Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. We've got a few things of housekeeping here before we kick off this really good show with Matt Wilkes. It's just packed with super valuable information. Firstly, I wanted to apologize for the irregularity of the shows coming out. As many of you know, I've been on a pretty major search and rescue effort mission to find our friend Kiwi, who I had on the show back in July, I guess early July. He was down with us in Texas flying. And then shortly after that, I was up in Nevada with him flying. And then the next weekend, he vanished literally right now into thin air. It's been as of record when I'm recording this.
And hopefully by the time the show goes live, we will have new information. But this is day, let's see, 12 that he's been missing. And I will do a full show on that and what we've learned. And just incredible. Absolutely. It's
been a great effort
of the community that came together from literally all over the world in this effort to find Kiwi and all that we learned and some of the mistakes we made. We haven't made many, but of course there always are some. But it was just a monumental effort by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, both financially and online and teams on the ground. So we learned a lot about devices and in-reach and communication. And we learned a lot about a lot of things. And some of this was, you know, we learned a bunch about major search and rescue effort when Guy Anderson disappeared here in Sun Valley in the 2012 PWC. And unfortunately, I've been involved in a number of these.
So we keep learning. And I'll do an article on that for Cross Country. And we'll also do just a show dedicated to that. But because of those efforts, it's been difficult to keep up with putting a show out every year. And I've been doing that for two weeks. And my wonderful editor, Miles Connolly, has been wrapped up in big projects with his work with National Geographic and the BBC and stuff. So we have had a hard time getting these out on time. And I apologize for that. We will get back to those. And anything we've – if we've missed any, we did a – we put out last week a replay of a past show with Pal Takats. That was the most popular show we've put out to date. So we kind of reengineered that. And put it out just because I hadn't been able to interview anybody.
So now, yesterday I interviewed three people. Today's show is going to be the first of those. So we are well caught back up. And we'll get back on our regular schedule of getting these out every other Wednesday. New swag. We've got some fantastic recaps. They really redesigned their trucker hats. Annika and the hats that we've got right now are just gorgeous. So check them out. If you go to our store on cloudbasemaham.com. And I've also got a whole new box of shirts from Patagonia that just came in. We've got some new models. The new Fitzroy. These are all 100 % organic, fair trade, low water use. They're terrific shirts. People are really digging them. And we've got some new tank tops for the ladies.
And I invite you to go check those out. Also some up high endurance I think they're called. So these are kind of cool new models. And they're new stuff. And in great colors. So check those out. It's a wonderful way to support the show. I also want to just mention that if you have interacted with us in any way in the last six years, seven years that we've been doing this. You should have an account to access all the bonus material. Whether you contribute to the show or not. If you contribute, for sure you do. But if you've bought any swag or sent us an email. All those have to be done manually. And certainly I miss some of those. And if you can't afford to support the show, I totally get it. You don't even need to explain yourself. Just send me an email and say, hey, I want to access the bonus content.
And I will set you up with a lifetime account. And hopefully someday you will be able to support us. And on that note, I really appreciate that. You know, I thought that when COVID hit, we were going to be in real trouble. Certainly my business is still totally on hold and in serious trouble. Which is my main source of income. And that just evaporated in March. And I thought that the same thing would happen with the podcast. And it's been the opposite of that. People have been really generous. And our contributions are at an all-time high. And I just really appreciate it. And they just kind of keep trickling in and keep going up. And that makes me feel really good about what we're doing here. And I just appreciate that you appreciate what we're doing. So thank you very much for that.
As always, all we ask for is a buck a show. It's kind of like a magazine subscription. So if you're getting something out of it, we appreciate you helping us out. Thank you. This show with Matt Wilkes. Matt was on the show about three years ago. He took my, what we were calling the master's class. And it was kind of a bivvy-oriented class. A single-day class up at the lakes at Jockey's Place. And he gave me a ride back to Edinburgh where I was flying out the next day. And I stayed with him. And he's an ER doc and a critical care doctor.
He's a very good friend of mine. And kind of one of the, I cut my teeth with them back in the day at Verbier Summits. And so he's been instructing with them. And no doubt you have seen some of his articles recently in Cross Country. He, when the last time I had him on the show, we talked mostly about trauma and what should be in your first aid kit. And you really need to go back and listen to that show if you haven't. And it's really, really good. And it's super valuable information. And we kind of update it in this show. But back then he was working on a big hypoxia project with Tom D 'Orlodeau and others that were doing some high-altitude flying in Pakistan. And so he did a big study on hypoxia and cold, which we get into in this show.
And how it affects us and how we need to mitigate it. And how insidious cold can be. And how it affects. And how hypoxia and cold affect our cognition. And we also talk about the debacle that was actually happening during the ex-alps last year. I was down low in the swamp trying to get to St. Hilaire while a lot of people were top landing on Mont Blanc. And that didn't go so well. And I was talking about SIV. And he's also completed two of the biggest, that I know of certainly, but I think they just are. The biggest reserves.
Oh little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little And also he did a big survey in conjunction with cross country and the BHPA analysis on cross country accidents and flying accidents and acroaccidents, just flying in general accidents. And what the numbers truly are, who they affect more, you know, at the early end of the spectrum versus the expert end of the spectrum. And we talk a lot about intermediate syndrome and pilot error and what are the main pilot errors that contribute to this, proximity to terrain, high pilot workloads, and a lot of stuff.
So we dig deep into what they've learned and what they still have to learn. And, of course, data is hard to sift and figure out and come up with real certainties, but they've done a terrific job there, he and his big team. Yeah. And
we've done
a lot of this and we glean a lot of fantastic information from that. So I think you'll really enjoy it. And then finally, we re-tap back into his first aid, the talk that he gave with us three years ago and his what should be in your kit and how he's maybe honed that a little bit. So a lot here. This is a long talk, but there's tons of great information. I think you'll really enjoy it. So please. Enjoy this talk with Matt Wilkes.
Matt, it's a pleasure to get you back on the show. I always enjoy talking to you. And it's cool. We had a little chat there at your place in Edinburgh, which I stayed at a few years back. And thanks for the hospitality. And thanks for coming back on the show to take us through all the stuff. Many of us have been reading your articles with a lot of interest the last couple of years. Your studies on hypoxia and reserves and accidents and risk and stuff. And also since the last time we talked, you've been doing quite a bit of instructing and a bunch of SIV. We're working for the boys. Shout out to Mike and Stu out in Verbier. I guess I understand this correctly until COVID kind of hit and you had to go back to your main job being a doctor and in critical care.
So catch us up real briefly on what you've been up to. And then we can. Dive into this master syllabus you've given me about all the things you've been doing since since last we talked.
Great stuff. Oh, thanks for having me back on the show, Gavin. It's a real pleasure to be back and to catch up. Yeah, life has been not quite how I thought it was going to go, but fun nonetheless. So since we last spoke, I have been doing a bit of doctoring, quite a lot of paragliding research. And last season I was working for Verbier Summits. And Verbier is a kind of baby guide learning from the kind of expert instructors there all about how to take people flying, which is a really, really good experience. I've been doing a bit of tandem flying. I've been trying to work on my own flying. And the plan was to do that all again this summer, which I was really looking forward to. And then, yeah, someone ate a medium rare bat and COVID became a thing.
And I went back to work in the hospital full time. So I've been there. I've been in intensive care. I've been there working as a doctor in Edinburgh until about a month or two ago.
And I think, I mean, you know, this is, of course, a free flight show, but put some paint some color for us on on what you're dealing with there in the UK, what that's looked like, you know, because we're all bombarded with many different things in the media these days and trying to stay clear of politics here. But what has it been like for you in the ER and what are you seeing on the ground? It's been
interesting on a number of levels. I think when COVID first started, I was living out in Verbier over through the winter. My wife was teaching yoga there. And I, you heard about this virus that came from China and then went to Italy. And it was like everything had a half-life. We're like, okay, well, we should be able to stay till the end of the season. And then it was until next week. And then we read, oh, actually we need to be heading back to the UK in about eight hours time. So we've been there. We packed up the car and we drove. And going through France was very, very interesting because they had locked down quite aggressively. There was police on the streets. You need to get papers from the town hall to be able to travel. And then we crossed back into the UK and it was like nothing was going on.
Everybody was still in cafes. Everyone was still kind of moving around. There was no social distancing. And this was back in March. And I think that initial complacency bit us in the ass. And so when I got back to Edinburgh and started working critical care again, we were a little bit behind London. So we were actually pretty organised. We had a bit of time to prepare and we were never overwhelmed. But when I talked to my colleagues in the hospitals down in London, where they were hit pretty hard, not as hard as the States or Italy, but they still had a good session. And they really felt the effects of us delaying things like lockdowns. And social distancing.
For us in the hospital in Edinburgh, it was as an individual doctor. It was I was very glad to have the opportunity to help and to work with my friends who are full time in hospital side by side again and to look after people. We had to triple the capacity of our ICU. And the hospital was pretty much exclusively filled with COVID patients at one stage. And we were very lucky that we never ran out of resources or staff. But there were points where we thought actually this could get pretty serious. And so I realised the lockdowns been very controversial in different parts of the world. But I was pretty happy that we did it. I think we averted something pretty big and pretty awful.
We did it late, but at least we did it.
And how do you see, you know, my good friend here who I had on the show back when right before we went into lockdown. So when this thing was kind of just maybe a week or two after it was declared a pandemic. And Mark. Terry O 'Connor, who's an ER doc like yourself and has been kind of the face of of handling the COVID here in our community, our little town in Sun Valley. What he keeps impressing on me, you know, when we go have a socially distanced dinner together or something, is that there's still a lot the community and the science side, the epidemiologist side don't know about it. How do you how do you see this playing out for us as a. Community in the world.
We're learning all the time and it's. Amazing, I think we're very fortunate in in Edinburgh that we have one of the main centres of learning about COVID. They do a lot of large scale research and looking at population trends. And it's amazing how much work those guys have put in and how much more we know about the virus in terms of herd effects and how it presents than we did in March. When really it was kind of. Going to little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little little and I'm slightly wary about how the next few months are going to play out.
Yeah. And you were saying before we started recording that, you know, if the, if the stage three trials go successfully and, you know, a vaccine is produced sometime early next year, that, you know, it's still going to take, it sounds like quite a while, you know, might be 2022 before you have enough people vaccinated that we can, you know, more easily jump on airplanes and travel around.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of the joys of paragliding is you hear on your podcast all the time is it takes us to some really interesting places and we get to know communities that often you don't see, you know, be that in Nepal or be that, you know, Vida Kalka in Colombia. And those guys, like the people that we know and care about over there are definitely not going to be first in the queue because that's how these things have always worked. And there's so much political clout amongst the big powers, particularly in, in the U S the UK, Russia, to ensure that their populations are vaccinated first, that I think some of the people that we care about in some of the countries that we like to go and fly, it's going to take a while before they get access to what they need.
I hope to be proved wrong, but historically, that's how it's always been.
Sure. Sure. Okay. Well, moving on to, I wouldn't say, you know, totally more positive subject, but, you know, we've got a lot to, get through here and it's, it's good to have your, your insight into that. And obviously we're still, still got a long way to go. And that's what it feels like certainly to me, but let's turn the, the discussion to other things you've learned about safety and how we can be safer and what we're doing. You've been involved in some really cool studies. The last time we talked, you were ramping up on your hypoxia study, which I want to hear about, but also you've done, um, you did a real massive study on, growing on reserves that I want to hear about and this accident analysis you did with the BHPA.
So take that however you want.
Sure. Thanks Kevin. Yeah. And it's actually, it's really nice to talk about paragliding. I mean, you know, it's at times I felt a little bit silly that my kind of main research interest is keeping paragliders safe when all this kind of global pandemic stuff's going on, but it's also, it's also been a real joy to, uh, to have been able to kind of look into this stuff because it's, it's something that I've been able to do. And it's something that I'm really, really passionate about. And yeah, since we last spoke a few years ago, we've been able to do a number of separate studies, um, kind of feeling our way a little bit through it. So it's not, if I was to go back and do it again, I'd have probably done them all slightly differently and in a different order. Um, but we've covered some ground. So yeah, since we last spoke, we did, uh, we analyzed
the BHPA, which is the British Hand Gliding Paragliding Association's accident database. So we looked in detail at about a thousand, we've done the largest survey of paragliding to date through cross country magazine. We had responses from 1700 pilots and that's going to come out next month, the results of that. But Ed has very kindly said, I can chat about it on the podcast. We've looked at paragliders in flights. We've done all sorts of kind of crazy instrumentation of paragliders on XC and Acro. And then we've done the reserve study work, which is the bit where I think we've probably had the most yield. And had I known what I know now, I'd have probably said, oh, I've done a lot of paragliding and I've done a lot of things. And I'd have probably said, oh, I've done a lot of things. And But coming at it from the background as a critical care doctor, the physiology was the bit that seemed most accessible to me. So that was kind of where I started.
Cool. Well, dive into that wherever you want. Let's, let's, let's hear more and, and, and learn more. Your, your article about the, the reserves was, was, was actually really enlightening for me. I thought I knew a lot about reserves and you guys discovered some really valuable information.
Thanks. Yeah. Well, I'd say I'm going to mix in two bits together and that's, let's start with what we found from looking at the accident stuff, because that leads really nicely into the reserve parachute. So when,
as you know, in, in all countries, we have this kind of voluntary system of accident reporting, which I think works better than people give it credit for. But if you ask a question as basic as how dangerous is paragliding, it's very hard to give a good answer because, we don't really know how much flying everybody does. And it's all very well me saying, well, there were 10 accidents last year. If there are 20 accidents next year, is that because the sports got more risky or because more people are flying? And people have made kind of efforts to, to answer this question in the past, but what they've tended to do is they've tended to look at numbers of pilots, not how much flying they do.
So what people might say before is like, well, there are 5,700 members in the British hang gliding paragliding association. There were this many accidents. So our accident rates are so-and-so per hundred thousand members or however you want to have what you want to do it. The problem is, is that when you start to then look into that data, you realise that because people do such different stuff in as diverse sport as flying, it's actually quite meaningless. So if you take a place, if you take a place where there's so many people flying, there's so many people flying. So if you take a place like Babadag in Turkey, Oludan is amazing place to fly there. They've actually got quite good numbers because there you have to buy a ticket to go up the road. And so they know how many flights people do.
And they have a fatality rate there of seven per hundred thousand flights, which is actually relatively high. But then you think, okay, well, what's Babadag like? Well, there's loads of tandem pilots. There's probably more mid-airs than there are in other places. And people go there and they're like, well, what's Babadag like? Well, they're like, well, there's loads of tandem pilots. There's loads of tandem pilots. So it is what happens in Babadag representative of what happens everywhere. And I think it's probably not. And so the thing that we got into and that's coming out in cross country next month is a good place to start, is we surveyed 1,700 pilots through Cross Country Magazine. And we said, well, what do you do? Like how much flying do you do? How much flying did you do last year?
What incidents did you have? And the nice thing is, is that you can't just do it. You can't just do it. You can't just do it. And the nice thing about using a database like Cross Country Magazine is that you know exactly how many people there are subscribed to the database. You can kind of tell how many people got the survey. Because the problem is if you just fire it out on the internet, you don't know who's reading it and whether who comes back to you as representative. So what we found from that is that the rate of injuries in paragliding is about 20 serious injuries per 100,000 flights. And about one and a half deaths per 100,000 flights. And to do that, to get that data, we had to work out how much flying people did from the XC survey.
And then we had to look quite deeply into a subpopulation, which was the British Handgliding Paragliding Association database, to find out what accidents people had and then marry the two together. So that's a very long-winded way of explaining how we got to the data. And then we had to look at the data and where we got to, which is coming up with a number, albeit a rough one, of how dangerous paragliding is. And I'm actually quite delighted that we now have a number because we can now start to compare ourselves to things like skydiving and general aviation. And we can also see if the safety efforts we make actually work because we'll now know if these numbers go up and down over time, as opposed to just saying there are these many pilots and there are these many accidents.
Because you did the study with the BHPA, how did the numbers, I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I would imagine there are areas in the world, like you said, in Turkey that are more dangerous. Certainly flying here in the Rockies would be more dangerous than most of the flying I've seen in the UK, just because the air and the desert and the launches, I mean, everything, it's rocky, it's nasty, it's big. I wonder how, does that go into your... Thinking and your modeling as well, because you're using the BHPA, is that mostly pilots that are flying in the UK or is, I know British pilots fly a lot in the Alps too.
That's a really good question. And what, I guess I should have perhaps been more clear, the purpose of using the BHPA data was to look at those BHPA members who filled out the cross country survey and start to compare accidents and deaths to, the total flying that is done. But the interesting thing that came out of both of those analyses is the things that cause accidents are pilot error, but in particular, the decisions we make, our abilities to control the glider, and perhaps from time to time, our ability to judge things like distance. And I would argue that those are global concerns.
Wherever you fly, those are going to be...
It'd be fascinating to know, too, the, if there's much of an impact in terms of where you learn and how you're taught, are you taught using the APPI system or something else, you know, or obviously the French and the Germans have the most numbers. And so I would think that their accidents, you know, way heavier there, but I wonder if, you know, the per capita, if the, if the, if the, if the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the data shows that they're also learning better or worse.
It's difficult to say from what we learned as to whether there were kind of national trends in that sense. As we were saying before, per capita doesn't really work because you have to know how much and what kind of flying they're all doing. I think the conclusion I came to, though, is just how vulnerable people are when they come out of any training scheme. Be it in the US or France or Germany. Switzerland is one of the few countries, for example, where people need a minimum of 50 flights before they can get their license. In other places, that would be an unthinkably large number. But if you think about what somebody's like when they come out of training, they've learned the very basics of launching and landing.
They've learned a little bit about the weather. And we were all in this position. They are very, very... Very vulnerable. And so one of the things that really struck me from the work I did is the importance of continued learning.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's dive into some of the takeaways. That's a great one. Well, first, how do we compare to some of the other sports or high-risk sports? And then, yeah, let's dive into some of these takeaways. What did you guys learn?
Sure thing. So, I mean, in terms of like those broad numbers that I generated, it makes us about twice as risky as skydiving and about twice as risky as flying a light aircraft. Those are very rough numbers and they're a big confidence interval. So there's a big spread in which those numbers, the true value could lie. But we're roughly twice as dangerous as those things. I don't want to get too fixated on that, though. I wanted those numbers because it's a start in terms of us growing up as a sport. And comparing ourselves to these other disciplines. But as your podcast really ably demonstrates, the number of people you've had on there, what really matters is why these things happen.
And I think the takeaways there for me were the gliders just don't break. Like we misuse them, but they don't break. There was about a four, between three and four percent technical error rate in all the stuff that we found. And I think that's a big part of the reason why we're so excited to be here. And I think that's a big part of the reason why we're so excited to be here. We do the crashing, not the gliders. And I know that's not particularly new, but some of the extra bits of light I can shed on that are really, we have two big areas of weakness, the decisions that we make and how we control the glider. And that feeds into two things, really. First of all, in terms of how we compare to other sports.
Or other forms of aviation. Those are the things that we do wrong in other forms of aviation, too. So even in commercial aviation, it's still the decisions we make and how we control the aircraft. It's not technical.
It's not
technical, but it's also it's not being drunk. It's not being, you know, it's not being reckless necessarily. It's making bad judgments with the best of intentions. And the other things that I was able. To kind of pull out of that, though, is.
There are times of high pilot workload, and I think we know this intuitively, but I think it's something that we really need to think about when we train. So in particular, take off. Flying in dense traffic and being close to terrain, which we are almost all the time, especially in Scotland, those are times when we are vulnerable. The other. Things is that when we find ourselves in. Times of glider instability. And once rotation starts to be a factor. That's another time where we become vulnerable again. And that was one of the reasons why we did some of the reserve work the way we did. And the other thing that came out of that data is that.
Reserve parachutes are massively under thrown. Yeah. And I think these were the these were the key things. We pulled from that analysis.
And what did you discover? Why? Because I, you know, I know we're going to get into the reserves pretty deep here, but in my experience, I have seen hundreds of reserve deployments. And I don't know that I've seen any accidents from any of them, you know, maybe other than a sprained ankle. But the. But I've also seen a lot of people not throw. And those almost never. Ever go well. And so why aren't people throwing.
Just to. Kind of actually put a number on your first point, because that's something we can now do from the work I've done. I calculated that you had a roughly 50 percent reduction in chance of injury if you throw your reserve, even if some of those are thrown low or they tangle. And it could not be clearer. You just got to throw it. God,
I'm surprised it's even that low. Yeah. Yeah.
I would
have put the number at almost 100.
Yeah. But I think the thing was, is I included when they, you know, I included ones where they chucked it at 20 feet.
Right. Sure.
Or where it was tangled. It's just that global. If it comes out of the bag, no matter where you are, it is very likely going to help you.
And that's a I think that's a message that needs to be drilled home. So why don't we, you know, the key question that you asked.
I guess let's look at the whole process and let's work backwards. So throwing a reserve at its most basic is grabbing the handle and getting it out of the harness. But then going back one step, it's realizing that you need to stop trying to fix your wing and switching your mental program into now it's time to throw mode. Right. Right. Right. That's where the problem lies. I think that's why people don't do it. And whether that's because they lose altitude awareness or whether that's because they simply lose the ability to access that mental program.
Sure. Of how to do it under stress, I think is still something that's not proven. But I think it's a mixture of both. And the reason why I think it's that is if you look at skydiving as an example.
Before automatic activation devices came in, these things like cypresses that chuck your reserve parachute in skydiving, if you're traveling a certain speed below a certain height. There were examples of experienced skydivers not throwing their reserve parachutes. They just freeze. They'd have a main malfunction and they'd hit the ground. What's called a no pull fatality. And when you then look at something like helicopter underwater escape training, which is something you have to do if you want to work on the oil rigs around the world. And you have to do it in a way that's not going to cause you to fall. Where you basically get put in a helicopter, flipped upside down, dunked in water, and you have to get out. Some people, if they've been told what they need to do, just can't access that bit of their memory.
And I think that we, reserves form such a small part of our lives as paragliders. You know, they're very rarely thrown. Students come out of school not really knowing much about them. And yet, actually, there's. There's a life-saving tool that we just get told about. But if you look at this other stuff, you look at what happened in skydiving, you look at what happened in the oil rig or the oil industry.
Like, you need to live and breathe the fact that you have a reserve. You need to know how it works. You need to chuck it in practice. Even if, you know, you don't have the opportunity to do that. You need to hang up your harness, attach the reserve handle to a cushion instead of a reserve parachute and chuck it and chuck it and chuck it. Like, no. The force you need to pull, the direction you need to pull, how hard you need to pull it. I'd love it if students, when they were in school, when they finished their training, they were hung up in a hang point in their harness and they went through those drills too. So they didn't become afraid of what was involved.
It's that level of familiarity and understanding. We need an order of magnitude more if we're to actually make use of what we have.
It has to become like our pre-flight checks, doesn't it? I mean, I love what. I love what you said. And like you said, I mean, none of this was part of my initial training. No, you have a reserve. That was kind of it. You know, or here's how you throw it, you know. And, you know, what Theo says with the Acro guys, because they do it so much and it's just part of their repertoire is, you know, first it's a mindset. First, you know, before every single flight, you have to, I am willing to, this might be the day where I have to throw my reserve. I'm going to throw my reserve if. And then the second part is just having it totally. I mean, that's part of your, like your pre-flight checks. You know, every time when I get off the ground, that's the first thing I do is, well, not right off the ground, but once I'm safe is, you know, reach down and practice it.
Because the other thing too, is these days we're often, many of us are flying with different gear. You know, I've got my comp gear. I've got my X-Alps gear. I've got my Acro gear. You know, the first time my funny story about throwing my reserve when it wasn't attached to me, you know, I had two reserves in that harness. Right. Right. I wasn't used to flying that harness. I didn't think about that until I saw my first one flying away and started laughing at myself. Wow. That's interesting. You know, and so, you know, we can't rely on luck, but it's, so it's the, it's the mindset. It's having it down. You know, Theo talks about like every single time he has to go down his leg and right. It's right there. Down his leg. Right there. Down his leg. Right there. It's, you know, it's because every harness is a little bit different. You have to switch your mindset. Okay. You know, my X-Alps gear, I've got one in my comp gear. I've got two.
That's a good thing to be practicing. Um, and then, yeah. And then that situational awareness is really hard for people to just, you can't tell somebody that on the ground and an instruction thing and go, remember to look at the ground. You know, it, it takes SIV practice. It takes, I mean, it's like you said, it's training.
It's training. I think you, you, there are so many good points in what you just said, Gavin, the two that I think are really worth picking up on are what Theo said about really visualizing the circumstances in which you might need to throw it. And the other is standardization, you know, swapping gear to start with the first point. Um, I learned to skydive a couple of years ago and it was, um, it was a great thing to do. And I'm wary of comparing skydiving and paragliding too much because they are very different things. Skydiving is quite in the best sense, formulaic. You're jumping in the same way, the same aircraft with the same gear. Usually with the same people and in the same air mass.
And you spend most of your time away from the ground. But one of the things that they do really well. And when I learned was they, there are a limited number of malfunctions in skydiving and they're actually a limited number of malfunctions in paragliding if you break them down. Um, and when I was learning, they put me in a mock harness. They had me look up on the ceiling of this little booth and on the ceiling of the booth were a bunch of different. Glider or parachute configurations, malfunctions. And every morning before we went to jump, they pointed that one and you'd work through the actions on your harness that you're in. So you were already preparing yourself to see something abnormal. You were then not only working out what you would do, but you were going through those physical motions and you were doing that again and again and again.
And one of the things I loved the most about that drop zone, it's an amazing drop zone was skydiving. I was based in Houston was that you see experienced guys doing that, you know, guys with thousands of jumps who just drop in there and just work themselves through it. And I thought that was incredibly admirable. And it's exactly what you were saying, what fear was saying. You are preparing yourself for the circumstances in which you may need to throw. Um,
and I think the, the, um, Revis talked about this. I don't know if on the show, I've talked about this several times. I'm sorry, listeners for being redundant, but I think this one's really important. The other thing is in flight. I think it really behooves us to constantly have an assessment as of right now, how much time you potentially have as of right now. I just, I do that now. I mean, if I'm flying eight or nine hours, I do that constantly throughout the whole flight. You know, am I on the deck? Am I, do I have 5,000 feet underneath my feet? You know how much, you know, because you can kind of, if you're going to a cascading situation, you are going to be looking up and dealing. And so you have to have a framework. You have to have a framework in your head. How often do I need to look down? How much time do I have to solve this?
And, and then just making an automatic, okay, I've got five seconds. I've got 10 seconds. You know, if something happens right now, this is how much time I'm going to have. And then you just don't push that. You just, you deal, don't have it throw. It's as easy as that. You know, you have to, you have to, I don't know, like prepare your mind for these frameworks before something happens.
I think that's right. I think it's very hard to do. It is hard to do, but
it, but it's, but it's like everything, it's a habit. You know, if you, if you start just doing it in the air while you're constantly just, you know, just checking in with, it's kind of like a check-in. Okay. I've got a lot of time to deal with this. I mean, it also helps me kind of deal with fear. You know, there's not really, I mean, even if the air is really hairy, there's not that much reason to be all that nervous. If you've got a lot of ground clearance, you know, if you've got a ton of margin, you're pretty safe, really. Like you said, the glider's not going to fail. Um. You've got, you've got time versus you're scratching out on a windy, uh, you know, ridge line. That's a different, that's a totally different ball game. That's an instant throw. Something goes wrong. You're throwing instantly. You're not trying to recover that.
Absolutely. And I think that's a great way of approaching it to add a nuance to that. There was, um, one of the coaches in the club in Scotland, he's been flying a long time, used to be a nuclear safety engineer, a guy called Dave Thompson. And he, he used to always say, just put numbers on something. Yeah. So I like your idea of five seconds and he would do it on everything. You do it on wind, on comfort, on everything. He's like, just start to calibrate these things. And so I really like your idea of, of saying I've got about five seconds or I've got about 10 seconds, something like that. I think is probably a more approachable way of doing it.
Yeah. Just cause you're going to be, you know, obviously you're going to be very busy. Your mind's going to be working on overload, trying to solve this problem. And it's, I, I, I get that. I mean, it sounds absurd. But I get that people can lose that ability for situational awareness and you just go all the way in without ever even thinking about it.
And I think, I think that's true. And I think people, when they're very stressed as well, they lose the ability to innovate. So one study that was quite well done again with the helicopter stuff was they worked out if there was a problem, how long does it take someone who's stressed to come up with a novel solution? And the answer is about 10 seconds. Hmm. On average. And we actually saw that, um, on the first reserve study we did where we sent 55 pilots down the zip line, we had, um, one chap who he grabbed his reserve handle and he also grabbed his stirrup. So when he pulled the handle, it could only come out, you know, a few inches from the harness and he looked at it and he just went down the whole zip line, just looking at it.
And this is, you know, this is an experienced pilot who when told what had happened was like, well, of course I just needed to let go of the stirrup or, you know, I need to pull the package or something, but he just looked at it and he froze. And the other behavior that you see quite often is, is what's called perseveration where people just do the same thing over and over again.
Right. Expecting a different result.
Yeah, exactly. And people can't innovate. And so that leads them to two things really. The first is that the capability. The kit has to work and it has to be as fluid as possible. And the second is, yeah, you're absolutely right. People have to prepare. This has to be on their radar that they might need to Chuck.
This is a big part. I mean, this whole psychological side of the sport that we play is, is a main ingredient in the book that will soon to be out about the podcast. But this, this came up again and again, that we have to know. Really clearly. Who we are and how we react. Are we a freezer? Are we a solver? Are we, do we do things calmly? Do we panic? Cause a lot of that can be trained. But it's also just good to know it about you. You know how much, and we're going to get into passive safety here, but you know, how much do we have to rely on passive safety versus getting things done?
Do you have interest? I'd like, do you think that that is contested? Oh man.
Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man.
Oh man. Oh man.
Oh man. Oh man. And like I said, I think it can be trained, but it's – you talk about kind of like – it's like the flow channel thing. When people are in a situation that is beyond their skill level, they often report that they don't remember any of it. They can't process, well, I don't – it just happened. It happened, whereas when you talk to really experienced pilots who have some kind of major event, it's really slow. It's like everything is happening in slow motion and you're dealing with it. It's just – it's not a big deal. You've done it so many times and you've been through it so many times.
So I – was that person at once a freezer and they've solved it through training? Yeah. And skills or – I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't have the – I don't have enough knowledge about that.
Nor do I. I mean I think from what I've seen in the medical field, it's very trainable. You see junior – very junior anesthesiologists or ER docs who are confronted with something stressful and some will freeze. Some will work things through. Lots of people do kind of stereotype behavior. They just do the same thing over and over again. It's usually trying to put a drip in somebody because it's a thing they know how to do.
But then by the time they've been doing that job, you know, a few years, they're seasoned pros. I think the issue is that flying is – you know, it's the icing on many people's cake. It's very hard to get that degree of experience and familiarity with your hobby.
And so I suspect that people who – Who still freeze when they fly, it may be that actually they're trainable and they can get beyond that freezing phase. But it's going to take a lot more hours than they're able to put in.
Yeah, I think so too. And I – when I look at myself, I wonder how much the other sports that I've done that, you know, before flying, you know, with kayaking and really serious stuff and kayaking and waterfalls and the kind of things that were really, you know, very much on the edge. I don't know if that training – It helped or that kind of going through that mentally helped for flying. But I've always had a very unusual, I think – would it be parasympathetic response? When I say that, is that the right way to – but when I get in really extreme situations, I experience fear like everybody else. So, you know, if I take some big whack or something, it's like, whoa, I mean my heart rate skyrockets.
But I think like most people's. But if it's a really serious – If it's a really serious situation, my heart rate plummets. It almost goes to resting heart rate and everything becomes really vivid and it's just a problem that is to be solved. It's really – and I've always been like that. So I don't know that that's something that training has done. I kind of doubt it. I don't know. It's really interesting. But I would posit that participation. I would say that taking in this sport without some of that would be really kind of hairy. It's hard to deal with things if you're just freaked out.
Yeah, absolutely. So I used to kayak not nearly at the level you did but some reasonably intense stuff that was way above my skill level. And I just managed to terrify myself through four months going around British Columbia with people who are much better boaters than I was. And I was getting more and more scared and more and more kind of incapable. And I think it can work the other way. And I think that actually that experience was incredibly useful because it meant that when it came to flying, I was able to pace myself. And as it is, I find flying a very relaxing experience. So I think it's the experience you take in.
It's the way you learn. It's probably a little bit about your personality and the other things. You've done. But it's a fascinating question and one that I would like to know the answer to. One thing that did come up actually, which was very interesting, is on the podcast, you know, you've talked a lot about intermediate syndrome.
And there's a book that many people will have heard of called The Killing Zone, which looked at general aviation pilots. And that was I don't remember if they called it intermediate syndrome in the book. I don't think they did. But. They said. Pilots, you know, with about up to about 300, 350 hours were the really vulnerable ones. And. There was a critique of that book that I read recently. And the guy who wrote the critique kind of looked at the author of the book's maths and just sort of not kind of oversimplify what he did. But he essentially said that, well, most pilots in the 50 to 350 hours. Bracket. And so they're most likely to have accidents because that's where most of them are.
They need to compensate for that. And those that who have flown for longer are alive by definition, but they've kept flying. So you need to kind of compensate for the maths. And what he came up with, actually, was he was like, yeah, there is intermediate syndrome, but it is probably up to about 2000 hours in general aviation pilots when you do the maths properly.
Which was it was depressing for me because when I read that, it was about two. I'd just gone past 350 hours and breathe that enormous sigh of relief. It's like 349 of the danger to life. And then 351. I am sorted.
One hundred percent safe. And it's like 2000. I can take a while.
Yeah. You know what? That's I really like that. I have, you know, I think for a long time and this might be numbers I'm just pulling from the sky. But, you know, for a long time, I kind of heard like 500 hours, you know, so you're kind of 50. 500 hours or like you said, I've heard 350 a lot. I like I don't have the data, but it sounds like this guy does. 2000 sounds a lot more reasonable to me. And just just now knowing the arc of of my own flying and chasing it really hard. I think the other thing, too, is if you don't log every single flight and hours, you know, whether that's on X contest or somewhere else, I think we have an often really inflate the numbers that we do. I mean, I hear people all the time, you know, saying.
That they got 200 or 50 or 300 hours. And I say, OK, well, you have to be like me then and basically unemployed and chasing it as hard as you possibly can. And I haven't seen you do that. You know, I mean, that's a lot of hours. You know, so when you hear like Antoine Girard that gets 500 hours a year, you know, I've known almost nobody that gets that kind of hours unless you're like a test pilot, you know. So, yeah. Anyway, back to the point that I think. Yeah, I think intermediate syndrome is. A much longer part of our flying career than we were either told or taught or. I mean, I think it's something we need to be wary of for much longer.
Absolutely. And I mean, it comes down to there's so many things in that. I mean, the first to your original point, like when you I chatted to some of the guys at the British Association and when people turn in their membership application every year, like it's always it's always rounded to the nearest 10. You know, no one has actually flown like ninety three point six hours. They've flown. They've flown ninety or they've flown a hundred. It's like, oh, man, everyone's landing like bang on the second.
So that's one thing. I think the other thing is, you know, it comes down to denominators a bit like we were saying at the beginning with, you know, do you do it by people or do you do it by hours? There's obviously the quality of the hours that you are flying and the way that you are learning. But the more global point, which is that, as they said in that critique that I read, mastery is assumed long before it is achieved. Yes. You know, we think we know. We're doing a lot sooner than we actually do. Well, I put myself in that bracket.
Yeah. And that was I guess that's my point with that with the 2000 hour thing is that I was I was the same. You know, I done I done a couple of big bivvies and my hours were getting up there and I'd done a bunch of S.I.V. and some macro training. And I was kind of like, who got through intermediate syndrome. And then looking back at when I thought that to now, it was just preposterous because now I know what I still don't know. There's just. So much to learn. I mean, I think that's what keeps most of us really fascinated with this sport is that, you know, even back then when I had all that, I was such a neophyte. I just man, I didn't know a lot and I still don't know a lot. And so I think it's one of these things that we should probably drag out a little bit longer. You're you're you're bending towards this exposure model.
I take it. What? Talk about that.
Yes. So this is.
Potentially. A quirk of some of the stats that we've done, and that's why I've not really published it in anything that we've, you know, we've kind of put out so far. But when when I looked at. The the kind of flying people were doing through the cross country survey in my head, I thought, well, the people who are the most current, so the people who have the shortest gaps between their flights and the people who did the most flying. So the most current. And the most. Experienced. Well, they're going to have the least number of incidents because that's what you want to be, isn't it? You want to be a pilot who's flown loads this year and flew yesterday, not somebody who flew one hour six months ago.
And. The data that we got. And I say this cautiously because there are limitations to every data set didn't really support that. I mean, what kind of came out of that data was the more time you spend flying, the more likely you are to have an accident flying. So. And that doesn't negate the value of experience. It probably reflects the fact that the more experience we get, the more risks we take.
God, I can't even imagine trying to parse that kind of data. That must be really difficult. But, yeah, that's that's something we talk about a lot. You know, currency versus exposure to risk. Yeah, I've been grappling with this personally lately because I, you know, when I start adding it up. It's like, wow, I've been at this a long time. You know, I participate in the X-Alps. You know, I participate in some stuff in aspects of the sport that aren't particularly, quote unquote, safe.
And yet I wouldn't do it if I didn't believe it could be done safely and through, you know, kind of religious training. But at the same time, yeah, you're out there doing it all the time. It is just odds.
Yeah, I think it is odds, but there's there are nuances to it. And the other thing is that. You know, if you don't want to die paragliding, don't go paragliding.
So you have to, as with all of this is going to be risks and benefits. But I do think that there are safer ways for us all to fly.
And I guess that's what the research that I've been doing is sort of coming towards is what are the. The key. Key things that will make us safer pilots.
The problem is, is that we do do all this for fun. And so it's all very well me coming up with loads of rules. But, you know, I would struggle to obey them. Like I fly because I love to fly. I fly because I love to be in the sky. If I say, you know, don't go above this altitude. Well, that's going to be hard when the thermal is going up and I'm having a great time. It takes an enormous amount of self-discipline. And I think a really great example of that is. Is what happened on Mont Blanc last year. And is that something you've discussed on the show before?
No, it hasn't even come up. That's a great example, because I was, of course, suffering the heat getting to St. Hilaire that day. So I'd like to hear about more fun, but also the dark side of that that day as well.
Well, it was interesting. So I was working through in Verbier, so about 45 minutes from Chamonix. And I went through on the Wednesday afternoon. And. As I. Pulled into Chamonix, I saw all these gliders super high and they were, you know, I went into the landing field and there were all these guys flying down. It's like just been on the summit of Mont Blanc. And I was pissed. I was like, I have I have missed this. I was such a grumpy bastard to my poor wife. I was an absolute dick. I was like, right, that's it. It's done. Never going to be able to land on there. And like because actually the last time it had been landable, I'd actually been in the air in Chamonix.
And I was like, oh, this is a good day. And I had to land because we had to catch a flight back to the UK. So I was like, man, this is never going to happen. Once once again, a bit like a bit like the covid crisis and me working for the boys. It's all about me. You know, the real human tragedy, real human tragedy here is what happened to me. So I was pissed. And then during the course of the evening and the next day on launch, where the winds were different, they were kind of like northerlies. They were, you know, it kind of came out what just an absolute clusterfuck had been going on on the summit the day before. And, you know, there were these sort of tales coming down of, you know, all these people being on there, guys slipping all over the place, failing to take off.
And, you know, as a community, we can be quite judgy. There was quite a lot of like, well, I mean, that guy should never have been up there. Right.
But actually, I think the truth is. If you look at what happens physiologically when you fly at that altitude, probably none of us should have been up there. And so.
I took off the next day and.
Managed managed to climb over Mont Blanc. Actually, it was gorgeous flying this way because you couldn't come from the Italian side. You had to soar up the face of it. And just to be soaring up the face of Mont Blanc. It was absolutely incredible.
You know, it was super emotional. And as I.
Was flying above the summit. There'd been a rule put out saying you can't land. And I saw some people landing. And like it took quite a lot of me not to just think, well, it was super easy to land because it was just soaring up. So it was just a bit like landing at the local hill. It's like, you know, you could just could just touch down a little touch and go. You know, maybe. Maybe you didn't tell anyone about it, but then, you know, at least you landed. But I managed to resist. I managed to stay high and had a memorably wonderful flight. But it did take a little bit of resisting. And. If you can bear it, can we talk just a little bit about the physiology of what happens when you try and do something like that?
Yeah, of course. That sounds fascinating. And I have a lot of experience with hypoxia flying here. So we all need to know about this.
And I think that's a good point in itself. Like you have a lot of experience with hypoxia. A lot of the people who were there on that day didn't. You take off at the Breville launch in Chamonix. And. You know, it's lightest winds. You run your forward launch and you start flying.
Then if you were quick, you could have on that day and certainly on the day before, you could have got yourself up to Mont Blanc altitude. So 4000 miles an hour. And 800 meters within about an hour and a half. And that's an enormous ascent rate. And so you're up there. And actually, the only reason I think why your body can tolerate that is because paragliding isn't very much work. Like we did a study with the help of Jocky Sanderson and the amazing folk at the Sharborough Open, where we worked out how much oxygen and how much energy you consumed. Flying a paraglider. And it was roughly the same as if you're driving a car. And the reason why, again, that's one of the things that retrospectively like, well, of course it is just sit in a chair and pull two strings.
But I'm always really tired when I land from a long flight. So I think that wasn't a given. But actually, that is the truth. It's not that much effort to fly your paraglider. And I think that's how you can get up to that altitude. But when you're at that altitude, you have very little reserve. Like the margins are slim. And it's only the fact that flying the paraglider doesn't require that. It doesn't require much oxygen that allows you to do it. To look at that at its most extreme, the fact that Antoine Girard managed to fly it 8,000 plus meters, I think is testament to the fact that one, he's an amazing pilot. And two, he's a mountain guy. But also he was acclimatized and it didn't require much oxygen from him. But then you're then probably not thinking that straight.
You're quite cold. You're tired. You're exhilarated. And you don't have much margin. Then land on the top of Mont Blanc. Then when it comes to take off again, as we all know, you've got to run faster at high altitude because the air is thinner. So you need more speed to launch the wing. But then suddenly you need a massive amount of oxygen because you're trying to run fast at just under 5,000 meters. And then your body completely decompensates. And I think that's why we saw what we saw on Mont Blanc. It's because these guys... These guys were unacclimatized. They ascended 3,000 plus meters in a very short period of time. They got there simply because they weren't doing much. And then when suddenly they had to do stuff, the wheels fell off.
Everything fell apart. And I think that's what we saw. But the point of that story is that does it stop people doing it? Absolutely not. It's their hobby and it's what they want to do. And it takes an enormous amount of discipline. And to put the lessons that we learn about how to be a safe pilot into practice. And I don't underestimate what discipline is required.
And I wonder too, you say about that it's physically not very hard, which certainly is true. Flying cross country. But to your point of being really tired, I think the caloric needs resemble...
Jogging for the same amount of time or even more. From what I can't remember, we had somebody on the show that spoke about all this. But your caloric needs, your glycogen needs from your brain burning so much energy are substantial. So I wonder how much that plays a factor into that. I mean, Matt Biesner, my neighbor and mentor really, always talks about it kind of like going into the alien world. When you're... When you have a really long flight. And this is different for different people. But, you know, for him, it'd be like an eight plus hour flight kind of thing. You know, you land and you don't really feel... The first time I really noticed this, I'm jumping around here a bit. But the first really big triangle I did out of Fiche.
And I made it back at, you know, 10 hours and 10 minutes after I took off back in Fiche. And until my feet hit the ground, I felt like I was really with it. I was really on it. I'm, you know, I'm having a... I'm having a good day. And it was a really good day. And then I landed and I could barely stand up. I was a gong show. I couldn't talk. I couldn't really process. I was just like... I mean, I was euphoric. And I'd had this amazing flight. But, you know, I hadn't been eating enough. Clearly, I hadn't been drinking enough. And this is when I was pretty new. I've learned how to help those things. Obviously, mitigate a bunch of that. But, you know, you are burning a lot of juice.
You absolutely are. And... I mean, I love that feeling. Like, I love that feeling of when you land and it's like the Earth is alien for a minute or two. I mean, my longest flights have been in beer. And, God, I love it when you do that. But you absolutely have to look after yourself up there. And what you talk about is true. You need to eat. You need to drink.
When you start to get into the real, like, weeds of what's going on in terms of your brain function and your, you know, your caloric needs, and we can delve into that if you want, because it's something that I'm very interested in. There are nuances to it. But the bottom line of... You just need to look after yourself. You need to eat. You need to drink. And you need to fuel your mind and body. Whether it's actually calories in the pure sort of sugar sense or whether it's some of the other chemicals in the brain that are getting used up, I think is a point for discussion. Whoa, that's...
I've never even thought about that. So you might just be running out of dopamine or something. You might be running out of... Yeah, it
might be adenosine, I think. So this is... You kind of get into the edge of my area of knowledge here. But, like, because the way the brain works is it's a great big bunch of nerves that are constantly moving potassium and sodium ions around. That's how the brain works. And thinking hard doesn't necessarily require much more movement of those things than is already going on. So it may not require... It may require more calories.
But the effort of flying and the effort of being up there and having your heart beat fast and the physical and environmental stress of flying a paraglider certainly does. Sure. Wow. I mean, one of the things that... And again, this is jumping around, but one of the things that we tried to do was simulate the paragliding flight environment. And this was a classic example of me thinking something was a really good idea and getting it way over my head. But I was helped by some really great people in doing so. So for the last few years I've been doing my research, I've been very fortunate to have signed on as a PhD student at a laboratory called Extreme Environments Lab in Portsmouth.
And they specialise primarily in cold water immersion. They're kind of a temperature lab, but they do... They do more hypoxia and other stuff. And the professor there is a guy called Mike Tipton, who's a remarkable guy. And the other guys who work there, Claire Eglin, Heather Matty, Jeff Long,
these guys are masters at framing a question. So I think, OK, well, what happens to your brain when you fly? And they're like, OK, slow down. What question are you actually trying to ask there?
And so that was the question I came to them with. And the question we ended up trying to test is, if you went on a ramped flight, so if you flew over two hours to 3,658 metres and then came straight down, how well is your brain working? Just pretty specific. And then we said, OK, well, if you add some environmental stresses, so if you add cold and you add a headwind and you add the hypoxia that you would experience at that altitude, then how well is your brain? How well is your brain working? And that was the question we tried to solve. Because I think when you fly in the places you do in Sun Valley or when you fly in, you know, you fly over Mont Blanc, like you're definitely not the full shilling.
But I was kind of interested a bit more, like if you fly, say, alpine altitudes, what's happening there? So we built the simulator and we got a pod harness and we got essentially a big fridge and a hypoxic chamber and a fan.
And we simulated the headwinds if you were flying at, you know, 35 kilometres an hour, 36 kilometres an hour. And we got people to do cognitive tests. We looked at these different aspects of brain function.
And what I got from that result, from that study, was a great big muddle. The reason why I got a great big muddle from it was because we're all in the same boat. We're all very different. So what physiologists would call inter-individual variability, there's a lot of it. And when you look at cognitive function, particularly,
we really vary in how things like hypoxia and cold affect us, except in the broadest, broadest sense. Some people get a bit better with a little bit of hypoxia and a little bit of cold. Most people get a bit worse. Then because it's a simulator and it's really hard to do and it's really faffy, we were able to test 20 people. 10 in the same 10 as controls, which isn't very many when you've got all that vulnerability. And then you say, okay, well, I'm doing all these cognitive tests. If my guy doesn't do so well on this puzzle, what does that mean when he's trying to decide whether or not to land a Mont Blanc? Can I link the two? I don't know. I don't think you can very well. And then there's the last problem with simulating anything,
which is it's not scalable. It's very scary being in a simulator. And the decisions you make in a simulator don't matter. You lose the game, but you don't lose your life.
That's a huge component. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Isn't it? Yeah, of course.
Exactly. So then you try and draw conclusions from this, and it's really difficult. And I think the only conclusion I could take from it is that when you're flying for a couple of hours at altitude, at pine altitudes,
you are not so grossly distorted that, for example, you need oxygen.
But I would be wary to make any broader conclusions from that. And I really learned from that experiment. And that's why in the reserve experiments I then did, instead of 20 people, I had 55 in the first one and 88 in the next one. And we tried to answer a much simpler, much more complex question. Right. So that was as much my journey as a researcher as anything else. But the point of this - It
sounds like, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like maybe the conclusion of the hypoxia study mirror in a sense what we were talking about with knowing how you react. My first real experience that I know of, at least, with hypoxia was many, many, this was right after college. I was climbing down. I was climbing down in the Andes in Bolivia. And we were up 17 something. And the day that we were trying to summit, there were three of us. And it was just really interesting. We all got hypoxic, though at the time, I don't know if we knew what that was. But it was really interesting to see the differences in the three of us. You know, this girl we were with was just hysterical.
She just became like a comedian. My buddy was like, he just turned into a comedian. He just turned into a little shit. He was just down and pissed and irritable about everything. And I was just kind of like happy-go-lucky. I was just kind of like, you know, kind of everything had better colors. It was almost like I was on something.
And I've noticed this. So my point is, I think you have to get kind of aware of how you deal with it. And since then, and with all the flying I've done, even when I have oxygen, we often spend a lot of time, really, really high here. And especially this last month, I've had a lot of really tall flights. And I've gotten in the habit of trying to give myself, I'm not very good at math anyway, but I'll give myself like really basic math problems as I start pushing up over 16. And a few of these flights, I haven't flown with oxygen more because I'm hiking, flying, whatever. I've blown the forecast and I'm taller than I think I would have been. And so most times just trying to save weight. And so I won't have, have the oxygen and I'll start doing these math problems.
And, you know, one plus one and two times two and easy stuff. But I started getting into the moderately difficult. And I like, wow. And I, the point is I feel fine, but I'm not work. I'm clearly not operating very well. And so it's just, it's just a kind of a signal to me, like, okay, you need more margin. You're kind of goofy. You're kind of silly. If you were on the radio right now, I don't think anybody would understand you. Even though in my mind, I feel like everything is totally fine. Totally.
I think that's true. And obviously as you get more frost bit and it's hard to do the math problems, you lose the fingers. But I think the, the bit that I think is important to separate there is this, the kind of flying you're doing, like the really tall flying when hypoxia is a problem, you should be flying with oxygen. And you need to know, as you say, what, what they would call in aviation medicine, your hypoxic signature. So there's some great videos on YouTube of like where you, you see these super competitive mega macho American fighter pilots, like, you know, at 25,000 feet and the chamber in which they're training depressurizes. And you see them just kind of mashing these kids toys together and giggling, um, which is, I mean, that's great to watch the, um, and you know, I actually discovered through, through going to attain myself that my hypothesis signature is that I select start saying the word rad a lot, which is very English.
But it's just, it's really different. It's like, man, that was so rad. I was like, Oh dear, that's not your, it's not your style. Um, but, uh, the, the lower altitudes are the interesting ones though. And that's why in the studies we did, we went up to, to just 10,000 feet, no, to 12,000 feet, sorry, 3,660 meters, because there,
you know, as soon as you leave the ground, like your body starts to change. Um, but I was kind of interested if in the paragliding environment, the unique mix we have, we have of, of cold and hypoxia, um, at these say Alpine altitudes, what are our brains doing then? Are we impaired and are we unable to make good decisions? And the answer is, I don't know, but I don't think so.
Hmm. Interesting. That's, that's, that's super interesting. Before we totally leave this subject, you mentioned quite a while back that the three main things, the pilot air, uh, decisions in glider control, misjudgment, a distance, passive state safety is the, is that is not the most important factor. Can we dig a little bit more into those, especially misjudgment of distance? This is a new one for me.
Yeah, no, with pleasure. Um, and those are, I think our best approaches. Okay. I guess when you look at aviation as a whole, um, there's been some amazing work done by some guys called weakman and Chappelle, and they've got this thing called the human factors, um, analysis and classification system, H backs. And it's actually really simple. It's well worth a look. And what they do is they have this big tree in which every error, say a skill based error, which is, you know, do you turn the glider left or right? Do you move your airline or where it needs to go? Is it the root of this enormous tree of different influences? Um,
but when they put all their findings together initially for military aviation, and then for commercial aviation, then for general aviation, they found that it was well meaning wrong decisions and an inability to adequately control the glider or the aircraft under the circumstances that led to the majority of accidents. When I analyzed that in paragliding, it was exactly the same on a minor, on a more minor level. They, they had this category of perceptual errors. Um, and, and in, you know, commercial aviation terms that might be, you know, how they read the instruments or how they read the landing lights.
Um, really the only relevant one for us, um, was misjudgment of distance. So that would either be distance on the cloud and which I always find really difficult. Like I always think, ah, I've got ages to go. And then suddenly it's all gone white, um, or misjudgment of distance on landing. Um, and, and, and,
and, or time returns, all these things. But that's still a minor part. The bit that really matters are the decisions we make and how we control the glider. And so the passive safety is not the most important factor. I think it's, you know, you talk to pilots, and I'm the same, that you buy a new glider and you spend ages, like, you know, you look at Dust of the Universe, you look at the reviews, you're like, hmm, it's got this, you look at the EN testing. And the gliders are undoubtedly becoming more and more safe if you do nothing. But I think the problem is we do stuff. We try and control our glider, we make bad decisions, and we misjudge distance. So I don't think passive safety, well, desirable,
and it's great that it's still improving and you get improvement to performance with it. I don't think it's passive safety that keeps us safe. And Stefan Bernhardt on a recent podcast was talking about that, I think. He's like, you need to train actively. You don't need pilots. You don't need safe gliders.
Yeah, Alex Roby said the same thing. I mean, I think that, yeah, and the classifications are,
well, I've talked about that stuff to death. I mean, you really very much go from, as Theo shows in his videos, you know, just hands up and it will recover to, it's a whole different animal, and then that's not going to work. And, you know, so it requires very different skills. But, yeah, I think it's, I think, again, it's more important to know who we are and how we react than, you know, relying on something like passive safety. You know, what kind of pilot do you want to be?
Absolutely. And like I say, the glider is not the problem. It's great that it's safe. It's us that's the problem. We make the bad decisions. We do the errors. And I think, so, I mean, we want to keep flying. We don't want to beat ourselves with sticks. Like, you know, so the question is, is how do you, how do you then build constructively on knowing that you are the problem? And I think I'm a massive advocate of SIV or pilotage or whatever you want to call it. But I think, I think the way you find out the kind of pilot you are, and I think the way you train reactions and the way you understand is you have to feel stuff.
So I've been trying, I've been trying to do as much SIV as possible because I try, try, at least try to practice what I preach. And I think the bits that are really valuable, I've done a few courses. I've done brilliant ones with Jockey. I've done some brilliant ones with, with Malin and Fabien at Flyo. I've messed about over various lakes and occasionally hard ground. And the bits that are really valuable in SIV, I think aren't the complicated stuff. They're not stalls. You know, they're not spins. It's useful to be able to spin to get rid of a cravat. But understanding the power of the glider, understanding how to get out of auto rotation,
understanding when you've not got control. Those are the things that I think you need to gain from it. And the huge skill of the SIV instructor, and that's why I think it has to be done so sensitively because it has to build confidence. The huge skill is getting you to understand these things without scaring your witness.
Yeah. And that takes time and training. It
really does. And an SIV where someone comes out scared is a completely pointless experience. Right. That's going to make somebody freeze more.
I'm utterly convinced of that. But, you know, I lost a friend last year who was a relatively new pilot. And he died because he, he wasn't able to correct auto rotation. He was flying an A glider. He was flying a glider with passive safety. He had a collapse. He went into auto rotation. And he was fresh out of school. He not had the, and he was someone who would have trained. He would have done SIV. He would have done pilotage, but he hadn't had the opportunity to do that. And that's what we come back to what we're saying about the beginning of, of training being far, far too short. I mean, it has to be, and I understand why it's the length it is. But we are vulnerable when we come out. We need to keep learning.
And I'm really desperate for new pilots to do these courses in the right way and with the right instructor early and to learn how to come out of auto rotation. If my friend had been able to just pull the opposite brake hard enough and soon enough, I am convinced that he would still be alive.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, that's, that's one of the big subjects with this search and rescue that I was talking about. He's on for Kiwi and he's still, you know, this, hopefully this information will change by the time this show goes up. But as of Sunday, the 5th of September, when you and I are talking, he's still vanished. So it's been two weeks and a day. You know, there was just very little clues other than, you know, his last ping was at 14,500 feet and then everything just went dark. So no radio, no inReach, no more, no more tracking, obviously no SOS, no, no messages. And so, you know, you start when you, when you really, really search, it was quite dense. So, you know, people can disappear and dense stuff as we see all the time and in the Alps and Valle and, you know, people go through the canopy and just vanish.
But so that, that certainly could have happened, but you start to, you start to put together, okay, well, you know, what, what are the things that could have taken him down to the ground before 10, you know, before the next ping, which was 10 minutes later, when you're that tall, you know, you're not, you're not really, most likely you're not having a cascading event. You haven't thrown your reserve because we would, you know, have a very good chance of, you know, one thing for your wing to disappear, but your reserve and your wing harder, you know, that's just more stuff that we can see from the sky, whether it be helicopters or fixed wings or drones or just walking around. We have a lot of people on this, on this search and still do. So, you know, the, the two most dangerous things are the most, you know, the,
most consequential for sure are being gift wrapped, you know, not sorting out a reinflation after a big stall or something, you know, maybe you have a frontal and it goes behind you and then not catching it and you go into the wing. So you can't, because basically we were operating on, okay, he didn't get his reserve out because this is a pilot who has thrown his reserve quite a bit. He knows they work. We know that, you know, he was pretty risk averse and pretty smart. And so we believe he would have gotten his reserve out if we could have. And so the other one is the auto, auto rotation because often it can be pretty hard to get your reserve out when you've got that much G force. So, you know, the, the, the possibilities are obviously more than that, but those are the two that we came up with it. Okay. Those are the two things that are going to get you to the ground pretty quick without a possible deployment.
Well, first and foremost, I really hope that he is found and he is okay. And he emerges like Guy Anderson with a story to tell. But I, I, you know, I realized I've, how difficult that must be. And I'm very grateful. I guess all pilots are. There are people like you guys who go out and search. I mean, there is a third factor and this is not just speak to what's happened to Kiwi. But one of the things we don't know about pilots is how many accidents are a result of what you call medical incapacitation. So if someone flies very high, that's the other consequence of hypoxia is it puts enormous strain on the heart. And so you don't know about people who have hypos or who have heart attacks or who have other things in the air.
Because when, you know, if there is an accident as a result of it, it's very hard to work out what caused what. Again, that's not to sort of dwell on this, you know, in this instance. But I think that's another factor that's not considered. But that also doesn't say we need to all have medicals because I don't think we should go down some big legislative route with that. Right,
right. Well, and it was, you know, and it also, it kind of fits the bill where this one fell apart for us a little bit was just the 10 minute thing. But, you know, if you're, if he'd had a heart attack in the air, you know, and he wasn't really fit. So that's certainly possible. And he was in his 50s. So certainly possible. You know, that would explain one of the reasons that the in-reach stopped tracking because he might have bent over his instruments. So certainly, you know, we explored those and that's certainly a possibility. You know, the, the problem then is usually, you know, an unmanned glider, you know, unless he, unless he had like a big spasm or something and buried one of the brakes, he probably would have flown for a while. You know, there was some wind and he was tall.
And, you know, I think again, the chances are maybe higher to find a person in that scenario than, than not. But that does explain the potential for the in-reach stopped working because you're, you're, you're over it, you know? So,
yeah. Oh, like I say, a hundred percent hoping for the best. Yeah.
Yeah. No kidding. Well, we've got, we got the A team out there looking for them. It's been, you know, there's, there's always positives out of these and that's hard to say, obviously right now, but you know, we, we learn a lot from each one of these. Unfortunately, many of us have been involved in many and, you know, there'll be, there'll be great learning from this as there has been in all of them. But it's also, it's just, it's real heartening, I guess, I'm not sure that's the right word, but to just see our community in action, it's unbelievable. You know, he, he, he disappeared on Saturday and by Monday morning, you know, we had just teams around the world and it's, you know, and there'll be, I'll do a big article on this and we'll do a podcast, I'm sure just specifically about this incident.
But, you know, it was, it was incredible to just see the organization, A, that's required on something like this, just from the, you know, managing the telegram groups and managing the gear resources and managing the fundraising. And, you know, so there's all of that. I mean, I know there's a lot of frustration in our community for people that couldn't be there looking for him, but it's been amazing to see, you know, there's so much that people can do. You know, we've had people working on this all over the world and it's been in there and it's been invaluable. It's not just for them that it makes them feel better that they're helping, but it's actually stuff that we really need on the ground. You know, studying satellite imagery and contacting military.
I mean, it's just, I guess what my point is is that our community is way more resourceful than almost any search and rescue team. And we have people from so many different backgrounds that can pull in crazy resources, whether that's Google or satellites or technology, tech or, you know, or like I said, fundraising. I mean, that's one of the main aspects of going to look for somebody is having the money to do it. So, yeah, it was, you know, it's tragic and I do hope we find him and I hope he's sitting by a spring somewhere. But it's also, it makes me feel better about us as a community for sure because it's been really neat to see how everybody pulls together, makes it happen.
Definitely. I mean, there's been a lot of, times over the last few years when I've been very glad to be a paraglider pilot. And, you know, you see things like that. So, I think it was a Spanish chap who went missing in beer who fortunately turned up, you know, the efforts and fundraising that went into him. And even as I said, when I lost my friend, like I am fortunate to be part of a fantastic local group of pilots in Scotland and they were amazing. They rallied around and, you know, and I went flying 10 days later. And the police had impounded my glider, which is, I mean, you know, we've got to love our friends in blue, but it's, you know, when something really tragic happens, what you tend to do is you tend to like pick some other random thing to get really pissed off about.
So, I decided that the hill upon which I would make my stand was the fact that the police had impounded my glider because they couldn't, couldn't tell the difference between the one that belonged to my friend who'd had an accident and the one that belonged to me, despite the fact that my one had my name on it, didn't have any of the lines cut and wasn't covered in blood. But when I actually was able to get my glider back, I went flying with my friends from the local club and it was just a, it was quite a, it was a very moving experience to be back in the air again, thinking of the person who we'd lost. But also just the support of, of those around you to get you back in the air. It was a really moving thing and hugely appreciated.
I'm sorry about your friend and it's, it's unfortunately, I mean, that's why we talk about it so much on the podcast and going up to launch and everything else. It's just a part of our sport. It's just, it's going to keep happening, but hopefully we can, you know, through your studies and, you know, looking into all these reasons that happens, we can make it less and less. I don't think we'll ever get to zero, obviously, but we can, we can, we can help. And I appreciate that. But so before we're going to move on to SIV, some more thoughts there. I forgot to ask you the final question about hypoxia. Are we doing damage to ourselves? I mean, is it like mountaineers that spend time at death zone for too much time? Is it, is part of the reason we should fly with oxygen just because we want to save our brains?
I don't think we're doing that much damage for the short periods of time that we're up there. There's been some really interesting studies of, as you say, very high altitude mountaineers. And also speaking of someone who spent three months living at just under 5,000 meters in Nepal, lower altitude mountaineers, that you can, you can get changes in the white matter of your brain on MRI scan after spending long periods of time at altitude. I think the bit where we might damage ourselves is cold. So one of the things that came out of that simulator study is just how cold it is. How cold our hands get. We were kind of simulating UK style conditions. And when I was trialing the simulator, I was like, oh yeah, this kind of feels like how it is flying at home. But I had temperature sensors on my skin because the university said we had to, it's part of the kind of ethics thing.
And we were measuring skin temperatures that breach the university ethics guidelines, which was something of a worry. And it made me think that it's, it's not a huge thing. But we're quite vulnerable to something called non-freezing cold injury, which is when you get frostbite, the tissue freezes. When you get a non-freezing cold injury, it gets to between nought and about six degrees. And so it doesn't freeze, but you get changes in the nerves and the blood vessels of your fingers. And it means that the fingers become much more vulnerable to cold each time they then get re-excited. And so it's a really important thing to keep in mind So, you know, I guess anyone who was a kayaker
who got really cold hands is then when they go into the outdoors, they often get this kind of white fingers and they get screaming barfies when they come back to you. It's becoming more and more recognized, mostly in the military context where this has been well studied, but in the outdoor industry as well, that if you keep getting really cold hands, you can end up with pain and you can end up with loss of sensation or altered and annoying sensation in your fingers. And so it's a really important thing to keep in mind. And when you talk to mountain guides and others, this is a bit of a part of life for them. But I think it's something that we can avoid as paraglider pilots and we should avoid because I think we are probably damaging ourselves a little bit there. And, you know, lots of these people, lots of the folk who listen to your podcast are very hardcore outdoors people, but just the basics, keeping your core warm,
investing in a decent pair of gloves, but letting your hands down when it's safe to do so, letting the blood flow come back in, letting your fingers come back to them. Don't let your hands get to that stage where they are ice cold, where you can't feel your fingers, where you get screaming barfies when they come back to you.
Because actually even that is a distraction. It's something that's going to mentally distract you from your flying. So irrespective of whatever damage you're doing, having very cold hands is going to impair your flight performance. But just, I think, pay attention to your fingers, I would say.
Yeah, I can speak to this personally. Recently this spring, I had a solo flight out of here, and it wasn't a particularly tall day, 13, 14, it's still tall, I guess, for the Alps, but for here, not so. But in spring, it's just, it's brutal. It's so cold. And I have tried everything, the heated gloves and the whole deal. And I was really well dressed, and I had the heated gloves, which in my opinion just don't work. And what I didn't have were the kind of pogies that you're seeing a lot of the Himalayan pilots use, which are now the way I have solved them. I
have solved this,
but I didn't have them that day. So these are like the down warm, like the sleeves. The down
sleeve things, the WinsRiders ones. Which are,
you know, you have to think about all aspects of that when it comes to reserves and flying on your Bs and just mobility with your hands. But I, just about a month ago, I got my middle finger back, and not fully still, but basically all summer. I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel down to the second knuckle at all, which for a rider makes typing really tricky.
But yeah, I had never, they had never gotten that bad. I had always treated it as just, you know, like the screaming barfies. But I'm noticing it now, whether part of that's age or not, I don't know. But they just seem to keep getting worse. In other words, the damage has been done, and I've got to be way more vigilant about keeping them warm than I used to. They just seem to get colder faster.
They do, and that is exactly what's going on. And it's not aging particularly. It's re-exposure. It's just that constant getting it cold, warming it up again, getting it cold, warming it up again. So as with all of these things, it's, you know, it's never too late. And actually just really working hard to prevent those hands getting cold is how you're going to stop again. And I think that's the thing that's going to make it worse. I think it's really difficult because the position we fly in as paragliders is like guaranteed cold. Like you've got the, your hands are high, so the blood's got to overcome a gradient to get to your fingers. The warm blood that kind of comes from your core goes under your armpits and then round past your elbow and then to the front of your wrists. So if you think about the position we have in the brake lines, all of that is exposed to the airflow.
So that's going to get cold. And then what happens is when your hands are up for a while in the brake lines, the muscles, particularly your biceps, get cold and they start acting like heat sinks. So the warm blood that's come from your core then passes by this cold muscle, has to overcome this gradient, gets colder and colder and colder, eventually makes it to your fingers, and then your fingers are looped around the brake line. So it pools there. So if you wanted to design a system to get cold hands, it's paragliding.
That's perfect. Perfectly designed. I'm so glad you're so kind for freezing your hands. Matt, I want to be mindful of your time. I know it's getting late. You're into the world. We're an hour and a half in and I feel like we could go for several more hours. So we might have to do a part two of this. But what in your list here do you feel like we need to tag? I know I want to end on your refinement of accidents and trauma and what we should be carrying with us, which we talked about pretty extensively in your first show. And everybody listening, you need to go back and check that out. What belongs in our first kit? I know you've refined that. So I want to end with that. But what haven't we hit here that you want to before we move to that?
Sure. I mean there's a couple of short things that would be nice to mention. The first is I've been learning a lot more about G-forces lately, partly by screwing up a bunch of times over Lake Garda. That was last week. But also through the research. I mean, I've done a lot of research on the reserve parachute studies that I've just done. G-forces are really interesting because your G-tolerance changes. And you wouldn't think it because you'd think it would just really be the gap between your heart and your neck and how fast you were going round and round. But I don't know if you've tried this, but when I start the season, I start doing spiral dives and I'll start to get that kind of gray out thing. These really not very deep spiral dives, you know, four, six meters per second. And then by the end of the season, you can confidently hit 16 down without any problems.
And it really hit home to me that your ability to tolerate G-force changes. It's affected by how cold you are, whether you're hydrated, whether you've had something to eat and drink. Yeah, another good reason.
Certainly if you're hypoxic or if you've got any illnesses and also just how often you've been flying, that's going to change your tolerance to G. And I think one of the things for people who do long flights is be aware that your tolerance to G can drop through that flight. As you become tired and as you perhaps eat less, you know, you're not drinking perhaps as much as you should, as you become a bit colder, all of these things are going to drop your G-tolerance. And I think that can sometimes catch people by surprise. Even for those who aren't doing kind of big flights or big spirals, it's worth just having a little look at some of the ways you can train your G-tolerance. You know, there are manoeuvres that pilots do, these kind of straining manoeuvres, where you like tend to your abdomen and imagine that you're trying to have a big shit or you're really trying to kind of breathe out against resistance.
If you look for, it's called the G-straining manoeuvre, then you'll see loads of examples and information on how to do that on the internet. But just learning something like that is really helpful and it can massively increase your tolerance. So if you do find yourself at the end of a long flight and you need to do a big spiral dive, it's worth knowing how to do these things beforehand. That was just a quick mention of G. The other bit that I kind of wanted to mention was some of the reserve parachute stuff that we've been doing.
So I've done two experiments with reserve parachutes. One where we sent 55 people down a zip line and we said, as soon as you feel as if you're going down a zip line, try and chuck your reserve parachute as fast as you can. And we stress people out. We gave them tasks. So before they were sent down the zip line, we had them look at two LED lights and try and match what those lights were doing with their brake lines. That meant their eyes were as if they were looking up at their wing. We then tried to get them to say every word they can, beginning with the letter A, which was absolutely hilarious. It was mostly, yes. Our community, as speaking for the British Paralympic community at least, seems to be focused on aardvarks, the Antichrist and anal.
Those were the big hitters for that. But people said those a lot. And then we sent people down the zip line and we found a bunch of stuff. And I think, like I said earlier, we have all these barriers to us throwing the reserve. We have barriers like, you know, us trying to fix the wing or us becoming task fixated or losing altitude awareness. So when we actually decide to throw it, I mean, that thing is just crazy. It's got to come out. And so the purpose of the studies that I was really doing were kind of working out some of the kind of barriers between human and reserve parachute to getting that parachute out.
There's a video that I'm sure we can link to that I made showing the zip line studies. It's actually, it's really long. It's quite dry, which I apologize. And it looks a little bit like it was hosted by the amazing Andre Bandara, who wasn't dry at all. But it does look on the video like I've been locked in his basement for some time. But we kind of go into the findings and details there. But there's some things that I would like people to know. The first is that you need to work out what direction your reserve parachute likes to be pulled out in. If I can make one plea to manufacturers, people who set standards, and I have been making these pleas, please design harnesses where reserve parachutes come out in any direction.
But if you look at some harnesses, some harnesses say you have to pull a parachute out sideways, laterally. 70 % of people on the zip line pulled upwards. That's just what we humans do. You like to use the big muscles of your biceps and, well, not my big muscles. Those are big muscles, like to use them.
But you like to use these kind of core muscles and instinctively pull upwards. And we saw people on those videos change their grip to pull upwards even harder. Even harder. Even though their reserve parachute was stuck. So work out what direction your parachute likes to come out in. If it likes to come out sideways, practice, practice, practice. You are the person who needs to be hanging up from the pull-up bar with a cushion. Repeating that action over and over again. And then petition your harness manufacturer to make your parachute come out in any direction you want.
When you say sideways, do you mean so you're like, let's just all together right now. We're facing forward. We're in our pod. We reach down. You mean sideways like doing a shoulder raise out to your side?
Yes. Jeez,
that's hard. It's not. Most of us aren't very strong in that position.
Yeah, it's not strong. It's not natural. And as a result, we don't do it. Like most of us told to do it. We just pull upwards, which is what you want to do. But unfortunately, some harnesses are designed such that the parachute doesn't come out very easily if you do that. And that is an example of a gear fail. Yeah. Like that's where the gear needs to be better. Like any direction you pull it, it needs to come out.
Here's another. I'm sorry to throw this in, but here's another gear failure that I just learned on this search and rescue. We do not. We should not be making wings that blend in with our environment. You know, I'm over the white and blue wings. They don't. I mean, we should all be flying red or orange gliders unless we're flying in the Wyoming Red Desert. Then you need something else. But think about this. There are things, you know, your rescue teams need to have orange shirts on. I mean, it's just then you can spot everybody. You know, if we wear colors that blend in and fly wings that blend in. Think about that if you go in.
Yeah, absolutely. And an example of that. So, Stefan, who you had in your podcast, who's a fantastic guy. As you know, he is. All you know, he is all that is man. And I was flying with him in Colombia and he was flying a black glider and a black harness. And you just see this thing, this black end. So come up behind you and you hear through the radio contact for ship hostile.
That works. That works. But yeah, you're quite right. Some of the other things that it would be great for people to check is we found that the harnesses. You know, the harnesses that have an integrated deployment bag. So whether the deployment bag comes with the harness, not with the reserve. Those work better, generally speaking. But for the ones where you have to attach a handle, check how long the strop, the bit that connects the handle to the reserve bag is. It needs to be long enough that, you know, when you pull the handle, it doesn't, you know, rotate the deployment bag or pull it before the pins are released. Because that's not going to come off. It's not going to come out at all. But it needs to be short enough that the bag is well clear of the harness before your arm is fully extended.
And if you look at the videos, I show example of this. But we had quite a number of smaller pilots, shorter pilots, a bunch of female pilots who they would pull their reserve handle. And this strop was so long that the reserve would just still be in the harness when the arm was fully extended. So that's definitely something to check. Again, hang it up. Have a go.
But the other
thing… But
doesn't that, Matt,
doesn't that resolve itself when you throw it?
Well, it's really hard to throw if your arm is like fully out as if at the end of your throw and the bag is still in the harness.
Okay. Because whenever I've thrown, I always do this kind of double motion thing. I rip it forward like up near my head and then I huck it back.
Yeah. And that's an interesting one of itself because we found some problems with that. So I was taught the same. I was taught kind of do a two-thing, you know, get it out and then throw it backwards. The problem is that the bag has obviously its own inertia and there's a slight delay between your hand and it. And so we saw a couple of examples of the… Well, one of the most memorable one, which I show in the video actually, is where the bag comes out and wraps around the guy… The strop wraps around the guy's wrist because it's also long. And then he's able to throw the… It's not the strop, sorry, the bridle wraps around the guy's wrist and then he throws the reserve. So actually, if that reserve had come out, it would have just pulled his shoulder out of his socket. Oh, God. So I know. So that's the disadvantage of the double.
So I kind of came away thinking that people should just throw in a single sweep, that you should locate the handle and just chuck the whole thing backwards. Okay. So what people will then say, and this is another interesting thing, is… Well, actually, if you chuck it backwards, isn't it going to tangle? And the big problem, as you know, is you can throw your reserve and then it can get stuck in the main wing. And if you're in a kind of auto-rotation or sat-type configuration, that's when it's most likely to get munched. And I was chatting to a guy called Gabe the other day. He's quite a remarkable bloke. If you look at Party Till Impact, this is Instagram. But he's a man who set his reserve parachutes on fire, who does all sorts of crazy things.
And he's like, well, the thing you need to do is you need to chuck the reserve parachute down between your legs because then it's least likely to end up in your parachute. And when the DHV did some studies, they got some mathematicians to work out what's the best direction to chuck your reserve parachute. And they said, oh, you should always chuck it towards your feet. The problem with this advice… Okay. …is that, one, it relies on that kind of two-stage motion, which I don't think works very well.
Secondly, it relies on people having the kind of wit to do that. And my other plea is don't overcomplicate the process. Unless you are a test pilot, unless you are an acro pilot, unless you're someone who's super used to chucking their reserve, please just throw it. Don't waste too much time and effort thinking I should throw it in this direction or that direction. Just get the thing out and then fix any problems that might then arise. That would be my advice. And particularly for people training pilots, I would strongly advise them to just train. Find the handle, chuck the thing away. That's what matters.
So this sounds like this is going to go against this. You tell me what you found.
One of the things I learned from Cody and all the acro training I've done with him, and, you know, he's doing the infinite and all that. I mean, he's way beyond my level. But I promised not him but one of his students recently about a week ago has been learning the heli for the last couple of years and wanted me to reemphasize this on the podcast because it's something I've talked about quite a bit because I feel like it's really important. But before you throw, whether it's left or right or, you know, if you've got two systems or one, to barrier breaks, you know, to grab. Before you just let go of your right brake to go with your right hand. You're going to have to have a hand to reserve. Just put them in both hand. And, you know, ideally you're in like a nice deep tail slide. You're not holding it in like deep stall, which is a really, you know, configuration that can go haywire really fast.
But a tail slide is super easy. Just bury the brakes. And, I mean, at worst you're in a stall ball, which is also fine. But the point is, is if what happens to a lot of people is they're way too hands on. And so they, in other words, they haven't relied enough on the passive safety. They put their hands up. It's going to solve most of the problems. A lot of people don't. They feel like their hands are up and they're just waving all over the place with their arms. And so that puts them into the cascade. And then they go to throw. And the wing is finally given an opportunity to get back under control, which it does when you go to throw. And then you end up in the wing. You end up getting gift wrapped. So this keeps the wing in a stable.
It's a stable configuration where it's not going to restart. And I think that's especially important if you're low. You know, if you allow your wing to restart and you're low, then you've got the whole pendulum thing happening instead of just if you just kept it in a pretty stable deep stall or a tail slide, you're probably going to walk away. That's basically like coming down under a very small reserve.
I'm not sure I agree with that one. It's too complicated. Yeah, it's just too complicated. Like I think. If you're the sort of person who has the skills and presence of mind to be like, I need to throw my reserve. I'm going to put myself in a really deep tail slide. Then, you know, you might have not found yourself in that situation in the first place. I think the reason I think if you have the skills and presence of mind and experience to really control the reserve throw, then there are definitely configurations that are going to be favorable to you. Exactly like you just described. But what I've seen from my studies, 55 pilots on the zipline and then 88 pilots, you know, going round and round at 4G.
What I've seen from that is people don't have that capacity. Like they, you know, even just trying to get people to do a task as simple as saying words while moving their brake lines. Most people can only do one or the other. They can't do both at the same time. And seeing people trying to fail to problem solve, seeing people scrabbling around for handles, all these things. A lot of times people, some would leave their hands in the brakes when they grab the handles. Some would let them go completely. Others would grab the risers. People do all sorts of funky stuff. I think it's unrealistic to tell people to do anything other than just throw it. That would that would be my view.
Again, as you train more and you become more experienced, time slows. As you say, you can do more. You can put yourself in a better position. But I think for most people, rather than thinking, I've got to break the brakes, we'll do that. Just get the thing out. Just chuck it.
Okay, great. Anything else on the reserve stuff before we move on?
Very small one. Just if you are a front mounted reserve person, make sure that it's secured at the base. Because what tends to happen with front mounts is you grab the risers. You grab the handle. You pull the handle up and the reserve pod comes with you. If it's not secured at the base. If it's just secured at the carabiners, then it's really mobile and you get a much less effective throw.
I want to make sure that everybody understands what you're talking about. Describe secured at the base.
Sure. So imagine you've got a front reserve that's secured from two loops at the top of it to your carabiners. So it's kind of dangling there and it can move up and down.
Put your hand on the handle of that reserve and you just very gently lifted the handle. You'd be able to move the whole reserve pod with you. It would come up. So what you need to do is have some other points at which it's secured. So be it that it gets secured to a leg strap or something else. So when you then pull the handle, the reserve pod doesn't move. It stays where it is. So you pull the handle and the parachute comes with you.
And is this something in your video?
Yes. Yeah, it's really clear. We've got some examples of that. I think people are going to have some hard
time visualizing that.
Yeah, no, for sure. And it's definitely something easier to see than describe. And again, apologies for the length of the video.
The next study that we've done, we then took the lessons we learned from that zipline. And we went to Flugschule Hockries in Germany, which is an amazing place. And we had 88 pilots, super willing. 45 went backwards at 3G. 43 went forwards at 4G, as if they were in a spiral dive. And they chucked their reserve parachutes. And we've got a video coming out of the conclusions from that soon. But they are broadly similar. The only bit that I would add to it from that experiment is if you are someone who flies very varied gear, you are the kind of person who needs to practice and practice and practice when they're in the air,
locating their reserve handle. We saw lots of people who had, for example, a front mount reserve go to their hip, because presumably that's what they're used to, or vice versa. I would really love it if reserve parachutes locations were standardized on all harnesses. Yeah.
I think that would be so helpful. We saw that. This comes back to that kind of just tricky thing. Yeah. Training your brain to do it over and over and over again. Because I have been caught out by this in an actual situation, throwing my reserve, just totally forgetting that I had two. Because I'd been using my X-Alps gear, and then suddenly I was with my Acro kit. It didn't occur to me until five seconds after the first faulty deployment that I had a second reserve.
Yeah, exactly. And it's amazing how your options narrow when you're under stress. So I would love to see parachute handles all be put on there. And I would love to see the reserve parachute handles on the hip. Because when we did our study, we saw that the majority of pilots, that's the first place they look. I think because maybe it's where your pockets are, or maybe you just orientate yourself by where the bones of your skeleton are. But that's where people's hands went first. There are technical difficulties in doing that relating to the back protection and also to that strop, like how you have something that's not too long that will hand-strain your hip. But it is doable. And again, my plea to manufacturers, I would love to see reserve parachute handles all in the same place. And the other thing is if you're moving around because you're being thrown around the place, your hip tends to stay in roughly the same place compared to, say, your thighs,
because they're going to wiggle around more. So I would really love it if all handles were put there. That's my plea.
Yeah, and again, this comes down to training, though. Like Theo, he's probably throwing his reserve more than anybody. And this is something he does every single time. He talks about it every single time. He launches and he launches. And he does the movement, both sides. Does it, does it, does it. It's something we have to make a habit of when it comes to safety because there
are a lot of
situations where you can't see it.
And people don't look. I mean, that was what we discovered in our experiments. People just don't look. What they do, and it's really almost universal, they turn their head in the slight direction of where the reserve is, but they don't look at it. They don't look for the handle. They feel for the handle. And it's only when they can't find it, and we're talking seconds, that they will actually look and try and see it. So that's one of the reasons why, yeah, it's really striking. Because people like to look in the direction that they're going, especially when they're stressed out.
So people just don't look. And so what I get concerned about is there's a bit of a trend for these, like, really thin, like, strimmer wire handles on some harnesses that are really flush with the harness. They're going to really flat against it. Like the XR7. I'd really like to see, yeah, I'd really like to see handles that are prominent, such that you can encircle your hand around it. Because people also, it's really noticeable, people like to get a grip on it. Even if they've got their thumb through it, they still don't like to throw until they feel like they've got a grip on the handle. Obviously, if you have the handles, like, super massive, it's going to catch on stuff. But there's a compromise, and I think the compromise isn't a very thin, hard-to-feel in gloves handle. It's flush against the harness. Yeah, that
was actually one of the reasons. I mean, I know we shouldn't be talking about manufacturers specifically, but that's actually one of the reasons I stopped flying the XR7. I didn't feel confident that I could, you know, that's not where I need to shave a quarter of a percent of aerodynamics. Yeah, that's not where you, I mean, I don't know. We take our glides and performance a little too far sometimes, and I think that that's one of them. I totally agree. And that thing's almost invisible and very hard to feel.
I mean, I've had some great discussions with manufacturers. A lot of the brands have been really engaged with what we've been doing. So I definitely don't want to knock the manufacturers. And they have a lot of different priorities, and ultimately, they are companies. People need to buy the harness, and the things that people care about when they're buying the harness is, by and large, weight and aerodynamics. And so, you know, the reserve parachutes tend to come in a lot more than quite far down people's shopping list. But as you say, I don't think those are the places to get your extra.00001 point of glide. It's by the drag of the handle. I absolutely agree with you. Agreed.
Okay, should we transition to your updated trauma kit?
Yeah, for sure. So in terms of the first aid stuff, I really appreciated how many people listened to the last podcast that we did on that, and also how many that have then got in touch with me and had some really good discussions with lots of your listeners about some of the stuff that we talked about.
Since we did that, actually three years ago, since we did that, I've kind of refined a bit what I think is important.
So I've kind of distilled the things that people need to know about, I think. And this is dealing with major paragliding crashes, not the little stuff. I think people need to think about how to work together as a team. They need to know how to manage the airway. They need to know how to locate and control external bleeding. They need to know how to bind somebody's pelvis. And they need to know how to protect someone from the environment. And I think those are the key topics. And I cover all this in the podcast that we did before, and I've written various things cross country. And I'll try and put stuff on the website that I have that is ludicrously out of date. But those are the things that if you're like, what do I need to know to treat a paragliding accident?
Those are some of the things you need to know. And for anybody of any experience, there are always things you can do under each of those headings to make things better.
And I will, so we'll put all that stuff that you just mentioned in the show notes. And I, like I promised earlier in the show, I will be writing an article also on cross country about this search and rescue. We just. We actually is ongoing right now for Kiwi, but and what we've learned from that. But I also want to implore all of you who are listening to, you know, when we get done with this show and after this, you know, this other information comes out, go do it. Like, go make the kit and put it in your bag and make sure that your community, your club, whoever it is, make sure everybody knows.
Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. best friend lied in the dirt for three hours in excruciating pain, not from his back, but from a shoulder that was out that we could have done something about had we had painkillers. And we learned after he got helicoptered away that we had a really good first aid kit in the truck that was about a hundred meters away, but that hadn't been, you know, that wasn't something we knew.
We didn't own kit and my own gear was too far away. So, you know, these are little things that really help your victim. Just knowing what resources, you know, you've got, does everybody have their map share page? Does everybody have the downloads to their inReach for that particular area? If you're not in cell, I mean, so there's a million things here. I'm not going to go into them right now, but, um, you know, if, if we just share what we, what resources we have before an incident, we're going to be able to do that. And so, you know, I think that's a really good way to do that. And if you're not in cell, I mean, so there's a million things here. If you're not it can really help the scene.
Absolutely. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast, but communication is 90 % of everything you do in the kind of rescue arena, um, communication and logistics. So yeah, knowing what you have, knowing where you are, knowing how to get help, um, knowing about your casualty, if it's not someone you've met before, all of these things matter. Yeah.
And it's, you know, kind of like the, the reserve thing, you know, if you're trying to learn all that in an actual scene, you're wow, it's frustrating and it's way too late. It's just so nice to know how to use that stuff in advance. And that's, you know, that's what we can learn from people like you who are professionals and paramedics and stuff is that, you know, you don't go fight a fire without any training. You got to do that stuff over and over and over again and make the mistakes. So you don't make them in an actual situation. I mean, there's still always going to be mistakes, but, um, we can make a lot less and, and have a lot less trauma and suffering for our victims if we're, if we're on the ball.
Definitely. And I think, you know, knowing what's in your first aid kit and how to use it, it's pretty important because actually if you buy a first aid kits kind of off the shelf, then they're, um, they're often filled with sort of relatively pointless and paragliding irrelevant stuff. Um, I do want to say like, you know, I, I really recognize when I do all the safety stuff that, that people go flying for fun. You don't go flying in anticipation of having an accident. Usually when you go flying, thank God there aren't accidents. So I do sort of keep all of this in perspective, but there are certain basic things that you can do to keep you and your friends safe. And they're the things that you're talking about. They're being organized, knowing what you have, doing a bit of first aid training, carrying a basic kit. So again, the kit is the least important part.
Like the most important part is your knowledge, your skills, and your ability to communicate with the people around you and the rescue services.
And just flying as sensibly as you can, given everything that we've talked about, the environmental limits, um, and your own personal ones in terms of the specifics of what should be in a kit. Um, I've kind of honed it down quite a lot. Um, the things that I think are important are pen and paper, some ability to write down what's happened to go with the casualty, um, pair of gloves, sterile gloves, a really decent bandage. So, and by that, I mean a trauma bandage or what's called a battlefield dressing. So that's something that's got a big thick pad on it and a kind of elasticated, um, bandage attached.
And that's something that allows you to apply continuous direct pressure, which is the best way to stop external bleeding. And then that's actually the barest minimum, I would say, then if you want to improve on things a little bit, you can start to add things like tape, a flexible splint. So like a Sam style splint, you can add some basic analgesia. So paracetamol acetaminophen, as you guys would call it. Um, you can add things like triangular bandages to support shoulders. You can add things like hemostatic gauze, which are, you know, kind of ways that again, ways of stopping bleeding. You can add all these things, but bleeding is what kills paraglider pilots. Knowing how to stop bleeding, how to find bleeding, stop bleeding and bind somebody's pelvis, which is a way of stopping internal bleeding is the minimum of knowledge I would say.
Great. Matt is always such a pleasure. Thank you so much for everything you're doing for the community and also just people in general at the hospital there in this trying time. And thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's just, it's, it's fantastic. It's, you know, one of the, I'm loving what's happening in the hospital. I'm loving what's happening in the hospital. I'm loving what's happening in the hospital. I'm loving what's happening in the community these days with just expanding our knowledge and you're a big piece of that, uh, chessboard. So thanks very much.
Thanks, Gavin. Thanks for having me on. And it goes without saying that everything that I do, all of this research stuff is actually a massive team effort. Like there are huge numbers of people who've been involved in all of these studies, not just the participants in the studies, but so many people from my home club, from the university to which I'm attached, you know, it's a, it's a massive, massive, massive team effort. So, um, thank you to everybody who's involved and continues to be involved. And, um, there's so much more to learn. That's what I'm excited about. There's so much more to learn and so much more we can do.
Yeah. And a shout out to cross country for, for helping us out with, with putting these studies together and having our back and publishing all this. So thanks Ed and the crew for, for helping us out. I
mean, I've almost deliberately not listed people because there are so many who have helped, but yeah, cross country have been absolutely stellar. So, and thank you, Gavin, for all that you do for the community. I love these podcasts and, and it's a real pleasure to be on it. It's even more of a pleasure to listen to them.
Well, I can't wait for the next one. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it.
All right. All right, my friend. Thanks. Take care.
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