Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. We are, well, as I record this, so when you get this, this will be shorter than that, but as I record this, we are less than 50 days out from the X-Alps, so that's getting pretty exciting. Stay tuned to my social stuff on Instagram and my Facebook page and other, I guess, Cloudbase Mayhem on the website. I write up articles about that. that if you want to follow along, we'll be posting constantly on that during the race. So if you follow my page, not my friend Dan, I don't do anything on the personal side of Facebook, but if you follow the page, I'll be recording videos and talks and pictures and stuff as the race goes on, and they just automatically get uploaded to that, and Red Bull does that pretty seamlessly for us.
Got a great show for you today about a midair that happened up on Vancouver Island. Rick Heatley, longtime pilot, very good pilot, tandem pilot, instructor, and he got kind of taken out of the air. Interesting mishap and crazy what happened after that. He did not get hurt. Spoiler alert, but pretty amazing story. Had to spend the night in the snow up high and got long lined out. So we hear all about that and interesting how it ties into the show about TEM, threat and error management that we just recently did. So you're going to really enjoy that. Before we get to it, just a couple longer bits of housekeeping here.
I have been talking about switching us over to a new platform directly from our site for our Patreon supporters. That is done. I should not have taken this on while I was training for the X-Alps. This ended up being a lot of work, but it is all done. You can see it on the website. We are still testing and cleaning it, it up, and we're going to make it look a little bit prettier. But if you want to migrate across from Patreon, you can do so. We're going to keep Patreon up; it's actually an awesome platform, and you know, I know there were some issues with some free speech stuff there on that platform. But from what I can tell, we did this switch to save you money and to for more of the money to get to us and not get taken out in fees. But now that I've set all this up, should have done more research on this on the front end, but it actually for the, especially for the lower donations, you know, one and three and five and stuff, their fees are really reasonable.
They're much less where that gets altered a little bit is if you're, you know, in the certain countries have a lot of that, and so then you end up paying quite a bit in tax. So it's really kind of person to person, depends on where you live, but there's no tax if you come through our website; it's just a direct credit card charge. But then, you know, credit card charges through PayPal or through Stripe, which is what we're using, really add up. So, uh, if you're on Patreon and you like that platform, we're going to keep it going. It's going to stay there. I'm going to keep posting everything to there, uh, so feel free to just stay. If you want to migrate over and switch, then please do. We've set it up basically the exact same way with the same rewards and all that stuff with the hats and t-shirts at certain levels, book and all that kind of thing. But just so you know, uh, we've got quite a bit of bonus bonus content that's kind of behind a paywall, but it's not really.
It's basically just subscriber content, member content, whatever you want to call it. The Ask Me Anything shows with me and Bill Belcourt. There'll be more in the future. The video we did with Paul Guschlbauer. We just put out a little segment, a little bonus segment from one of the conversations we're working on this weather podcast. And Jeff Shapiro just went off on a tangent about thermals and how they're formed and entrainment and using them and not bombing out, and it was just terrific stuff. It didn't belong in the weather one, so we just made this little bonus show. We are going to try to do a lot more of that, in fact. This talk that you're about to hear with Rick Keatley, when we signed off, we had a great conversation about, you know, what could have been done differently and some of my own experiences with that kind of thing, uh, and I just thought, "God, this is a great moment.
Everybody, everybody needs to hear this, too." So we're going to make that bonus content. So it is for members only. However, you are automatically a member. If you've signed up for our newsletter, if you've bought a t-shirt, if you've supported us on Patreon, if you've supported us on PayPal, I have combined that whole database. Hopefully it's all there. If you don't, if you're having trouble and you can't log into our site, then just reach out to me through the website and we'll get you all set up. But as I have always said, all we ask for is a buck a show. But if you're not in a financial position to do that, then that means like, I don't even want this to impinge on your latte as you're driving to work, you know? I really, you know, we're all paragliders. I find it hard to believe that we can't fork over a dollar for something if you find it valuable, but I totally get that you can't, and that's completely fine.
And I've asked for, you know, there are many other ways you can support the show, which I say over and over again, and all the other shows, so I won't say it here. But if you have supported us in any way, and that includes just signing up for our newsletter through the website, you have an account with us. You can go see that bonus content, so go to the website, log in. If you don't have a login, it'll walk you through it; it's pretty easy. Uh, if you get our newsletter, then it's just your email. So, but let us know if you have any problem. That should be all ready to go, like I said, we're still testing, we're still cleaning it up, but especially by the time you hear this, it should be ready to go. So, uh, one other bit of housekeeping: I know we've been, been totally slack about doing more hangy shows, and uh, I've got some great people lined up, man, for rumor, Christian check. I'm gonna do that when I'm over in Europe.
Um, do those, uh, Wolfie and I hung out a little bit down in Paia this year, and also recently out in Santa Barbara. I just missed him there to do a live show, which was unfortunate, but we're gonna get him on the show. You know, some of the best shows we have had have been with both hangies and, uh, with Larry Tudor and Dustin Martin. And I know we need to do more of those. So if you're a hang glider and you listen to the show, I apologize. But we are definitely going to be lining more and more of those up. Finally, I'm going to read an email to you. Many of you heard the Sailplane podcast we did quite a while back with Kevin Brooker. He reached out to me in an email about the TEM show, the Threatened Air Management show we did with JK. And I just wanted to read this to you because it's important.
important, and it's, uh, so I've gotten a lot of emails about that show. I really appreciate that people are digging this and interested in it and curious how we can make this a better part of our culture, kind of safety, and that's what this email is about. So I'm just going to read this to you, and then we'll, uh, we'll go straight to the show with Rick, which I think you're, you're going to really enjoy. Uh, Kevin says, while listening to the tem cast, there are a few things to add: the tm concept is really good and can be applied to everything we do, not just flying Anything risky, driving, flying, boating, marriage, can all benefit from this, and we need to be practicing it. The change of activity has a lot of crossover to flying and just thinking about a threat. There was a single mention of the culture of safety. TEM is almost useless if there's no culture around safety.
TEM works when everyone is looking for the T, the threat, and is willing to speak up. Rather than get all pissed off because someone is questioning my judgment, I should thank them for looking out for the sport. Self-righteousness and arrogance are counter to a safety culture. Safety and threats assessment is applicable to the entire activity, not just to the guy under the wing. An interested spectator gets tagged on launch, during a landing, wherever, and it's bad for everyone. Checklists. Checklists don't help if they are not taken seriously. When we pull out a checklist or are doing anything where a fuck-up is going to hurt someone, pilot or otherwise, we need to focus only on the list. Do not talk to someone with a list or interact with anyone during your list run-through. We've all heard about this, you know, when we're clipping in, you're not really supposed to bother somebody. Uh, too easy to become distracted and forget to finish closing a strap or checking the wing is attached.
Get interrupted, start over. Don't try to ignore them either; politely ask them to wait until you are done and re-engage them. Too much effort goes into ignoring something, and humans suck at multitasking. Isn't that the truth? Uh, there was a bit of chatter regarding only being a sport pilot or a sky jedi and adapting the risk compared to the task. Taking additional risk because it's a contest, record flight, etc., is a good way to get killed. Pilots should train the way they intend to fly. It was touched upon about being tired and flying into a new situation as being a big risk. Experience allows us to get away with a lot of stupid stuff, and we are essentially lucky. our experience and skill just allow us to move on autopilot when a new situation appears is when we we get slapped from the sky.
If during a contest, race, whatever, there's a chance of needing to fly into the lee, as mentioned in the podcast, we need to find a day or condition which allow us to experience this within safe parameters. Those of you that listened to the Chrigel show, I asked him about some of the real famous training he does to train for the conditions that he flies in all the time in the XLs. So you can go back and listen to that and find out some of the crazy stuff that he does trying something on-site with no experience while under stress, external or self-imposed, is a good way to get hurt. And finally, he says part of the safety culture is trusting your flying blood buddies. If they ask how you were feeling and up for the flight, be honest and thank them for caring.
You might feel a bit off and, rather than fly, you're the chase guy and go retrieve them. If you launch and they know you're off your game, there's a chance they'll be thinking of you flying around rather than themselves, and we suck at multitasking. Uh, just my own personal experience with this, I, I'm currently, you know, with the Red Bull stuff going on, I've also got a really stressful situation going on with my boat business. You know, I've had this scatamaran, this kite surfing expedition that I've run for an awful long time since the end of the 99, I guess now, so more than 20 years. And, uh, yeah, it's finishing up a big refit and, you know, we're selling memberships and it's just been incredibly, it'll be stressful. And the last few times I've been flying, doing a lot of hiking flies right now, you know, and I'm in the air and my brain is on this, you know, is not on flying, it's on the stress of this, of this boat business.
And I landed yesterday and I was like, I got to get my act together, you know, you got to be focused on what I'm doing right now, you know, and that whole thing we're constantly saying on the show, this one flight you're about to take is the most important, important flight you'll ever take. So have that in mind. Let's try to keep working on this TEM concept. I think it's really, really cool. I'm glad we dove into that. And I'm really thankful for those of you giving me all this feedback. I appreciate it. So let's hear this crazy story from Rick Heatley about a little midair that went bad, but not all bad. And I think there's a lot to learn from this. So enjoy.
Rick, awesome to have you on the Mayhem. I really appreciate this. I know you've just been through a very harrowing incident, and you're fine, and that's bravo. I can't wait to tell this story. I think the listeners are going to be awed for the next hour or however long it takes to get through this, so I can't wait to learn about it. I don't know much about it, but I thought before we get into it, I think the audience would appreciate knowing a little bit of your background and flying history and where you are and, uh, not a lot of people have spent time out in Victoria and on Vancouver Island. If you could describe your zone a little bit too, because it's a very, very special place. It's—I hold that area very dear to my heart. I used to start—I started going up there with my, my dad when I was a little kid.
You live in a really precious part of the world, yeah.
For sure, thanks Gavin. Thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it. Um, I'm a long-time listener of your podcast and, and it's fantastic what you're doing for the flying community. We really appreciate it, man. It's saved a lot of us, I'm sure. I'm up here in Victoria. It's kind of a rugged place. We don't have the big grassy launches and landing zones and stuff like that. So hiking flies and rugged launches is kind of our thing. And I've been up here for most of my life. I started flying about 12 years ago. Worked my way up. I got addicted like everybody else and worked my way up and got my novice rating, my intermediate rating. I worked on my instructor rating, tandem, so I could take friends and do a little commercial tandem and stuff like that.
And, of course, I worked my way through the glider classes, as we all do. And for about the last six, seven years, I've been flying D-class gliders. I just love the way they fly. They're exciting to fly. So that's kind of my deal. Mostly a recreational pilot, do some cross country flying. I don't really compete or anything like that. I just do it for the love of flying. It's a lot of fun.
Yeah. I
was just going to butt in and say, you got to tell us a little bit more about Vancouver Island. Give us some dimensions, what you're surrounded with. I mean, when you said rugged, you left me a little short there. That's, you know, it's an incredible place. I mean, that is proper BC. And I think, you know, to understand the scope of the trees and the density, you know, you're in some forested area.
Yeah, it's a heavily forested area. I think I heard a stat of something like the state of California has the population of all of Canada. So we got a lot of land, you know, that's just covered in trees with not a lot of people. So it's nice. And in a way, you know, there are no launches where there's lineups and stuff like that. If you can get four or five of your buddies to come out, that's a big day. So, yeah, we're climbing up hillsides and just chucking off little rock hills and stuff. Probably a lot like what you're doing in the XO. Say, hey, this looks good.
Are you mostly flying out of, like, clear cuts and that kind of thing? I mean, are these areas that have been cleared with logging?
I've never flown out on the island. tell us about you know what you're kind of dealing with is it is it windy is it really thermic is it is a big enough island to be super thermic
Uh, yeah, it can be thermic. Uh, I mean, some of our biggest sites, you maybe get to 10,000 feet. That, that would be, that would be big air here. So it's not, it's not huge altitude. And, you know, for us to get into the mountains, there has to be some logging. So the logging, the logging companies come in, they, they put their roads in, they move their way up. And, and I mean, the clear cuts are triggers, so they're on big hills. Uh, the thermal generators, you know, and, uh, you can, uh, you can fly some pretty good distances, but it's tiger country. So if you want to fly deep, you're, you know, you got a couple day walk out if you land in the wrong spot. So you have to be prepared and
You know, like, has anyone flown the length of the island, or is that just ridiculous? No,
No, it's impossible. No, there's no—there's no chain of mountains to kind of join. Um, yeah, it wouldn't be—wouldn't be doable, okay?
Okay, so what's a big flight there, uh?
I mean, if you get 70, 80 kilometers, that would be a big flight. Oh,
Man, that's pretty good, though. Yeah,
Yeah, it's all right, yeah.
These guys are, these typically kind of out and backs.
Yeah, yeah, there are some guys that have done some one-ways, um, that are pretty good, you know, but they're—they dig in deep. You go in deep and, uh, you make sure you don't make a mistake and you, you hope you pop out the other side. You get high enough, you can see both sides of the mount, or both sides of the ocean, on both sides of the island of
course, so you're looking one way towards Vancouver and the other way you're looking towards Japan. Oh,
Yeah, clear days, you can see, you can see clear over to Vancouver and Washington, yeah, and
Are you guys typically like, uh, you know, is a normal day you go over the west side and ridge soar, or are you flying typically on the east side? You're kind, kind of flying in lee, um...
Our island's so small, we can go from side to side on it. Um, the mountains mainly run kind of daggling across the mountain, not up and down them. So we get plagued with the north wind right in the summertime. You get the high pressure, you get north coming in, and it seems all our launches face south, so that's always—that's always a challenge. And we have one small ridge soaring site that's actually right downtown Victoria, and that in itself is a crazy site. It's power lines and houses and people everywhere. It's—it's amazing they even let us fly there, and that's—that's our one ridge site, so it's almost all thermic flying here, okay?
All right, well, okay. That gives us a good, uh, foundation for where you are. So, the—the, let's get into this incident. Um, okay. The reason to shy away from it, start very early. What, like, let's set up the whole day for us, okay?
Yeah, this is a site that was flown maybe 10 years ago, and it was flown quite a bit by maybe even earlier, 20 years ago. The hang gliders used to fly, and it's, it's a big site. It's, it's probably a ridge that runs 40, 50 kilometers, so you could possibly get 100 kilometer out and return on it. Mountaintops, maybe 5,000 plus feet, uh, pretty rugged, lots of clear cuts, stuff like that. And after a while, it's quite a trek for us to get there. It's about two and a half hours driving time to get to this site, so you know, over time, the, the hang gliders and all their gear back in the 70s and stuff, they're like, "Oh, forget this." They found sites closer, and then it was kind of abandoned for a while, you know, 10 years no one's flown it or longer. And some of our local guys, some keeners, newer pilots, they, uh, you know, just rediscovered it, and, uh, they were
inquiring if some of us more experienced pilots would come out and check it out, do some cross country flying. So, um, I had never flown the site. I've been flying 12 years, I'd never flown the site, so I'm like, "Sure, let's go out, let's take a look." It was, uh, it was a, you know, moderate day, so there wasn't any high expectations for big cross countries, but you know, find a new way in, hang out with friends. There's seven people going, so it seemed like a good day to go out and and check the site out. We had a range of pilots; we had everything from beginner novice pilots all the up to senior instructors. Actually, the instructor that taught me was out that day, so it was going to be an interesting day for sure, everybody keeping eyes on each other and and, um, you know, the new guys were eager to go far and I was just kind of eager to check out the site, so
We wandered up, found our way up the hill, and we hit, I think, around probably 4,000 feet, we hit snow, which is just impossible too—too deep to drive in, too deep to bother hiking in. So we just set up on the the side of the logging road over some clear cuts, and one by one we took off is
It kind of blowing in, it's just mellow, nice, perfect. Yeah, well, it's
Actually, when the day started, it was, uh, overcast, so we were like, well, we'll spend the day looking for, uh, for, uh, nice launches. And then it kind of cleared up, got a little blue cycle started coming in. They started getting stronger, and it was obviously the day was on. So, at that point, we just started hucking off the mountain and people were, were popping up, no problem climbing out. What time
Was this in the day, uh?
I would say it was probably around noon by then. Okay, yeah, so good climbs and, um, you know, I launched second to last one more pilot behind me and, um, everyone was already, already climbing. I think one pilot, um, might have bombed out or he landed on the lower logging road. So, uh, the day looked pretty good. I launched off, had a nice solid cycle, solid launch, and right away found myself low, scratching out front, and this kind of mean little clear cut pushing me around. And I took a beating for a little while and scratched around and then thought, you know, I'm going to push out front and see if I can find something that's more established and flew right into a nice established thermal and took that right up to cloud base.
And how high was base? Base that day topped out around 6,300 feet.
Okay. So that's not very high for you guys up there or that's good? Now,
we were basically, you know, 700, 800 feet above the mountaintop, so low. I mean, so to jump down the ridge, you were jumping from, you know, from top to top or flying right across the top of the ridge. You're not getting a lot of clearance from the top of the mountains, which later came back to get me. But so I thought my flight plan, once I got up high and I could see all the other pilots, everyone was just kind of wandering around having fun. I've seen a couple pilots that have gone down the bridge and we're coming back low, um, so I thought I'd wander down there and see what they were up to. So I just started climbing, gliding, climbing, gliding, working my way down the ridge and, I again, I had never been there, so once I started working my way down the ridge, the the mountaintops got higher and higher.
So I was able to climb up from, you know, I started around 5,000 and started pushing up beyond six and 6,300 feet, got pretty, pretty high, and I could see all the gulf islands and beautifully, really taking it in and working my way down the ridge. And like I mentioned, it's a long drive to get to this site, so by the time I pushed maybe 20 kilometers up the ridge, my options for landing were clear cuts and logging roads, and that's not something I wanted to do that day. You know, it's a two, three hour hike out, you got all your buddies waiting for you, and you know, it just lengthens the day. So I figured a nice out and return would be, would be the day's, uh, task and
I don't know, you know, maybe the clear cuts there are different, although I really doubt it. But it's, uh, every time I've flown, like, when, when Will and I did the Rockies thing, you know, the clear cuts look epic from the air. But yeah, they are, they're not, they're not really a place you can, I mean, you can land, obviously, but yeah, you know, there's a famous story of him, not on our, on our trip, but, uh, you know, he landed in a clear cut when he was trying to do something. I can't remember where it was, somewhere, maybe it was Camloops or something, I can't remember. But he, he landed in a clear cut and it was like two and a half days of getting out, and just, but just getting out of the clear cut was like hours, you know, just, just to get to this, you know, because they're just, I think people hear that word and they think clear cut, but it's like they're stumps and down trees and, you know, that all the new growth and, I mean, they're vicious, yeah.
Clear is, uh, not the best term for a clear-cut, you know, and they replant lots of the time. So you're looking down at this clear-cut that looks like a good landing option, you get down closer to it, and there's 15-foot tall trees. Exactly, exactly, that look tiny from, from the air. So I just wanted to let
let the audience know that just, I mean, these are, you know, these are—it looks better because they're not 220-foot trees, but it's—they're still, they're are not good, yeah.
Clear, clear is not the quite the right word for them, but yeah, I mean they are options and and usually there's roads between them and stuff like that, so you're not going into, you're not going to be hanging from a tree, you know, 100 feet up, so it is option, yeah. And once I pushed down the ridge far enough, I thought a nice out and return, maybe it was like a 40 kilometer day, so it, it was, you know, just, just to kind of check out the new site, so I started, uh, I turned, I got the highest climb of the day, 6,300 feet, so I turned back, pushed into a little bit of a headwind, maybe 15-kilometer headwind, easy glide back, and I started working my way back down the ridge. As I did, my flight instrument started showing some over-the-back wind. Right around the time I realized that, or maybe slightly after, I took about a 60 % collapse on the wing.
I haven't taken a collapse like that probably for five or six years. It was, it was pretty good, and it was enough to wake me up and say, "Hey, I'm, you know, I'm probably in the lead here. Um, you're going to want to push out maybe a little bit away from the ridge." So that's what, that's what I did. I pushed out from the ridge, and I was getting good, good, nice solid lines, lift, lift on my glides and stuff like that. So I was able to make it back, uh, towards launch. And as I got back towards launch, the five of the seven pilots were kind of circling around round one and round launch kind of area, and maybe a couple, couple more, um, ridges down towards me. And I spotted a couple, uh, one pilot situated nice and high, peak level, and another one below, um, climbing, good solid climb. So I moved my glide in, and I headed towards that lower pilot to join in the glide.
I needed a little more altitude to continue my transition towards, to go back and tag the launch. Uh, I got in that climb with that pilot, probably a little bit downwind of him, and we started to climb both of us up underneath another pilot. I made sure I kept distance from him, but as I climbed up on the other pilot, I lost sight of them because they were basically directly above me. And I climbed, I didn't need to climb up to above ridge height. I thought, uh, you know, with the, with the lee, uh, the wind coming over the back, I'm gonna stay just below ridge height and try to stay in the lee of the mountain, which I did. And, uh, got the height I needed, went on glide, was on a nice glide, sighted my next point I was gonna hit, and took another collapse, um, what I thought was another collapse, and, uh, it felt like a frontal.
So when I looked up, I was pretty surprised to see that pilot in my wing, um, and right away I knew, who I knew who it was. It was the pilot that was circling right above me, because I still had eyes on the other pilot climbing, and, um, yeah, it was not a good sight to see, for sure. Well,
Okay, so is the other pilot tangled up in your lines, or yeah?
Yeah, when I looked up, I saw my wingtips fly forward and and the wing I fly, sometimes when it takes frontals, the wingtips can race forward and touch each other. So I saw the wingtips come forward and completely wrap around her. Yeah. And at that point, I knew I had very little time. I mean, I've seen the YouTube videos. I've heard all the stories from people, midair collisions and people getting tangled. So my first thought was stall the glider. Um, get the wing tips to peel back, um, and hopefully give this other pilot a chance to get out of my wing. But at this point, I was probably only less 400 feet above the ridge top, and the wind was blown back into the ridge, so I knew stalling my glider wasn't really my best option.
Well, it was the best option, but it wasn't really something I wanted to be doing that close to the ground, right?
You had to do it quick, yeah.
you had to do it quick. There wasn't a whole lot of thought; my My thought pattern was, I stay tangled and I let fate choose its decision, or I stall the glider and at least I have a choice in the matter. So I stall the glider. What glider are you on? I'm flying an Advance Omega X-Alps glider. Okay,
yeah, lightweight. Yeah,
lightweight. And, you know, it's a nice glider. It's nice and fast and fairly stable, fairly predictable. So I knew when I stalled this glider, I knew the wingtips would peel back. They did immediately. They peeled back, the glider opened up, and the pilot—I think it was a combination of me stalling the glider and her glider still flying—but it pulled us apart pretty violently, and she went out through the top of my glider, taking a couple lines with her and tearing the glider and whatnot, but she was free and she flew away, which, which was a, was a huge relief. Unfortunately, my glider was pretty damaged, missing some lines, huge cravat on the right-hand side, and the glider exited the stall and dove forward really hard. Um, I, I slowed, I slowed the, I slowed the glider down as it shot forward, but it was far too damaged on the right-hand side, so it entered a nose-down spiral at that point.
And, uh, I'd practice a fair amount of SIV on wings like that, so as the G-force is built up, it started to auto-rotate and started to peel my neck back and my head back, and I knew this was something that I just, I was not going to be able to recover from that close to the ground. I wouldn't, I wouldn't need a lot more altitude to deal with that, if at all, because it was winding right up. So immediately, hand down to the handle, my hand went right into the reserve. I tossed it out, um, up in clean air, and I have a real vivid memory of those white lines coming out of the bag, and and when it hit the end, it just, boom, it exploded and opened perfectly clean, perfectly symmetrical.
Round, square, regalo? It
was a round, pull-down apex round.
And I had enough time to swing under it. As I was swinging under it, I knew it had opened. I knew I wasn't going to be yanking the reserve bridle. It was a nice, clean opening. I swung underneath it, started wrapping brake lines to disable my glider. And as I was doing that, I thought I better check my altitude again, and I looked over my shoulder and I could see the trees in the mountain like seconds away, so I abandoned the the glider and spun around to get my feet face in the mountain and just managed to somehow dodge in between a few trees. The first couple, I thought I was going to grab onto that was my initial thought, grab onto the tree as I go flying by, but um, I was moving a little too fast to do that, and I was there was a nice gap in the trees, so I managed to go right in between the gap of the trees, land on my feet on the mountain, and my reserve just land in a nice clearing spot just above me, ah.
reserves
Another success story with reserve, yeah.
Nice, it was... it was beautiful. It opened cleanly and, and quickly, and I was happy. And then I, I'm standing on the hillside, I'm standing on my feet, completely unharmed, and I feel this tugging motion, like pulling me up the hill. And I look behind me and my glass, my reserve is fully inflated, and there's a thermal going up the ridge, so it's trying to pull me up the ridge. So it was easy to disable it, grabbed a few lines, it collapsed, and I relaunched. Yeah, I bundled it up, shoved it in the back of my harness, and you know, you start the process of, you know, radioing your friends, "I'm on the ground, I'm all right." Um, but right away I knew, you know, there was no walking out of where I landed, so I told him right away, I said, "You know, I'm gonna need a helicopter." When you need a long line, that's gonna have to happen for sure.
I'm not walking out of here, yeah.
So the the the next, I'm just gonna let you go. There's no reason for me to be even in here, but I, I, uh, because I've seen the report and I saw the picture. I mean, you're in proper snow, right? Yeah, or was that that night you got much more snow? This picture, just you look like like this little ant on the side of a massive snow mountain, yeah.
Unfortunately, I landed about 4,300 feet up. Okay, so there was snow, knee-deep snow, and uh, you know, I'm standing on a, on a hillside that's like 60-degree slope. So my next biggest fear is sliding down the hill and dying. Uh, I mean, that's deep. Yeah, yeah, it was one of those take the wrong step and you're, you become a toboggan. You're gonna be, you're gonna be going down the hills hoping to grab onto trees as you go by. So once I got the call in, I knew the helicopter was coming. My thought was to maybe mess around, see if I could get my glider out of the tree, and uh, I felt so bad tugging on those lines knowing that tissue paper glider up there probably just was not gonna come down.
and we have a site that's uh over in vancouver um bridal falls it's called and there's this this red glider that's been stuck in the trees for a decade, you know, it's the glider, the glider that's marked. So it's going through my head. Oh, great. That my, my, my Omega is the glider that's going to mark this hillside for all time.
So tell me a little bit, just because I've been quite curious about this. So the helicopter was that via cell phone or you guys in cell phone range, are you doing that with SOS on your inReach or how tell me, Take me through how you were able to get this message out that you need a long line and, um, and obviously, you know, helicopters are ubiquitous where you are. I imagine there's lots of good pilots and lots of good heli, so that must be a, you know, kind of the number one way you guys deal with these kind of emergency situations, is that correct? Yeah.
In this type of situation, it's, it's heli or nothing, um, and there was, uh, two or three pilots that had in reaches on them and they were eager to use them, so they hit the SOS. I had really good cell phone service and we were all carrying two-meter radios as well, so I was able to use a combination of things. I started getting text messages right away, phone calls from the search and rescue, so there was really good contact, really good communication. We were about 30 minutes from an Air Force space base, um, up in Comox, so I assumed, you know, within 30, I was assumed within under the hour, there's going to be a helicopter hovering over top of me. But for some reason, they decided to dispatch from other areas and I was up there about an hour and a half or more before the helicopter showed up and, uh, part of the reason, um, I was heading back to, uh, the launch to tag launch and land was, was overdevelopment that day, was just completely overdeveloping.
So I'm standing up there watching those little wispies of cloud forming, you know, 500 feet below me and coming up the ridge, so I knew my time is ticking. Yeah, that's what's going through my head. I'm thinking, if this helicopter doesn't get here soon, I'm going to be standing, you know, in a cloud. I'm cloud base is going to be a thousand feet below me and, unfortunately, that's what happened. Everything started to work against me once I got on the ground. Clouds moved in, cloud base lowered and, and about an hour and a half, hour, 45 minutes later, I had a helicopter hovering in front of me, but they were just in like whiteout conditions. I actually put a new battery in my GoPro to film the helicopter coming to get me, and all I got was footage of a helicopter hovering 100 meters out in front of me.
They just couldn't get in. They don't
like those conditions, understandably. Yeah, you don't want to make it worse.
No. So they hovered around. They took four or five attempts. They came, kept coming back in close. They knew exactly where I was, but around 7:30, I got the call, "Sorry buddy, you're on your own. We're not coming to get you." So at that point, I knew, um, I needed that glider. Yeah, there's my blankie. Yeah, so out comes the hook knife. I hack off all the lines, cut the risers off, and um, I get a real long stick, longest stick I can find, and I, I stand up on, on my tippy toes, and I get it just in the leading edge, and I'm able to pull the glider out. And I mean, we've all put gliders in trees from, you know, one time or another, and they're impossible to get out. But, for you know, you could spend an hour trying to get a glider out of a tree, but somehow I managed to get that glider in about 15 minutes.
I had that glider in my hands, I even took the time to fold it up nice and put it in this little packing bag, and I stuck it all in my harness and, uh, started moving downhill. My thought was, get below the snow line. If you're still going to spend the night here, below the snow line is going to be a lot more comfortable. I now know that that was totally impossible. The snow was a thousand, fifteen hundred feet below me, still on the hillside, but I started moving down the ridge, um, always keeping myself in front of trees, so if I slid, I was going to slide down into the next tree below me and work my way down the ridge. And eventually, nightfall picked my, pick my camping spot. Um, I got so dark I couldn't see anymore, and, uh, where I was standing is where I was staying for the night, and
What have you got? What have you got on you? How much water? How much food? Uh, anything else? You know, any other kind of safety gear have you got? Like, yeah, you know, a little emergency blanket, or you just got your glider, um...
We're dressed really well because springtime here is, um, it's cold and, uh, you know, even at 6,000 feet, it's cold—minus temperatures. So I have a wool shirt on, I've got a, um, a down jacket, then I've got another wind jacket on top of that, I've got gloves, bella clava, you know, a buff, all that kind of stuff on, so I'm pretty warm. Unfortunately, I wasn't wearing proper shoes; I had little socks on and something all like, uh, summer hiker kind of shoes, so quickly my feet got wet, which was, it turned out to be a, a real pain in the, you know, pain in the ass later on because, uh, once I finally found that place to, to camp for the night, cover myself up with the glider, I used my reserve on the ground and immediately the shoes and the socks had to come off because it was frostbite was definitely a concern.
Um, unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a place that was flat either, so I had some hiking poles with me and I planted them in the ground, put them up against my chest to hold myself up, up. Um, and that was kind of my gauge. If they were between my belly button and my chest, I knew I wasn't sliding down the hill.
So a couple of times I woke up and they were up around my neck. So I had to kind of push myself back down, push them back down. Um, yeah. And I used my glider and, and, you know, I covered myself up and, and, uh, you know, I, uh, settled in and I thought, you know, this isn't that bad. I'm, I'm pretty warm. I'll be all right. Uh, and I kept communications vacations with the, with the rescue team and whatnot. But, and your crew,
the guys you were flying with, um, what did they decide to do? Or they, did they just plant themselves at the launch or were they like, well, that's silly. What did they end up doing?
Well, there was a, there was an airport about five miles away. So, yeah. So the helicopters were able to come in and out of there. Um, some of the pilots stayed, some went home, you know, I told them there's no point on hanging and out here you know go home you're
Fine, you're physically, you're fine. Yeah, you're gonna make it, yeah.
Yeah, I was gonna make it through the night, no problem. Um, you know, by by six in the morning, it was probably minus four, minus five, and it had been snowing. So yeah, I I I had myself covered up and, uh, it was nice and calm. The mountain had a nice quiet to it and I thought, "Hey, this isn't going to be too bad." But unfortunately, about two, three hours later, the winds picked up and they They were, they were blown like 40 kilometers an hour in this beautiful, nice open area for the helicopter to see me. What I thought was a nice area turned out to be the bad choice because now I'm open to getting beat on, on by the wind. So I took a beat, I took a beat down for two or three hours and then it calmed down and then it started to snow.
It has to, man. It just wouldn't be a good story if it didn't snow on you. yeah
That's well, I got snow for about four or five hours until morning, and it was still snowing in the morning. So I remember waking up and kind of pushing the glider and all the snow coming off the glider, so I had like a little glider igloo thing going on. And, and uh, it wasn't too bad. I was able to make it through the night. Uh, I had to rub my feet every half an hour, you know, to keep them warm, um, which is a bit of a challenge when you're kind of perched on a hillside. But you got—had enough water? I had enough water. I had a little bit of food. I was good for the night. If I was being—if I was going to get left there again for a second night, I had some. I was in trouble, yeah. But, um, yeah, they—you know, they were saying, uh, uh, first crack of dawn, 30 minutes, you know, 30 minutes after sunrise, uh, the helicopter is going to be in the air and we're going to be up there.
Uh, and when I woke up in the morning, I pulled the glider off me. I look out, it's snowing heavily and it's just so fogged in. It's way worse than it was when they couldn't come get me the day before. So at this point, I'm starting to formulate a plan on how I'm going to hike out of there, um, because they're not coming to get me. But fortunately, um, you know, they did come and get me. And and these guys, man, these uh helicopter pilots, they were, they were, um, it was impressive. When the long line came in, had two guys hanging off of it, and he planted those guys right at my, my feet. Uh, we clipped into a harness, and as we took off, um, the one of the guys was telling the helicopter how close we were to the trees.
Oh, we're 50 feet from the trees. Okay, we're 100 feet from the trees. And he was using that as a reference for the helicopter, who was flying in completely white out conditions above us.
That's a good pilot. There's not a lot of guys that'll do that. That's amazing, yeah.
So I was, uh, you know, I said to him afterwards, I said, "I recognize what you did there, man. That was, that was impressive flying. Um, you know, flying with no ground reference at all." Yeah, and unfortunately, when, uh, they came to get me, these, these two guys on the end of the long line, they were excited when they landed because, obviously, they flew in, in completely white conditions, and they're flying back out. So I'm standing there on the hillside with my, with my bag on my back, and first thing they say is, "Drop the bag. You can't take the bag." Bag? Oh, yeah, to which I responded, "That's a ten thousand dollar bag right there." And, uh, you know, I got the look like, "Are you kidding me, man? You're leaving the bag?" So I had to leave all my gear on the hillside, and it, it's, uh, been about 10 days now.
It's still sitting there on the hillside. We can't get in to get it, so no.
Kidding, I didn't think that you'd have to do that. That kind of makes sense. I mean, yeah, wow.
They weren't concerned with the gear, no, of course not. They wanted to get in and out, yeah.
I mean, hats off to them. I mean, there's no—no, you can't fault them, there can you? Oh,
I had no complaints over that, so we'll make it another mission to go back and get the bag later, yeah.
I mean, eventually the snow will melt and you'll be able to dig in there, and you know...
It'll be, yeah, the glider's
kind of wrecked, anyway, you know, but the
glider and the reserve there. Yeah, there's no—there's no, we're using them again. So, so the one, okay.
I was gonna say, before we move, move on. I'd love to, you know, because obviously, you know, most people listening are like, well, that's never going to happen to me, but this does happen. People spend nights out and I'd love to just get, you know, what are some tips? What are some, oh man, I wish I would've had that. You know, what, what, what do you wish you would've had? You know, if you could, what will you have with you when, you know, from, from this day forward, I'm sure your, your kit's probably going to change a little bit, but the other thing is, you know, how about some tips with the wings? Because, you know, we spent a night out in Mozambique after I totally smashed our dinghy. You know, I had it anchored and the tide came way up and took it in over the beach and just destroyed it. So there was eight of us that had to sleep on the beach. Now, this is Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.
It wasn't the cold you were dealing with. We just slept in the sand. I did learn a little bit about using a glider to stay warm. Did you wrap it up like a taco? Did you wrap it round and round and round and round? What advice could you give? Did you use your reserve as well? Did you use the two? do
I did, yeah, yeah. When I found a nice spot to sit down, I pulled the reserve out. I put it down on the ground first. Um, my main thought is, uh, getting wet in those type of conditions, you know, minus, minus four, minus six degrees. If you're wet, your down jacket gets wet, your pants get wet, you're, you're in bad situation. You'll get hypothermia really fast. So, um, I put, uh, the, the reserve parachute down, it acted as a really nice waterproof kind of, um, barrier between me and the ground. Um, and then I, yeah, I basically wrapped the glider around me leading edge up towards my head so I could use like the nylon battens to kind of, you know, keep it away from my face a bit. Um, when the winds picked up, I had to adjust it because, you know, these thoughts started going through my head.
What if the wind comes whipping through and inflates my glider, You know, and whips me off the hillside or something, so I ended up in the middle of night gathering all the leading edges together and tucking them under my back and stuff like that. But I was actually pretty impressed; it worked really well. It kept me warm, uh, very windproof. Obviously, the one thing I would recommend—I mean, I had hiking poles with me, and man, I will never fly without those again. Even if you don't use them for hiking, they were... I was able to use them to hold myself up on the hillside, and if I was laying down, I probably would have used them as like little tent poles and to keep the glider for me. Because of the difference between me under the glider and the snow outside, there was a lot of condensation on the inside of the glider, so every time I kept hitting the glider to knock the snow off, my hands would get wet and then they would get cold because there's so much constant condensation inside the glider.
So you could use the poles to hold the glider up off of your body, and that would be a good thing to have. A headlamp? I mean, I won't go flying without a headlamp. It's one of those things you think, "Why would I need a headlamp flying?" But how? That, yeah, got it. Gotta have a headlamp. If I, um, I mean, I could have used the light on my cell phone. Um, luckily, when I took off that morning, I had a hundred percent on my phone, and I was able to use that phone all the way through the day, all the way through that night to the next morning. The next morning, I had three percent left on my phone. so backup battery for a phone would be uh you know you can get little small ones you know like like lipstick-sized ones that give you one more charger on your phone, that might have been the difference between more communication with the rescue team and none at all.
That sounds like
you didn't have an inReach.
I did not, no. Okay, bad boy,
Rick. I'm very disappointed. You listened to the podcast, man. I
know, I know. That's unacceptable. Going out and buying one. And, you know, that was probably, I had never flown the site and I didn't really realize how remote it was or, you know, I just, I wasn't prepared for sure. There was, there were some mistakes I made for sure. And, uh, this is kind of a whole learning experience for all of us. Um, I learned a lot that day for sure.
Yeah. I would say those things you mentioned are, are musts. You know, I think it's, you know, we have to approach, uh, our flying whenever we're even remotely remote, um, as, as if we're going backcountry skiing, you know, So you've got to have the extra battery, you've got to have the inReach, you've got to have some extra clothes. You've got to be prepared for that night out and at least a little bit of food. Even if you're just going for a ridge-soaring session, I have been involved in enough of these. And like you said, the battery. You lose your phone, you're out of comms.
And that's what's nice about having an inReach, of course. But, but, uh, you know, then you've got that as a backup, and they last forever. But, um, yeah, okay. Well, good. Oh, I was gonna say, and headlamp—headlamp with batteries, that's just a must. That you just, yeah, you'd never go back in your skin without a headlamp. And we gotta, we gotta take the line the same way, yeah.
And if I'd had a headlamp, I would have had enough time to continue to search for a better place to sleep, um, I mean, the night shows where I was going to sleep, and that was a bad, odd feeling because where I slept wasn't a good choice. Um, I could have easily slid down the hillside to my death. So, you know, a headlamp, and I, and I, you know, ran through my mind, "Hey, use your phone, use the light on your phone." But then you're walking around holding your phone in one hand, you got one hand to catch yourself when you slip, and you're aiming the battery—the battery of your phone would just be killed using the light. So, headlamp would have been a huge way
nothing and they take up no space. You know, the, the one, the one piece of advice I would have with that is a lot of people, you know, pull out the headlamp and like, Hey, I got my headlamp and their batteries are fried because they leave their batteries in. So just take one battery out and reverse it. You know, otherwise you've got the battery, you want the batteries in the headlamp. Um, but if you just take one out and reverse it, whenever you're just, you know, when it's ever, when it's in your pack and then you can, you can, you know, You can do that in in the dark. You can open it up, you know, it's the middle battery, you switch it and you're good to go. You know, but that's a—that's one that's caught a lot of people as well. Yeah, that's a good point, for sure. Okay, well, carry on. I kind of cut you off there. So, good. So you're—you're going to be flying with a little bit extra kit in the future. That's a good thing.
Yeah, you know, yeah, uh, charging everything, you know, having your, having your InReach charge, having your, uh, radio charged, having your cell phone charged, all that stuff, and being able to charge them again. The two-meter radio was invaluable, like, um, the next morning when the helicopter came, I had three percent left on my phone. I wasn't sure if they were gonna, you know, actually be successful, so I switched over to my tubing and radio, and I couldn't even see the helicopter, um, and I just grabbed my, uh, my radio. I started talking, uh, they already had a dispatch set up, and that put me in direct contact with the helicopter, so I was able to talk to someone on the ground that could immediately relay to the helicopter something I couldn't do with the cell phone, something I couldn't do with an InReach, but you couldn't, you, you
weren't talking to the cockpit
Were you? Well, I was talking to dispatch, who was immediately talking to them in the cockpit. Yeah, because that's—that's usually
They usually can't operate on our bands, and not—not that they can't physically—but they just, they're, they're, they're, they're working higher, or is that lower? I'd always get confused, but they're down to 130s and we're, you know, we don't start to 140, so something like, yeah.
So that, that was great to have that fully charged. I'd actually taken it and, uh, stuck it in my down jacket that night when I, I slept to keep the batteries warm, knowing that the cold is going to kill that battery. And I wanted to keep it as warm as I could. Got that thing out in the morning. And then I could hear the helicopter hovering in front of me. And once it got right in front of me, I just relayed, OK, the helicopter's in the exact right spot. It's in front of me. I can't see it, but I can hear it. And I know it's right in front of me. Just tell them to move in closer to the mountain. And they were able to hover in closer to the mountain until they could see me. I could see the light starting to poke through the clouds. And they got up right close. So you know, fully charged batteries, uh, was a huge thing. If I didn't have my radio, if I didn't have my cell phone, things would have went down differently, for sure.
Yeah, cool. Um, okay. So, uh, I'd love to ask you about the long line and your first cup of coffee. You know, I kind of think—I'm sure that was pretty fun—but um, let's go back and kind of break it down in some ways. This is, I feel, um, fortunate to be having this talk now. We just released, you know, a couple days ago, this show on on TEM, uh, threatened air management. Yeah. That was, that was really interesting to me. So let's try to be forensic now as the TEM system is and, and take it back. Um, what'd you do wrong? Uh, what'd the other pilot do wrong? What, you know, what do we all need to learn as a community? So this doesn't happen.
Yeah, for sure. Um, I definitely made some mistakes that day and, And listening to that last podcast just put it so perfectly into perspective. I could see the errors I made. I could see what led up to it. So I made some assumptions that day. After the incident happened, I talked to a couple of old hang gliders that have been flying decades and decades. And one of them made a really good point to me. He said that he has a 15-second rule. It's the time he figures it takes him to do an avoidance turn or a full 360 on his hang glider, and um, he prioritizes the glide. The pilots closest to him gives him a one, two, three priority, and if they're in that 15-second space, he never loses eyes on them.
Um, and if he does, he even if he has to, he leaves his thermal, gets eyes on them again, and then back into the thermal if he can. And I thought that was a beautiful piece of information. Had I been doing that, I can guarantee you this would not have happened. One of the mistakes I made was I made some assumptions. So first biggest assumption I made was, are all the pilots flying there today, do they all have the minimum skills to fly here? Are they all competent to fly here that day? And I assumed they were because they were there. I didn't know a lot of the pilots, so I gave them maybe more leeway than I should have, you know? I follow, I assume they would follow all the basic, uh, right away rules: turn the same way, you know?
Get out of a glider, that's, that's climbing below you, uh, faster, move to one side, you know? Keep your distance from other gliders. The, the person above is going to keep their eyes on the glider below, you know? Fly in a predictable way, so that other pilots can predict what you're going to do. And I, I gave all of these assumptions to this pilot, and it turns out that this pilot wasn't doing predictable things. And before the accident, we have a track log and you know, the pilot made a left-hand turn, flew straight, made a right-hand turn, flew straight, did a left-hand 360, flew straight, did a right-hand 360, was just wandering around the sky above us as we were established in thermals, climbing up to them, rapidly climbing up to them. They were doing all these maneuvers above us, um, never gaining any altitude, so we had a moving target above us, basically.
And I, and I never left that thermal to get eyes on them again, and as I got closer and closer, they were harder and harder to see, and um, so
A clear, a very clear, you know, right away, uh, screw up on this other, on this other pilot, and yet at the same time, it's kind of like, you know, they like driving, you know, driving accidents, I always think, you know, if we're defensive enough, it doesn't really matter, you know, I mean, yeah, so it sounded like, I mean, I'm not putting on you at all, it just sounds, it sounds like, um, you know, that, and that's a, that's a tricky right of way one too, and that, you know, because it's you, you're absolutely supposed to be paying attention to the people coming up from below you, but there are, there's also that window, just like driving in a car where people are kind of hard to see, yeah, and it's tricky and impossible for you, but
yeah it's it's It's like coming up to that red light. I'm sorry, you got a green light. You're assuming the other person's got a red light. You're assuming they're going to stop because that's the law. But they don't always stop. Sometimes they blow that red light and they T-bone you. And, you know, what can you do about that? And as I got closer and closer to this glider, obviously, I couldn't see them at all. And I had actually stopped turning and started gliding again when this pilot decided to. To, um, their, their final move was to glide in a straight line, pretty much over top of us, and make a turn in the opposite direction. So we had already established in thermals, uh, the one pilot beside me had already done about seven left-hand revolutions, seven 360s. This pilot decided to fly over top of us and initiate a right-hand turn the opposite way, and they fell out of the thermal.
So they were, were doing a right-hand turn, lost about 150 feet in their turn, about 270 degrees, they lost about 150 feet. So they're doing right-hand ascending turns as we're doing left-hand ascending turns, so it was a crash, yeah. And, you know, she kind of flew right into my flight path, and luckily Kind of, luckily, she flew right into the middle of the glider. Yeah, so the glider, the wingtips were able to fly forward and wrapped her up, but it did give me that chance to open the glider up again. Had she flown into the corner of the wing or something, and my wing, you know, spiraled around her, that would have been a hard down. It would have been a very, very hard to get her out; I probably would have just, yeah, lost all control. So there was some very, very lucky things that happened there, but yeah, there were some errors made, for sure, from both sides, so
how have you guys addressed this as a community um but you know that yeah don't want to throw anybody under the bus but But there's, you know, these are great learning situations. Yeah, they are. And thank goodness it came out. You know, she flew away, it sounds like. Yep. And you, you know, you spent a cold night out, but you're probably thankful stars, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we lost a year. That's a bummer. Yeah.
We both walked away, so you got, you know, the best outcome you could hope for.
The best outcome, yeah.
Mid-airs, you know, you hear all the stories. They don't always end up so great. More times than not, you know, they end up with fatalities. Uh, for us to both walk away, that's—that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, I mean, and yeah, we want to learn from it. We want to—we want to kind of pinpoint, how does—how does something like this happen? I kind of pride myself on keeping eyes on people. Uh, safety is a big thing. I love your podcasts; they're on safety. They're always the ones I gravitate to. I've had 12 years of flying, not a single accident. So to go from 12 years of flying to my first accident is a midair with a reserve deployment. Yeah, I—I know I want to dig into this. I want to think, how did—how did I get there? How did that happen? So, you know, we've looked at things like, um, training is a big thing.
We have a lot of pilots that, um, they're just not being trained to the level that they should be, and a lot of the time they're surrounded by other pilots that are trained to these low levels, too. So they start to think that, hey, I'm pretty good, and they—they don't know what they don't know. And then you get these – you get a group. I think what happened in this situation is there's a group of pilots and they have like a group intermediates syndrome problem where they're all at the stage where they're intermediates. They all think they're really good and they're just enough to make themselves dangerous and they're all competing with each other, pushing each other. So every single time they go offline, they're pushing to the absolute maximum red line of the day. And there's no one there to pull them back and, you know, slow them down.
They don't have the
mentors. They don't have the instructors. Yeah, we were talking about this before, you know, before we started recording that, you know, that what you're seeing in Canada and certainly what I'm seeing here in the States is, you know, there's this massive hole. And you and I were talking about we don't really know how this works in other countries, but we assume that it's better because there's, you know, you get your P2, you get your very novice rate. I mean, you get, you know, you get a week of training and down in Utah, you know, with good weather and, um, you got your P2 in a week and, um, and you've learned a lot in that week. So there's no way you're going to retain, you know, like the rules of the road. You know, when I, when I go through the rules of the road with the, with the boat, I mean, that's a massive course, you know, right return is you got to know a lot more than that, you know?
So, um, and you got to refresh it, you know, it's like a wilderness first responder course. It's something you've got to refresh and refresh and refresh. Um, but yeah, so, you know, we, we, we send these fledglings off, um, with very little knowledge and very little airtime into the real world. And, and, uh, and there's this massive gap. I mean, if you don't have yourself surrounded by, you know, a great community, uh, and a lot of mentors, um, for no fault of their own, you know, they're, they're just, it's a, it's a dangerous time. time and in your case it's dangerous time for other people too yeah
Yeah, people that do know, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, you're right. Um, you know, if you don't know what you don't know, uh, you can be dangerous to yourself and and to others. Um, five days of training blows my mind if you, I mean, and I've heard that story. Lots of people say, "Oh, yeah, my course was five days and I've got my novice," and it just, you know, you know, only enough to kill yourself. After five days is basically like you've got the basics, but you do need that community. You need that, you know, you know, like the UK, they've got the club pilot. So you get your novice rating, your club pilot, and you have comp pilots and other advanced pilots that are able to, you know, give you advice and and mold your approach to flying. So it's a healthy approach.
Uh, I think it's really easy to get a very unhealthy approach to flying where you don't even understand the risks you're taking and you're always in danger and there's no one really there to to say otherwise. And that kind of stuff just comes with with time with flying. You know, there's lots of times you look back and say, "Holy cow, I almost killed myself there. I got lucky." There was no, there was no one there to kind of Tell you what, you were doing was dangerous, so I
Was out. I was flying in a comp in, uh, in Macedonia at the Nordic Open this last year and, uh, having dinner one night with the Swedes—a big group of Swedes—and they, their club, I just couldn't believe this. It was unbelievable. They, so they, what they do is, so when they join a club, then you basically get assigned to, uh, you know, a senior person in the club and the club pays the the due. So when this person gets to a certain level and, and they start thinking about like, hey, wouldn't it be cool to go to Annecy? The club pays for the instructor. You know, they pay for their flights. You don't earn any money. Like if you're part of the club, this is just expected of you as a mentor. But your trip is basically free.
So you go down, they fly you down to Annecy with this new group of pilots. So there's like a couple of instructors and a very small group of new pilots. And you get instruction for a week for free.
That's amazing. It's
amazing. You know, it's just like, why don't we do stuff like that? I mean, literally, it's just, we wonder, and then we see the accident reports, and we're all, you know, it's not like you have to scratch your head very hard.
Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, that's another point to touch on, too, is the accident reports being, you know, here we're all self-regulated, so it's up to us to report these accidents. And, of course, you know, right away, I'm reporting the accident. I want everyone to learn from this. We did a big write-up and posted it so everyone can learn from the whole incident. But there's lots of pilots that don't report incidents or accidents here. And I don't know, it's ego or, you know, you're embarrassed or whatnot, but we can learn from every single accident. And this particular pilot had had several accidents leading up to this that I was unaware of. One of them was flying into, you know, power lines. Had I been aware of that information, I probably wouldn't have flown that close to that pilot, but I didn't have that information.
So I think reporting these types of things and and, you know, dissecting them and finding out why this happened, and this can happen to anyone. And what can we do to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen again? You know, we're self-regulated, so we got to implement those things ourself, you know, teach each other that kind of stuff, have checklists and stuff like that.
I'm gonna be opening this, uh, this show. I haven't recorded this yet, but once when we're done, I'll be recording the opening as I always do afterwards. And I got an awesome email this last week from Kevin Booker. He's, he's our guy that did the sailplane episode a while back, the Perlan project and all that. And, uh, obviously he's a sailplane pilot. He was very familiar with Tem, and you know, and his, his feedback was that, you know, this system is awesome and the reason and check marks, you know, the check marks work is that, is that they were, you know, they force you to zero in and go down through the list, but without a culture of safety, TEM is useless, you know, and, and that's so true in what we're, you know, it's great to understand it, but we have to make safety a part of our culture.
You know, we had, it has to be that, oh, we had an accident. There's a, everybody's going to have an accident at some point flying everyone. Everyone, and so there's, there is no need for embarrassment, you know? I mean, I was out in Santa Barbara, I'm training for the X-Ops. I went in two trees when I was out in Santa Barbara for that month, you know? I mean, and one of them was right off launch with a bunch of P2s. I went in the tree, you know? I mean, it's just, it's just part of the sport, you
know it happens, yeah, it, it happens for sure, and, and you know, I was happy to have not had an accident 12 years and then this happens, so So, you know, it can happen. I got complacent. I got, you know, I wasn't doing due diligence. And it'll come up and bite you, sometimes bite you hard. And we were lucky to walk away, for sure. We got very lucky. I was able to clear out of the glider. My reserve opened beautifully. You know, I was rescued. Very lucky. I don't even sit down and think about the alternatives of what could happen because they're all bad.
Yeah. so
You know, I, yeah, I know how lucky we were. What was
the date this just happened.
It was last Friday, last...
Friday, so a week ago. Yeah, so, uh, how's your head? Have you flown since, uh, did you know because was it, is it, was it a non-event because it went so well? Or was it, or, or, you know, are you having nightmares? No,
I'm, I'm pretty good. I think the other pilot is worse off than I am. They're pretty shaken up, and they're gonna, you know, take a step back and look at what's going on. I've got other gear in my closet, but you know, the weather went to crap afterwards, so I'm just waiting for a nice day. Looks like the next couple days are nice, and I'll probably go out and shake, shake it off. And I know that it wasn't, I didn't make some gross error where it almost cost me my, my life. I made some smaller errors and, and, uh, it, I got the worst possible outcome from small errors. So I'm confident that, you know, this isn't something that I, you know, it's going to happen again anytime soon, that's for sure. And in the 20 years of flying here on the island, there's never been a mid-air, or even longer, 30 years, there's never been an mid-air, and there's never been a reserve deployment.
So it's not a common thing, you know, and I think it's a lot of the time it's because you're only flying with four other people in the air. It's, it's pretty hard to hit four people when you have a huge amount of air that we don't have a lot of people around. And you know, that was one of my other errors too, is I got, you get used to flying with your buddies. You got your buddy on the wingtip, you get in the thermal, you're spinning around wingtip to wingtip talking to each other, and, uh, you know, you become comfortable with those people. You know, they're going to be predictable, you know, they know what they're doing, that, you know, they're not going to put you in danger. And I gave that kind of, I gave that to another pilot that I didn't know. And that was a big mistake.
You probably heard there was a really tragic midair at the British this summer, this last summer, right before the Nordic open. And Ennis, a very famous, long, long time UK pilot, pilot, uh, at a comp and had a midair with, uh, a non-comp pilot, so a free flyer who was obviously much, much less skilled, and I think these are the one, these things, you know, and they both died. Yeah, and, uh, you know, I think that, that's when you know, when you're at a comp, when like in a World Cup, it's amazing how, how close you can fly to a lot of other pilots, you know, and, and do it pretty, pretty calmly. Um, but as soon as you start flying in a comp, you know, like, like I'm always way more wary, say if I'm at the Monarca or something, cause you know, you've got, you've got 40 comp pilots and then you've got a lot of folks that are at their first comp ever and they're on a B and they don't understand how a two liner with big, you know, you know, huge aspect, uh, they don't turn the same.
You can't just bank those over and get out of the way, you know? And so I, I really like my, I kind of my, one of my favorite takeaways here so far is this hanging telling you this bad information. I've never heard that. That's great.
That's gold. I mean, had I been flying using his 15 second rule, I can guarantee you this would not have happened. So, I mean, it's kind of a pain. You're, you're in a thermal, your thermal center, the pilot, he's above you. You're, you're assuming he's doing the right things. Are you going to leave your thermal every time you lose eyes on him? It's kind of an impractical thing. But at the same time, this could have been avoided if that was, you know, if you followed that kind of methodology.
Yeah. Well, I, Rick, I appreciate that you're, you know, clearly this was, you know, a right of way fault. You know, if we're going to weigh the fault, the fault's obviously more on the other pilot. But you have identified, you know, there was a whole lot of little threats here, isn't there? And errors that led up to this that, you know, you're kind of casual, you're kind of having fun. It's part, it's kind of at the end of the day, it sounds like, you know, um, you're, you're, you know, you're ripping up to this climb and it's, and it's, and it's great. You're kind of making some assumptions, you know, there's a bunch of stuff here that I, I appreciate that that you've, you know, you've kind of broken it down and, and, uh, you know, that's going to make you certainly a much better pilot and I think certainly the, you know, that your crew up there as well, I'm sure everybody's talking about this thing right now.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I remember I took a thermaling course with Will Gadd one time, and and he was saying, "You know, um, and this always stuck with me, it's not what you were doing right when the accident happened; it was three or four things you did right before that." And and this was a was a perfect example of that. You know, I made this assumption and I put myself in this place, and then this other glider, you know, they fixated on something, and you know, we can easily follow her chain of events back, um, you know, and say, well, you know, this happened, then and this happened, then it made you do this, and then you fixated on another pilot, you made an unclear turn, you know, and it just cascaded. It's always a cascade. Yeah, and, you know, you can go back and look at how it happened, and, you know, you can make changes for sure to avoid that type of stuff.
So we've identified some cool things here, and I think the biggest one One is this gap in instruction. And, you know, I know, you know, like my buddies that fly tandems in Switzerland, you know, it's like going to university to get that. I mean, it is not easy. And, you know, we still see these crazy mistakes, like the hang glider that didn't get clipped in and that whole thing went viral. I'm still hoping to get him on the show. He lives down on the shore. But, you know, I mean, so obviously mistakes are going to be made no matter what system you come up through. And, and, you know, there's, but it seems like there's the, these other systems are a lot more methodical. There's a lot more you have to cover. You have to keep coming back and get refreshed.
I don't know. It just seems like we, we, we don't have that built into our, you know, USHPA and your version. And we need to, you know, as a community, we need to, to just work on that. We need to make it happen.
Yeah, it would be interesting, uh, for our system if there was a way to hold instructors accountable as much as the novice pilot, because the novice pilot leaves and they've been taught a certain amount and they think they know what they're doing, but there's no way to hold any instructor accountable either for the amount of training he's doing. We've, we've got, we've got instructors and I'm sure there's instructors all around the world that are like this, that are, you know, we call them the pump and dump, right? You just, you get them in, you pump them through the course, and you get them on the other side. You got the money, you sold them a bunch of gear, four days later, you know, I've heard stories of people saying they're on the, they're on the launch on the very first day of their training, flying brand new gear in a pod harness on a high mb, uh, flying off on their first day.
Three days later, the instructor's like, "Oh, just fly with your buddies for, you know, until you got your 30 flights, let me know and I'll sign you off." I mean, that's not a train That's, yeah, so you know, that is a problem in itself, and that is breeding a lot of pilots that, you know, are like this, and then you mix them all together, and and you got pilots I
Hope that's not ubiquitous. I have heard a couple stories like that, man. You know, that you're really infringing there on, on, uh, you know, criminals. I mean, that really, I mean, these are people's lives, and if if an instructor takes it that casually, then, man, I wouldn't want to be that instructor down the line. I mean, you can have – I can't get into it. I was going to talk about the local issue we've had in the last few years. But, I mean, somebody is going to come after them.
Yeah, it happens. And, you know, it's up to the community, I think, at that point to gather around that person and say, hey, you know, you need a little more training or give them some advice, you know, and do that mentoring thing to kind of to bring them up to speed up to at least a minimum safety level. But we have no way to make instructors accountable. You know, there's the pilots and they do their tests and they do their checklists. But it's really easy just for an instructor to say, oh, yeah, here you go. You're done, you know. know so that's a concern okay you just
This is gonna, this is we're gonna end on this because this is important. Um, you just brought up something that I have been really struggling with and I, you know, and actually I believe it's come up quite a few times on the show even, but how do you handle that person? Like, let's write, let's rewind this day all the way back. You guys are on launch and this, this, uh, you know, the, the person that you end up having this, um, you know, this mid-air with, had you, had you know, is there anybody in your group that knew all this, this history? You know, was that, was there, has there been any talk amongst your group like, "Yeah, gosh, I wish we would have said something," or I wish, you know, or you know, would it have been appropriate to call this person aside and and be like, "Hey, I'm gonna leave that question with you, think about that for a second," because I just, I just got back.
If you heard the podcast with Rob Sporrer at Eagle Paragliding, they have developed this culture there that I had never seen anywhere else. It was unbelievably supportive and optimistic and, but also very realistic. And, you know, they're, they're incredibly inviting into, you know, pilots from anywhere. You know, if you, if you go there, you just feel like you're, you're being kind of brought into this family. And when they, they just have this culture of when they drive up to launch, if, you know, if it's a visiting pilot and they're not, they're not, they don't know this culture yet. And they start doing the whole negative ground suck talk, you know, like, oh, I don't know about the weather, you know, you know, the one Mitch often Riley, who's down there as an instructor there, he's driving the van.
but many of the others just, they just, you know, start talking right over them or turn the music on. Like that's, that's just, that's not allowed. You know, you're, you're, that's part of the culture there that, Hey, we're going flying. We don't need a bunch of negative stuff in our head. And then, you know, this is a big mountain sites, a 4,000 foot site, you know, over a very crowded town down to the beach. And so, I mean, it's for real. And, uh, and a lot of pilots come there and They're very new, you know, they're P2s, they're really learning. And, and yet they're, they're kind of folded into this culture of safety. So they're not talked down to on launch, like, oh man, this is way too much for you. Mitch will deliver the, the weather, the information, the same to that person as me, you know? So they're, and, and, you know, but they're, you're, you're kind of expected to make your own decision.
You know, they're doing that in a way that's really positive, but like, hey, this is serious, you know? And we want you to know what you're getting involved in, and so it kind of puts it back on the person like, "Wow, okay. I, I didn't know that. I thought we were just gonna huck off and have a blast," you know? Because often, when, when you are P2, you don't know—like you said, you don't know what you don't know, yeah.
I know, I—I mean, I love to hear stuff like that. I love to hear of communities that are embracing like that. I mean, as humans, we learn way better in positive environments, for sure. You got a big negative group of people and you don't even want to be around them, you know? You get that ground suck talk like you were mentioning, and and you don't—you don't learn anything. So, I mean, I love hearing that type of, uh, of, uh, situation. Yeah. And I mean, in this situation, unfortunately, there were people with the knowledge that this pilot had been in other accidents and and, you know, like collisions with other things, and that wasn't brought to everyone's attention. Again, it was probably like a—an ego thing, or an embarrassment thing, or something where they didn't feel it was necessary to to share that information.
And um, learning about it afterwards, it was a little bit—it made me a little mad because it was—it was very valuable information that that would have changed, you know, how how you fly and interact with that person. So, yeah, that day, um, there was a senior instructor and he's—he's doing his best. He's doing his best to try to get through to her and try to keep her safe. And and, um, but as you said, it's up to that pilot, you know? Do they want to adopt a healthy respect for the sport and and approach it in a healthy way, or are they just kind of push the red line every day? And, and, you know, I, I always said, you know, if you're a gambler and you gamble like that, you'll be broken a week.
You, you can't, you can't fly like that. It doesn't work. Right. He'll be, he'll be broke quick. Yeah. So Rick,
thank you for sharing this, uh, amazing story. I'm so stoked. You're, uh, you're totally fine. That's, So that's, that's fantastic. Well done throwing your reserve so fast. You did, you know, you did some things wrong, but you did a lot of things right. And, uh, and that was the big one. So Bravo. I'm glad you're okay. And, and really, I, I very much appreciate this. I think the listeners will get a lot out of this. Just yet one more little tick in our information box that helps us be safe. I appreciate you sharing this with us.
Yeah. Thanks, Gavin. Thanks for having me on here. And I hope we can all learn something from it. You know, everybody's, you know, could be in an accident. Every day we take off, it could be that day. So, you know, be prepared and do your training and, yeah, and learn as much as you can. And, I mean, your podcasts are a great source for that. So go back and re-listen to them all for sure.
Every flight we take is the most important flight we will take. Thanks, Rick. I appreciate it, man.
Thanks, Gavin. Take care.
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