Well, happy holidays, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase 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 you who listen 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 that 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 uh, 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 a few 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 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 geo 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 to 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. 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 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 talks he gave here back during the 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 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 Xeno, their new two-liner wing. 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 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 You were really terrific, and you were a little bit tumultuous, of course, here in the States. But without further ado, please enjoy this most terrific conversation with 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 Cloudbase Mayhem. 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 hungover that day as well because it was the day after we found Guy. That's right. And so I was a bit hungover. But I sobered up by the end of it, I think.
Yeah, no, it was a—it was a great talk, and I, I'd love to get into some of that, you know, two-liner talk, yeah, um, here at some point. And actually, you know, by the way, I don't know if you've heard that one, but I had guy on the show, uh, I don't know, maybe a month and a half ago, and uh, it was so awesome listening to his recollection of those days because, you know, when we found him, well, you—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 some 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 their time so freely and spend so much time and effort on finding someone. One, and you know, after the as the days went by, I, I fully expected that, as I think we all did, you know, just to be picking up a body and to find him alive. Alive was just incredible, incredible. I'll never forget us both being in tears, uh, flying back in the in the helicopter, but, uh, yeah, no, no, very special memories, actually.
Yeah,
That's a—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, uh, the—the happiest of endings. Um, Russ, for those who don't know, who have had their head in the sand for the last, maybe, 20 years in paragliding, um, can you—uh, can you tell our audience, just, can you give us the—the Russ Ogden brief? You know, catch us up to, you know, how it all started for you way back in the day? And, uh, you know, I—I don't want to put you on the hot spot, but I'd love to hear, you know, about some of your resorts. Yeah, you're—you're—yeah, can we give the—can we get the two-minute life story, two—
minutes after, I guess for me, my whole love affair with the air and the sky started through my dad, who was, uh, he was in the parachute regiment in the UK and, uh, did a lot of of early sport parachuting, early free fall stuff back in the 60s, 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 and early 70s, I think. So my first route into the air was through parachuting, and I did a handful of jumps when I was 16 or 17, and then my brother started paragliding when I was at university, and And as soon as I left university, I knew that 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 then I taught paragliding with Sussex Hang Gliding and paragliding down in Brighton 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 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 I put up a little post on Facebook about an hour ago on CloudBaseBand 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 you just told me the name of the town before we got on, but it's near grioli air is that right yeah
We live in, uh, Barcelona, Barcelona, which is the same, it's the same, uh, town, same village, uh, that the ozone office is based in. So I'm just five, ten minutes from work and
Your is your test site, Gordon, is that right? Yeah.
we mostly fly at gordon or grioli air or colder blend we're flying a colder blend today um and la chenne sometimes we go to rock Rune in Monaco, but mostly it's in Gordons. Okay. We fly here pretty much every day in Gordons.
Okay, a very cool site, and it's one I flew quite a few years back.
Yeah, it's a great site because 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. On it's always quite choppy; it's moving all the time, so it gives us a good, uh, 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, the movements of the wing and the movements of the, 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 um, let's stick with that theme for a bit. You're—you've been a test pilot for Ozone for how long, um?
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 a wing is built. Uh, again, I'm not asking you to give away any secrets of 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 it, how does a new wing come to life from
the old one from the wing that it's replacing. Um, you can think of a paragliding development as a continuous line; it's a continuous stream from, from model to, uh, 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, um, 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 for.
Um, so we don't really start from a, 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 whistle it down to to the to the one that we want, and that or certainly that type, that family 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 until we get to something that we're happy with, and he's passing the tests, and he's performing better, and he's good fun to fly, and has good feel, and he's solid, and 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, uh, do you, do you have a baseline? Okay, we that this, this prototype, you know, going from the Enzo two, 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 you're working on? 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 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, um, because all the wings are getting better and better, so the to make improvements becomes harder and harder. But, uh, no, we've always dreamt about the one prototype wing, the one prototype product, but I don't think it's ever happened, or certainly not. 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. Um, CCC is going through some changes, I guess. Um, yeah, you know, what's your... what's your opinion on all 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, uh, are these great wings just way too rad to be given up on? No.
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, um, of the serial class. I thought it was the right way to go. I think with hindsight, um, and uh, with hindsight, it was probably not the best way to go. And there's just 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 feeling now is that we should go back to open. Okay. I think for the World Cup level, for the World Championship type level, I think for the really good pilots, So 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, less restriction, and less pressure on the lower classes.
Would it allow enough manufacturers into the game?
What I'm getting at here is that right now there are three companies that are able to 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. For us, the core work is with our ENBs, our ENCs. They're our core gliders. The Rushes, the Buzzes, the Deltas, they're the most important wings for us. The Mantra as well. The Enzo is our flagship. It's very much for the elite pilots. And 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 And the Xeno as well. We've had the last couple of months where we've also been able to focus a little bit more on the Enzo. But now that we've got a slightly larger team, where there's five of us, we can split our resources slightly. And some can work 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 this talk, I—I don't want to get us too skewed into just the wing side of things in 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 end of 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.
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 good products in the other range. No, I think it all depends on your core product. I think having a good competition scene or a good competition reputation 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 on the product that you sell at the end of the day. And if you've got good products, 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 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 from him, he and it sounds like his wife. First question from him, uh, being a a new pilot with 70-ish hours and only a couple of 50, 60k flights in the UK, what's the best thing to work on through the winter months and next season to maybe get into his first comp in 2018? In
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 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 stack, you then punt out in front of the hill as far as you can and then come back as low as you can 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 nothing too crazy, too fast, too low, but just getting comfortable using the speed bar.
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 days and extend the 50, 60K flights and break the 100K barrier.
I'd be interested to hear 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, I think especially when you're, when you're at the PWC end of things, obviously, 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, to get off Facebook because this thing's going to keep dinging. I got one more question for bail 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 Any difference whatsoever. Speed to fly is simple. If the day is on, if it's good, you should be flying at least half bar. 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 cumulus falling and growing and you're 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.
If you're on a high-performance wing, an Ed Ewing or a top-end E &C-type wing, then you should be going full bar.
And if you're really trying to maximise 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'm covering the ground at 38k an hour into wind, Then I 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 I don't use instruments a great deal, and occasionally it inhibits me slightly, but 95 % 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 get the good line through the sky with a minimum amount of sync is far better than worrying about the correct speed to be flying at.
I've often heard, and I certainly have noticed this in my own flying, I think the genius of somebody like a Chrigel is exactly what you're talking about, is the gliding. Matt Bieschner talked quite a bit about gliding in his podcast. I think as we get better, we realize that thermaling is pretty easy and gliding is very difficult and is very hard to teach. But do you have some words on gliding? It seems to me like the really, really elite pilots find those lines you're talking about more often than not. They're finding those seams. They're able to stay in them. I, for one, I have trouble with certainly feeling that seam when I'm using a lot of bar because my hands are a little bit heavy in the Bs, and that's something I've been working on.
Talk about that a little bit. No,
again, I keep it quite simple.
Sniffing out the line, if you get a good line, then 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 downwind. The trick is when you're not in the good line is to be able to get yourself back in the 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, I don't do a great deal of flying on my own, so I'm 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 sometimes. You, you shift one way and actually 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, so 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 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 having that search. But you have to accept the inefficiencies to gain on the efficiencies. So you have to take that risk. You have to take that gamble.
And gliding is very much a similar thing. You know, you have to, if you're on a good line, try and stay on it. 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 on a 45-degree line from your given track. And that way, you're still covering the ground in roughly the direction you want to go to, but you're just changing your position in the air mass.
Russ, you gave me a bit of advice at the, I believe it was 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 book, we've all read all the books, and if you haven't, then you should, do you know? But everyone basically has, 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 the discipline, 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 overcomplicate 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 actually actually, you should just be flying full speed. You may not be flying full speed because you're not confident under your glider, which means that you need to work on your flying skills and so on. But I think discipline is about being, for me personally, it depends on the different pilots. Some pilots are naturally extremely cautious when they fly cross country, 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. was 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, Wagger Watts, was brilliant at that. He used to always get himself in. He's such a good pilot. He climbs 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 air, and 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—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 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 Camden a couple years ago, and I know you have plans of doing that again. I haven't been, but I've heard this is not the greatest place in the world to uh spend your time and you know flatland
What are you talking about? Hebronville is the most wonderful place I think I've ever been. They had a subway, yeah, 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. We were inhabited by wonderful, lovely, kind, friendly people. And we had a really nice time. We met some really awesome people. And the flying there, we were a bit unlucky with the weather. We were there over the end of June, early July. So it was the best time to be there. But we didn't really get the good flying conditions.
But we managed to crack out some pretty good flights. We did four flights in the 10 days or so that we were there. The first day was – 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 so, yeah, we had to tow up from this airfield, and that was the most horrific, terrifying experience of my life. The first tow we ever did, it was super windy. I mean, it was limit okay on the runway to be able to... You hoiked the glider up and you got hoiked off the ground and whipped round and then you're pulled by this metal thing or by a car along the runway. And all I remember from my first time 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 I was absolutely crapping myself. self, 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, then 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 let go of 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 the 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 missed a launch or had to relaunch or something. I can't remember what happened.
But he was a good 40 minutes or so behind us and ended up flying 465. And so I had a half an hour good jump on him. 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 with our fingernails to try and eke out until we got into the good part of the day.
And that first day, I was looking at this amazing sky over to my right, about probably 10, 15K to the north of me. And all day I was there thinking, I really want to be over there, but I had 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. illustrating, I'd, 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 till 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'd say, "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 with the sun just touched 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 real motivation to not land was, was that the ground down 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'd been warned about mini pigs as well. So there was nothing particularly friendly on the ground. But the worst thing was the roads, the lack of roads. There was one point where, actually, I don't know which is the closest direction the road is in.
and 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 weird places and just amazing, amazing terrain but very, very quite gripping, scary. Fortunately, 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 going to say, well, you do it again. Tell me about the reason for chasing these world records like that. Is it 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, I think it was more of an excuse to get together and go flying and meet some friends and, you know, Bill was there and Nick was there and there was a handful of pilots that came down and it was just a really, really lovely few days
and 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 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 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, year, year before Charles and Seiko did their big flights last year, um, towing, and it's, oh, I, I, I find it very disconcerting on some days when you're dealing with all that heat and the flies and the and the wind and the in the tow rig breaking, and oh, it's really stressful.
It's just frustrating, yeah. I mean, the other times I had the subsequent toes I had after that first one were really nice in comparison. It was just a... it was just a turbulence that we were flying in on that first day. Well, certainly that bottom layer when we um, that we towed through was just, for me, it was horrible. It's scary. It was, in fact, it's probably one of my scariest various flying experiences, yeah.
I, I, uh, I wasn't in a huge hurry to go back, actually. Actually, after my... I know there's people that go every year back to Australia, but it's, uh, yeah, you know, you long drives home with kangaroos all over the roads and, and, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's a pretty serious undertaking, it
is yeah no it's great it is a serious undertaking but you know when when it it pales into comparison to what you and Dave did this summer. It did 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 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 so
I'm really looking forward to the story in full, uh
Well, I'll, 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. Um, Russ, where does your, where does your passion for, for paragliding live these, 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, uh, maybe not so much in free flight, but where, where do you, you know, after all these years, uh, are you still really passionate about it? Is it still really turning on? Um, and if so, what, what, what aspects?
I think, I think, yeah, my, my relationship with flying over the years has changed. It is like a, a relationship; it has its ups and downs, you know. Some days, I, I, I, I'm not interested in paragliding; some days 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 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, 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 thinking, well, I'd be lucky if I get the glider out of the pack. And, uh, the first day we flew 210k 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 still pinched myself over that because, because before then, I'd never even flown 100k in the UK. And to come back after a weekend, after flying 350k in a weekend, I was completely made up. But I get very few opportunities to fly cross country.
And I'm not super motivated to go cross country just on my own, just to fly, you know. I've been flying long enough that I don't need to do that anymore. Unless maybe it was a really, really classic. Even this year, you know, when Luke and Ono were making those big, big flights, I was quite happy just to be here working and testing here over Gordons. No, it didn't put me out at all. But I'd say competition is something that I love the most. But I don't, again, I don't do a huge amount of that anymore. I just do one or two comps a year. it.
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 flying, so my, 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 all over the place a little bit. My head's not in the right place. I'm not, I'm a bit indecisive and, uh, I'm not that, that great, so so that's something for sure. No, 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. They'll do five or six competitions a year.
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 take off, I'm fine. I climb okay because I'm pretty much in tune with my flying. I don't feel rusty. but I think my decision making certainly what I've noticed in the last couple of years is my decision making at comps hasn't been that brilliant You
and I were talking about this down somewhere, I think it was Columbia and I don't at all know the complete history of your World Cup results but I remember you and I were kind of having a laugh about, I think you got second that year and you'd said to me that you had a whole lot of seconds and you were kind of cracking up about maybe being too reserved in the last thermal, a little bit too careful and not quite enough cowboy. I don't know if that's correct. Is that correct? And if so, would you like to comment on it?
Yeah, as Craig Morgan once said, I was the king of mediocrity and never, yeah, brilliant underachiever. I've been second and third in the Superfinal. I've been third in the European Championships and I've been second in the Superfinal twice, I think. But I did win a World Cup once, an individual World Cup once.
Yes, I think I am just ill-disciplined. You know, I didn't apply myself well enough. 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.
I think winning is, to be able to win all the time is very difficult. That's what makes people like Ono really, really impressive because his win rate is super, super high. And even when he does badly, he doesn't even do that badly.
It depends what you want to be in flying, you know. I mean, I really respect people like Julian Wirtz, Yuri Vidich, and guys like that that are just so consistently up there. And Chevy Bonnet, 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—there are a handful that—that stand out for 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 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—and I'll train—I'll train as much as I can for that as well, um...
Again, that question of, you know, is there something definitive that separates the the wurtzes and the bonnets and, you know, these guys that are so consistent, well...
They make less mistakes than the rest of everyone else, you know? Know they're not making the mistakes; 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 were training 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 a cross country decision to actually win the task or win the competition. But often the guys like, uh, Julian, Yuri, 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.
The only way you can achieve that is by climbing extremely well, gliding extremely well, applying, and being really disciplined, right? And there's very few pilots in, 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, um—
When you, when you, uh, let's say you were in a year where you were really chasing like the, uh, you know, the world championship, or um, you know, you were going to do a whole bunch of PDBCs, or take me back to a time when, when you were doing that, um, are you, is there a, uh, is there a training regimen? Is there a, is there a preparation kind of protocol that you go through? Is there a, um, is there a head space 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, you know, That they have found often through trial and error, you know, that they'll—they'll just suddenly have a really good comp, and when they look back on it, it's because they were either a little bit tired or, uh, 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—do you approach comps like that, or do you just kind of go into them and and have a go? Well,
The first one, the first World Cup I ever went to was in January, and this was when I was living back in the UK, and we don't fly in the winter that much in the UK, and 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 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.
super psyched super
slow yeah
Every time I go to a competition now, cast my wife says I have to win as I leave the door and, uh, so that's my, that's my, uh, that's my regime, I guess. Uh, but no, I don't, I don't have a regime. I, I, um, 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, being super motivated, I've tried it all and it makes absolutely for me, it makes zero difference whatsoever. Um, for me, the best thing to do is to wake up in the morning and go fly and, and don't treat it as any more than that and, uh, and then when you're, when you can do that and you're relaxed enough to do that, um, and you, you can maintain 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 as part of our sport. It's a really demoralising sport at times because even you can do just the right things and you get a bit of bad luck, you get a bad cycle, You miss the bottom of the climb, um, and you could, 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, oh, you've won a day, you know, it's, it's
A little bit random like that, um, but so that's why I try and keep it simple and 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 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, know, because it was something that had been—it was techniques that had been used, um, and taught for many years by many pilots, not just me. And, uh, a good friend of mine, uh, said he tormented himself by putting through that talk by listening to on YouTube, because he'd been to so many of my courses and heard the same shit over and over and over again, and I didn't give any new information. So it did—it did surprise me that a lot of people commented on, on how, how new some of that information was to them. Um, and I think now, looking back, from what I said, um, I think most of it still stands.
I have seen different behavior in gliders; um, I have seen some gliders now where hands up is possibly the best thing to do on after a frontal, but I'll still stand by the fact that most gliders irrespective of their class, irrespective whether they're two line, three line, whatever, if the glider starts to deflate and you start getting a frontal, the first input you should do is hit the brakes quite sharpish and get the nose open, and then keep the hands up to let the glider to fly, and certainly for the, for the two liners to, uh, to 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, bit of a parachute stall, that's no problem, you just put your hands up and you fly away from it, you know, you, if you're flying a two-liner, um, then you should have the skills to be able to stall, um, hesitation
anytime, really, and be able to fly away from it
I think what was, um, one of the things that was, was quite impactful for me. And this was, you know, I was flying my first two liner at that world cup. So that was pretty new for me anyway, um, was also just how, how powerful the, well, how much practice you needed on the badger bar on the bees, you know, that, that so much of the wing could be held open with the bees, um, while staying on bar. I think you mentioned, You know that you were, you know that if you start to put those two things together quite well, you know, reasons that in the past were reasons to get off the speed, go to the brakes, were no, weren't there, if you were using those correctly, that you could literally power through quite turbulent air.
Um, yeah, with on the bees, using the bees, well...
absolutely yeah because you can you can And you can pull enough B 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. And, yeah, but there does come a point where, you know, 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 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 SIV, and it's by flying in turbulent air. So, in order to learn the skills that you need, you have to put the—you have to put yourself in risk in a way, and that's—that's the, uh, 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 um, the
Beautiful, that's the beautiful thing about our sport and, uh, and that's why there's so much longevity in it. Um, but that's also what makes it dangerous, you
said in that talk, um, that you'd never thrown your reserve. Is that... is that still the case? And are you still accident-free? I've
Had 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 the UK. Um, I've had no, I've had my fair share, but I've yet to, I've yet to, um, I've landed under Morris there, but I've never thrown it. I actually had, uh, I was flying in Gordon last year, um, just after coming back from the the World Cup in in India, and uh, we were, I was flying some, I think, when we just started some new Enzo protos, and uh, I took off, flew around for a good 10-15 minutes, it's scratching along the cliffs, going over the gorge, I was super low, couldn't get up. Eventually, uh, I got a climb, got up above the mountain, I just got to cloud base, and then, but some someone started pulling my shoulders.
I thought, "What the hell?" I actually even turned around and looked to see what it, who, who or what it was, and boom, my parachute just popped out, and uh, I so I, I have 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?
It was a really bizarre feeling. 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 um, even after 20 years of flying, and I'm, I'm pretty good at checking my stuff because, you know, doing, 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 and, um, so I was pretty hard on myself with about that because it was a bad mistake to not check my pin, but um, I was just fortunate after it all held in for that length of time because had it 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 a reserve on and certainly not nice to have an inadvertent deployment when you're along a cliff. So I was actually 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. So, um, but no, I've never thrown my my reserve in in anger, but I guess I don't push it too hard. I know my limits, um...
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, uh, it's, it's one of the kind of common themes I like to talk about safety on the podcast because we've got a lot of listeners who are pretty low-hour pilots, or, uh, we just did one with Cedar Wright, who's firmly in the grasp of intermediate syndrome. You know, he's only been flying for a year and a half, so I think there's, there could be some good, great, uh, yeah, some good passing along some good advice from you in terms of, you know, are there some common and very avoidable mistakes that you see happen? And you're, you're mostly seeing, you know, you're mostly going to PwC's and seeing, and there's plenty of accidents at those, so, uh, you know, maybe, 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.
Right, I've got the old cliches, I mean, the the common stuff is on the ground, um, certainly for intermediate pilots, it's on the ground. It's, 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 flying, we fly in air that just we wouldn't even 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 five mile an hour to 15 mile an hour, then maybe it's a bit too strong, and so on. Five mile, five mile an hour to 15 mile an hour nowadays is a good day, so we're flying in stronger, and even though the gliders are safer and better, better because we're flying much stronger conditions.
I don't think the sport is any 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 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 autorotation, 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, um, I've certainly seen it at the top level and, and hopefully it'll filter down everywhere. Um, 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 think, well, why on earth can that happen? And, and, uh, it used to be quite a regular occurrence. People were, 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 FIV, 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, yeah, the top level, I think the piloting is definitely improving. improving
Speaking of wings, um, you know, Luke, I think is bears the responsibility or the credit for the shark nose technology, and if I'm wrong, let me know, but um, you know, 2009, we had this, this incredible jump, uh, in, in what paragliders could do, and, and, uh, 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, 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 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? Well, I don't know. I mean,
like Bill was saying, I remember back in 1996 people saying, Like, that's it. Yeah, that's it with the diagonal ribs. That's it. We're never going any further. Um, very definite gains to be made, for sure. There's gains to be made, I think. The gains are getting harder, um, 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 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
in terms of supporting the structure.
But I think there are gains to be made. in you
You mentioned Honoren and I, I'm probably—I know I'm not saying his name right, I never do, uh—but he won it, one of Honoren, okay? He won one of your pilots who just had an unbelievable year. Um, what, what separates, and he's pretty young, which is kind of cool. Uh, 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 you older guys just crushing it. Um, but he's pretty young and, uh, 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 um, what separates somebody like him from, um, other good and great pilots very
Good question. I think, I think Ono is, uh, 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, um, attitude towards it. It's a really nice balance, and Chrigel and Ono have always impressed me 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, their profession and what they want to do, and they're into every facet of it. So, um, Ono has done incredibly well.
I mean, he's only 25 years old now, and, uh, he's an awesome pilot. He's a very mature pilot as well, and, um, 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 not peaking at the moment, which is the scary thing. Yeah, 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, uh, certainly his test flying come on really, really well, and, um, I think, I think he's only going to get better, yeah, um.
If you could rewind the clock, Russ, uh, this is a question I ask of everybody. People seem to really like, uh, back to your 50-hour self, um, 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. Um, I don't know, I don't know. I think, you know, the the the intermediate syndrome, like you touched on earlier, was is is is the difficult part. And if there was some magical way to get through that, 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 um, 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.
Um, 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. Um, and uh, 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 clocks, I would move to a better place to go flying.
that that leads perfectly into a question that just Just came through on Facebook from Gemma. Hope I'm saying that right. She's a four-hour pilot. She wanted to stress that. She's brand new. She wants to know where you would send her, best place in the world, 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. Um, 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. Um, so yeah, you need somewhere like maybe Columbia or somewhere, or or somewhere in there are areas in France, June to peel out the peeler, these sort of places.
Um, these are quite good. Um, 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 and so on, so I don't really know where all the 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 very forgiving place to fly and it's a good place 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 it's different up north, 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, uh, our friend, uh, Matt Bieschner, farmer, uh, he wants to know because I think he's looking at this wing, uh, how solid is the leading edge of the Enzo 2 versus the Xeno? What
Does he want that in in grams per square inch, or what?
Um, it's the... the profile has slightly more solidity than the um Enzo, to put it another way. I've never had a collapse on it that I haven't induced myself ever, and that's from flying quite a lot on the glider. It is a relatively stable wing. Um, I would say it's more stable than the Enzo, and um, the B pressure is slightly lighter as well, so it's slightly easier to fly on the B lines.
Um, so yeah, it's an easier glider to fly than the Enzo 2, and given the same inputs, it's probably less likely to collapse.
Okay, great. Uh, this is for my own curiosity, you don't have to give this away if you don't want to, but uh, is anybody going to be using it in the X-Alps? It will
be yeah 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. 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.
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? Yeah,
I feel sorry for you guys over there right now.
Yeah, so do we. but
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. We usually do. We'll figure it out.
You'll figure it out. I mean, we we've just had Brexit in the UK as well. I
know you did
which is just left out left Europe, which was, which was actually that was the day I signed for our, it was the day of Brexit. It was the day we bought the house here in France. Out nailed it. These things happen, these things happen, you know? Yeah, right? They do, they do. Well,
It's been, uh, it's been a terrific joy. Thank you so much, uh, again, thank you for your time. I think people are gonna totally dig that, and, uh, until we, uh, 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 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 So 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. You can text her and find out how you can lend a a huge helping hand. So you can reach Anna at 4 0 1 5 9 2 7 5 8 4, or that's 4 0 1 5 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, um, do you think that, you know, just from a safety standpoint, and you know, I mean, I know this has been argued added for an item, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. You know, should we all just be racing around on one class gliders? Would that be, you know, a better way forward, uh, or does that wreck open class innovation, or what are your thoughts on that? I'm just curious, well...
the the original thought was that serial class would kill innovation in the open class and would kill innovation throughout the rest of the range. But I think, you know, over the last few years of being in serial class, being in the new 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 car, I used to be an advocate of the serial class quite strongly, and but I kind of realized that maybe that's not the best way. But but right now, working with the the CCC, I think is almost a good compromise. We've got gliders that are very similar to open class wings, yet they have a inbuilt added amount of safety into them because they have to perform and meet certain criteria, which is 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 with the CCC as a compromise one.
of the questions then, I think you've answered this, uh, uh, uh, one of the guys, one of the guys who listens to the show, Joe Crutchley, I hope I'm saying that right. Um, wanted me to ask you, yeah, 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.
Um, safer is a very hard thing to quantify. You know, safety is, is, is, is, is really down to the pilot and the pilot skills. Um, As wings have developed over the last few years, I think pilots have up their skill level in order to deal with them. In the 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're not more inherent stability in the wings, but when they collapse, they can still be quite aggressive. So, so I think pilots have less training less nowadays with or less they have less collapses, so you're naturally, you're more rusty when you do get a collapse, but I think that's been kind of
counted by pilots doing a lot more SIV training now, and I see in the top level competitions that pilots 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 Zeno, 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 Zeno has a little bit less aspect ratio than the Enzo 2. It sits between the M6 and the Enzo 2 and accelerated. It's very stable; it's got a really nice, it's got quite a high CM profile and it's quite light pressure on the B, so it's very controllable and probably more inherent stability than the Enzo 2 at full speed. But again, these wings, you know, it's not a case of pushing the speed bar to maximum and then just sort of closing your eyes and letting the wing go. You have to control the wing with the B risers, with the speed bar, depending on the air that you're in. So as soon as you feel the air turbulent, you need to put pressure on the Bs and and hold the wing back a bit.
And if you get a big sudden increase or a sudden decrease in pressure in the nose, you have to input the bees quite hard and come off the bar if necessary. But overall, I would say that the Zeno is more stable than the Enso 2 at the same speed.
Cool. I found a lot of these questions really good. 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 the weight and the loading and the length of the lines, but they can get an oscillation also if the lines go become asymmetric in any way. Then, then you can have quite a pendulum descent.
From what I've seen, the squares are undoubtedly, undoubtedly a lot better in terms of pendulum stability, and if, you, 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 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 with the beamer type, um, but I think the the squares address these, uh, issues. They're not steerable, but they can, they have such good stability and and bring you down quite softly that I think 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. I've heard that lightly loaded parachutes can cause pendulum issues, instability issues, but speaking to parachute designers, speaking to acro pilots, seeing all the tests under the squares and so on, I don't think that having a parachute that's big 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 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 um, 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 Very much so. Yes. The first one actually wasn't attached. You may have seen that article. Luckily, I had a second, but that one didn't deploy in time. But luckily, I was in a deep stall configuration, and I was able to keep it like that. And I bounced pretty well. You might have... Anyway. The first
one wasn't attached.
This wasn't a previous episode. But yeah, Yeah, I was down training acro with – I need the
full story on this one. Where did that happen?
I actually put it in my column in cross country, which I was lauded for, for the honesty. People thought that was pretty cool that I didn't just run away from that one. But, yeah, I was training acro. The full story is quite funny. I was training acro with Cody down in Virgin in the desert near Zion. On, 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'd 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, 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 cause 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 going to do another one, you know, so mistake number 15 in the whole series of mistakes. And yeah, it got all twisted up and went to throw and through and, you know, hucked it, hucked 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.
And I shit you not Russ. I was like, my first thought was like, that's pretty funny.
that's hilarious look
at that 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—and 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, looked, and went, there is no way. Oh, I've got a second reserve. But at this point I was less than a hundred 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 an 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 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 two reserves in my testing equipment and I fly with two reserves in my cross country equipment. I think the time that an experienced pilot is going to be in a reserve deployment situation, forgetting getting the big collapse low down, which is always an eventuality, but um, the the most common kind of position to be in will be, it will be in a heavy twisted cravatted spiral. And from all of the deployments you watch on YouTube, I've seen in SOV, I've seen, uh, over the years, I 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 not flow my two reserves anymore. I
Think this is a good place to remind the listeners that, uh, 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.
Um, 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. Um, 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 being attached. Um, I, I think the, there's a tendency, especially with the hike and fly crew, the bivy crew, um, to get into really lightweight gear and to go with lightweight reserves, which are great. Um, but you got to be careful to, you know, like you said, 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, I mean, 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, 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 the lightweight cloth is fine. There's no problems there per se. Say, 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. Um, these things are a compromise, yeah. Absolutely sure, but you know, for the hike and fly gang, um, height—if I go, when we go hike and fly, uh, we generally don't take reserves because we know that we're just gonna fly from the top of, of a mountain and and fly down in relatively benign conditions. So, um, that's—that's the risk that—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—you're flying acro or something like that, then—then yeah, no, you can't compromise. Um, so I'm—yeah, no, I'm definitely an advocate of big is beautiful. I'd like to come down—I'd like to come down softly, yeah.
um Cool. Next question. Speed bar. This gentleman was taught, I won't name the teacher, that bar and brakes are okay. And he's even been taught that in his clinics. What's the real deal? Does it vary depending on the glider? uh
No brakes and, uh, speed bar are not okay. Um, when you, what you do is, you inherently, you weaken the profile by applying brake with the glider accelerated. You basically, you give the glider, um, 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 the wing to full speed and then apply a 25 % break. 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. Okay. And with the competition wings, it's normally 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 % pitch stability test.
Wing overs. And this one's kind of interesting to me because Martin was talking about doing these 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?
Uh, possibly, but you don't really do wing overs. Um, I've never managed to do wing overs without ever using the brakes, and maybe 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. Um, 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—a huge amount, okay? Um, 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—uh, 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, control timing, uh, collapse stopping; it's got all the skills wrapped up in one maneuver, the wing over. So I think, um, it's a very good, uh, 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 worst 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 and wagger, the old wagger stuff, doing stuff close to the ground, yeah, it used to be appealing, but to me, it's it's lost lost its appeal these days. Hmm.
Cool, uh, stalls. Uh, we talked about this quite a bit with Jockey, uh, but how important of a maneuver are stalls, uh? And I, 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, um?
I wouldn't say it's irrelevant; I wouldn't say it's super important, but um, ultimately, a good, uh, a good command of the stall can save your life. Um, so with our, with our sport, I, 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 cravats, being able to stall the glider if necessary, dealing with twists, being able to throw your reserve—all of these, it's not golf, a 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 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. And 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, would have maybe not been here, so yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, no, no, I totally agree, yeah.
So moving on from stalls, the next question he has is SIV, how useful is it really to just do one SIV course, 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, and you don't learn a huge amount; you just get yourself through the week trying to deal with the fear and seeing how you're going to kind of take to it, to see how you react in, in these situations. 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 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 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 deal with it when that happens. And the only way is through SIV training.
Absolutely. Okay, seatboard. Seatboard harnesses seem to dampen turbulence. Is this actually helping or hurting? Interesting question. interesting
Question, and I don't know, I think, uh, the the I've always flown with seat boarded harnesses. Um, I've flown a quite a bit in, I've flown quite a bit in, in harnesses without a seat board. 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 kind of things, it's quite nice to have a seat board, but I don't think that it's, uh, impossible to, to get all those skills and get the same control if you don't have a seat board. Um, but I've seen certainly with the first generation of seat, uh, with seat boardless 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 seat boarded harnesses have a slight burnish compared to the, certainly, compared to the first generation type. Um, uh, but, uh, no, I think you, and I think there's lots of pilots out there that fly with a seat board and 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 don't change both at the same time. 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 and to be comfortable in than a wing, 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 buy yourself a seat boardless harness and move up a leveling wing all at the same time. it's quite a lot of information to come but uh well yeah changing your equipment progressively one piece by one piece is always a good idea sure
Um, new wings here's one. Uh, there's quite a bit of fanfare about Nova's new phantom. Is Ozone working on something similar? Well,
we uh the the we're we're we're in a fortunate situation where whereby we can uh design whatever wings we want so yes Yes, we have looked into making lower aspect ratio wings with lots of cells.
There is potential in this route. It's a very expensive way, but it's interesting. We don't have anything imminently ready quite yet. We're focusing at the moment on other wings, but it's certainly something that we've got in our foresight for the future.
Okay. Okay. Pod harnesses, how much do they help in terms of top speed and glide? Can we just say a lot and move on?
In terms of top speed, I don't think they help at all that I'm aware of. But in terms of glide, I think they're about a point, just over a point on a well-designed pod harness. But it also really depends on your angle of dangle and getting that right. If you can get the optimum angle, then you will gain at least a point in glide. If you're not at the optimum angle, you won't gain anything or you'll gain very little. Great. Excellent. And from the studies that we've seen in wind tunnels, 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 being useful? Why does it feel so damn good to flap your way down? I, I don't know.
why it feels so damn good for you, Gavin, to slap your way down. No, that's not,
this is not my question. Oh, okay. I thought that was you just giving away
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. But as with all things, the more you practice, 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, pretty familiar with their other stall point is, so yeah, it can go wrong if you screw it up. Don't screw it up. No,
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I guess for you doing Cross Alps, uh, X-Alps, uh, it's, 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 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 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 or reducing your forward speed whilst trying to get some heavy sink rate going on as well.
I've seen some and really good guys actually play with parachutal close to the ground, but that is that is really on a knife edge there.
Yeah, absolutely. Here's an interesting one: 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, 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, 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 something like that. Tighten up your chest strap more, and that can give you neutral problems or even instability.
Okay.
Sink rate. Do the higher ozone gliders, I'm assuming the higher rate, have a better sink rate than the lower gliders, or is performance all in top speed and glide? glide
No sync rate is better on more aspecty rings as a general rule, 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, you'll find that there's bits of sync 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 outclimb, a comp pilot, okay?
Because because you can stick the glider on 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 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 chord, then the whole center section isn't really supported and it's just, uh, it's, it would 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 chord 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'll 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 being able to support the structure better within the cord and, um, it's not, 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, too long, 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, or you'd have to accelerate to stop yourself from getting blown back. And the gliders became became inherently so unstable that they would collapse really easily. So what's happened now is we made gliders that are much faster, so our window of opportunity to fly is much greater. 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, 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? And 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, give ourselves more risk, Gavin. 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 wing suits 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, you know, 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 how much, 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. 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, uh, the smaller sizes?
Is it, is it substantial? Well,
I think there's an advantage in speed and glide.
You've got more surface area, creating more lift. You've got higher wing loading. As a general rule, the larger wings behave slightly better in the certification type testing. So that allows them to have a bigger speed range, more top speed. Obviously, there's the Reynolds number 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 in the small wings, not always just a 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, I always remember flying with Jimmy Packer, 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, but he used to climb so well, because no one could turn with him, he'd just be turning inside everyone, and just rocketing up through the middle 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 give it to the world.
Such a prophet you are.
You're like Ganesh or someone else. Hanuman.
No, but thank you. I really do appreciate it. And I know that... It's
lovely to speak with you, Gavin.
I've kept you up again at your end of the world there. But thanks. And until we see each other at Cloudbase again. again
I hope to see you soon, man. You take care, all right buddy? You too, bud. Talk to you soon. Bye.