Sleep in the skies, stars in the sea. These are dreams of mine, I fall at your feet. Hi there everybody, welcome to another episode of the Cloud Based Mayhem. Got a special show for you today that's maybe a little more applicable to our North American listeners than to our European and Australian, New Zealand and Asian listeners. But I think you'll get a lot out of this. I sat down here locally in Sun Valley with a good friend of mine, an excellent pilot, Revis Gray, who is really heavy into the technical side of what we do. So, you know, he uses an air band radio when he's in the air to talk to airports to get weather.
He's really good on using various different tools for weather and deciding a good day and, you know, days to go out and epic days and days to avoid. And really conservative in terms of his progression and how he approached safety because he didn't really experience fear when he was learning how to paraglide and still doesn't to this day, which is pretty unusual. So he has a really unique take on all of that. He had a comment actually in the show about, I was asking him about, you know, what he sees that he doesn't like when people are learning or kind of mitigating intermediate syndrome. And he had a really cool comment that I had never heard from any of our other guests about keeping the speed of your wing up, especially for those who spend a lot of time like ridge soaring, that kind of thing.
So some really interesting stuff here. This one's a lot more on the technical side of what we do than what we typically talk about. And I think you're going to get a lot out of it, especially, you know, using things like X contest to explore various lines. And for those who aren't really... Really strong with Meteo, this is a great way to delve into more of that. And we've got everything that we talk about in the show in the show notes on cloudbasemayhem.com for this episode. So I invite you to explore that, put up tons of resources where you can just bookmark. And if you're in what, depending on what part of the world you're in, I think that'll come in really handy. So we're just going to get right into it. Please enjoy this great talk.
A good friend of mine, Revis Gray.
Revis, welcome to the Mayhem, man. I really appreciate your time. And just before we started recording here, you said something pretty interesting to me. You said when you first started flying, you weren't experiencing fear. So you had to kind of approach it more analytically. So that seems like an awesome place to start. Give me a little bit of your flying history, when you started and how it's all kind of panned out.
All right. Yeah. I'm specifically talking about flying paragliders. I actually got into some other parts of aviation a lot earlier in life. When I was, I think, 12 or 13 years old, I took a ride in a Cessna at an air show. We were doing $5 airplane rides. It was basically a lap around the pattern. And some sort of switch flipped in my brain after that experience. And I pretty much knew I needed to fly. Yeah. My parents were incredibly supportive of that.
Where were you?
This was up in Northern California. North Bay, Santa Rosa, that area. Okay. Cool. On the advice of one of my friend's fathers, who was an ex-Air National Guard pilot and flew for Delta, they got me some lessons in sailplanes when I was, I want to say, 14 years old. Wicked. And I never soloed or got my ticket flying sailplanes, but ended up going on to take power lessons in Cessna 152s. Soloed when I was 17, got my private pilot license when I was 18. Then I went away to college. And my parents... Priorities shifted. I got more into partying. Didn't really have the kind of income you need to fly private airplanes. Right. And so I sort of fell by the wayside. And when I was finishing up college, a good friend of mine, Daniel Barquet, kept telling me about paragliding and how fantastic it was.
And I should get into it. My response was always, well, I broke college so you don't have time or money to pick up an expensive hobby like that. Right. Yeah. And I kind of forgot about it for a while. A few years down the road, my career had started picking up and I did have some time and money. And I did a tandem skydive for a friend's birthday. And the free fall was an incredible experience. I didn't like anything I'd experienced before. And I enjoyed it. But as soon as the canopy opened, it was another light bulb moment where I was like, I just want to do this all day. I need to learn to paraglide. Right. Yeah. And basically from that moment forward was pretty obsessed. And it took me, I think, maybe three to six months before I had my first lesson. And then the first year for me was pretty slow because I was traveling down Santa Barbara.
And what year were we? This was 2007. Okay. Ten years ago.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. Traveling down to Santa Barbara for weekends to train down there. With Eagle? With FlyBuddle, actually. Okay. You know, with Duncan Shadabash and was running it. Yep. And once I got through the progression and got my P2 and sort of began trying to figure out how to become a paraglider pilot, how to actually learn all the things that are ahead of you once you, once you get signed up as a P2, it was very clear to me that a lot of situations where I probably should be scared, all I was feeling was an intense desire to get in the air and fly. And I knew that there was a ton of things I didn't know yet, that I didn't even know what those things were. Yeah, right. And so I took the approach of really trying to be conservative about the choices I was making and almost picturing what it would be like to be scared in moments when I was not feeling scared.
Yeah. Yeah. To use that as a tool and say, like, fear is here for a reason. I'm not feeling it. All I want is, I'm just craving being in the air. But I need that tool in my toolkit. And so I have to tell myself, this should be making me scared.
I find that a lot of engineers are really good pilots. And I don't know what your schooling background is exactly, but I know you're quite analytical, quite technical, quite engineering oriented. Do you credit to that? Is it more just, this is a problem to solve? Rather than a reaction to, like, the, oh, shit, reaction?
Possibly, yeah. I studied computer science, and I do software engineering. There may be some sort of relationship there. It really is just who I am, I think. You know, for whatever reason, I don't have intense emotional reactions in general, and especially around fear. I don't have much background in other sports, so I don't know if it would have come up. If I did, but I was really more of a computer geek, you know, growing up. I got outside some, but not a lot. Right.
That's really interesting. And so you were cognizant that this was super dangerous, and you just had to approach it in a different way. Were you, did you find mentors that helped out with that? Or was this something you just kind of figured out? Like, how did you know back then, not knowing what you know now? How did you know how to go slow? And how did that? Yeah. How did you know how to piece together?
Well, as soon as I realized I wanted to learn to paraglide, I started devouring all the information on the forum, reading everything I could, basically. And so I knew right from the start that there was a pretty significant level of risk to find a paraglider. Yeah. Unfortunately, finding mentors was kind of difficult.
The area where I was, like I say, progressing out of being a new P2 was really more dominated by hang glider pilots. So there were not a whole lot of paraglider pilots around in my club. And unfortunately, sort of two of the more experienced ones either moved across the country or quit flying right around the time where it really would have been great to have them as mentors. Okay. So I think I kind of took it upon myself. And the time when I did start to connect with mentors was a little bit later on in my progression. And I got involved with the Northern Cross Country League. Which was incredibly helpful in progressing through the sport and learning, being around better pilots, and flying with purpose.
But yeah, the part about disciplining myself to act as though I was scared in times when I wasn't really, I figured out pretty early. And I'm not sure to explain how or why that happened. Have you had any accidents? I've had an incident that involved ending up in a tree with my feet on the ground,
uninjured and no damage to my feet. I used my equipment, a little bit of poison oak after getting the gear out of the tree.
Oh, that's the worst. I've had a crash.
And I've had a relatively bad ankle sprain. So far, that's the worst of it. I hope I can keep that track record going.
Yeah, why not? Let's keep a margin. Well, the reason I really wanted to talk to you is I know you've got this great background in the technical side of what we do, which is really important. From studying lines on XCSkies, I mean, sorry, on X-Contest, to studying weather on XCSkies. Let's talk about how you now, after all these years, the last 10 years of flying, how do you break down ongoing flying?
Well, probably a little bit of background is helpful here in that I've basically centered my entire life around flying paragliders. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not independently wealthy to the point where I don't have to work. So I've figured out how to have a career doing remote freelance software work. And I'm basically having an understanding with all of my clients that I will get the work that they need me to do done, and I'll do it on a certain schedule. But the exact days that happens are pretty much up to me, except for, you know, rarely I'll agree to the schedule of meetings and conference calls and commitments, but pretty much I work
when the weather's bad and fly when the weather's good. So obviously that requires quite a bit of looking at the weather and understanding of the source of information that are available and how to predict what you're going to experience. But to a large extent, that allows me to pick the choice days. And so that's what I'm generally looking for in weather. The basic technique I use, since I've, set my life up in this way, I didn't mention that, so I live out of a trailer, so I can move around and kind of be in areas where the weather tends to be good at any given time of year.
Let's just pause on that real quickly. What's the last year look like? Rewind to a year ago and take me through the last 12 months.
All right. So a year ago, I was right back here in Sun Valley. Perfect. Because this is an excellent time of year for flying cross country in Sun Valley if you're up for dealing with some big air. Serious turbulence.
Perfect training ground.
Yup. And after Sun Valley, I passed through Telluride, Colorado for a bit. That was quite an interesting place to fly. It was spectacular. Some of the most amazing scenery I've seen probably anywhere, but definitely flying a paraglider in the United States. And a lot of challenge too there. The weather tends to be extremely unpredictable and the mountains are tall enough that my tagline for Telluride is 18,000 feet has never looked so low. Right. Yeah. Don't really have a lot of options from 18,000 in terms of where you can glide. That's amazing.
That's amazing.
And after Telluride, I passed through Arizona for a bit. That was more for visiting family than flying, but I think there's a lot of potential there and I hope to go back next, actually this winter and explore a little bit more. And then I've been spending a lot of time in the winters down in Southern California flying Marshall and San Bernardino. Fantastic community there. It's a really consistent site with some good thermal flying all through the winter. And yeah, a good place to sort of train and stay current and maybe fly small tasks or just try and do out and returns and things. But most people in the United States are maybe skiing instead. Yeah.
So then in the spring, I passed through the Owens Valley for a while. It's one of my favorite places to go in the spring. It's quite nice in the fall too. Fall is a little more approachable for people who maybe aren't ready for the full-on conditions that you get in the Owens. But had some great flights there. Then headed up to Southern Oregon for the rat race. Spent a brief stint in Bend, Oregon. Flew Pine Mountain a couple times and now I'm back here in Southern Valley. 12 months of flying. Sort of a migratory loop, you know. I figure when I see lots of migratory birds around, I'm in the right place.
Perfect. And do you, I know you've been doing this now for the last few years. You getting burned out? You getting bored? Is it hard to find motivation to keep doing it? Or what's rocker on right now? I've been
living in the trailer and doing sort of fully chasing paragliding thing for coming up on two years now. That started September of this year. And so far I love it. Right now, I would say I'm basically trying to do everything I can to continue this life as long as possible. Perfect. Nothing else is really tempting me to do anything different.
Perfect. Perfect. Cool. Okay. So back to identifying a great day. Like right now we've got, this is a good example, we've got, you know, some bad days ahead. So what are you, what will weather analyzing look like? Is a good day in years or a potential good day? What are you using? What are the tools?
So this varies a lot depending on the flying site. Here in Sun Valley, wind is super important. The mountains are big enough that as soon as the wind passes a certain threshold, you really have very few options about where you can go and it starts to get turbulent and scary. Yeah. And dangerous. Yeah. So the first thing I'm looking for is, are the winds reasonable? And around here, I figure if you're seeing maybe 20 miles an hour at peak heights, 12,000 feet, that's pretty much hitting the upper limit of manageable. So definitely looking for lighter winds. The next thing in a place like Sun Valley is what's the chance of overdevelopment? Something that I'm just starting to learn about and so this is really what I'm focusing on now, but I don't have a lot of wisdom to give out is how monsoonal moisture plays into that.
I haven't really spent a lot of time in places where the monsoon is a significant factor. And around here, this time of year, it's a big deal.
And you're heading to the Wausau actually. Exactly. In
Utah, I think it's even more important than here because it's farther south, more access for that moisture to infiltrate. But having mid-level moisture present basically provides a lot of energy to the atmosphere to allow for clouds and storms to overdevelop. So figuring out whether or not that's going to happen is a key part of figuring out whether or not a day is going to be good for flying. So you mentioned
wind and instability moisture. What are you using to identify those?
For wind, XCSkies is a good starting point. I also look at... Well, I guess maybe I should back up a little bit and say the first thing I check every day is the area forecast discussion for whatever regional office is closest to the flying site. Fire weather? Potentially two or three. And they'll give you a lot of information. It's the professional meteorologist's take on the next maybe 12 to 24 hours. And they will give you a little bit more extended forecast too, but I usually kind of gloss over that part because it tends to change. It takes a little while to get used to reading those because they use some jargon, but typically most of the acronyms and sort of more terms of art are hyperlinked to a dictionary, a thesaurus or dictionary. It's a glossary actually to give you definitions of the terms.
And if you start reading the one for your local office, you'll pick up on a lot of the terminology they use. And then occasionally you'll run across something you have no idea what they're talking about. And if you go and read a little bit about it, your weather knowledge will greatly expand. Great.
Those of you who are listening to the links to everything we talk about will be in the show notes. So just go check that out. It'll be on this episode and we'll have links to everything and you can explore it or you can send me a question. I can sort you out. Okay.
Anyway, the meteorologists will tend to talk about whatever they feel is important to the population in that area. So, it may be fire weather, it may be storms, it may be extreme heat, it may be damaging winds, any sort of severe weather they'll sort of focus in on. But they'll tend to talk about the output from several different weather forecasting models. Oftentimes they'll talk about whether or not those models agree. If the models are in agreement, then you can have a lot more confidence that what you're seeing in forecast is probably going to happen. When the models are saying different things, we have less to go on. They'll also talk about pressure systems, and fronts, troughs and ridges, prevailing winds. Around here, they'll mention monsoonal moisture when they think it's going to infiltrate
because that has a huge effect on daytime temperatures and thunderstorms. So, that's a great starting point. I recommend that to everybody who flies paragliders. Read the area forecast discussion. Well, I say everybody. This applies to the United States. Unfortunately, I don't have much knowledge of the weather source available in the rest of the world. But hopefully you have similar tools at your disposal as well. Then, XCSkies is usually one of my first stops. It's a fantastic tool. Especially the new version gives you access to more models to look at and potentially some more intuitive ways to view the output from those models. I find the point forecast tool to be one of the best places to start. Especially if you're looking at winds. It'll give you an overview of the coming days.
And it'll show you wind at different altitudes throughout the day. Getting that much detail across in the map view requires quite a bit of clicking around. Then, depending on what I'm seeing there, if it looks really bad, I'll often just cut off my forecasting for the day and go to work. Which
model do you find? Are you using certain models for the day of, like the HRR3? Are you using GFS? Are you using NAMM? Which one are you finding? I ask, too, because you mentioned that it depends on where you are. We found XCSkies in Europe to be way too optimistic. It was always under-calling the wind, over-calling the base, under-calling the development. That's because I think Chris has only access to GFS and maybe one other there. When you're in Europe, especially in France, you can use Medio Parapente. When you're in Italy, they have another one that's the Italian version, which is a lot more accurate. Because it's using more models, it's interpolating more data.
Right, it is regional. Something I'm learning moving around is each area, each site may be better served by certain models. The GFS generally seems to be a relatively good starting point, but some places the NAMM seems to be more accurate. I do like to check the high-resolution models, especially morning of, and see what they say. But generally my technique, since I don't have one area where I'm really focusing on understanding those intricacies, is kind of to average them. And once again, the closer that the models are in agreement, the more I believe that that forecast probably is going to be somewhat accurate. It is nice, especially with GFS, that it gives you quite a few days into the future, too.
You can start keying into features that may indicate a really good flying day two or three days out. And then keep tabs on them to get closer.
Are you using many of the a lot of the stuff on the left-hand side, CAPE, XC potential, thermal updraft, velocity, a lot of that kind of stuff, too?
I generally start with looking at top of lift on the map. I look at cloud base if there's any chance of cumulus development. Around here I started looking at lifted index and CAPE more to try and understand when instability is going to lead to overdevelopment. That's an area I'm a little bit less familiar with. But it seems useful if there's any concern about better storms. I look at buoyancy to shear ratio with some regularity. But usually when the winds are light, the buoyancy to shear ratio is going to be fine. I personally don't look at XC potential a lot because it's sort of an, I guess you could call it an index of several parameters that aren't necessarily useful to the kind of flying that I'm doing. I think it's a great starting point, especially if you're a newer pilot and not so familiar with the weather.
But I would say I evaluate the XC potential based on looking at all those parameters and more in my head rather than a lot in that layer.
Okay, okay.
As far as other resources, so that I think covers pretty much what I do in XCSkies. Okay. I look at satellite pictures. There's a new satellite called GOES-16. It's not operational yet. It's a geosynchronous weather satellite. It provides much higher resolution images and much faster updates than we had previously. So I've been looking at that every day. It has visible layers, infrared layers, and a mid-level water vapor and moisture layer, which is actually very useful for, once again, understanding where monsoonal moisture is, how it's moving, and how much moisture is available for overdevelopment.
Are you trying to identify from, in looking at these models, is your line of the day based purely off winds, or are you also looking for, like, potential convergence lines? Are you looking for other stuff?
Yeah, definitely convergence, wind, and ideally cloud development, but not overdevelopment. Those all factor into it. Wind is obviously the most important, but convergence is hugely important too. And for many flying sites, there's what's called a regional atmospheric soaring prediction, or RASP, which is a high-resolution model run over a smaller area. And RASPs tend to be good at picking out convergence or resolving convergence. So if your area has a RASP, I would highly recommend starting to look at it. They tend to provide much better detail about convergence, much better detail about how wind moves near passes,
any place where there's a venturi or constriction, sort of multiple air masses meeting. I find that a RASP tends to give you much better results than you'll see on a 40-kilometer grid like you might with an XCSkies GFS. Okay.
Is that something similar to, like, a Windy TV?
Windy TV uses the same models as... Actually, it's just Windy now. They've changed the name. It uses the same models as XCSkies, but also includes the ECMWF, the European model. So I do look at Windy every day as well, because it's the best view that I'm aware of currently for the ECMWF wind information. Okay. It does have a high-resolution NAM as well. So if you don't have a RASP in your area, then high-resolution NAM tends to resolve some of those same kind of smaller circulation patterns, terrain-dependent circulations, that can be really useful to understand, especially if you're flying near passes and there's any chance of getting windy. Okay. Any other tools? I look at a sounding prediction, using the RUC sounding site every day for a point in the area, potentially multiple points, depending on the flying site.
And it plots model information on a skewed heat diagram. So it's taking
a balloon trace interpretation, so it'll take the Boise one and plane it.
It's using the same plot that you get for a balloon sounding, but it's just rendering model data. And you can see the same thing in XCSkies. There's a skew-T tool there. But I've found, at least for California, and Southern California especially, that the RUC sounding skew-T, based on back 40 model, gives very good results. Maybe over-predicts the wind sometimes. But it's better at resolving inversions and giving an idea of how much, once again, how much moisture is available for convection than a lot of the other options. Okay. I will often look at a balloon sounding too. Some places, especially near the coast, I feel like they're kind of worthless because, at least on the west coast of the United States, the hours that they're launched
are kind of the opposite of primetime flying hours. So a marine inversion or a low-level night inversion kind of skews your whole picture. If maybe you're only going to get to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 feet, and there's 1,000 feet of marine layer, how do you know how much the heating is going to overpower that the next day? Sure. Okay. Whereas I think in more continental areas, the balloon soundings are a lot more useful.
Okay. Cool. Any others?
Let's see. As I moved around, I sort of collected the local resources at each site. So I have a folder of weather bookmarks with a folder for each flying site that I visited. And each folder usually has 15 or 20 bookmarks. Wow. So there are a few others, but a lot of them are more site-dependent. I'll try and give you a dump of as many as possible for the show notes. That
would be great. I'll put those up. I mean, to me, the takeaway here is this is one of the great ways to become a better pilot, even if you're not flying. This is something you should just spend time on. A lot of the stuff we just talked about is Greek to you, listener. Then that's how you resolve that, is playing around and reading stuff and farting around and seeing how close you are. I just got back from the ex-Alps. We had a guy dedicated to weather, Emilio France, who lives in Chamonix. He's done weather for the ex-Alps since the beginning for one athlete. This time we shared it with another one. And he sits there with seven screens and looks at weather all day.
And it's really, really sophisticated. But what it comes down to is really, does what you see line up with what you get? And that's how we have to go. That's when we get excited about going flying.
Yeah, and it can be useful to get out and fly on days that are maybe borderline, as long as you have the skills for it, to develop a better understanding of what you're seeing in the forecast matching what the sky is actually doing. But it always is helpful if you're doing that to keep in mind that maybe those days are borderline and give yourself extra wide margins for safety. Yeah.
One of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you is we had a flight here last summer, which is kind of hazy to me. But, you know, we knew we were borderline OD kind of day. We took off from Baldy. We dove over the back of the Paios. You were out in front of me by a margin. We were kind of heading towards Arco, as I recall. And I started getting a little bit of rain and the clouds were getting pretty tall. And I landed and you kept pushing on. And I later found out, you know, your reasoning for why you did that was actually really sound. Whereas when I landed, I was looking at you on XC5 and I was like, Jesus, I hope he doesn't get caught in this stuff. So now let's advance from, you know, you're trying to pick out the day and you're looking at all these weather things.
Now you're in the air. What are you doing that's different than what most people are doing in terms of resources when you're up there? Because you're using quite a few while you're flying.
Right. Yeah. Well, let's see. First off, I would like to say that I had a decent number of very good flights last year where I feel like the weather was borderline. And so one of my resolutions for this flying season was to give myself wider margins and take fewer chances with the weather. That day last year in Sun Valley, I feel like there was a decent amount of luck involved in being on the ground before our development encroached. So basically outrunning it and landing in time. So I'm trying to make luck less of a factor. Yeah. So one of the ways to do that that I found incredibly helpful, I started doing this this winter in Southern California, is flying with an air band radio. How useful it is will vary depending on your flying site and how many airports around with automated weather or terminal information.
Most general aviation airports above a certain size have a weather station. And if they have a control tower, often the controller will once an hour record all the weather stats and provide a bunch of weather information about the airport. So that's useful, but slightly less useful in my eyes than the sites where it's fully automated. All you have to do is tune in the frequency for the airport and you'll hear what sounds like a looped recording, but it's actually like a synthetic voice reading you out all the weather information that's current for that airport. So it'll give you wind speed. It'll give you often wind variability and gust factor, surface pressure, sky condition, and then maybe some other information about the airport that's not super useful.
But having this real-time information, especially if wind is a concern, if you're worried about it getting blown out, or if you're worried about the wind in certain areas. So flying in Southern California, the LA basin is separated from deserts by relatively high mountains, and there are a couple of big passes. So, a small pressure difference across those passes can equate to winds that are very unsafe for trying to land a paraglider. So this is an effective fern. Yeah, I think, I mean... We never
talk about fern over here, but in Europe, fern is a major deal.
Yeah, in Southern California, they talk about Santa Ana. Santa Ana is essentially like a fern through a downslope. But it can happen either way. So, you can have a pass that's way too windy to fly in because there's high pressure in the high desert, and it's flowing down into the basin. Or you can have a pass that's too windy to fly in because it's lifting in the high desert and all the air is flowing up through the pass. Either one, you don't want to be low in that constricted venturi area. And so having an airport in or near the pass with real-time weather updates, you know, real-time wind conditions, can be incredibly helpful in making decisions about whether or not it makes sense to try and cross or, you know, basically navigate around the pass in the higher mountains.
Because you can't necessarily tell what's happening on the surface when you're up high. Sure, yeah. Also, in Southern California, I feel like having an airband radio is hugely helpful for safety. There's a ton of traffic, you know, giant commercial jets, a lot of general aviation, sailplanes, pretty much everything. Yeah. And most of the time, we're flying paragliders close enough to the terrain that we don't have to worry too much about the big jets. But occasionally you get good days where all of a sudden, you're flying near these super high-traffic approach corridors. And I've had very positive experiences talking to SoCal Approach and telling them about a paraglider, giving a position report, saying how many other pilots are flying with me,
and then having them warn the incoming jets to watch out for us, and then actually hear the jet pilots call out that they spotted us. Really? Yeah, which is... Amazing. Feels fantastic.
Instead of just praying.
Have you ever done that out here with like the military jets and stuff? I mean, I can't count the number of times I've been up at like 16, 17 grand and I hear these guys. Half the time, I don't even see them. But they're right down on the deck, you know, doing their barrel rolls and F-16s. And I've been told by those pilots that they wouldn't have a chance in hell of seeing us.
Yeah, I haven't tried that out there. The effectiveness really depends on sort of what frequency is available, what the controlling agency is. You know, you have to be on site. You
have to have the same
frequency that the pilots that you care about communicating with are on. So I feel like it works best in places where you're near large metropolitan airports and they're sort of well-defined approach corridors and approach controllers. I'll
have to ask some of the British pilots about this because they deal with a lot of airspace. They must be doing something similar, so we'll talk to them. Yeah, I
can't speak to the legality in Britain, but in the U.S., in 1996, a law was passed that changed life of
aircraft with a licensing
requirement for airband, so that instead of requiring an individual license or a specific station license for an aircraft, aircraft are licensed by rule, so you can carry a handheld airband radio as long as you're flying an aircraft. You don't need a license to operate it.
Okay. On that note, you do have your ham license, I understand, right? And how important is that for us? Should we all have it? I
personally highly recommend all paraglider pilots get a ham license, or at least any paraglider pilot who wants to go cross country. There are a number of reasons for that. First off is USPA has specific frequencies in the business band that they've been allocated to use for paragliding operations, but technically you're only supposed to use those frequencies with a type-certified business band radio, which probably nobody's going to bother getting. Also, since they're a business band and they're frequencies that are used across the United States, there are other users with those same frequencies. So sometimes on a USPA channel, you'll still get other business users interfering. Generally, on the ham frequencies, as long as you're licensed and obeying the rules,
if you talk to ham radio operators up and down the same channel, they're usually very willing to move to a different channel when you tell them that you're flying paragliders and it's not convenient to change frequencies.
Sure, sure. So talk through some of the advantages of having it.
Okay, well, the biggest one is, in my mind, is that the radios work really well. You can use something like FRS or GMRS, these little camping radios, but they just don't work very well. The ham radios transmit at five watts to a handheld, and especially if you use a speaker mic or some kind of headset, the quality of transmission and reception is good, and the range is good. I think it's important for people to get licenses because the amateur radio part of the spectrum is one of the few that's available for public use. Most of the radio spectrum is tied up for commercial interests, you know, TV, radio.
Basically, there's very little that's available to the public, and having the amateur radio community defending that part of the airwaves keeps them open. And the more amateur radio operators we have, the more likely that is to stay the case in the future. So if you want those frequencies back, it's available. I think it makes sense to get a ham license to prove to the government that we're out there and we're using them. Sure, sure. There's one more point, which is, depending on your area, if you fly someplace where there's very bad cell phone coverage, like surprisingly a lot of Northern California mountains, the coverage is extremely spotty, there may be repeaters in the area that will allow you to communicate way better than with cell phones. And that can be useful just for logistics and retrieve,
but it could be especially useful in an emergency situation where you need to get a call out for help.
Yeah, great. Back to what you're using in the air. So, you know, in the X-Alps, I think what a lot of people don't understand when you're watching live trackings, that kind of thing, is they're just thinking, oh my God, they're flying in the most heinous stuff. But, you know, at least for myself, and I know a lot of the athletes in the race, you know, we're tied to our teams. Who are sending me real-time information constantly. You know, wind data from peaks, wind data from valleys, from the airports, radar, that was a big one in this race because we had thunderstorms every day and we had to fly between these storms. And so, you know, they could pick up exactly where these cells were and how they were moving.
And, you know, again, this is a little bit of a game and you want to have some margin. But are you looking at any of that type of stuff too? Are you looking at radar? Are you looking at other kind of resources? I mean, most of the places we fly, we don't have cells, so I imagine not, but...
Yeah, I have looked at radar on occasion and I've used some, you know, internet weather sites on my phone in flight. Technically, in the United States, using a cell phone in an aircraft that's flying is illegal. I
didn't know that.
Yeah, just FYI. I can't recommend that you do this. Right, okay.
I'm not a lawyer, but...
But if you see overdevelopment or are concerned about embedded thunderstorms in sort of a stratus layer, I think it can certainly be helpful to see some weather pictures. Or if you can get on the radio with, you know, maybe a chase driver or other pilots that have landed and have them look up information for you. Get as much information as you can about what's going on with the air on the surface and, yeah, potential development, rain.
Stick on this. We haven't covered it all, but I thought we might jump to your flying a Zeno. I wanted to just talk to you a little bit about progression. Started 10 years ago, but I know you've kept it pretty safe, pretty, not slow, but conservative. And just wanted to get your thoughts on that because I think one of the really common questions I get from the listeners is, how do you know when to jump up? And when should you? When should you not? What are your thoughts on that?
Well, so going back to what we mentioned earlier about having to kind of analytically understand things that fear would maybe tell other people. Yeah. When I got into the sport, I also looked around at, you know, who some of the good pilots were and saw a lot of people performing really well in their 40s and 50s and found out that a lot of people who got injured badly just left and never came back. The trauma, the physical trauma could just completely take you out of the sport, even if you recovered fully. And so in a similar way, I sort of told myself, you have a lot of time,
do it step by step, take it slow. I think that I didn't necessarily do that very well right at the start because I didn't know what I didn't know yet and ended up flying kind of a higher-end B, after I got my P2, that was a secondhand wing from a friend. And I survived on it. I got lucky a few times. That incident where I ended up in a tree was on that glider. Right.
But after that, I think that I did a pretty good job of really building hours and flying the wings that I was on until I was totally comfortable on them and pretty much worn them out. And let's see, so there was Independence Dragons, that B I mentioned, and then I flew a Sigma 6 for a little while, and then the original Delta from OZM, and then I've had two Mantra 6s before switching to the Xena.
Okay. And SIV, acro training, other kind of stuff?
Yeah, I've done two SIV clinics. Probably due for another one. I'd really like to get back over the water. But I found SIV to be incredibly helpful. Went into it. Raring to go and learned a lot and got myself in some dicey situations, but nothing bad after the reserve, so that was good. Yeah. And then I was fortunate enough to have some friends who'd get together and one of whom owned a towboat in Winch and would go out to the lake and just train without an instructor, you know, no coaching. So I've done quite a bit of spins and stalls and just practicing collapses and so on. Over the water without instruction, and I found that to be incredibly valuable as well.
One of the things that
I think one of the big questions we get all the time is, you know, how can you fly more? How can you? And the answer to that over and over and over again is live in the right place and have the right job. You've clearly nailed both of those by creating a work environment where you can be totally flexible and then you got the trailer, so you can go wherever you want. But if you could change anything about the last 10 years or maybe let's rewind the clock to, you know, your 50-hour self or your 100-hour self, advice you wish you would have gotten or maybe advice you got but didn't heed?
I mean, I think that the part that I feel like didn't go well was living in a spot that wasn't great for prairie gliding for a lot of those years. We did have a local mountain that was really good maybe six times a year. Okay. And it had a flyable window. You know, it was generally flyable maybe like March through beginning of June, mid-June, but not great for most of that time of year, really only a few good days a year. And then having to drive at minimum of two and a half hours, usually three, three and a half, five-plus hours to go somewhere to go flying really, really limited the number of hours I was able to fly.
And so I think that limits your progression. Sure. If you want to develop your skills, I think getting out there and flying consistently and doing a lot of hours is a big part of that.
A tool we haven't discussed yet that I know both you and I are pretty passionate about is X-Contest. Talk about X-Contest.
Yeah. So I've always been a big proponent of uploading your track logs and analyzing them post-flight. I think that's another great way to learn and develop your skills. You can see where you made bad choices. You can see where you fell out of a thermal, where you needed to go to get back into it, those sorts of things. And for a long time, I was only familiar with Leonardo. So I was uploading all my tracks to Leonardo. And it's a great tool, but there's another one that's sort of more popular in the rest of the world. And I guess, you know, potentially more well-respected or more watched. If you read Cross Country Magazine, they'll mention the top flights on X-Contest at any given month or period, two-month period. And I think I really started keying into it more last year when I was out here in Sun Valley for Nate Scales' Intermountain Wide Open where he was using that for the scoring.
Personally, I like the way that it scores the flights a little better. I feel like Leonardo gives you a lot of points for flights that are scored through three-way points. And so the triangle and out-and-return bonuses, you know, FEI triangles, the flat triangle bonuses aren't really as relevant. Whereas in X-Contest, you just get one point per kilometer for anything that's not a triangle. And bonuses matter a little bit more. And I find that out-and-returns and triangles are a great challenge. Yeah. I think that's
a lot more in tune with what's happening out there. Triangles are way harder. They're just winging it down the end.
Yeah. Another nice feature on X-Contest is there's a search tool. So if you know you're going to be flying in a specific area and want to sort of see what other people have done and what lines tend to work, you can choose a point and a radius and either look at flights that started, you know, had a takeoff within that area, or flights that intersected that area.
Yeah, so I knew about the takeoff. I didn't know about the intersect. That's really useful.
So if you're going to fly a new site, I highly recommend scouting and seeing what other people have done just to get the lay of the land.
Yeah. I think X-Contest is a really great tool. We use it months in advance before the race just to see how people get through certain terrain. You know, you can learn a lot from X-Contest. Not so much in places like this when there's not that many pilots. It definitely helps out more pilots. Yeah. Do you use the Skyways feature as well in places that are busy? That's pretty handy. I
do, yeah. And I can't recall offhand the URL for the site, but we'll put it in the show notes. The site that provides that data has some other features that people may or may not be aware of, one of which is you can download a waypoint file with thermal hotspots. Oh. So if you have a device on your flight deck that will show you waypoints in flight, that can be a very helpful thing to have on there. That's really helpful. These days, I find most often, say I'm flying a new site, that I'll pick a line and have maybe a point on a ridge picked out where I think that there's going to be a thermal, and then I'll look down at the instrument and there'll be a hotspot there. And not so much looking at the instrument and trying to navigate to hotspots,
but it's great having that confirmation that, okay, yes, I am going to the right place.
Right. That's excellent. Wow, that's really... Okay, we'll definitely put that in the show notes. That's fantastic. I wish I would have had that for the race.
Cool. Okay. So Leonardo, you used it for a while. Now you're using X-Contest. Any other things we've missed with X-Contest?
Well, for anybody who wants to sort of get out and be a little bit competitive with their XC flying in the United States, USPA has started a new competition format this year that's being scored on X-Contest. Like a U.S. league kind of thing? A U.S. league, exactly. Cool. There are a lot of other countries that do this as well, and we're finally getting with the program. Excellent. So in addition to Race to Goal, we have an XC ranking as well. And that's helpful because we don't really have any contests anymore. I know.
Oh, lament. Okay, great. We'll put a link to the page for that in the show notes as well. Perfect,
yeah. That's one thing we haven't talked about, competitions. I know you've been doing some comps, and how do you view them in terms of progression and value?
Well, I first got into flying tasks with Northern California Cross Country League. Mm-hmm. Run by Jagdeep Agarwal. That was a fantastic way to progress. Just being around other better pilots and all trying to fly the same course will do a lot for your skills. Yeah. And then, I'm trying to remember. I think my first competition was the rat race, maybe in 2011. Mm-hmm. And I've done quite a few comps since then, and I've generally approached competitions as a way to develop my skills and as a way to have kind of a... a convenient flying experience while traveling. You know, where a tree and rides to the launch are handled and without doing guiding.
Yeah. Because
generally, competitions are a little more bang for your buck, in my opinion. Plus, you know, hopefully all your friends are there and you're having a great time racing around the sky.
Sure, yeah, sure. You've had this 10-year career in paragliding. Now that you've got a lot more experience and a lot more hours chasing it super hard, you hang out in a lot of places like here where there's very, very few pilots, but you're also hanging out in places like Marshall and you're heading down to the Wasatch. You've probably seen some bad stuff. Are there things that you wish more people knew? Are there things you're seeing that are common that are easily avoided? Like maybe at Marshall, I'm thinking there's a lot of new pilots. It's a great place to learn. You know, are there ways to mitigate?
Intermediate syndrome?
Let's see. I mean, there are a couple big ones.
One thing that I feel like isn't necessarily drilled in enough in paraglider training is how important airspeed is to flying an aircraft. I think that's because we don't have a whole lot of speed range. You've got your speed bar, but that only controls your pitch a very small amount. You're always swinging underneath since you're a pendulum. But coming from having flown sailplanes and Cessnas,
it's really emphasized that airspeed is incredibly important. Your wing needs to be moving through the air in order to fly. As soon as it's not, you're in a stall. And I think people forget that. I think that flying at the coast can sometimes ingrain habits of experiencing very low ground speed, even when your airspeed is in the normal range. Because of the wind. Exactly. When you're into the wind and you get this perception that you're not moving very fast, that's fine. And so, for instance, moving from the coast to the mountains, maybe it's high altitude mountains on a light wind day, all of a sudden your speed over the ground seems incredibly high. But it needs to be. And so I've seen lots of people make approaches into thermic mountain LZs with a lot of brake applied.
And I think that's a big problem. People really should focus on flying with the minimum amount of brake necessary to feel the glider react to potential airspeed. Because
if you don't, your glider will
collapse. Because there may be a wind gradient. The bottom may fall out. You may take a collapse. And if you have brake, you don't have the speed to keep your glider flying. And you're just going to cascade right into the ground.
Excellent observation. So airspeed. Yeah, airspeed's a great one.
Another thing that maybe is a more minor point, but I constantly cringe when I see people do this, is feet leave the ground off takeoff, and either the brakes immediately go into one hand, or the pilot lets go of the brakes and starts using the hands to push back in the harness and wiggling around. And there are these two phases of flight where you're going to be in a lot more danger potentially than the rest of the flight and there's nothing you can do about it. Launch and landing. You're near the ground. And the ground is what hurts you. So I would love to see more pilots fly away from the hill, hanging from their leg straps, flying the glider actively until they've climbed a little bit maybe. I know. It's not easy to get in your harness. Thermal hanging from those leg straps until you're away from the ground because I've witnessed a couple very close calls because people weren't actively flying the glider off launch.
Yeah, great. Great. Okay. That's fantastic. Any others?
I don't know that I have the authority to say this because I've never thrown my reserve, but if you don't know what's going on with the glider, it's out of control, throw the reserve. I've seen quite a few reserve tosses, and I don't think any of them resulted in any kind of serious injury. Maybe minor injuries, but it's not bad at all. And
we've both seen a lot where they haven't thrown. True. And it's terrible. Yeah. Jockey told me something when I was doing some acro training with him out in Turkey in 2012, and we were talking. It was the reserve day. We were talking reserves. We didn't want to throw the reserves. And I said, how low is too low? He said, there's no such thing. You throw it at 10 feet because that thing might snag something. Yeah. I hear people say all the time, I was too low to throw my reserve. There's no such thing. I think if you have – I was really impressed. We had Tom Payne on the show, and he was talking about doing helis and drifted out, threw his first reserve right into his wing, threw his second reserve right into his wing, got incredibly lucky.
But then he was talking about another experience flying comp glider in a comp in San Andre and just had a massive blowout and just threw instantly. And I thought that was really incredibly mature because he was pretty low. Probably had enough time to deal a little bit, but I think he was like 200 feet. That's not a lot of time. And why not? When in doubt, there's no doubt.
Yeah. I personally try and – anytime flying near terrain, try and gauge what is the height below which my first reaction should be go for the handle. Yeah. And sort of have that in my head. Yeah. Anytime I feel like I'm scratching, anytime I'm within 500 to 1,000 feet of terrain and it's thermic and turbulent, I try and get myself ready so that if the wind goes away, I don't try and fight it to the ground because that's clearly a way to get hurt, and the reserve saves your ass a lot of times, I think. Yeah.
Great advice. Great advice. And we hear it a lot. And I think we just need to keep hearing it. Yeah. That's great. Anything else? I feel like we covered a lot there. I think we did too. Excellent. Ravistan, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Always, always, always educational hanging out with you. I dig it. And I think the listeners will as well. And, man, I hope you have a good time just chasing it and sending it.
Thanks for having me, Gavin. It was a pleasure. It's always fun hanging out with you. And you're an inspiration in your flying and hiking. And hiking.
And a lot of hiking. Cool, man. Well, thanks. Well, let's go fly. Cheers, man. I
hope you enjoyed that. A little bit different show. That was a lot of fun for me to do. I learned a lot. I hope you did as well. As always, all we ask for is a buck a show. Thank you so much for contributing. This is a listener-supported podcast. And if you can't support us financially, there are many other ways you can do so. You can share it on the social medias. You can give us a rating. Tell your friends. The whole purpose of this is just to make us successful. As a community, safer. Fly farther, fly better. And have more fun. So I hope you enjoyed it. Reach out to me if you've got any questions or ideas for future guests. We've got some great shows coming up. We're going to be talking sailplanes. We're going to be talking wave. Some really exciting things. So great to be back on the air. Great to be back from the race. Thank you all for your support during the race.
That was pretty epic. And I hope you're having a good summer of flying. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere. And I hope you're getting stoked to fly. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere. And we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks. Cheers.