profile has slightly more solidity than the Enzo II. To put it another way, I've never had a collapse on it that I haven't induced myself ever. And that's from, I've been flying quite a lot on the glider. It is a relatively stable wing. I would say it's more stable than the Enzo. And the B pressure is slightly lighter as well. So it's slightly easier to fly on the B lines.

So yeah, it's an easier glider to fly than the Enzo II. And given the same inputs, it's probably less likely to collapse.

Okay, great. This is for my own curiosity. You don't have to give this away if you don't want to, but is anybody going to give this away? Are you going to be using it in the X-Alps? Will

be, yeah. Yeah.

I think

they will be. All

right. Okay, well, good. That'll help my planning.

Yeah. Okay. No, I think we're intending to make a lightweight version, although we can't get a huge amount of weight from it. But I think there are certainly pilots that have expressed an interest.

And yeah, it could be an interesting wing for that.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Okay, buddy. I want to be, I know it's getting late for you there. I have one more funny question for you, and then I'll allow you to chime in with anything else you want to add to it. But one of your fans or somebody came through and said, you live in France, why don't you like cheese and wine?

Because I'm slightly allergic to

red wine. But the guy I work with, Fred, he doesn't like cheese either, and he's French. So, and I don't think he's a big wine fan either. So it's not just me. I don't like eating snails or frog legs either, but I do enjoy the weather that they have here and lots of other things.

Oh, fantastic. Well, hey, Russ, I didn't find much stuff about you online. I think you kind of avoid that whole scene, which has probably been terrific for you this last week. As you know, we've had quite a tumultuous week here in the States, but is there anything? I've been, yeah.

I've been, yeah. I feel sorry for you guys over there right now.

Yeah. So do we.

It'll be a new challenge, and I don't think it'll be that bad. I don't think it'll be that bad.

I hope so. I hope so. I don't totally share the optimism, but I'm optimistic. We'll figure it out. Yeah. We usually do. We'll figure it out. No, no.

You'll figure it out. I mean, we've just had Brexit in the UK as well. I

know you did.

Which has just left out, left Europe, which was actually, that was the day I signed for my car. It was the day of Brexit. It was the day we bought the house here in France.

Nailed it.

These things happen. These things happen, you know? Yeah. Right. They do. They do.

Well, it's been a terrific joy. Thank you so much. Again, thank you for your time. I think people are going to totally dig that. And until we meet again at Cloudbase, my friend, thank you very much.

Cheers, Kevin.

All right, bud. Cheers.

Take care.

Cool.

Before we get into the little bonus part, which is, we're going to have a little bit of time, which I implore you to stick around for. It's about another 45 minutes with some great, great questions that went out. So thank you to our audience for providing those questions. Thanks again to Larry Tudor for his amazing talk a few episodes back. If you haven't listened to that one, please go do it. It's really amazing. And then if you can, send us a buck. That's all we ask for is a buck a show. You'll find that link on the cloudbasemayhem.com. And then also a little call out from my friend, Anna Dow. Revis's girlfriend, who we did a lot of flying with here this summer. She is out at Standing Rock. If you've followed the whole situation there with the pipeline and what's going on out in North Dakota with the Sioux, the big win for the Sioux recently, but that fight is not over.

And Anna Dow is actually out there in North Dakota, braving the cold, and they could really use your help. And knowing that paragliders have quite unique situations. When it comes to work and a lot more time off typically than a lot of people have, they need your help. If you can go out there and just give them your time or your money, either one of those would go a long way. You can reach Anna. I'm going to give you here a phone number that you can text her and find out how you can lend a huge helping hand. So you can reach Anna at 401-592-7584. Okay. Or that's 4015-WARMTH.

They could really use your help out in North Dakota. This is a brutal time of year. There's not as many people as there was out there and this fight is not over. So lend Anna your hand and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you. Merry Christmas. Cheers.

So Russ, do you think that just from a safety standpoint, and I know this has been argued, added for an item. But I'd love to get your thoughts on it. Should we all just be racing around on one class gliders? Would that be a better way forward? Or does that wreck open class innovation or what are your thoughts on that? I'm just curious.

Well, the original thought was that a serial class would kill innovation in the open class and would kill innovation throughout the rest of the range. But I think over the last few years of being in serial class, being in the new C-class, the CCC class, that hasn't necessarily been the case. We're still working on gliders, we're still improving things, we're still finding ways to make gliders better. And the serial class, I used to be an advocate of the serial class quite strongly. But I kind of realized that maybe that's not the best way. But right now working with the CCC, I think is almost a good compromise. We've got gliders that are very similar to open class wings, yet they have an inbuilt added amount of safety into them because they have to perform and meet certain criteria, which is strict enough to keep safety intact, but without really inhibiting design too much.

And I think what's the best thing that's come out of them is that the gliders have remained really good. Pleasurable to fly, but we've just chopped out some of the top speed, which was slightly unnecessary and made the sport slightly more dangerous than it should otherwise be. So I think the CCC class is, for the moment, a pretty good compromise, and it's something that's pliable. It's something that can change in the future as new problems arise, as new things come up. So I think we're in not a bad place at the moment. We're in a good place at the moment with the CCC, as a compromise.

One of the questions then, I think you've answered this, one of the guys who listens to the show, Joe Crutchley, I hope I'm saying that right, wanted me to ask you, do you think that the current certification rules will lead to better, safer gliders? I'm assuming he's talking about the CCC rules, and it sounds like you think they will.

Safer is a very hard thing to quantify. You know, safety is really down to the core. The pilot and the pilot's skills. As wings have developed over the last few years, I think pilots have upped their skill level in order to deal with them. Back in the old days, before I started competing, gliders were very unstable and very difficult to fly. They'd collapse all the time. So pilots back then had to be good at dealing with collapses, otherwise they injured themselves a lot. And gliders nowadays have become a lot more stable. They've got more inherent stability in the wings, but when they collapse they can still be quite aggressive. So I think pilots have less training nowadays, or they have less collapses, so you're naturally more rusty when you do get a collapse.

But I think that's been kind of countered by pilots doing a lot more SIV training now. And I see in the top level competitions that pilots are disrupting that. generally have a much better handling and feel of their wings

russ i've got a whole list of great questions that came in um via the facebook when i put out that i was going to be talking to you before we get into those uh you know good friend of both of ours Matt Beechinor a farmer yeah um he would really like to ask you a bit and i actually just got off the phone with Nick Greece who's just come back from brazil who was flying the xeno so i wanted i wanted to provide a forum for you to talk about that wing people are pretty excited about it but specifically farmer wanted me to ask you um how being on full speed compares to the being on full speed with the enzo 2 in other words is it more collapse resistant is it less uh i think that's what he's getting at but give us give us the two minute version of your your newest latest and greatest yeah

the xeno has a little better than the enzo 2 um it sits between the m6 and the enzo 2 and um accelerated it's very stable it's got a really nice it's got quite a high cm profile and um it's quite light pressure on the b so it's very controllable and um probably more inherent stability than the enzo 2 at full speed but again these wings you know it's it's it's it's not a case of pushing the speed bar to maximum and just sort of closing your eyes and letting the wing go it's it's you have to you have to control the wing with the b rises with the speed bar um depending on the air that you're in so um

as soon as you feel the air turbulent you need to put pressure on the b's and and hold the wing back a bit and if you if you get a big sudden increase or a sudden decrease in pressure in the nose you have to input the b's quite hard and come off the bar if necessary um but overall i would say that the xeno is more stable than the enzo 2 at the same speed

cool i found a lot of these questions really good uh the first one is are there disadvantages to a square reserve over a round and do you recommend flying with more than one reserve this is an interesting one i've been asking the reserve question with quite a few pilots and it's been really interesting where people sit with that i had a great talk a few episodes ago with jockey so i'll be interested to see what your thoughts on that um and then where should we be in the weight range uh on reserves and has anyone ever chucked and wish their reserve was smaller yeah

i'm i don't have a great deal of experience with reserves uh we've um we've developed the uh the square reserve and from the testing i've seen and the certification flights i've seen and not just our square reserves but all square reserves that i've seen um the the stability and sink rate is incredible compared to a to a round reserve um often with the round reserves they they work quite well but they're on the verge of being unstable and it depends on what the glider does it depends on uh the weight and the loading and the length of the lines but they can get an oscillation also if the lines go um become uh asymmetric in any way then then you can have quite a pendulum descent um from what i've seen um the squares are undoubtedly undoubtedly a lot better in terms of pendulum stability

and uh if you have a big enough one then you've also got the very good sink rate so from what i've seen um i am convinced by the square i think the square is a good way forward there's also obviously the beamer type the delta shape ones um which i think are very effective if you can release the glider and you've got enough altitude to be able to steer them and and point them in the right direction but if you have to throw very low and you're next to a cliff face then i can see that there's a problem with a with a parachute that that's gliding at that point but i understand why the acro boys use them because they're normally in clear space above water and uh they're not next to a cliff face so but i think for cross country pilots flying in the mountains there are there are potential disadvantages with the beamer type um but i think

squares address these uh issues they're not steerable um but they can they they have such good stability and and bring you down quite softly that i think uh i think the square in my opinion is the way to go and it's definitely what i'm going to have in my harnesses and i'm going to keep them big as well i i definitely think big is best um i've heard that that lightly loaded parachutes can can cause um pendulum issues instability issues um but speaking to parachute designers speaking to acro pilots seeing all the the the tests under the squares and so on um i don't think that um having a parachute that's big is is any disadvantage at all in the olden days people used to say well a big parachute would take longer to deploy but i don't think that's the case at all um i like the idea of big parachute when i'm flying a big parachute i like the idea of having a big parachute and i have to use it and bringing me down softly yeah

i i could add to that a little bit too just from my own experience not from throwing in my own experience although i've done that as well but that was more in a controlled environment doing acro but although it was over the dirt um but you know i think the tendency these days was that was that

was that out of control controlled environment yeah

very much so yes yes the first one actually wasn't attached you may have seen that article uh luckily i had a second but that one didn't uh ploy in time but luckily i was uh i was in a in a deep stall configuration and i was able to keep it like that and i i bounced pretty well you might have anyway the first

one yeah yeah

this this wasn't a previous episode but yeah i was down training uh acro i need i need the

full story on this yeah where did that happen

i actually put it in in my uh in my column in cross country which i was lauded for for the for the honesty people thought

it was a little bit

that was pretty cool that i didn't just run away from that one but yeah i was uh i was training acro the full story is quite funny i was i was training acro with uh with cody down in virgin in the desert near zion and yeah you know all these things always have this excuse that excuse that excuse the the main was my back was kind of tweaked not related to paragliding whatsoever and the night before i went down there i was moving everything from my cross country crit to my acro kit way way way exhausted i just come back from a film festival and just you know screwed up just radically screwed up and then i've never even thrown a reserve and so you know i was working on deep stalls and helis with cody and i think my second flight you know got all twisted up and i you know and we had we had made the deal that you know nothing was happening below a thousand feet because we're over the dirt and uh you know but it was one of those i'm about a thousand i'm nailing these deep stalls i'm gonna do another one you know so mistake number

four

and i was just waiting and i was waiting in my seat like oh man oh man's my head's gonna be all twisted up in the other side of the plane and

the whole series of mistakes and yeah i got all twisted up and went to throw and threw and you know hucked it chucked it hard and you know because it was all twisted up my head was kind of pinned down looking at the ground and uh and i thought to myself god these reserves take forever this is so slow like i mean the ground's coming really fast and i looked behind me and my reserve was just perfectly deployed flying away

rest i was like my first thought was like that's pretty funny that's

hilarious thank god i have a second one yeah

and then uh you know well my first thought actually after that was like i got to get out of these twists because i'm not even this will go into our second question should you fly with two reserves well i'm not used to flying with two reserves and of course that wasn't on my mind and so the first thing i did was like i got to spin out of this twist you know i had both toggles down in my belly you know so i had a deep stalled proper deep stalled uh so it wasn't going to surge on me or anything and i just looked and went there is no way oh i've got a second reserve but at this point i was less than 100 feet and so i threw the second reserve it didn't have a chance and my next thought was just okay dude tuck and roll do not try to stick this i just got a plf the best i can and luckily the dirt was really soft and i was in a pretty nice deep stalls on f gravity too so i mean i didn't have a lot of the wing over my head at that point but enough that i just kind of bounced unbelievable unbelievable well it just goes

it goes goes to show the importance of a second reserve and remembering that you have the second one oh all these things i

mean god remember to attach it to your body i mean yeah just a number of silly mistakes that were a lot of very good lessons so uh without without dwelling on the stupidity of that what do you think about when when you're flying cross country these days are you using two reserves yeah

i fly with two reserves all the time now i fly with um uh two reserves in my testing equipment and i fly with two reserves in my cross country equipment um i i think the the the time that an experienced pilot uh is going to be in a reserve deployment situation forgetting the big collapse low down which is always an eventuality but um the the most common kind of position to be in will be will be in a heavy twisted cravated spiral that has to be controlled through their own university level they are very to be considered and from all of the deployments you watch on youtube i've seen in sov i've seen over the years uh i would say in that configuration when the wing is auto rotating kind of satting around you and you've got a load of twists and it's terminal there's nothing you can do.

I would say a good 50 % of the deployments I've seen end up straight into the wing. And so the idea of having another parachute to be able to negate that fact or I mean it's possible that two go in there but yeah it just doubles your chances and I'm very comfortable flying with my two reserves and I wouldn't like to not fly with my two reserves anymore. I

think this is a good place to remind the listeners that reserves need practice. You know one of the things that that I had never really practiced before working with Cody over the desert was that you know I think a lot of people when they get in a situation where you got to throw your reserve you're just like I just got to throw your reserve and you know acro guys will very very consciously make sure their wing is in a controlled deep stall before they throw. You know so this is grabbing both toggles having them down low you can be in a tail slide you don't have to be exactly in a deep stall you could just but if you just let go of your brakes reach down grab your reserve and huck it that's why very often you can end up throwing your reserve right into your wing because your wing restarts from wherever you were or it gets wildly out of control.

There's almost nothing bad that can happen from just grabbing both brakes pulling them way down get your wing in a stable configuration of course if you have the time but you know this is a much better way to throw and then to just back up my my what we were originally talking about before I talk about throwing my reserve without it being attached. I think the there's a tendency especially with the hike and fly crew the bivy crew to get into really lightweight gear and to go with lightweight reserves which are great but you got to be careful to you know like you said there's not a lot of time to do that. You know there's a lot of time to do that. You know there's not a lot of advantage going with a lightweight reserve at the top end of where that reserve you know like a lightweight reserve that's say rated 80 to 100 if you're at 100 you're coming down six meters a second which is wicked fast.

I mean that's a that's a rate that's really easy to blow an ankle or a leg or even a back and so I don't think that's where you want to save weight. This is a fallacy thinking.

Yeah I think I mean there's you have to remember that there's a compromise in everything and when you compromise in weight you compromise normally in surface area. I think the cloth material itself is is the lightweight cloth is is fine. There's no problems there per se but if you're if you're sacrificing surface area or maybe you're going into super thin dyneema lines as well because they save quite a lot of weight. These things are a compromise. Yeah absolutely. Sure. But you know for the hike and fly gang the height if I go when we go hike and fly we generally don't take reserves because we know that we're just going to fly from the top of the mountain and fly down in relatively benign conditions. So that's that's the risk that I'm willing to take.

But if if you're if you're battling in thermic air and you're flying on a high performance wing or you're you're you're you're flying acro or something like that then then yeah no you can't compromise. So I'm yeah no I'm definitely an advocate of big is beautiful. Absolutely. I'd like to come down I'd like to come down softly.

Yeah. Cool. Next question. Speed bar. This gentleman was taught I won't name the teacher that bar and brakes are OK. And he's even been taught that in his clinics. What's the real deal. Does it does it vary depending on the glider.

No brakes and speed bar are not OK. When you what you do is you inherently you you weaken the profile by applying brake with the glider accelerated. You basically you give the glider more camber. You give the profile more camber which means it will want to go nose down more and nose down more on a paraglider leads to collapses. There is actually a test in the EN

certification whereby you accelerate accelerate the wing to full speed and then apply 25 percent brake. Hmm. And every. EN certified wing has to pass that test. But in turbulent and that's in absolute dead calm smooth air in turbulent air you can touch the brakes whilst on the speed bar and it can actually provoke a collapse. OK. And with the competition wings it's it's normally the the test that limits the top speed in the current CCC certification. The test that limits the top speed of the wings is the 25 percent pitch stability test.

Wing overs. And this one's kind of interesting to me because Martin was talking about doing these in the in the talk that you gave here in 2012. But with wing overs is it true that learning wing overs without using the brakes is significantly safer.

Possibly. But you don't really do wing overs.

I've never managed to do wing overs without ever using the brakes. I may be on a very small heavily loaded acro type wing. It's it's possible. But on a normal wing you can do some you can do some rolling. Yeah. I think I don't know. It's never the technique that I've used to teach. It's never a technique that I've really delved into a huge amount. But yeah I could imagine that it is a good way of certainly learning the timing and learning the feel. But you do need to start to get nice good strong wing overs. You do need to start to. I love the wing over. I think the wing over is a magnificent. Maneuver because it's got everything in flying in the wing over. It's got pitch control pressure control roll control timing collapse stopping.

It's got all the skills wrapped up in one maneuver the wing over. So I think it's a very good maneuver to learn and pilots to learn to really understand the dynamics of the wing. And you can normally do perform wing overs in a relatively safe manner. Where the worst thing that can happen or worse thing that should happen is a exterior collapse.

And they're normally relatively simple to deal with. The important thing with wing overs is always doing them up high and away from the ground. Because no matter how experienced you are you can still get wing over wing overs wrong when you're close to the ground. And wagger the old wagger stuff doing stuff close to the ground. Yeah. It used to be appealing but to me it's lost its appeal these days.

Cool.

Stalls. We talked about this quite a bit with Jockey. But how important of a maneuver are stalls? And then he says I know some people who think it's super important to feel comfortable stalling your wing. Others think it's irrelevant. What do you think?

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. I wouldn't say it's super important. But ultimately a good command of the stall can save your life. So with our sport, I don't see the point in not being able to control the glider pretty much fully in terms of spin. Appreciation, spin control, collapse appreciation, collapse control. Getting out crevettes. Being able to stall the glider if necessary. Dealing with twists. being able to throw your reserve all of these it's not golf eh paragliding yeah if you're not good at putting it doesn't really matter but if you're not good at stalling it could actually kill you so i don't see i don't think it's irrelevant i think it's it's not absolutely important you can go your entire flying career without ever having to do a stall that is for certain um but i don't think it's something that you should actively avoid for the sake of avoiding or because you're scared of doing it i think uh i think the the the more command you have over the wing the less fear you can fly with the less gremlins you have on your shoulder and the more enjoyment you can get from the sport

yeah i i can add my own two cents to that in the in the xops last year i had to full stall three times they were really acro stalls but you know call them a full stall three times uh one day my my big day heading towards mont blanc and you know yeah i think i think having that in your kit is a really important thing if i hadn't been able to do that i would maybe not been here so yeah absolutely yeah

absolutely yeah yeah no no totally yeah so

moving on from stalls the next question he has is SIV how useful is it really to just do one SIV course uh does collapsing the wing and going hands up a few times really teach us i'd like to answer this but yeah does it really teach us anything what so what's your what's your view on SIV well

SIV i think is fundamental it's really really important the first SIV course that you do is a lesson in fear control normally um and you don't learn a huge amount you just get yourself through the world and you don't learn a huge amount you just get yourself through the week trying to deal with the fear um and seeing how you're going to kind of take to it see how you react in in these situations um but it's a stepping stone into the to the further training i think on the second and third and fourth SIV is when you start to learn it's when you start to really absorb what the instructor says and take on board all the little other parts that you kind of miss in the first SIV course that you do because you're just so concerned about your how you're going to perform and and all that and all the fear control um so but i think it's a journey i think it's a continual journey uh and it should be a regular part of your of your of your training of your of your um of your flying career really because it makes you like i was saying earlier it makes you it makes you more confident it makes you safer it gets rid of gremlins um and it allows you to enjoy the sport a little bit more i mean paragliders uh you know they they they can get themselves into some weird configurations more than any other aircraft in a way quite suddenly quite rapidly and you need to be able to you need the you need to be able to deal with it when that happens and um the only way is through it's through SIV training

absolutely um okay seatboard uh seatboard harnesses seem to dampen turbulence uh is this actually helping or hurting interesting question

interesting question and i don't know i think uh uh the the i've always flown with seatboarded harnesses um i've flown a quite a bit in i've flown quite a bit in in harnesses without a seatboard the difference isn't huge um i don't know uh yeah i think it's whatever you feel comfortable with and it's whatever you're used to it's fine i certainly think for for for stalling and getting twists and all these kinds of things it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's one of the things it's quite nice to have a seatboard but i don't think that it's uh impossible to to to get all those skills and get the same control if you don't have a seatboard um but i've seen certainly with the first generation of seat uh with seatboardless harnesses they had issues getting your legs tucked under to go with the collapses and so on i think it's important to be able to ball up in in in cascading events in in times when you're having troubles getting the glider back under control again it's really important to keep your core strength and keep your legs tucked under so that you're not going to get twisted up very easily um and i think that's where the seatboarded harnesses have a slight burnish compared to the certainly compared to the first generation type um uh but uh no i think you can i think there's there's lots of pilots out there that fly with seatboardless harnesses and they do extremely well and are very comfortable with them

a bit of advice just to add on to that a bit of advice i got a while back actually from Nate Scales which i thought was really good is that um don't change both at the same time you know that uh you know change a wing or change a harness but don't do them both especially not you know if you're going into a competition and i thought that was really good advice because their harnesses are certainly a lot harder to learn uh and to be comfortable in than a wing uh especially if you fly a ton so it takes a little bit of time to get used to whatever you're using but it's you know change one thing and then get used to that and then change another thing do you agree with that

yeah no yeah i totally agree with that and you know yeah the worst thing you can do is is buy yourself a seat boardless harness and move up a move up a leveling wing all at the same time it's all it's quite a lot of information to come but uh yeah changing your equipment progressively one piece by one piece is always a good idea sure

um new wings here's one just quite a bit of uh fanfare about nova's new phantom is ozone working on something similar well

we uh the the we're we're in a fortunate situation where whereby we can uh design whatever wings we want so yes we uh we have uh looked into making lower aspect ratio wings with lots of cells um there is potential in this route it's a very expensive way uh

yeah it's interesting we don't have anything imminently ready quite yet we're we're focusing at the moment on other wings um but it's certainly something that we've got in our in our in our foresight for the future okay

uh pod harnesses how much do they help in terms of top speed and glide can we just say a lot and move on or in

terms of top speed i don't think they help at all okay i'm aware of um but in terms of top speed i don't think they help at all of glides um well in terms of glide i think they're about a point just over a point for the well-designed um pod harness but it also really depends on your angle of dangle um and getting that right if you can get the optimum if you can get the optimum angle then you you will gain at least a point in glide um if you're not at the optimal angle you won't gain anything or you'll gain very little

great excellent

from the studies that we've seen in in wind tunnels it's it's better to be slightly feet up slightly feet down if your feet are slightly too low that's not so good for performance and obviously it's best to be perfect but if you uh feet up slightly that's better than feet down

interesting i didn't know that cool um yeah here's one something i use a lot uh flapping to land is flapping really more useful than just flying really slowly uh do you have to reach a stall point to make flapping useful why does it feel so damn good to flap your way down i

don't know why it feels so damn good for you gavin to flap your way down no

that's not this is not my question this is okay i

thought that was huge no no no no one of your inner secrets no no no no i'm a secret flapper fan

um flapping to land is good to get yourself into a little tight area yes or if you're coming into a top landing and it's there's a lot of lift going on and you need to to be able to to get yourself down uh but there are risks involved with doing it so um but yes it's a technique that uh i use it's a technique that um lots of good pilots use to get into very small areas

and yeah it's a useful it's a useful good technique but there are inherent dangers with it and if you don't know the stall point of your wing if you don't know the feel of your wing because obviously you can't necessarily be looking at the glider you have to feel it as you're doing it and you have to be able to judge it correctly uh but as with all things the more you practice uh the better you get at doing it i

can uh put out a warning to those of you who are thinking about flapping or who haven't done a ton of it uh there's some really really good footage of me and huber uh trying to top land at plan fey in pretty strong conditions uh flapping like crazy and uh we both lost one side of our wing and i would imagine that he like i am pretty familiar with their other stall point is so yeah it can go wrong if you screw it up don't screw it up oh no

absolutely yeah yeah but i mean i guess for you doing cross alps uh X-Alps uh it's it's it's absolutely important skill oh

absolutely yeah tricky

landings that you've got to put yourself into uh and so on i think for the for for the guys that are just flying on the normal club sites with the normal lz landing zone at the bottom and the relatively large areas to top land it's not really something that's absolutely necessary but if you're if you have to stick it into a tiny little field in amongst trees um or you're trying to top land on a very small in gordon where we fly we we we top land on this very small area and uh when the when the conditions are right you don't need to flap at all i mean i only we only use it if you have to use it it's not something that you just use for every landing but if if you're in a lot of lifting air and lifting air where there's not so much wind so you're getting drawn back into the lift band again then it's a good way of just stalling your your forward speed and then you uh or reducing your forward speed whilst trying to get some heavy sink rate going on as well i've seen some really good guys actually play with parachutal close to the ground but that is uh that's that's that is really on a knife edge there

yeah absolutely um here's an interesting one uh stable nose down spiral is it not possible to make a well-performing wing that will automatically exit a fully developed spiral yes

very easily but it won't be a very nice wing to fly um the uh as a basic rule if you want a glider that's really responsive in roll and in the turn then they will always be close to spiral stability

okay um

the uh yeah the beginner type wings that that um that exit spirals very quickly and very easily are also a little bit more sluggish in the turn um but there are there are some exceptions the the enzo i think was was quite hard to make it you had to get it so hard and deep into the spiral you had so much g that it was uncomfortable before you could get to a kind of stable point but um but uh no most wings most modern wings now that have the really lovely feel really lovely handling uh uh they're okay they are they are stable in spiral they're not neutral but all you need to do is tighten up your chest strap a few settings or or something like that tighten up your chest strap more and that can give you neutral problems or even instability

okay uh sink rate do the higher ozone gliders i'm assuming the higher rated have a better sink rate than the lower gliders or is performance all in top speed and glide no

sink rate is better on more aspecting readings as a general rule um and you see that with the competition wings that not only glide better but they also climb better especially in broken lift i think where also the advantage comes as well is in broken lift um you'll find that uh there's bits of sink and there's bits of zeros in amongst all the lift and the more efficient wing will glide better through that will cut better through that and lose less so in weak broken thermals um they will they will uh they will climb better but give it a strong tight gnarly little core and a good pilot on a low end bit on an enb type wing will should be able to climb with if not out climb a comp pilot okay because because you can stick the glider on in a in a tighter turn radius and keep it on the inside of the core so a low performing wing staying six meters all the way around the 360 is is better than a high performance wing that's doing six meters four meters six meters four meters so yeah if you can if you can pin the glider on its wing tip and get it around and use all that handling um then no you'll climb just as well okay

uh this is a good one uh two liners how low can you go uh i.e what is preventing manufacturers from making a b class two liner do you need a high aspect ratio to reap the benefits of a two liner yeah

yeah you need you need relatively high aspect ratio low aspect ratio and two liners at the moment is not really feasible because you've got so much of the wing that's unsupported so if you have for example if you have the the b's a long way backwards and you've got a big cord then the whole center section isn't really supported and it's just uh it's it'll just be like a um uh it would just concertina between the a's and the b's in the middle of the wing um and if you have the b's too far forwards or you've got a big cord and you've got a large unsupported area at the back then it will just be flapping around and flipping around and as soon as you touch the brakes you will just make a big bobble between the back of the wing and the brakes and it won't feel very nice so um it's difficult to make a two liner below an aspect ratio of of six six and a half

okay six

six and a half is already quite hard to make two liners but who knows in the future you know we may find ways of of being able to support the structure better within the cord and um it's not we're not writing it off but right at the moment it's not something we're not we're not working on a on a low aspect two liner okay

great uh okay one

of the questions alex has was accidents um do you russ have a theory on why so many people crash their paragliders because

it's a dangerous sport um there's no way around it paragliding is dangerous and everyone who who does it has to understand that and we have to accept those risks what's happened over the years is wings have become safer they become faster in the olden days wings used to get blown back really easily you just get blown back over the ridge um or you'd have to accelerate to stop yourself from getting blown back and the gliders became inherently so unstable that they would collapse really easily so what's happened now is we made gliders that um are much faster so our window of opportunity to fly is much greater um and also when they when we accelerate to full speed the gliders are still relatively stable they're less stable than they are at trim speed but they're still relatively stable so

of course what do we do we start flying in stronger and stronger conditions and um when you fly in stronger and stronger and stronger conditions um there's mechanical turbulence out there that can collapse the wing we're all human beings we all make mistakes we make errors in judgment we can make errors in inputs to the glider and accidents continue to happen i think if we if we if we were all extremely strict with ourselves and flew when the conditions were only ever suitable to fly in then we would see the accident rates drop and drop and drop but unfortunately what happens now the experienced pilots can be blamed for this because the experienced good cross country pilots want to fly in the stronger conditions and the new pilots see this new pilots aspire to this new pilots think that this is the way that that you need to these are the conditions you need to fly in to be good and so we we we give ourselves more risk getting so i think that's why the accidents continue to happen it's like base jumping you know they spent

base jumping has always been so dangerous and they spent years and years and years of ways to make it safer finally they made it safer by having these amazing wingsuits that they can track immediately away from the cliff so then what do they do they start proximity flag and trying to come back to the cliff and going close to the mountain again you know right i think i think i think human beings make this sport dangerous sure

yeah absolutely the gear just keeps getting better and better a few episodes back i talked to isabella messenger and we got into it pretty good about size and you know just yeah how much uh you know smaller pilots are handicapped by having to fly smaller wings and also by having to really ballast up that can be pretty dangerous uh it's kind of like flying bivy across alaska but when you're in a PWC um you know if you're if you weigh 115 pounds and you're and you're ballasting up the maximum 32 kgs you can do that that's not ideal um but how how much how much are how much advantage is there for you know flying a a large you know ozone enzo 2 compared to the smaller sizes is it is it substantial well

i think there's a there's an advantage in in speed and glide there's the there's you've got more surface area creating more lift you've got better higher wing loading um as a general rule the larger wings are behave slightly better in the certification type testing so i think that's a big advantage there's a big advantage there's a

bigger speed range more top speed there's obviously there's the reynolds numbers that comes into effect um but i think yeah i think that the the problem here is is down to wing loading um and the smaller wings are more aggressive in collapses they're harder to um get through certification and uh the the that's often limited by a smaller speed range than the small wings not always just the small wings um that have to have a smaller speed range but uh more commonly they are and and and they're less wing there's less wing loading relative so so they're slightly slower so yes small people in paragliding especially in competitive paragliding are disadvantaged in speed and glide but what they they can they can gain in climb uh small pilots can often climb really well a very good i always remember flying with jimmy bach uh he was an awesome pilot he was quite small quite light he always flew the small wings and he was a very successful pilot he did very well uh but he used to climb so well because he no one could turn with him he'd just be turning inside everyone and just rocketing up through the middle of the of the of the of the gaggle so so the big boys push their buses around the outside of the thermal while the little guys squeak up through the middle um so you can gain in in climate it's difficult to make up in speed and glide okay

great russ uh thank you man that's that's all i got for you that was uh terrific we've got a lot of really good stuff there and uh i can't wait to put this one together and uh and give it to the world

such a prophet you are

you're like ganesh or someone else

no but thank you i really do appreciate it and i know that uh it's

lovely to speak with you gavin i've

kept you up again at your your end of the world there but uh thanks and until we see each other at cloudbase again i

hope to see you soon man you take care all right buddy you too bud talk to you soon bye