Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Base Mayhem. Sorry about skipping the last week. I was down in Brazil chasing the world record. We didn't have the most awesome weather, so we didn't get that, but had some really nice flying, and it's good to be back and catch them and bringing you these shows. Just got off the phone with Dustin Martin, who many of you will know. Legendary hang glider pilot and flies a lot of other stuff, but he set the world record, which still holds, back in 2012. Beat out Johnny Durand by a couple K. Went 761, I believe, down in Texas. Pretty much flew across the state of Texas, which is no small feat and very, very cool. And in this episode, we get into all kinds of really good stuff. Finding good lines, working light lift.
Chasing records, flying RC planes and what that does for paragliding and hang gliding skills, but try to kind of distill what makes him so great on hang glider and use a lot of that skill in the paragliding world. This is super relevant for everybody that flies anything, but yeah, I think you're going to really dig it. Before we get into it, I just wanted to put out a couple little housekeeping items. First, I wanted to say a couple of things for a couple of my own personal sponsors. These aren't... These aren't sponsors of the podcast, and this is always, as always, a listener-supported show. They're not involved with this show at all, but I just wanted to give these guys a shout-out because they're doing cool things. The first is a company here, a small company here called PlayHard Give Back and Catch Them, run by a father-son team.
The Brendles, Jeff and Spencer, they make awesome trail mix, and it's just the most amazing stuff, and these great kind of energy bars, and that is just terrific. I don't go anywhere. I don't go anywhere without that stuff, so that alone is really cool, but they've also just partnered with a company who, for every package of trail mix that they sell, a full meal is donated to someone in need. That's just in the States right now, but it's a really cool program and a great way to give back. That's what the company is all about, PlayHard Give Back. They do all kinds of other great social work and social causes stuff, and just awesome to see. As most of you know, I'm really involved with Patagonia. I really dig being involved with companies. Patagonia is one of the biggest companies that are giving back and doing the right thing with the money that they bring in, and this is one of them.
So check them out, especially if you're in the States. You can order it online, playhardgiveback.com. Doing really cool stuff. One of these purchases you can feel really good about. The other one is Onnit. Many of you that follow the X-House probably saw the big logo on my wing, Onnit. That's Joe Rogan's company. You guys will know from comedy and from UFC and all kinds of stuff, but Onnit makes, among other things, kettlebells. And ropes and all kinds of stuff for torturing yourself in the gym. But they also make really good supplements. And my trainer, Ben Abruzzo, put me on this stuff about 18 months ago called Total Primate Care. They've got a lot of other, they've got great stuff, great supplements. But this Total Primate Care is something that he started taking a while back and noticed that he never got sick after he did.
And then put me on it because after all the years on the boat, my immune system's kind of taxed. And I definitely tend to. get cold and stuff especially in the winter this time of year and he put me on it because we couldn't really afford me getting sick during training for the xops i couldn't afford any downtime and uh it's just amazing so uh check them out too they're worth taking a look at that's on it onnit.com first heard about them on the tim ferris show uh they make some really cool stuff very progressive cool company making great things and uh worth checking out so check out both those shows uh spotify playlist they mentioned this in the last show but we are keeping track of all our music we've gotten a lot of requests over the months for uh you know hey what was the music on that one show that all of them are now on our playlist which you can find on spotify under cloud cloud-based mayhem also find those links on our facebook page cloud-based mayhem or on the website cloud-based mayhem.com and then we've still got this giveaway going i'm gonna take this on for another month i've got the power traveler battery a brand new 2015 xops um never used on the package but really cool battery i think it's like 8 000 milliamps might be wrong there but it's close to that um so for bivvy flying or for just flying all day you want to keep your phone going that's a great little thing i've also got a fly master an older one but still works great b1 and i've got the noco 5 watt uh solar charger so in my experience that's not quite enough to power you through a bivvy trip but um definitely enough to keep your phone going or you know for shorter bivvy trips no problem it's pretty light nice little unit kind of like the goal zero units um so what we're going to do for those giveaways is for just those of you who pass this around what this show is all about is kind of spreading knowledge and trying to keep our community safer so if you put it out on facebook or instagram or however you share your stuff um just make sure that i know about it and if you say something crafty or cool or like hey man you gotta listen to this but in a funny good way uh i'll pick it up and you'll be in to win one of those cool things so appreciate that uh and then finally social media help i put that out in one of the previous shows that we could use some social media help for just getting this out in more places getting the show out more places uh i've got a few people now on that task in the uk and in europe we're still looking for somebody in north america i think we're pretty covered in australia new zealand and asia but i could use some help just in the you know the fb the facebook forums or uh groups and clubs and that kind of thing that's going to be a lot of them in the states and uh in canada not nearly as many in europe but as there are in europe but there's a ton and that would be super helpful so if you can't afford supporting the show financially you know as always all we ask for is a buck show that's a great way to do it and i'd really appreciate it just reach out to me via email you'll find that on cloudbasedmayhem.com
so yeah let's get into it really cool talk by the current world record holder 761ks uh dustin martin uh very good friend of mine and i'll see you in the next one bye bye friends with a guy i was just flying with down in brazil jeff shapiro and uh i talked to jeff before knowing i was going to be talking to dustin about several things that we bring up in this talk there's a lot here to glean uh as pg pilots from these hang gliders that been doing it for a long time uh dustin's quite a bit younger than me it's not like he's one of these older pilots but he's uh he's been at it a long time he's been going hard and super passionate about it you can tell on this talk that he's got a lot of passion and love for this sport and uh there's a lot to learn here a lot to enjoy so enjoy dustin
man so stoked to get you on the show i really appreciate this i know you've been listening to these and uh we've had many many requests to get you on here because uh you're a hang gliding jedi and we don't talk to enough hang gliders so yeah i'm i'm really excited first
of all i'm i'm super honored to be on your show and i i'm a long time listener since the beginning and i i sit at the sewing machine and every time i'm on the show i'm like oh my god i'm so excited to be on your show they come out i'm i'm uh pretty much right on it so um thanks for that so
dustin we before we started recording we were talking about you know we're going to talk about your record flight because we have to we were talking about you know some of the cool things you've done and uh i brought up Larry Tudor and you know saying you know like you know have there been any flights you've done that have been like his flight when he flew from dobs in new mexico and he and his his ground support was like dude uh turn around you're in you're in a tornado and you're like oh dude i i've been in like five tornadoes and so i i'm gonna go ahead and assume because you know chasing records is rad and and it's super fun and you know we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about your texas flight but i'm i'm going to make the jump and make an assumption that that probably wasn't the best flight you've ever had is that is that correct
that's correct that was not my favorite flight ever so
tell me you know let's start it off with a bang before we we're going to talk about your history and everybody's going to get like what's you know replay your favorite flight or one okay
well i'll give you i'll give you one of them i mean my my favorite flight is probably not something that would be as entertaining um it was something that was just more meaningful to me at the time but uh you know i was thinking after we did talk about um Larry Tudor flying near that tornado i was thinking well you know i flew i flew near a tornado that i can't remember what year it was i think it was 98 or somewhere between 98 and 2000 in salt lake city and i was soaring the south side of the point and it got really dark to my north it really like a black curtain between me and and south salt lake and i thought well that's pretty interesting and the wind picked up and you know it got a little textured it actually got really good and i stayed up for a while and then it sort of got ominous i mean it was a little more ominous than usual and i had only by that time only been flying two or three years and so i flew for a while and then i'll land and i landed and
somebody came up later and said man what were you flying that was insane and a tornado just completely like wiped out half of salt lake city and like really so then yeah that night on the news i was uh you know listening to i was watching recordings of people in office buildings you know as as windows were blowing out and they were screaming and i was like man that was right there holy crap so i
love that you're like oh it's kind of ominous yeah
i mean there was a yeah it was it was salt lake city so there was a there were no expletives but there was a whole lot of oh my hex on the on the news channel that night and then so i'm thinking about that i mean we we talked about that and um i was thinking well was that the only tornado and then i realized well actually that wasn't the only tornado there was time uh i don't remember when a few years later when i was i was flying up at a sailport in north phoenix and it got really ominous again and i but i kept flying for a while i was like well i'm just gonna keep flying i've done this before so flying it got pretty windy actually got pretty sweet again that's kind of like what happens and then um then it was obviously time to land so i landed just in time for a huge just like a you know
monumental gust front to come through right after i landed and uh it it turns out a guy in a sail plane died that day former angler pilot died that day right about the time i landed maybe or not connected to that gust front but then same deal like a couple hours later yeah a tornado has just gone through uh north phoenix arizona and they you know it was 15 miles to the south or whatever so i was thinking about you know is that the only tornado and it turns out that wasn't the only tornado because i had a dude i had a much more interesting flight uh yeah so there's there's those two um then i was thinking i was in georgia at this comp that we had up there and um americus maybe well yeah i think it was americus we had a really good comp up there but one of the days was was pretty sketchy and we knew it was gonna be sketchy it was totally blue and then the clouds started popping and it was just beautiful but we knew from looking at you know the radar and the live images that it was gonna get crazy soon sooner than later uh to the north of us you know between atlanta and us and the weather was you know was pushing south
and they were like well look we're gonna try to get the day off you i'm sure you're familiar with trying to get the day off at a comp so they're like yeah we're gonna try to squeeze this in it's gonna get crazy you know we know we're not gonna have all day to do this and we know when it does go south it's gonna be really bad so like all right we're game so we all took off and uh you know everybody tried to take the first start they could get it was an aerosol comp so there was a few starts and we all started heading south and getting pushed by the wind and it was light and really scratchy and uh and really smooth and nice it was georgia so we're over the you know we're over these fields and it started to shade out by the time we had taken the start it was pretty good at the start you know four or five hundred up clouds around and then it just shaded over and it got shaded over by you know an anvil from from basically atlanta i mean like one of those you know not your thirty thousand foot anvil it was like a sixty thousand foot anvil it was just spreading out over the state so it shaded us
but there was still lift and cloud and cumies forming under it it was you know there was energy in the air even though it was completely shaded and i've learned that that means that that's not good
really scary
i've learned that if it's shady and you should be gliding to the ground without a beep then you probably should be on the ground if you're if you're still in lift so it was really good you know it got scratchy for a while and then suddenly it's like well we're in twos and threes and suddenly four and five hundred up and it's just fine but it's a little bit it's a little bit you know hazy a little bit humid it's humid so you can't see very far but you can see it's like black and purple and green and whatever behind you know to the north it's coming but i can't really tell and i'm and they have little fires burning every you know a couple people have fires burning in their fields and their yards and the smoke's kind of laid over but it's it's laid over because you know it's there's no real energy down there it's shaded and and this looks like it's blowing 10 miles an hour and it was so we're drifting drifting drifting and then it kind of gets a little better i'd say we had like a four or five hundred up and
it went from being a couple of us you know little disjoined groups to actually maybe a gaggle of five or six or seven and maybe another half dozen a little lower and we went over this town we're probably 20 miles from the start and uh finally a good thermal and we're getting we're actually going to get to base it looks good so there i am i'm climbing four or five hundred feet a minute and i remember the feeling from a flight i did i don't know like in 2000 down here i flew from phoenix down to the mexican border and i was flying towards towards a line of of thunderstorms because they were right on the border it was monsoon season and i was just going to go as close as i could i didn't know much at that time about how you know how far gust fronts could go from from the storms and how that you know how that would feel and what it would look like and but at the time on that side of me i was like oh my god i'm gonna get a lot of luck and i flight in Arizona, I got, you know, I was gliding in this amazingly smooth air in the shade of an anvil, a similar story.
And then I just got smacked by this really, uh, cold, moist, really sweet smelling air. Um, and I was like, Oh, I know that that smell, that's what I smelled right when I gust front usually hits me on the ground, but I had gotten hit in the air and I knew I was, I mean, I, it took a second, but I realized, you know, that it's kind of the, that they hit kind of in a wedge shape. So they, you know, typically they'll, they're kind of have a little, like the scoop on the front of a train, they hit the ground a little earlier than they do higher up. So I already, I realized at that point that it was under me already and I just hadn't noticed. And so the fact that it hit me now meant I was, I was totally screwed. But at that time I didn't know. So on that Arizona flight, I spiraled down and landed in it and that was stupid.
And I ended up like in this river bed that wasn't quite aligned with the wind. A really deep river bed. And I, you know, dropped a wing right as I, you know, I wasn't going to flare. I was flying like 30 and 35 miles an hour. And I touched down and dropped the wing and spun around a really big glider. It's kind of out of control, but nothing, nothing happened. That was all fine. But I learned my lesson. So here I am in Georgia and I get that really humid, nice, cool feeling smack in the face. And I was like, Oh man. Cause I was, I was already, I already knew I was dancing on the line here. I'm like, well, you know, I could, I just need to go away from this thing. And we were getting pushed away from it pretty fast. And I was like, I just need to get away from it. And I felt this, I'm like, Oh Jesus. And I looked down and I realized it had snuck up on me again.
I just, you know, cause there's no dirt. It's Georgia. You can't tell until it's almost there. And I should have, it's a comp. So I just, I was, that's what was going to happen. And that was either going to happen or it wasn't. And it happened and I got caught off guard. So then I looked down at that moment and of course it's the leading edge of it was, already miles beyond me and under me. And I was like, Oh Jesus. But it was the real deal this time. It was like, I would guess 40 miles an hour plus on the ground, really, you know, smooth laminar, but you know, there was tall trees and buildings from this town. And I was like, Oh Jesus. You know, I was, I was proper.
And there's a bunch of you in the air.
I would say there's probably 15 that I could see around me within a mile or two. I was, I was like properly identified at that point. So, uh, I might, you know, you, and the first reaction, it's almost uncontrollable is to straighten out from the thermal and pull in and just, you just want to go. But, and I did that and it only took me about half a second to go, I need to stay in this thermal because this, it's not going to help me to, to go down. I mean, it's just not going to help, especially like the beginning of the, when the gust front hits always seems to be the worst. You know, when, when you're on the ground, I mean, it always dissipates at some point. So I thought, Oh,
I'm going to go down. I'm going to go down. I'm going to go down. I'm going to go down. Uh, I
need to, I just need to get the base, which is a really hard thing to do when you're looking on the ground. And this wasn't like a normal, you know, I didn't just see trees moving and smoke laying flat. I saw there was a circle farm that was just dirt just downwind of that town, a huge Georgia size. Like I, I'm going to guess it was probably, uh, a solid three quarter mile, you know, diameter circle, just huge circle of dirt. And it, it was covered in a fine layer, probably 10 foot deep of blowing dust. You couldn't see the field anymore. You could just see what looked like a roiling. It could have been a thousand feet thick or 10 feet thick, but I could tell by the trees around that it was 10 feet thick. It was just roiling over this field.
I'm like, Oh my God, I am, this is not good. So I was like, Jesus, I started thermal and I got to, you know, I eventually did get the base. And during that time between, between, you know, deciding to climb and getting to bay, I watched a few guys, maybe five or six guys spiral down in this and, and land in that field. And they were, you know, you could just tell that you could look at a glider and tell that it's going fast, but by the way, it's moving. And these guys were pulled in and hauling ass and completely stationary over the field. And then right as they get, you know, down to 15 feet, they would just disappear. I'm like, Oh Jesus, this is bad. And you know, they all, all those guys ended up, I mean, it was, it would have been a very high speed backwards landing in a paraglider.
It was pretty gnarly, but, but they had good terrain. So I was, I was scared because we knew from the reports that morning that this wasn't just a thunderstorm. This was a line of craziness and tornadoes. And, you know, we were in tornado alley and we knew what was coming. So I was like, I need to get the hell out of here. And I popped out. And basically at that point, just
did anybody else do what you did? Uh, were you, were you solo now? Did anybody else go up? I'll ditch it.
My memory is not a hundred percent on that, but I'm pretty sure that I know pilots ended up further than me that day, a couple of pilots. And I know, well, maybe only one or two. And I can't remember anybody exactly with me doing that same thing. I can't, they may have all attempted to land, but I mean, I was five or 6,000 feet above the ground and I could see, you know, 60 foot tall trees moving, shaking, violently from a mile above them. It was, it was clear. I didn't, I didn't have to focus on them. I could just see. And I was like, Oh Jesus Christ. So I, you know, I went past that field. I crossed a couple of rivers and, you know, nothing looked at that point when you're looking at 40 mile an hour wind, suddenly what is flatlands doesn't look so flat anymore.
You notice every tree line and every little building you're like, Oh geez. So I kept going and going. And I basically, even though the race was clearly canceled and over in, in, and over in my mind, still was like, I need to go as efficiently and quickly as, as race fast as I can possibly make this go as far as I can go until I can't go anymore. And maybe I could outrun it. And I was pretty sure I could outrun the thing, you know, because I was just, I'm going to be able to make 25, 30 miles an hour speed plus whatever tail when I'm in. So I was like, sure, I could outrun it. And I spent the next probably close to hour and a half, two hours going as fast as I possibly could. Not getting stuck, getting five, six, seven hundreds, uh, you know, getting really good lines, staying at base, running streets all the while, not able to outrun this thing.
And I got out into some sunshine, which made me feel safe somehow, but it, that didn't mean anything. So I came in and, you know, I was all the way till about 200 feet above the ground. It was a solid 40 miles an hour. And I was freaking terrified. Because it's not, for us, it's not really about landing backwards. It's about, you know, marginal control, marginal lateral control, and, you know, just getting turned. And you just can't, you can't get afford to get turned with wind like that. So coming in, it's probably 40. And then just suddenly at, I don't know, 200 feet or something, it, I was in some kind of gradient or something. And it just ratcheted down to maybe 20 miles an hour on the ground.
And I had, you know, a turbulent, breezy landing, which felt like a midday, windy landing. And I pulled it off. And, and that was that. And I, so basically, I outran the meat of it. Got picked, you know, it was windy enough that I kind of had to pay attention on the ground, handling the thing to not get flipped over, but it never got worse. It never, I got far enough away that that storm never really, I wasn't in danger of being like killed by the storm. But later, just like on all those other flights, the reports were, you know, massive tornadoes, moved through south of Atlanta and, you know, whatever, the north of the Americas region and, you know, like wiped out this and that. And I'm just like, oh my God, how retarded can I be? It's just like, this is like the fourth time.
So that, that, I mean, if you look at it from a turbulence perspective or a, you know, if you just couldn't see the atmosphere around you, that flight would have been a great flight. There was nothing out of the ordinary turbulence wise, or, you know, besides the wind over the ground. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. If you didn't know it was so gnarly, it would have been great. Yeah, it would have been awesome. It was
awesome. It's just, so that's why it was memorable. You know, it was a really great flight, but it's like, all right, four tornadoes. Oh, the other tornado. That's right. So that was a really cool flight, but the only other tornado I can remember. And so I, you know, when we first talked about this, I, I remember two and I thought, oh yeah, two, that's stupid. I can't believe I've been in the air with two tornadoes. And then I quickly realized, oh, there's another one. Turns out the fourth one. So that means there's probably more. And I just can't remember them. But this fourth one was, uh, at quest when I was flying tandems and it was just a guy that came just, he came on kind of a ridiculous day. We thought, well, for sure, we don't even have to cancel. He'll just not show up. He showed up and, uh, we did the flight.
I mean, it was kind of a skeleton cruise. We're like, yeah, we'll do it. We don't care. We'll find anything. So we took him up and it was closing in around us in a very serious way. And it kind of, and around us, we're like, oh, we, we might need to spiral down and land right now. And we did. And you know, we pulled it off. We got our 15, 20 minute flight. And there was this, this one had like bolts of lightning right next to us. This typical, you know, searing light in your eye and full on fear. And, and that feels really sketchy and in wind, um, in a tandem, it's, it's not quite as bad, but we pulled that off. And yeah, I remember that guy.
Did you, did you do the Bill Murray? Like, I don't think the heavy stuff's coming down for quite some time.
I was like, Hey man, we do this all the time. You know, it's, we're only minutes from the ground at any time. We, you know, we could, and he kept asking, are you sure? Are you sure? But we knew he was game. He wasn't scared. And I was like, yeah, I'm sure. And you know, we kind of were, but you can't predict, well, I guess you could predict there would be lightning, but we didn't want to think about that. And that's what we landed really was the lightning. It was just getting kind of out of hand. So, um, yeah, that was my fault and maybe the tow pilot, but, uh, me and her, we, we laughed about it afterwards. Cause he, he tipped us a lot of money. I can't remember what it was. We might've gotten like a $200 tip for that flight. We, we came out just for that one flight. This is no reflection on quest air, by the way, I was, I was just being a cowboy or whatever.
It was, it was a one-off, but, uh, yeah, he tipped us a lot of money. I remember we went around the side of the hangar and it was, it wasn't like, like a couple of hundreds. It was maybe like in fives and tens. And it was just a stack. We're like, Oh my God, we were laughing at each other. And it got away from us. Kind of the cash got away from us. And it was just ripping through there. Like, you know, same story, same as the other flights blowing like 40. And we're around this, around the rotor of the hangar. And this like, this is just like funnel of Moyes blowing around and we're laughing our ass off trying to count it. It's getting away from us. We're like, what the, so yeah, I'm kind of a tornado magnet. Oh, but the whole thing was, tornado that day had rolled through Leesburg. So, you know, 15 miles North of us, right at the moment we were in the air.
Listeners, I promise that as this, as the show develops here, we will have advice.
Don't do this. You know, if you don't learn it the fifth time, you'll learn it the fifth time. Maybe.
That is awesome.
Oh my God. Okay. So before, before we, uh, before we started recording you, you also mentioned, we could keep talking about tornadoes, but I'm hoping that's
near the end. That's the only thing I can remember.
Yeah.
You were talking about, uh, some flights you had or made a flight in Ecuador where you said it would be hard to, uh, it would be hard to keep, keep the four letter words out of the story. Can we, can we, uh, let's do that before we get into your history. I
mean, the theme of that, that competition, by the way, just finished and Raul, who was, who organized that competition during those days, uh, was the winner. And that was like, uh, two, three days ago. So that's, yeah, that's pretty cool that, that he finally won because the full
circle, the big dogs weren't
down there. I hope he's listening. Um, so yeah, that was, those were good times. I mean, around 2000, uh, maybe five, six, seven, eight, something like that. It was really good times. We had, uh, the Jeff's come down there. Daniel Vela is from Columbia. Um, I went down there, I don't know, seven, eight years in a row, maybe six years, seven years in a row. Uh, Kevin Carter came down there the first time I went down there. And then, you know, more recently, um, Moyes sent Tom Weisenberger down there. Um, Craig Coomber has been down there. Um, so it's been like super hot contested race. Um, and it just comes down to, you know, that race is really cool to me personally, because it comes down to nothing but glider performance and harness cleanliness.
There's just no, you know, it's a ridge race. There's no getting around. You can't pull in more to go, to go better. You just, you got what you got when you, when you show up, your preparation is, is what you've got. So, um, after that first year, when Kevin beat me, I was like, man, that's, he just was going better than me. And I felt helpless because it wasn't like I needed to climb better or pick a better line. There's only one line, you know, it's 10 feet from the cliff. That's the line. So yeah, each year I successively, was adding things, you know, a little, just more balance. How much balance can you possibly launch with and land with safely? And, you know, airfoil, little extruded rubber airfoil covers for the side wires and little carbon fiber bits to cover all the, you know, all the hardware that sticks out on the glider and the airflow and just, you know, crazy helmets that look like
time trial bike stuff with visors and, you know, all sorts of textured speeds leaves like they use for swimming and all that. It doesn't just crazy stuff. So it's interesting to see the performance difference in a really controlled environment like that. But so yeah, it was pretty funny. The Jeff, you know, they came down, Jeff Shapiro and Jeff O 'Brien and Craig Coomber all came down maybe three, four years into that, into that string of really fun events. It had gained some notoriety and I was like, guys, you got to come down here. And they were, they were like, all right, finally, they're like, all right, we're going to come down there. And, uh, yeah, it ended up, so we were really worried about Craig because Craig is, is always been known as amazing on the ridge.
Like he's unbeatable. So, I mean, we all, I was nervous. Everybody was nervous. And, uh, so those guys were, were prepping pretty hard. And I mean, you know, both of them there when it's, when it's time to get serious, they get serious. So, you know, they prepped really hard and came down there and were really serious. And, uh, another interesting thing about that is when they came down there, that was the, that was the origin of the cloud-based foundation was, uh, that trip. Yeah. So they, they came down and we sort of toured, uh, why Akil that's, that's where we based out of and flew into because Raul lives there. And, uh, we went to some pretty, uh,
pretty harsh areas, you know, some, some definitely less fortunate spots in a, in a big way. And, you know, they both saw that. And another guy, Ricker was down there and, you know, I don't know if you've heard about Ricker Goldsboro and how he helped start that, but yeah, that was sort of the initiation of the cloud-based foundation, which is why it
it's, yeah.
So that's why it had, um, a big connection to Kanoa and that, that, that school down there. Um, so yeah, we, we'd flying why Akil for a couple of days and then we go to Kanoa and start practicing on the beach and yeah, it's pretty funny. Those, it's kind of a unique spot to fly. It's really smooth there, but the, and the launch looks really good too. It's just picture. Perfect. Except for right below, it's got a little bit of a concave, a little bit of a hole, a little, yeah, a little spot that you gotta, you can't believe in 10 miles an hour of wind that it's going to do anything, but it's just amazing. The turbulence right off, you know, on your last step. So I remember telling, Oh, you know, Jeff O 'Brien, who was at the time in Salt Lake city, flying the point every day and a lot of wind, I was like, you got to watch out for that, this little spot.
And he pretty much was saying like, I got it, bro. Yeah, whatever. I got it, bro.
And, yeah, there's a picture of him just about dragging the wing while hugging one, one down tube all the way to the side. We talked about it later and he's like, man, that was, that was pretty much like you said, that was insane.
And, uh, yeah, I heard
that. I heard that spot was tricky. There was, everybody was talking about before the world cup this time that it's, it's a dicey launch.
Yeah. It's a little sketchy even for, even for, yeah, for a paraglider, it's hard to get off there too, because you, you basically pull up and I mean, there's like any spot where there's like a steep drop off, you pull up and there's not a lot of energy. So you got to put quite a bit of energy to get the wing up over your head and right in the power band. I mean, right in the power band, it's, it's just, it's almost hard to get the thing up with enough energy and then keep from having the thing. Yeah. Or overflies you so hard that it almost like sucks you off before it plucks you. It's kind of, it's kind of a weird spot. So yeah, we had some, we had some good times and we were definitely,
we all had our eyes on Craig and we all wanted to, to beat him. I mean, that was the goal. We were team Wills Wing, but that did not keep us from, uh, pinching each other against the cliff with like three feet between each other and the cliff and while smiling, you know, I, I, I think, I think it was O 'Brien against Shapiro or somebody like that basically flying underneath, you know, both three feet from the cliff, but flying underneath giving no, you know, the other person zero. options and just like looking over and smiling. It's like, bro, this is really serious. This is actually really serious here. So here's
my middle finger. Have fun. Yeah. Well, you didn't,
there's no, it's really smooth air, but you're going, you're so close to the cliff to get right in that best line that, you know, you're playing with a little bit of a, a little bit of wind gradient against the cliff because it's, you're so close that you're kind of in that lower speed wind area on your, on your, on your can, you know, on your cliffside wing. So when somebody, you know, pulls under you and then maybe slow, you know, pushes out in front of you to regain position and awake you, it's not, it's not as funny as it sounded, you know, it's kind of like a really tense situation. So we did three days of that. And, um, that's all really good. We all had like is customary down there for all the green goes.
We all had basically projectile diarrhea. The entire week and, and, and bed bugs and all sorts of unmentionable things happen. But, uh,
you should ask the Jeffs about that. You should have Jeff O 'Brien on it's it's, it's pretty crazy that this, the stories are legendary, but, uh, yeah, that's one of my favorite places to fly. I wouldn't want to fly there every day of my flying life, but to, you know, to go down there once a year.
Yeah, I know. I
don't have the, the, uh, intestinal strength for it, but, but it's, it's an amazing little,
literally and figuratively. Yeah.
It's an, it's an amazing race. So yeah. So the race ends, you do your, you do your, um, it's about a 35 minute race or something like that. We average about, I think we average about 70 Ks an hour, um, over, uh, yeah, 35, 45. 40 K course, something like that. Yes. It's really fast. It's really low. And it's, and it's often terrifying, but it's very satisfying when you finish it. And, you know, at your lowest point, at your highest point during the race, you're maybe a hundred meters over the ridge. And at your lowest point, you're about 15 meters over the, over the beach, but it's not a beach. It's a highway with a power line between you and the beach. Yes. It's pretty, it's pretty nuts.
People have landed on the highway or, or, into the bushes against the base of the hill. And it's always worked out fine, but it's very, it's very tense. And it's, uh, it's been covered by, by Davis Straub. He was, he might've been down there that I think he was down there that year. Um, you know, he, he,
I gotta, I gotta talk to him too. Yeah.
I mean, he, he, he could tell you how tense it was. So yeah, you do the race and the race is only 40 minutes and it's, and it starts at 4 PM for conditions, but also because we're just, we were just, uh, chronic. Hung over like it was, and not, you know, one year we had a beer sponsor thanks to roll. And that was great because we were actually drinking beer, which is more forgiving, but every other year it was just nothing but tequila. And I mean, I I've lost days of my life down there. Like I, if I look back, if I look back at hangovers, I mean, I know one in particular and it was there and I've lost, I can say that I lost a day of my life. Like,
it was, it was, yeah, I remember that I woke up
and I hate that kind of, that kind of pain is no fun. It
was not worth it. Uh, so yeah, anyway, it's memorable. Uh, you finish the race. So it starts at four for those reasons. And then you finish the race and it's, you know, four 30 or five and it's, it's on the equator. So you have another 45 minutes or so. And then you go north to, to these, what we call, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, what the gringos call the North cliffs. And, uh, you, you glide over town, you get a little out to you, glide over town and that puts you out over. I don't know if you've ever flown there, but you glide out over this town and you'll connect to this other tiny little, little pillar of a ridge that's sticking out close to the water. And you, you know, it's literally a hundred yards long and a hundred yards high and you get a little altitude and you now from then on heading north, you have nothing but, but sand stone cliffs going straight down into crash.
And waves, you know, fairly, fairly decent way. I don't know, three, four foot waves. And they just go committing. Yeah. It's kind of these undercut, you know, overhanging cliffs. This is really kind of stark. So you start working your way out there and initially you're pretty low. You're definitely far out of glide of, of survival. Like you're not, you're done. So you, you test the lift and it's good. Okay. It's good. And you go and you keep going, going, going for a few miles. You go around this point, maybe three or four miles, you go to this point and then there's a beach. So you get around this point, which is sticking way out in the ocean and you go around and then there's a beach. So that's where we would typically go after the flight, because you can get, it's kind of straight into the wind and it's right over the water. So it's, you know, it goes right to the water. So it's really smooth air. You can do aerobatics and it's really smooth.
So we would go down there. I'd often go down there with Shapiro after the, after the race. And we just fly around and do some loops and you know, you're six or seven, eight miles from, from where you took off. And there's nothing, there's, there's no trails down to that beach. There's no access and high tide hits the cliff. So at the time you'd all, you know, you'd always see a beach that was about a couple of wingspans wide. So it was landable. It was no problem, but you weren't getting out. Like a pilot had landed there, I think. And they, they told us about some story of how it landed there and they had to get them with a boat and it's, it gets dark fast. So they're not getting you before dark. Like
yeah, it's equator.
Yeah. They'll miss you. They'll just miss you. And then later they'll, they'll get you. So there's a little, there's like a little bit of, uh, extreme snow on the coast. It's, it's, it's a little bit too wet. So, uh, you know, and obviously we're, we're not going to be able to do anything that's going to get us to that beach. And it's, it's, it's just a, it's, it's just a, it's, it's just, it's just a, I'm being trying to figure out how that's going to go. Well, but, so the, uh,
the water ride is just, it's, it's not going to be easy. It's still pretty overseas to get back there. And, and, and, and it's, it's just, it's just that, it's like the best bridge you've ever seen. It's like Torrey Pines, but Torrey Pines is twice as high and totally vertical and smooth sand like the best you couldn't design it better and uh yeah we go down there and have fun and i remember one day tell me if i'm droning on too long here
no not at all i've got the biggest smile that day it sounds awesome i
just want to highlight canoa because that place is you know you asked what what are some of the best flights and they've they've often happened there we
went to this place when we were when we were doing this sailing around the world thing i don't remember what year that was maybe 2010 or 2011 we we ended up in sao miguel in the azores so you know a thousand miles off uh from from portugal and there's a there's a solid flying community there they have this big fly in there every august and we hooked in with one of the guys joao he's still just an awesome friend and we would go to this beach we went there every day for 30 days and he kept saying like when it lines up here this is the place you guys are going to dig it and you know it's 29 days never lined up we'd go over there oh fuck it didn't work again and uh but it's just this there's there was a picture and outside you might you might have seen it but it sounds exactly like that because when it's right it's so right and i mean it was you're flying over the ocean against this cliff where if the wind changes like 30 degrees or if it just dies suddenly you're going in the ocean there's no there's there's no bailout there's no it's the atlantic ocean i mean it's not
like kind of landing in some water you're going to swim in i mean it's just sheer cliffs as far as you can see and and it just oh my god but when it finally lined up the 30th day we went there and it was one of the most magical flights i mean no cross country nothing really i mean because the conditions were perfect it wasn't really that rad or gnarly it was just like oh my god i can't believe i'm flying over the ocean
yeah there's something about that i mean obviously there's something about um having having the ability to fly over the ocean it's just like oh my god i can't pay for mistakes i mean consequences definitely consequence definitely makes it more exciting i mean at obviously at your stage and at my stage that's a measured decision sure yeah but i mean we're making calculations but that definitely makes uh shines a light on what you're doing and makes it makes it more memorable that's for sure i mean it it sticks in the memory banks longer than those flights that have a giant farm field in front of the hill you know
yeah totally hey dustin before before we uh before we jump into your your your history you said something there that i wanted to ask about um because when when i was just down in brazil with jeff um he had on one of these super flared helmets you know really aerodynamic and a couple months before i went to the ex-ops this year i got a text from larry Larry Tudor we talked about him and he and i become friends and i loved talking to him on the podcast a bunch of months ago and he was like hey dude think about drag and uh and i was like wait what and and he was like you you cut down on drag and and i think this is something that you guys clearly think about a ton because you're closer to the sailplane realm of things but because i know you paraglide and you understand that too like are we missing out on something there i mean should we be thinking a lot more about that than we do because we don't wear helmets that are aerodynamic and we don't worry too much about our clothing i mean you know we we use pod harnesses and you know clearly like with the new xeno you know i mean clearly the manufacturers are thinking a lot about line drag and reducing lines i mean that that's not a new thing but are we are we missing something there
no i don't i i honestly feel pretty confident in saying no because um you know you you got to obviously have the equipment to keep up if you're if you're flying with a with a buddy i mean you don't want to be you don't want to have a big day for 10 hours and not be able to keep up with someone or struggle with someone you don't want to have a big day for 10 hours and not so hard that it's just it's almost impossible so you know as long as you're matched that's really the most important thing and all those years in canoa has taught me for sure that that those small changes are completely they are absolutely invisible in a in air that has any texture at all there's no there's just absolutely no way to see those changes and and i've and that's a kind of a contentious issue because a lot of people are convinced that that it is and and then they'll say well you know i was gliding next to so and so on this day and we you know he was 100 yards to my right and he just totally killed me and it's nothing but line because after all those changes we made and we don't just randomly make them i mean we you know steve pearson from Wills Wing came out here to to arizona to our flight park and we towed up in the winter spent like a weekend doing nothing but comparisons and doing you know isolating every little thing that i that i wanted to add to the glider or change on the glider bad profiles uh adding reflex taking away reflex all these little stupid fairing things the helmet you know i had a carbon fairing on my main riser that connects the harness to the glider um just you know in a ridiculously low reflex set or washout setting on the glider like a super low twist setting something you'd never fly in thermals and after all those changes we would do it's actually a video that dave aldrich made of these these comparison tests we do three minute glides and the best of all of those modifications would work out to about a five foot height difference after three minutes so there's just nothing you can't just when you control the glider a little bit sloppy and you get a little bit adverse yaw it would kind of equalize us for a second i'm like oh man now we gotta glide three more minutes to see if there's actually any difference and i'm talking about in winter smooth air so you know we glide three minutes get a five foot difference turn around do it again at different speeds and then we're going to do it again at different speeds
and it's things that you think it's irrelevant yeah things that you think you you know from reading books on you know sailplane books on aerodynamics and speed of flying on all that you think oh this is definitely making a difference and it's really weird like one thing that you think would make a difference will make kind of a little difference and then you're like well if if more reflex is good then a little more reflex is better and we'd add a little more reflex reflex on that fourth bat and i'm talking about just bending it to where the the tip the back tip of the baton is one inch higher on that one one single baton and suddenly the gain that we had made from this from the inboard three battens being raised up an inch was completely erased with that fourth baton so clearly we were adding reflex too far outboard and and then the you know we did several comparison glides to make sure and it's like well that didn't
that doesn't work like i expected it to work so you know when you're you know from gliding with people it in one second a guy can gain 20 feet on you and be a wingspan away from you just from the air i mean there's just no there's no way that it's going to help you and certainly not if you're doing your own flight you know or if you're mostly flying alone or just one guy it's nice to know that you have the best glider that's probably the most useful part of it is to have that psychological advantage knowing sure
you know if you have the tiniest
edge you're probably not going to get dropped but to go to all those lengths to you know you certainly wouldn't want to compromise safety by wearing a helmet that doesn't have um you know i don't wear lube and shells anymore unless i'm at the beach on that at that race i wouldn't compromise something like crushable foam in a helmet or you know some kind of protection on some at least some protection on a paraglider harness i mean it's just no i don't think you're getting anything i don't think you're getting anything tangible from it
uh why don't we talk briefly about and it doesn't have to be super brief but let's talk about your uh for those of you for those of the listeners who don't know uh they know you broke the record which we'll get into but um why don't we give us a brief kind of history of of the uh dustin flying show since the beginning and uh and then we'll we'll take it from there so
yeah my flying history i guess the first thing i did was rc i can't remember when that was exactly i must have been eight years old or 10 years old or something like that but uh that definitely helps to be able to picture how how a glider flies or how anything you know how an airplane flies uh when i was learning it definitely sort of sets you apart it gives you a leg up for sure and that's i mean even until today you know being able to look at something sort of uh you know third person from the ground and and sort of watch what it does and then have that instant feedback of you know okay well that's it's lifting because of the you know falling out of the thermal i'm doing i'm doing that that's been a you know a real help and it's translated pretty much directly
i don't know so much about how that's worked out with paragliding but but overall it's been a big help and then
it's interesting if i if i could just interrupt for a second you know just earlier today i was i was uh doing another i was doing another recording with a an acro guy that's been around a long time named andy he lives over in gerlitz and and that's how he started his flying and it just clicked with me i i don't know if you know farmer Matt Beechinor he's kind of our you know local air jedi and he's one of the most important people i've ever met in my life these guys that i just you know he flies a quarter as much as i do now because he's just busy and he's got work and other stuff but i don't think i'll ever be as good as him because he's just one of these people that just has this insane feel and he has also spent a lot of time with rc i think you guys are on to something there it must be it must be a really good learning tool
yeah it's um i mean i i don't know about for other pilots who do it but it you know since i started young i started it was all i had is all i could do i wasn't old enough to fly you know fly on my own but yeah it definitely does something to to your hand eye coordination and to your perception of of i mean i'm constantly relating in my mind what's happening to me in my glider relative to you know what that would look like on the ground and that's i mean i don't know if that constantly helps me but it for sure and centering thermals and you know finding beneficial lines and and stuff like that it's it's definitely helped and i mean i was pretty obsessed with it i mean i wasn't you know out flying the things five days or six days a week or whatever but i do remember with a buddy that i taught to hang glide back in the 90s um you know we were both into rcu we were roommates for a while and i mean it was to the point where you know we were throwing these things off the hill and one day i was had the thing pretty high
and uh i was like man that thing's pretty high i think we should probably just go ahead and try to fly it home and he got in the driver's seat of that freaking land yacht and i sat in the on the windowsill of the passenger seat and we we drove that thing uh down ray road for i don't know seven or eight miles losing constantly losing sight of the glider and then intermittently having the thing so low that we had to stop in the middle of traffic to like get a low save and oh my god yeah we
eventually you guys were like the original drone pilots that is yeah
yeah we were so we we ended up you know we did that a couple times and yeah it teaches you a lot about air and lines and i'm not giving up like one of those times we i i just lost sight of it i mean you know when something gets so far away it kind of just disappears into the pixels of your of your eyes i mean it was just gone and you know after a while after a few minutes of looking for it we're like well i guess we lost that one and started driving home and uh saw that thing and i was like oh my god i'm gonna nothing like spiraling out of control towards the ground over the freeway we're like oh i guess we got it now suddenly you know we flew home with it so yeah they they have definitely factored in in a positive way um to just my general feel i don't know if that was you know the the only thing that or what gave me a real advantage but yeah it's if i could do it again i'd definitely start that way it was really helpful and
give me give me some time and some reference how old are you now and when when was that so
37 now and you know that that was all happening around that was actually all happening around the time the stories are when i just started hang gliding or maybe two or three years after i'd started hang gliding i was fairly fully obsessed actually and uh but i probably started that when i was eight or ten or something like that and then when i was um when i was 14 i had i had just about then moved out here full-time to arizona and uh and i started flying sailplanes and i had i already knew about hang gliding in some way i can't remember when i first saw or learned that it existed it was definitely before that it was probably when i was you know 10 or 12 years old i do remember seeing like a lookout mountain advertisement or flyer or something something relating to lookout mountain i saw i knew about when i was when i was young
but uh for some reason the sailplanes seemed like the way to go at the time i maybe because of the model so when i was 14 i got a job out out here this place called estrella sailport and uh yeah i just ran wings i ran the wings when they took off and that was good for 50 cents a tow and i think maybe two bucks an hour on top of that 250 an hour um that's something like that so i i you know i i took a tried to take a flight or two at the end of each day you know lesson with the instructors there and so my they would actually print me out a check uh each two weeks or month with a negative value on it i don't know if that was just a an accounting thing or as a joke but it was they always printed me out my negative check at the end of the month
because you weren't getting enough you weren't making enough to pay for your flying time no
definitely not definitely not and uh so that that went on for i guess i i sold it at 15 and and was pretty i was pretty pretty much into it but i can't remember i must have been about 15 and a guy came down there and i had already you know i was in high school and and i had already managed to find some books in the library about hang gliding not by accident i mean i was looking and i already knew about it i can't remember the details but a guy did come down there to the sailport flying a pretty clapped out old glider called a a lack and i mean that wasn't a very well-made glider to start with and it was pretty clapped out version of it and he wanted to sell me an equally scary hang glider because he heard that i was interested in hang gliding so as a pilot who had zero
experience not even one second under a hang glider he wanted to sell me a foil combat which uh i think it from what i've heard is actually a pretty sweet flying glider but it was nothing that you'd ever you
wouldn't put an offer to a beginner
so he he uh talked about a few flights he had and um yeah my interest peaked again because i just to step back a little bit i was i don't know 13 or 14 or somewhere around there my mom took me to another sailport on the other side of phoenix and i took a flight in a sailplane might have been my first one and we were thermaling up it must have been summertime just over the carefree highway up there and this guy in a hang glider rocked right up to us the same altitude and just basically was like waving at us and cord right through us and was gone and i was just like what the hell just happened that dude was like hanging in a golf bag underneath that thing. That was incredible. I guess that was amazing.
I'm going to make those golf bags someday. Yeah.
I'm going to, I'm going to make absolutely no money making those one day. They're going to look really cool. So yeah, that was, that was from a place called the Oasis. That was turf soaring school and they towed right across the street at a place called the Oasis. Um, and, and that's when, you know, when was that? That would have been 1990 or something. Hang gliding in Phoenix or in Arizona was a kind of a big deal. They had, they didn't just go out there on the weekends with, with one truck and a winch. They, they had lanes lined up and we're running multiple lanes of tow trucks with winches and dune buggies with winches to get these guys up in the air. And
shit. Yeah.
I mean this, yeah, this was the era of Hans Heidrich and, uh, Bob Thompson and you know, the other Jeff Reynolds and Brad Lindsay, they were all towing was the thing in Phoenix at the time. And there was a big community and it was, it was kind of a, you know, I got in in 96 and it was still an exciting thing. Like it was big. It was big enough that the meetings always broke down into huge shouting matches. Like just with everybody, you know, it, it seemed important at the time. There was a lot of people and they were passionate about it. And there was all, there was always a fight. It was in hindsight, that was all very cool. But at the time we thought we got to get a, you know, we got to reign this in a little bit. This is not attracting new members. Yeah. We need to attract new members. And now it's just like, we need anything. We don't care.
A drag out fight every night would be preferable. So better
than what you have. Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's basically how I started to learn about hang gliding. I was through the, a few little chance encounters. Um, so yeah, I'm at, I'm at Estrella sailport. I soloed at 15, got my license at 16. And then I probably would have gotten obsessed with that if the hang gliding hadn't completely, completely, you know, derailed that. And so as soon as I took a look at hang gliding, which back then wasn't getting on the internet, it was, you know, uh, looking at magazines and, and digging through the yellow pages, you know, I found an instructor and then that was it. Like I took, I went up there one weekend and I already was like, well, the sailport is a waste of my time. And then, you know, I did three total weekends of, you know, six days of flying with, uh, this instructor, Bill Holmes, who's still around instructing.
And I was like, yep, yep, this is it. So, I mean, I was a hundred percent obsessed. And, uh, managed to get myself fired from the sailport just for general jackassery. They
didn't, they didn't want to pay you negative money anymore or what?
Yeah. I'm actually still really good friends with all those guys. It was kind of a, for me, it was kind of a joke and, and, you know, I still go there once in a while and run a sailplane out and it's all, it's all good. But yeah, that's the, I guess they realized that, uh, my time was, you know, more important for me than, giving it to them in a very selfish way. So I was like, well, I'm going to go hang gliding. So yeah, I learned with, I learned with Bill Holmes and, and, uh, yeah, that was that. I got, I got a, my first hang glider just shortly after that. And, and just was completely obsessed for several years.
This is 96.
Yeah. 96, you know, August 96, I took lessons and, you know, early 97, I, with a sort of a mentor of mine here in Phoenix, I found and purchased a Moyse XT 165, which turned out to be a pretty, pretty average glider for someone with my experience. I probably took about one step too far to, you know, buying that thing, but it worked out fine. It was looking at it now. I mean, it's just like any other sort of novice glider. I should have bought a, a Falcon or something like that, a single surface, but you know, in the nineties in Phoenix, that just wasn't an option. I was, I was going to get the glider to beat all gliders. If it was my, you know, even though it was my first glider.
Can you, can you give me a, just because I'm so stupid when it comes to hang gliding, can you, can you give me and the audience, uh, just a brief lesson on, you know, single surface, uh, are there, are, do they have ratings like paragliders have, you know, that from, from real, from comp to real, you know, to learning, you know, give us the, you know, the two minute basic course on, uh, you know, for somebody that wants to learn how to hang glide, where do you start? Where do you end? What, what are the differences in single surface and those, right?
Everyone's probably aware of, you know, single surface and double surface. So you've got a really simple single surface, you know, top sale, which is essentially like a windsurf sale and all the, the tubes are exposed basically. Uh, and that's the cheapest, uh, the, you know, the, the cheapest to, to build generally the sort of the most stable because of the increased, um, cord length. So it's, you know, more resistant to sort of tumbling events. It's really, really damped. It's not unstable. And the, you know, they don't have, so that would be considered a beginner glider and they use beginner gliders also as training gliders. So it's, it's slightly different than, than paragliding. You can have like a school wing, right. Or, or you can have what someone would generally buy as a first wing for us.
It's pretty much the same. And that, that's only changed a little bit, with Wills Wing, one of Will's wings, latest gliders, the alpha. So that could be considered really a school wing because it's just, it's just really slow and a little bit bigger than, than, you know, the larger Falcons. So it allows somebody on their first day to go a little bit slower and be a little bit less overwhelmed, you know, as they're running headfirst down a hill. Um, so yeah, they don't glide
ratio be on, on that versus, you know, what you're flying in comps.
Well, you know, Wills Wing guys, they're, I'm probably going to say it wrong. No, let me know. But it's, I think a Falcon is probably, let's guess like, geez, who knows, like six to one or something like that. I mean, they're, the alpha is probably pretty similar. I mean, at that performance level, yeah, it's one, no, it's depending on the paraglider. Yeah. It's a low end
paraglider. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a speedway.
Yeah, exactly. That goes really slow. It's really easy to fly. You know, it's ideal. It's what I should have got as a first glider. It's what, it's what everybody should get as a first glider. And that's what I attempt to convince, you know, all of my students or the students where I, where I tow, um, that they should get as a first or even a second or third glider. I mean, it's, I, I wish I had one sitting here in my apartment too, but yeah. So one of your questions is, do they come with ratings and they don't, they don't come with ratings like you're accustomed to. So, so those, you know, new pilots may be looking for that and they may be confused, but I guess we that, we're already flying and are kind of in the market. We, we know that, you know, an alpha is a school glider, a Falcon. Is it, is it, you know, a really great first glider or a tandem glider?
The, the, the tandem models, um, are generally a large version of like the, the beginner glider, uh, just for handling and takeoff speed and landing speed. And because you're not, you know, you're not trying to get performance with a, with a tandem passenger. Then the next thing would be like a novice glider. And that's, um, uh, something like a, uh, sport too. And that's not an appropriate first glider for somebody straight out of straight out of lessons. I mean, it's, it's easy to get in over your head and, you know, it's really tempting to buy a glider that you think is going to carry you through whatever, whatever, you know, position in your flying career, you, you think you want to get to before you have to buy a new glider.
And it's, you know, I, I, I did it a little bit too, and it's kind of the wrong, it's the wrong way. I mean, if, if I could go back, yeah, that's the only thing I would really change if I could go back was, was, uh, just the first glider I got. Um, yeah, after that you, you started getting into intermediate gliders and then there's a, there's a huge range of intermediate gliders. And they all, by that point, they, they take about the same, nearly the same skill level to fly as the absolute top of the line racing glider. So, you know, it's, your choices are much more important in those first few years than they are later on. I mean, if you can successfully fly an intermediate glider, then you can most likely easily fly a topless glider.
And what are, what are the risks, Dustin, there that when you're, as you, as you step up to these much higher gliders, is it, is it kind of synonymous with what's happened with, you know, with the paraglider, they just get way harder to recover. You know, if you, if you have, if, if you have a blowout or, you know, cascades become, you know, just almost inevitable on a, on a, on a comp glider and they're just more, more spanny. So they're faster. So things happen faster. Is it kind of, is it kind of the same, is it the same speak, the same trouble you have with it?
You guys don't fold up,
they don't collapse.
Yeah. I mean, I think that you'd have a different problem. Like you could put a, I'm, I'm guessing this, I'm pretty confident you could put a, anybody who could fly a, a, a level, a paraglider on a comp glider, if they could successfully, successfully get the thing launched and they could fly it down and, you know, totally dead air and be fine. But when you throw somebody off in a high performance hang glider, that's only flown single surface, you know, really baggy gliders, you're going to encounter the problem immediately off of launch with handling and sort of this, this damped, you know, delayed handling response on the high performance glider. And it's going to get them, really quick. It gets almost everyone really quickly into an oscillation issue really close to the hill.
So that's, it's more of a handling thing than, yeah, it's definitely more of a handling thing than a inherent glider safety thing. I mean, but then of course you, when you start throwing in midday conditions, then yeah, you're going to have similar problems to the paragliders.
Okay. Not
to mention also take off and landing speeds are going to be thrilling and terrifying on your first flight on a topless glider.
Yeah. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Um, okay. So thank you for that. I appreciate that. And so take us from, you know, so you get your, you get your first glider in, in 96, uh, you, you move up maybe a little too fast, 97. How do you go fill in the gap between there and, and breaking world records? So,
yeah, I got that first glider in 97 after I borrowed a lucky enough that there was a community here. So I was able to borrow a beginner glider in the, meantime between lessons and actually getting my first glider. So I was on, you know, this borrowed glider and being thrown off every, every sketchy no wind cliff launch around the Valley here by my, my mentor and other pilots got through that pretty much completely unscathed. And I guess I, you know, knew enough to, to stay on that sort of novice intermediate glider that I had for a while. And I, and I did, I didn't have much need to, to step up, but I, I really stepped up to the next glider, which was an extra light, just out of just the sheer sexiness of that thing.
I saw this guy up at a Mingus had one and I had to have it. I mean, I had to have his, not just one of them. I had to have that one. So I chased him around for, you know, a season. And I was like, I must have your glider thing is the sexiest thing I've ever laid eyes on. And I, uh, kept telling me, no, no, no, no. And finally he knew he had his sucker after he had put all the hours on it. And, you know, I bought that thing from him and I, I was ready for it when I, you know, I guess I was ready for it and I did it right. I went up to the craters, uh, which is basically Arizona's, um, sort of legendary training site. They're really smooth. Uh, you know, the terrain is smooth. And at the time of year I flew it, it was really cold. There might've even been snow on the ground and it was really smooth flight. So even after, after all the hours and the XCs, I had done some limited XC on my glider and flown it and all kinds of crazy air, just stepping up to that extra light, which now looking back is, it's just, it's just another intermediate glider in today's, you know, today's range of gliders.
It was incredibly fast and scary and just, you know, the sound of the air moving past the wing and me was, was terrifying. Um, as soon as I flew away from the hill and, you know, I just, I managed to do a couple of one eighties and not get really into too much trouble. It didn't oscillate too much. And I landed it on my feet. I couldn't believe it. And I, and I bought the thing. I loved it. So, you know, I got, I got used to that glider and started to have, uh, some, some success with cross country in, in this, you know, I started to have success in this small, relatively small community we have out here, you know, relatively small compared to California or some of those places in Brazil. I mean, so, so I had achieved some measure of success out here and that was enough with, within, you know, I guess it was about 98,
I got a call from a guy named Ken Brown, who's a good friend now. And he was, he was the, uh, us distributor for Moise. And he's like, Hey, I've got a, got an idea for you. You know, it looks like you've been doing all right. And I'd like to help you out. So, uh, it turns out that he wanted to give me a glider and, you know, maybe make that a regular thing. And so I ended up getting, uh, used comp gliders from, from, you know, there was comp pilots that were fully sponsored. They were, they were getting new stuff. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and I was, that was pretty amazing. So I was getting, you know, pretty much top end equipment. That's right. When the first good topless gliders were coming out, the first good ones.
And what
would it, what would, what would a glider have costed? What is, what's a retail topless glider in 2000 cost?
Yeah, that probably would have been done. I probably seven or eight grand or something like that. Oh,
so this is, you were stoked.
Yeah, there weren't all the carbon options or maybe even actually any carbon options at that point in time. You know, these weren't the first topless. This was kind of the second round of topless. They had figured out some issues. And so, yeah, he helped me out. And I started getting kind of, you know, semi-regular gliders from him that were used from, you know, U.S. comp pilots like Kurt Warren and some other guys. And, yeah, I was super stoked. And so he kept me in gliders and sort of funded a first little trip for me. And that was to go from here in Arizona up through sort of the western U.S., through the Rockies, up to Golden. Actually, no. Sorry. Sun – what is it? Sun Peaks? I think it's called Sun Peaks.
It's up near Kamloops. Okay, yeah. So, yeah, I drove up and I did – stayed in Salt Lake City for a while. I did the Chelan comp. That might have – yeah, that was my first comp, I guess. I did Chelan. I might have done Dinosaur in that same period. I went up to Canada. I actually couldn't get into Canada. I had to spend the night at the border in a hotel because I didn't have – I couldn't prove that I had enough money to get into Canada.
And that still makes me nervous going in there these days for the same reason. So I showed up and they're like, well, that's – you're going to need more than whatever I had, 200 bucks for two weeks. I was like, well, you don't know me. Right. Right. So I went there and I accidentally drove to Golden. That was back in the day when you would just use an atlas to navigate. So I was going and I just – the last thing I remember was that Golden was a place that they had competitions at. And for some reason, that name stuck in my head and I drove all the way to Golden. That was a pretty amazing place. I think I ended up flying a day there and, yeah, it was pretty awesome. And then they're like, no, the comp's back at Kamloops. I'm like, oh, Jesus. Okay. So I turn around and freaking drive my Bonneville back.
This is like – this is the most clapped out old 84 Bonneville with like that fake pleather roof. It's just ridiculous. It's like the Jimmy Chase
mobile. It's ridiculous.
You hit a speed bump and it just keeps going up and down for like half an hour. So I get to Kamloops and, yeah, I forget the guy's name but he had organized this comp. And some of the Canadian stars were there and some people from actually out of the – across the ocean had come and it seemed like a pretty big deal. And that was great flying. So I camped out for that week and had a great comp and definitely learned a lot. I got my ass kicked by a New Zealand pilot that came up to do that comp. And, man, I think I might have gotten second place there just by luck. I tend to do. I've had my best days, not my best comps, but my best days towards the beginning of a comp when I have the least expectation and definitely the lowest confidence in my ability.
I tend to just slow the thing down and try to hang high and just let everyone else make decisions. And that's how I flew that whole comp because I didn't know what I was doing. And, yeah, so I got lucky and did well. And that guy, Jeff, did much better. He was a pretty crafty pilot and taught me, by example, a few little tricks about popping into a cloud and hanging out while other people take the first start and then popping out of the cloud on the other side and grabbing the next start. And just little start games that I still haven't learned.
Now, 20 years later, I haven't learned what start to take and how to take it. So it's ongoing. But, yeah, that was all as a result of Kenny Brown sort of sponsoring. And then I came back and, you know, another topless was in development in Australia. And he's like, hey, man, how would you feel about going to Australia? Oh, my God, dude, I'm there. So he bought me a ticket and I and it was sort of as a you know, I I worked there under the table, obviously, at the factory. And, you know, I got got paid enough to to sort of survive and did this. The winter, you know, the North American winter comps there.
And yeah, that was a sell. So the guy here that helped in Phoenix that sort of helped me find that first glider and mentored me for a few years. He had a big industrial sewing machine and talked me into buying that thing from him. And I was like, well, I don't need it, but OK, the price is right. And I just started sewing on it and making stuff. And then, yeah, when I went to to Australia, that was just two or three years later. I I talked to them into sort of letting me use the machine. Here and there after hours to sew a tow bridle or do whatever. And I I could fake that I knew what I was doing well enough to let them grudgingly say, OK, you know, he probably won't break the machine. And I and I did and I, you know, sewed a few little things. And that's over the years that's transformed into, you know, making harnesses and stuff.
I had the same thing with Wills Wing. I was like, like, yeah, I know how to use a machine. I'm not going to break it. And at that point, that was true when I when I joined Wills Wing and thanks to them and a lot of time that's gone by. I've I've gotten better and better at sewing and I've got more experience with with how to do things right. And we've over the years done done structural tests and I get to see the results of how certain how certain stitch patterns hold. And, you know, just I guess that's what it takes. Just a lot of experience. And obviously with with Shapiro and the covert project that that added a lot of experience.
And when when did. So so now we're at 2000. You're down in Oz. You're working with Moyes. You know, when when did it start? Was there kind of like an aha moment in there in terms of you mentioned kind of like in Kamloops year? You mentioned a little bit of flying psychology and just in terms of like, you know, you you've kind of identified like, oh, this is when I do well. But, you know, how are you able to kind of accelerate maybe into the comp scene and big distances? Was there was it just kind of past? I was going to
say that it's nothing but just pure obsession is just just being passionate. I mean, there's no you can tell when somebody asks you, like, how can I get to this level, whether or not they're going to get there regardless of what they do or whether they're going to get close to there because they really they really want it, but they're not passionate about it. And you just you know, anybody can be pretty good at it. But to get to get really good at it. And I honestly haven't ever made that. I haven't stepped up to whatever that level is of the, you know, like Manfred and Christian. And, you know, I got to watch Alex Ploner make that step between between about the time he was in Zapata. I don't remember what year that was. And when he obviously got really good and won a couple of worlds, there were there's some last plateau.
I'm sure it's not the last, but the last demonstrated plateau we can see in the hang gliding world is to reach where they are. And I don't know what how you get there. I mean, I suppose that you just stay obsessed. And, you know, honestly, I lost that that particular level of obsession, maybe for the better. I don't know. But at the time I was it was, you know, I could I could fly my local hill here three times a day. And that included two hours of driving round trip, you know, to pick up the glider at the LZ and hike up and get the car. That seemed totally normal to me. And it's just that those days are gone. But I'm super happy. Super, super thankful for him. And, yeah, so going like going back to Australia, I was fully obsessed. So I did the, you know, the summer comps there and had guys sort of my Johnny was my age and he was getting he was already good.
And he's he's always been a little better than me. And he's just kept that that spacing between us as the years have gone by. So I learned a lot from him. And there was a young guy named Joel Rebecki who who unfortunately died after he went to airborne gliders. And was helping to develop a glider there. And he just had a, you know, launched a really sketchy day with a really strong and very cross wind at the coast attempting to do basically a foot launch world record from the beach. As I heard it attempting to launch off on a I don't know what kind of a frontal day it was, but clearly a nuking day at the beach. And it's I forget the name of the cliff, but it's up.
You forget the name of the town, but it's north. It's Sydney up there where airborne is based, I think. Yeah, he was going to fly inland and get over the mountains. And then, you know, he was Joel was incredible. He was an amazing pilot and would have very easily reached the absolute top. I mean, he was at the time he was already as pretty much as good as they got. Like he was he definitely had the magic already. And so I learned, you know, I learned a lot from him and he was super cool, young guy, super funny. And, you know, we hung out a lot during those few months that I was there.
And, you know, obviously, Gerolf, the designer from from Austria, had when you could squeeze it out of him, had some has some really just amazing technical knowledge. And, you know, I learned a lot. I was like a sponge. Basically, I was trying to soak everything up. And, you know, so I was flying his glider and I wanted to know everything about it. And he sort of kind of tolerated that a little bit. And, you know, so I flew with him and Joel and Johnny and all those guys. And we did Mount Beauty. We did Corion and obviously went to Hay and to Niloquin and all those inland desert sites. And, yeah, that was a big experience. And then I came home from that. And I don't know why. I don't know if it was because of some accidents that I had seen or heard of.
You know, and I, you know, I'm young. I was a young guy. So at that point in my life, I hadn't been doing I hadn't been doing anything where I would seeing people around me die. That was that was a new thing. I guess I could because of that, I could probably identify with like the Jews. I could probably identify with the general public as they see us. So at that time, I was like, man, I maybe that was it. I can't say for sure, but I might have just been getting burned out just from the competitive, you know, competitive aspect of it. And I hadn't really competed in anything before either. So at the same time, I was super stoked about it. But I had this confusing feeling of like I might need to step back from this. And so I did. And in two, you know, 2001 or whatever it was when I got back. So, yeah, I got back and I immediately just step back. I was like, I mean, I really I was totally obsessed with flying still.
That never changed at all. So but I stepped back from the comps and sort of had to look inward a little bit. And, you know, that was a couple of year, a few years. And I get the occasional call and heckle from from the crew. And, you know, Johnny and those guys like, what's you know, what's the matter? Are you scared of us? And so, yeah, that was about 2003. Probably I met Kevin Carter. He's this, you know, he's good. He's good at everything he does. And that's so when he started hang gliding. He got. Got really good, really fast. He got, you know, he got some some minor sponsorship, some help from arrows at the time and started doing some comps. And I mean, literally within three years of him starting hang gliding, he was on the team and he became a really good friend. And, yeah,
one day he called me up when I was doing some odd job, whatever I was doing here in Phoenix. And he's like, hey, bro, you you need to you need to come over here to Wills Wing. And, you know, I talked to these guys and they're they're keen to like maybe. Make a deal with you and, you know, you just need to you need to be on board. And I was and we may have talked about it before. And I was like, no, I got this. You know, I was a kid and I had some sort of a small sponsorship going. I'm like, oh, I don't want to wreck it. And but he he knew better. I mean, he knew better. So he's like, look, you need to this is what you need to do. And this is why he laid it out. I was like, all right, that makes that makes sense. So so I ended up talking to those guys. I think it was Rob Kells that I talked to. And he's like, you know, Rob Kells is like the nicest guy ever.
He was sort of the face of Wills Wing at the time. He was the he was the voice between Wills Wing and all the dealers. And, you know, he was sort of taking care of the team at the time. And that was Kevin and and me. And then that grew into Shapiro and Jeff O 'Brien and Zach. And so, yeah, I got in right at the right time. And and, you know, thanks to Kevin. So, yeah, that was over the next. Three or four or five years, we built a really amazing team. And, you know, you don't know it till you look back. You always at the time, I was like, man, that must have been that must have been great to be, you know, a member of the Wills Wing team back in the 80s or 90s. You know, it sounded so all the stories sounded so cool. And they're, you know, those guys were just like epic partiers.
And and I mean, epic partiers. It sounds like there's a few stories there. But in in hindsight now, I mean, I wouldn't. I wish to be there at any other time. Like we have we have the best team that I think there ever was. It was just super cool time to be involved. And we traveled we traveled everywhere together. I mean, we we traveled the world together. It's pretty cool. And everybody just so happened at that time to not have really any any pressing responsibilities. And and, you know, it was just kind of a continuous good time. It was great. And we learned a lot. And everybody was really well matched in skills. We got really good together. And and, you know. We're all still really close friends. And, you know, that was having
a community and mentors and is everything, isn't it? It really is. I just. Yeah. And
having someone else's, you know, seeing someone else's passion makes you will rekindle your own passion. I mean, it's really easy in a in a community like the one I'm in now to just kind of hang the glider up and be like, well, there's no one to fly with or there's right. There's only paraglider pilots. And every time I put my glider on their roof, they're kind enough to let me put it on there. But I like crush the thing on there. Because there's no rack. It's just easier to say, like, you know, maybe I'll hang it up. But at the time, it's like, you know, God, man, Shapiro stoked and O 'Brien is freaking stoked. And Zach's like, what are you doing with your life if you're not hang gliding? And I was like, well, that's that's right. So let's spend all of our, you know, let's spend all of our money and time doing this. And it was funny, I was doing my, you know, I actually doing taxes and I did my taxes and that, you know, for a few years there, I was spending over ten thousand a year on tickets.
And I was like, well, this is this is a thing. This is a thing that I do. I guess I mean, I guess I'm a hang glider pilot, a traveling hang glider pilot.
That was a real deal.
That was the bang your head like, oh, my God.
Yeah. There's some money here. I could I could I could be doing some interesting things with this money. But I'm doing this. So, yeah, no, it was it was awesome. And there was a yeah, the traveling was probably the most valuable aspect of the whole deal, for sure.
Yeah, it always is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I learned a lot of lessons in travel.
Eventually, you know, I did get back into comps because I think I ended up doing a world in 2000. Yeah, I guess I did a world in France in 2004. So I didn't I was only out of the comp scene for a couple of years. But that was probably, you know, a sign of things to come because I've since, you know, 2003 or four, I've been doing comps pretty regularly and I've hit most of the worlds that I was interested in doing. And then, you know, the world's came around to Valle a couple of years ago. And I. Bailed on that. I made the team and I was like, yeah, I'm not definitely wasn't it if I and then this one in Brazil, I really wanted to go to and it was basically financially I just couldn't make it work. I got myself into a little bit of a hole here that would have been not wise to go to Brazil for three weeks or a month and spend all my money at the time.
So it you know, I didn't I didn't regret it at all after hearing about the conditions there and just the gaggles. And it's just. There's just I've had a general turn off to the bigger comps, cat one and cat two comps. And just the you know, I was in a world in Italy and the organization there. I just didn't like the way I didn't just I just didn't like the general feeling of the comp. It didn't feel peaceful and it wasn't it just wasn't benefiting me, you know, at the time. So I that's that's sort of brought me to the day where I'm. I'm totally happy flying. I actually fly quite a bit less now just because of other other things going on, but I'm super happy to fly.
I'm I'm I see a good day and I want to go, but I don't have the that urge to hit
up the comps. It's not the obsession.
Oh, I don't have that obsession to start with. And I definitely am and not interested in cat one or cat two comps at the moment. Yeah, that could change as it as it has in the past.
And so how does that jive with 2012? Yeah. I mean, you know, chasing the Jason, I mean, that is you and I talked about before we started recording. I just got back from Brazil. I went down to fly to SEMA where, you know, Raphael and Donna's any of those guys broke the world record last year. And I mean, it it's brutal. I have so much respect for those guys because, I mean, you're waiting around in a terrible place for weeks with the chance of getting one flight and that one flight, you know, it's a crapshoot if you bomb out in the first 50 K. And like, like that happened last year, you know, one of the best pilots in the world was on the ground, 15 K out and the other guys went, you know, they, they got it. It's just, it's just brutal and just, it's the waiting game is, you know, I think people imagine that, you know, you go and it's fun and you're hanging out with your buds and the train's really cool.
But I think Brazil's from what I understand, it's like Texas, it's the real Denali mean, it's, there's, there's fences, there's shit that can kill you. And especially in Texas, there's lots of people with guns. I mean, it's, it's. Um, I wouldn't call it like a pleasurable experience.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's, it's, yeah, that's an interesting, it's interesting contrast between that and comps. I don't have any problem with personal suffering. I mean, I can, I can, I'm from Phoenix, I can dig in and the heat, I really don't care very much. And in fact, when I showed up in 2012, it was, it was like a hundred and 105 or something, 107. And it was a definite cool relief when I stepped out of my car compared to Phoenix. Right. Yeah. I was like, well, this is great. I could hang out here all day long. And, uh, so yeah, the, the suffering doesn't really worry me and the hours in the harness, I really don't care. Um, I don't like being scared at all.
And that day it just, as it worked out, I didn't even know there was only brief spikes of fear, like on the takeoff, cause it was crossover the trees, there's 10 seconds of terror. And then that was fine. And then, you know, there's a couple of not, I guess not scared, I was too low and I'm like, oh man. I might just throw this day away and, but otherwise it was a completely safe day. I mean, it was very relaxing. It was the opposite of, of, uh, turning circles with 50 of your friends, uh, in, in every thermal all the way to goal. You know, that's in, in hang gliders for, I mean, flying goggles is one thing when you're, you know, on a paraglider, when you've got a bunch of guys around and you're, you know, you just have to worry about hitting somebody, but in a hang glider, you have to worry about hitting somebody. Not because of just how many there are.
Not because you can't control the freaking thing because you're in everybody's wake and you, it's not like you can just pull the brake handle and overpower somebody's wake. I mean, you can, you'll be in, you know, if there's a heavy guy in front of you and he's pushed way out and you hit his wake, you could just go from a 30 degree bank into the thermal to a 45 degree bank out of the thermal in one big smooth roll and you'll have nothing to say about it. I mean, it's kind of, and that can be really interesting if that rolls you into the thermal, like right into the cauldron of, of all those pilots. So it's a, it's a workout. I mean, yeah, you can over, to an extent you can overpower that, but it takes an incredible level of focus and strength, you know, with a high performance glider to fly in, in gaggles, especially in weak air when everybody's shallow banked and extremely annoying to be flying with.
I'm sure that's probably the case in paragliders too. I'm just screw, I find myself screaming at like, like banging on the base, even screaming and screaming for someone to just bank their glider. And it's probably just a personal problem because I, I'll end up cutting inside of them and do my thing, come back around and they're at the same altitude or higher than me. So it's, I don't know, maybe it's just a personal flying style.
So you, you and Johnny are, you're, you're down there and you're flying together. It sounds like wicked good day, you know, little sketchy on launch, but otherwise, I mean, you guys went 7.61. That's a fricking, it's a fucking good day. Uh, and, and, uh, at the end, it says in the article, anyway, you guys are like wingtip to wingtip. So I got to ask you, was it like, did you guys just talk about this in advance? Like, Hey man, if we have the chance to come in together, we're coming in together or like, I mean, you know, is he still pissed at you about that or, or would he have done the same thing to you?
I believe he would have done the same thing and it wasn't, it wasn't, the details are a little bit different, but yeah, it's, it's, there, it wasn't really eked out. I mean, we, we did end up wingtip to wingtip at. The 438 mile mark, which is exactly where we, we intersected the previous longest flight from Mike Barber. Okay. So I was there and I was watching my GPS and it was like 438 and I'm like, you know, kind of like having my little celebration there for a second cause I was high, like 10 grand and you know, the clouds were dying. I'm like, I got it. Cause I had, I had sort of left him at the beginning of a cloud street. I had just flown off the end of, and just by my lucky positioning, when I flew under one really good cloud, I got the climb before. You know, he was a few hundred yards to the side. I got a really good, like four meter and, and by the time he slid over after I'd done a turn or two, it was kind of, I pulled the ladder up on him.
So that separation turned into thousands of feet and miles and the clouds were dissipating as I was sort of topping each one out and then they were all gone and I'm like, well, I got him. He's he's like, no, I'd seen him last miles, miles behind and thousands below. I'm like, it's just too late. And you know, I don't know what time it was seven something. And. And, uh, she right at 438 miles through the humidity in the haze, there's this glider coming at me at the same altitude. It's like, this can't possibly be that guy. And I saw him come in and he claims he had the same thought as I did for, cause we had just passed big spring, you know, an hour before and I'm like, maybe this is just a hang glider from big spring as if I don't even think there, I don't even think there's locals that live in big spring.
But I'm like, maybe it just can't. It just, I can't do the math. I don't see how he climbed so quickly and, and recovered from where he was since I had not been held up in the last 30, 45 minutes. And sure enough, it was him. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me. So there we were. And it was, it was like, basically I had at 438, I had started circling in like a 50 up. Cause I had just felt like, well, this is the time. And it turns out that I was right. That was, there was to be nothing stronger than that for the rest of the flight. And so nothing to separate us for the rest of the flight. Either. And, and you know, he's a pretty imposing pilot to, to be head to head with when it's, when the stakes are that high and I had pretty much over the next few minutes, I was pretty much resigned to him.
Like, well, he's probably going to get me because you know, he's, he's a better climber. He's really good at flying lines. He's going to do something. But you know, luckily at the end of the day, there's not all the air is pretty good. It's not, you don't have to be a genius to get a good line. And, and, and I was pretty fresh at the time I was, you know, been in the air 10 hours, but I was feeling fine and couldn't, couldn't complain. I mean, I didn't have an ache in my body and I was hydrated and just, you know, I'd been peeing all day and eating. So I just, I felt great. All I wanted. I just wanted a beer. That's all I lacked at that time. But I was, I was totally happy in my harness and, and he was definitely showing some signs of fatigue and constantly sort of rocking up and stretching his neck and you know, you
know. He was shaking his arms out and stuff and that's understandable. But I guess that's, and filming, he'll, he'll remind you if you talk to him, he's, he lost that flight because of filming me and I, I laugh about that, but I'm very thankful that he got filmed that day because I wasn't going to take any, I wasn't going to waste my energy on that. And so he's got some really amazing, you know, he made like a 20 minute film from that day and it's, it's pretty interesting. It's pretty good to look back on that. And I'm sure in a few years. It'll be even more interesting. So.
Those of you listening, we'll put that up in the, in the show notes as well. And when this, when this goes live, well, that'll all be up there. Did Dustin, did it, did it change anything for you getting the record? I mean, it hasn't been beaten well, just in terms of your career, uh, passion, sponsorship. Um, did it, you know, did it, uh, you, you and I were talking beforehand that, you know, Johnny these days is kind of one of the only ones that's who's really. You know, making a, a, a living from the flying side of it, you know, you're making a living from sewing and to be, being involved with the companies and that kind of thing. But, you know, he's, he's really kind of gotten it figured out, um, which is tough to do and hang gliding now is I understand because it's just, you know, there it's, it's not the rage that it once was.
Um, I mean, it's hard enough to do in paragliding, um, but did it, did it, did it allow you to do stuff that you hadn't done before? It
certainly doesn't hurt. Yeah. To have that record. I mean, if, if I was inclined to use that to my benefit to, to get some, you know, increased sponsorship or, or I came there to fly 500 miles, I didn't even care about the record really. I just wanted the big 500 and that's what I went there for. And I was a little, you know, I even had a declared goal right up the street from where we landed at, at 500 and I was like, I was a little bit disappointed about that. And getting the record was cool, but I already didn't, you know, it's, it feels good to have, have something like that and get the recognition up to a point. But yeah, I wasn't, I already wasn't interested in using it to, for promotion or anything like that. It's just, it's, it's nice to have, and it's nice to finally beat him at something he's so good at.
And
yeah. And I know he's still, he's still chasing it. I've been watching the news. He goes back there. He's trying.
Well, I mean, I have to admit, I was, I was a little nervous when he stayed there, you know, for all those days, but that just reinforced what we all already know. I mean, what you guys know too, is that there are good places, but there it's the day. And that day, I used to think that day probably happened several times a season and we just had to be there all of the summer season to get it. But I'm convinced more and more that the day that you get the real, the actual longest flight ever is, is probably not even once a season. It's probably, it probably doesn't, it sometimes doesn't happen during a summer season.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you're dead on there. Well, Hey, Dustin, it'd be remiss of me to, to, to, to the listeners, especially to not ask you, I want to get into some technical stuff. Then I got really excited about talking to you when I was, I was just down in Brazil and I was hanging out with your buddy, Jeff Shapiro. And he, one of the days that was, you know, good, but not great. He got away with a guy named Tyler Bradford. Who's been chasing it really hard. He's a Tahoe pilot on Lake Tahoe. And and the rest of us. It's all dirt and early, which happens a lot there and he should, and and when Tyler came back, he said, cause I, I actually never got a chance to fly with Jeff and, and, you know, as you know, his backgrounds in hang gliding, and now he's just crazy about paragliding. He's chasing it really hard for the last kind of year and a half.
And Tyler was amazed with how well he was flying in really light lift. He said it just every single thermal, he was out climbing everybody. And there were some good pilots down in Tahoe. He said, oh, I can take a little break for a second.
I can actually do this.
I'm just trying to get up the hill. And he said, okay, we're not doing that. I mean, we're always going to go back and forth. It's just always kind of hard to, but I just, I'm just trying to get my feet on the road And so I was at the top of the hill and he said, he's coming up off the hill. So I said, okay, you're trying to go back and forth or something. And anyway, I mean,
definitely one of the things that I've noticed with some of the others in the fleet is that the the speed to where we're at is really a fun factor, in his head is from hang gliding. I don't know where he gets the extra edge. Maybe it's because flying in Missoula is not, it's not very, it's not always easy to get up there and the air is kind of weird. And there's always these inversions and shears and it's, you would look at the sky and think, well, I'm going to jump off this hill and get to 15 grand, but it just has never happened like that for me there. So maybe flying, you know, that mountain above the university there is, has helped him a lot. And I mean, obviously he's fully committed to it and traveling constantly to do it. And, you know, that's, that is the definition of being passionate. So that's, he's just taken his hang gliding experience. And I mean, he was, he was on the team repeatedly and doing, you know, doing good in the worlds.
And, and I mean, he was right up there with the best for, for years. So I'm sure it just transfers right over once he figures out how to keep the wing open and, and, and, you know, how to launch a thing in sketchy conditions.
What about lines? Um, he, he had some really good, some of the guys, one morning we were down there talking and, and some of the guys were really having trouble with the sink. Um, part of that, I think was that, you know, we don't, a lot of us weren't, we're not flatland pilots and, you know, and when there's a lot of wind, you know, Jeff was explaining that, that, you know, that sink and in cloud streets in between them, or, you know, if you're, if you're, you're out in the blue hole or something, that, that sink is, is tremendous. Uh, one, it was getting all of us, but, um, I had, I had learned by that point. And because I, I wasn't, you know, we've all heard like, okay, you get in sync, you, you turn 45 degrees and you use a lot of bar.
And that's kind of what I've thought of for 10 years. And I was, I was learning in Brazil that that's not nearly enough. Like you get in that case,
I'm screwed. Cause that's probably what I would tell you is I was, it
was, I was really amazed by it because, because there's so much wind. It just, it seems wrong going completely cross to the wind. You know, your, your glide goes to shit. Your speed goes to shit. You're not flying course line. But I found the only thing that was working for me to get out of this stuff was to be extremely aggressive. And, and Jeff had some thoughts about that. He was explaining, like, if you just keep going, like what you're doing and just do it a little bit, you know, that you will never get to the thermal, you know, you're going to blow so much height, uh, to go down. So it made me think
about that. I think
more about lines and I just wanted to see what your thoughts were on it because I, I think this is, you know, to me, like I was fascinated to hear when Chrigel was on the show that he doesn't feel like he's a very good climber. And I mean, but to me, climbing is, yes, there are brilliant climbers, but climbing to me is kind of one of these things that everybody can be pretty good at and do. Okay. To me, it's the gliding. And I would just think because of your aircraft, what you guys are flying, I think you're picking up on some things with gliding that don't know about.
I feel a little bit out of my depth just because, I mean, I'm pretty hard critic of myself. And I know when I, I know the very next time, if I tell you how to do it, the very next time I go on fly, I'm just going to take it right 45 and go straight to the ground. But generally that's what I do is take a, you know, it's at our level of performance from paragliders all the way up to rigid wings. I mean, our performance sucks. It doesn't matter how, how good they are. They're all, they all relatively suck compared to sailplanes. So, you know, just pounding your head through sink at that perfect, uh, McCready speed that, that your vario is telling you to fly is, um, is not going to work nearly as well as just getting out of that sink. So yeah, it takes some pretty aggressive committed moves sometimes.
I mean, when it's a cloud day, it's pretty easy to do the right thing usually. And it's, you know, you wouldn't think twice about going 60 or 70 degrees over to a cloud. Um, if the whole sky is visible to you and up ahead was, you know, blue hole for 10 miles. I mean, obviously you go to that cloud and then you go, you know, maybe 45 degrees to the right after that. So you could see what is, what happens on the blue days that you just can't see. So unfortunately on the blue days, you have to sort of stumble into it. And I'm certainly not the best at flying lines, but, um, I, I won't just fly downwind and sink. I'll, I'll almost instantly turn. I mean, I won't even spend five seconds in it. I'll just, I'll just turn and get out of there. And I've, and that's worked. And that's also not working. I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't work. And I've, you know, there's some great pilots like Craig Coomer comes to mind.
He comes out here to Arizona and just kicks all of our asses at my competition every year for the past 10 years. And I remember him telling me like, man, you are just all over the place. Like we fly straight from thermal to thermal and you fly twice the distance to get there and are like, and lower when you get there. And I was like, yeah, I just can't, it wasn't about not being able to decide. It was constantly trying to shift lines. And so there is a, there is a limit. Uh, you can definitely fly too far off course for too long and waste time. And, and also just constantly, you know, just have a bad day and constantly turn away from what you think is sink and keep turning into more sink or, so, you know, there's the pilots that there's a lot of pilots that just fly course line and they just fly course line.
That's all they do. And they often do really well, especially in, if they have numbers on their side, if there's a big enough gaggle, they just fly course line more often than not. Uh, I'm penalized, by all my hunting around, uh, but I still don't, I won't stop doing it. And it's because once in a while I'll, I'll get a really good line by hunting around like that. And I think for me personally, I need to scale that back a bit. Um, and it sounds like, you know, maybe you hold course line a little more and Shapiro's advice could come in handy. I mean, there's,
I mean, if you're flying straight ahead and you hit a thousand down and it's blowing 20 miles an hour, I mean, yeah, there's not, there's not much choice. You got to get out of it or you could spend five miles in it, you know?
Yeah. That's what he made me more aware of. And he kind of was using diagrams and I was like, ah, okay, right. You're not going to get to that.
There's just, there, there's a level of magic that you're talking about with some of those pilots that I, I honestly, I wish I could, I wish I could explain it at night and I don't know what they do. And I've, I've flown with some, with a really good paraglider pilot here at my local site and we've gone on a glide XC together and he's kicked my ass on glide when I was in my angler. Um, you know, several consecutive glides just by feeling it out. And you know, when I was flying, I flew a, I borrowed a Delta two down in Columbia last year or a year and a half ago and felt like I could just feel lines like never before. It was just incredible. The tactile feedback through the lines. Yeah. And you, and you're not going to get overpowered. You're if that, if you want it to turn, it will turn like right up until it spins, it will turn.
So it was just really cool to be able to feel those lines in a, in a much more micro way. And that was pretty satisfying. I wish I had the, you know, I wish I had the handling to exploit it like that in a hang glider, but clearly there are pilots, uh, like Oleg when, when Oleg was competing and Brett Haslett was really good at flying lines. Geroff and obviously Christian and Manfred and Alex, they're all, they're all right there. They can, you know, they're all, they're obviously the best at thermaling and the best at gliding. But when you get to a thermal 50 feet higher, you, you don't really have to be the best at climbing and you're out of everybody's wake. And, you know, you'd much rather be 50 feet higher in a thermal than 50 feet lower, because when it does, when the ladder does get pulled up, the guys on top are going to,
will always get a little bit more than the guys just below them. So yeah, getting, getting there a little bit higher is definitely really important.
That, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because the next thing I wanted to talk about was speed, you know, so you, it's great that you have, you know, so you have so much ground in both aircraft, but you know, you guys can fly McCready, we can't. And, and Jeff and I had a pretty interesting conversation about speed. Like I, I'm still very confused about how much speed to use, how much bar to use when I'm going downwind.
Thoughts on that?
Yeah, I do have some thoughts on that. It's, and I've, it's, it's almost like talking religion. So I'll just, I'll just say my, my thoughts on it. I remember when I was at McCready, I was at McCready, I was at McCready, I was at McCready, I was at McCready, this, this pilot, Attila Bertok, he probably still works there in some capacity, was, was flying for them and, and helping with some, maybe some minor parts of design and especially with a larger glider because he's a big guy. And he actually won the worlds in Big Spring, Texas. He won the pre-worlds and the worlds there consecutively. So he's a pretty good pilot. And I remember I was just a young punk and he was like, I think I just overheard him talking to someone else about speed to fly in wind. And, you know, explained it to me and was like, oh, that makes sense.
That, that doesn't change at all in wind. It's exactly the same whether there's no wind, headwind or tailwind as far as interthermal speeds go during the course of a cross country flight. Now, if you're, if you're on final glide and you're trying to get to a point on the ground, then obviously, you know, with a tailwind, you're going to slow down. But, you know, you're over, if you're trying to maximize your cross country average speed through a, a parcel of air through the day, then you can only, you're, you know, your craft is only capable of a certain mile, you know, kilometer per hour through that parcel of air, given the lift and sink. And so since, since that parcel of air isn't aware that the earth is below it and your glider isn't aware of that either, it doesn't change at all.
It's, you're flying precisely that same speed all day.
Obviously, it's not just a parcel of air. We have trigger, you know, trigger points and mountains. You know, mountain tops we have to cross and, and bodies of water and, you know, maybe a cloud is, is a little bit more anchored to the ground than, than the parcel of air that's moving around it. And I, you know, there's some little things like that, but that did stick with me. And, and I definitely don't alter my speed when there's a lot of tailwind or headwind, unless I'm on final glide.
So what you're saying is fly best glide, or you're, or are you saying fly as fast as you possibly can?
Well, fly best, fly best speed to fly based on next expected thermal strength.
Okay. All right. Gotcha. I mean,
and, and as far as I understand, and I haven't heard anything to convince me otherwise, that's, that doesn't change in a headwind or a tailwind. If, if you're, if your destination is a thermal, if your destination is a point on the ground, it changes, but yeah.
Okay. I gotcha. Okay. Interesting. So yeah, yeah. That makes perfect sense. He, Jeff was kind of talking about that in terms of like, if you're, and this is a little bit different for, for hang gliders, cause you have different starts, you know, in a comp, but if you're flying downwind, you know, he's talking about like, if it's, if it's the time of the day where the thermals are, you know, things are working pretty well. You know, if you, if you fart around, if you, if you, if you, you know, you guys call it pulling rope, right? If you're, you know, if you're tucking, going as fast as you possibly can, you get to that next thermal, like you said, seconds faster than, than the guy behind you, you know, over the course
of the day, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're,
course of the day that could be hours you know that could be a couple hours of that because you're you're going to top out you're going to go on glide faster and then you're into the next one faster and it just keeps adding up you know so if you're in survival mode obviously everything changes you know this is this is when things are working and you know you can see the cloud and you can get to you know pretty high confidence you can get there you know fly fast yeah
i mean when i'm flying with a group of really good pilots i've tried to hang back at a speed that i thought was more reasonable than what they were flying and i especially in a place as consistent as big spring i remember you know flying with a group that included craig and kurt and maybe robin and a bunch of really good pilots and i was like man we are flying we are flying like 52 miles an hour between thermals and this is not right so i after a couple i was like this is just this is just crazy i'm gonna slow down i'm gonna go 45 that seems a little more reasonable and and i tried it and you know what it didn't the the change in polar at that's at that speed just wasn't significant enough that when they hit that climb every single time i would get there and i'd be below where where i had started relative to them i would lose a little bit i was like this just can't i don't this it's only 800 feet a minute i mean we're not supposed to go that fast and it just convinced me that that you know when you're with a group you got to stay with the group and it's kind of it's it's hard to outsmart a group that that's got you know it's half a dozen people and they're that good so
you just have to you're not going to win the comp you're not going to win the day in the first few thermals um and you may not win the day at all but you can do really well if you you stay with that group and that sounds you know i hear a bunch of the i hear a lot of these guys especially on your show like you know you gotta fly with the group gotta fly the group and i and and that's you know it makes a lot of sense to me in my experience you pretty much have to stick with those guys and you're not gonna you can definitely lose a comp um on the first day and in the first thermal if you are in that first day you're not gonna win the day and you're not gonna win the day glide if you try to outsmart the guys i mean there's let's say you do get away on that first or second or third thermal of the day let's say it's 15 thermal day i mean do you really want to get away from those guys yeah
right on
the second thermal and be all alone i mean not that's
the wrong place to risk yeah yeah
i mean i don't want to be alone out there unless it's just the most epic day ever and even then you know clouds are big and it's hard to hit the it's hard to hit the right part of the cloud on every single thermal consecutively all the way to the goal line it's it pays to have to have people fanned out
dustin i i i've already taken up way too much of your time but i got to ask you one one more question well maybe maybe a couple but uh jeff kind of i know you're quiet about this but jeff spilled the beans to me that you're also a paraglider i don't know how how much you you fly these days but uh i would love to know you know that because you are flying paragliders you know what what are there are there things that that you brought from him gliding that maybe wouldn't be obvious you know like the tips or advice or uh you know from the years that you spent hang gliding then now you're you're doing some some some paragliding you're like oh man those guys should know this um
i mean maybe back when i you know i started paragliding a long time ago so back then it was hang glider pilots outnumbered paraglider pilots here by far so i at that time maybe i thought we had something to share with them but you know now the combined community experience of the paraglider pilots has probably already exceeded the hang glider pilots experience so i mean you know it's the same thing you'd share with up-and-coming hang glider pilots is you know you just obviously need to once in a while take a step back and check your ego and realize that we're regardless of what we fly we're all flying these basically super ultra light aircraft that
pretty unforgiving i mean it's i doubt any pilot out there doesn't know if somebody or many people in the community that have been hurt so you know in my mind it would just be to just kind of check the passion once you know once in a while and give the conditions a second thought here and there and
obviously show a you know high level of respect for something that's that is fairly unforgiving compared to other activities we could be doing you
mentioned that you know you you were pretty hopped up or you know kind of early on in your career about comps and stuff and then that kind of waned you know you took a step back from like cat one and cat two and maybe a step back from all of it you know kind of together you know obviously 2012 was was a high moment but if you had um if you had like if you had lulls that are i mean i guess that's what those are is lulls but it sounds to me like you still really have the passion for the
and if you if you kind of maintain that all the way through and if not you know how have you been able to kind of come back to it yeah
i've still got it i i it's i have uh what in my mind is kind of like a calmer passion for it right now i mean i maybe a more maybe more appreciative for the the process and the moment than the i was pretty goal oriented back in the beginning and and now i'm definitely process oriented and i enjoy all the things around it and
in the moment in the flight i can i look around and i'm like well this is pretty badass like i i'm enjoying myself here um and so that with you know being a little calmer like that comes uh turning down certain days that i definitely would have flown in you know flown on when i was totally obsessed you know i flew on some ridiculous days and shapiro can attest to that we've flown on some ridiculous days during comps and just when we were generally more obsessed with the sport because we were just kind of like you know we were just kind of like because it all worked out well for me i wouldn't do anything differently obviously um because the experience is huge i mean you can't acquire that level of experience without being totally obsessed and so i'm thankful for it and that benefits my my recreational flying now hugely i mean i i fly you know a little less often on my own now but i fly and i fly tandems and you know i'm in the tow plane all the time down there at our flight park here and it just factors in
it definitely benefits all of my flying that that experience with different conditions and different states of mind i mean i've you know especially during comps i've flown in some pretty questionable states of mind and states of hangover or drunkenness and that's that just i'm definitely calmer now and i'm thankful for the experience experiences i had and also for my state of mind now i feel uh yeah just super thankful that i'm able to throw the glider on my go out and and i'm capable and flying in pretty much any condition and it's just nice no you can go out you know you're gonna get up you know that's that's that kind of experience and the skill level you get to from being in comps and being super obsessed is you know it's kind of hard to get any other way so yeah i'm really glad that it worked out the way it did
is it do you see it kind of potentially coming full circle are you going to go back to sailplanes or may i and no
no no never i mean i i still fly them once in a great while and um you know a day off at a comp or whatever if we're just bored uh but no it's far from it it's not even the same thing it's much more closely related to an airliner than a hang glider huh
because i i i've never been in one and i you probably heard that i did this podcast with kevin brooker and then we were talking about the perlan project and i'm just fascinated now i'm like god i gotta get into that but it's just is so much different it's uh it just doesn't doesn't do the same thing for you
yeah my in my experience in my own head um they're really cool to think about it's it's really cool to uh think about going out there and plan about going out there and and and getting those getting in that thing and it's you know they're awesome machines and you know that kind of like distant perspective like if you're flying a model looking at the thing they're sexy i mean they're amazing but the second i close that canopy and i'm just getting baked in there i'm not really i'm not so into it i mean i like it it's definitely better than a lot of other things you could be doing but it's i'm not passionate about it and uh i wouldn't it would be no replacement for the flying that we do for sure okay
last one and i promise uh you you said early on that you you know maybe the only thing you would change in your in your flying career would be to not you know move up so fast on on wings um but i love i love this question just because
some fascinating stuff but is that really true is it like if you could go back to your 50-hour self and uh i'm sorry i know you've listened to this podcast a lot this probably gets old but i think it's
an interesting question to actually think to really think about yeah
i mean would you would that be the only thing you changed or i mean do you wish you would honestly i wouldn't
change a thing in fear of changing everything i mean i i wouldn't want an alter i wouldn't want to alter a single breath because what's the i dig it well if you mean if you live by hindsight we're not that would imply i dig
it yeah that's awesome that that reminds me of you know will gadds i used to ask this question you know like if you if you got to the pearly gates what would you want god to say and he said that i'm wrong you get to do it over again i'm
not letting you go back back yeah well i you know honestly i i would yeah out of fear of changing everything i would change everything i would change everything i would change everything i would change everything nothing but uh i but i'm not not 100 because i know that's i've got somebody listening to this right now that is very close to me that i'm that i'm uh helping introduce to the sport right now and yes do everything differently than i did definitely definitely uh you know get the most beginner glider there is stick with it forever and uh you know just listen to what i say not what i did
right right yeah i i am i am not disappointed whatsoever that my significant other that maddie does not want to fly i took her on a tandem and she was like yeah whatever i was like
perfect yes yeah you do a little sandwich here exactly yeah
dustin awesome yeah this has just been uh a blast i'm so glad we were able to do this and uh thanks man thanks for your time i really appreciate it i think that's a good place to end and uh man i gotta get out to arizona and and fly with you i've been watching your your stuff for years that would be really cool absolutely
yeah any any time except summer don't come out here in the summer
no i wouldn't i dude i live in sun valley i would just die i'd get off the plane if you'd watch me melt you know that's it that's it for gavin yeah
yeah i'm sitting in my sound booth right
now and it's like probably it's probably 15 degrees oh
well yeah any any time in the winter don't come in the summer we won't be here but uh yeah you're you're you're welcome anytime man we're we have a glider waiting for you
awesome i'll come out in the summer thanks dustin appreciate it if you
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