Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the CloudBase Mayhem. I wanted to thank all of you who have so far done the survey. I put out a survey a couple weeks ago after the Bastien show on how we could improve the podcast now that we're six years in and have no plans to stop. So it just takes a few minutes. If you haven't filled it out yet, it's on the website, cloudbasemayhem.com forward slash survey. Getting some great feedback there and especially on things we can improve. So critical feedback is, of course, welcome. And if you haven't done it, please do so. And there's swag to be given out. Bastien's books, The Beginner's Guide to Paragliding. And I'm going to throw a bunch of CloudBase Mayhem swag into that, truckers hats and Patagonian T-shirts and stuff.
So thanks if you've done it. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. And if you haven't, go check it out. Again, it only takes a few minutes. And it's pretty fun to get all this feedback and lots of suggestions for new questions and that kind of thing, which I wasn't able to incorporate into this show. We just put that out, but definitely will in the future. So thanks, everybody. Again, cloudbasemayhem.com forward slash survey. This talk is with a good friend of mine, Malin Lobb, a British comp pilot who is also the co-owner of Flyo with Fabian Blanco, who I've had on the show. They're there in Annecy. They do a ton of SIV instruction, probably one of the leading schools in the world on SIV instruction and also tandems and gear and just general pilot instruction.
So Malin was chasing comps pretty hard and still is a few years back and met up with Fabian to work on his own SIV and decided to become an instructor and has so mostly has written lately quite a bit about flying two liners. And also the. The ins and outs of SIV and how it's really changed over the years to accommodate the newer, you know, sharknose, pyramidal shaped wings, sharknose, sharknose plan forms and how SIV has really become, especially for Flyo, not so much about checklists, but about adapting to each individual's pilot skills. And so this is a long one. We spent almost two hours and barely touched the surface.
So we will do. A follow up show with Malin, please reach out to me after you listen to this one and please stick through the whole thing. There is a ton of really super solid advice and information here, a bunch of things that I'd actually never heard before. So a lot of stuff on safety and improvement and just becoming better autonomous pilot, you know, things like not relying on a passive safety and the problems of certification and where it gets. People. People into trouble. So a lot of great stuff here, but we decided after the show that we really needed to do a follow up. And I thought maybe the best way to do that would be to have you listen or reach out with any questions for Malin after you listen to this.
If there's things we've missed, if there's other things you'd like to ask him, just reach out via the website or Instagram, Facebook, whatever way you like to communicate. And we'll do a follow up, ask me anything show with Malin. And unfortunately. I have to apologize that the sound quality on this one on Malin's side, there's a fuzz that comes in every once in a while. And this was not something we were able to edit out as miles, our editor, who's amazing. He can do a lot of things, but this one was just going to be something that would take hours and hours and hours to deal with. And one of the feedbacks we got in the survey was that often the sound quality is not great on the other end. That's because we. We do all of these via Skype and really depends on the internet connection and a lot of other things.
We don't have the budget or the time or the ability to send out microphones as we would like to to our guests because they're all over the world. If they were in the States, you know, near me, that'd be one thing we could do it. But unfortunately, we can't. So just bear with it. It goes to the back. You know, you won't notice it after a while. It just becomes part of the thing without further delay. Please enjoy this great talk with someone who's. Who's made his living in paragliding and free flight, really talented pilot and talented instructor. Enjoy.
Now, and great to have you on the show. I've been wanting to talk to you ever since you very kindly trim my very out of whack glider after the ex-alps last year in Annecy. And man, much has happened in the world since then. So we'll get into some of that, but I I'd love to, you know, before we talk two liners and SIV and some of the stuff you've been writing about. Very well lately, it's been some great articles and thoughts on, on flying two liners is just your history. How did you end up, you don't have the right accent for France. How'd you end up in, in Annecy and how'd you end up with fly yo and, and working with Fabian?
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me.
So it's a bit of a long winded story, but I I'd sold my, my business in the UK and I had a bit of time on my hands. And so that was around the time that we created the, the British paraglider. So I started my own business in America. I started in England for a few years on a racing academy for as much as I wanted more training in comps. So I kind of set up to help train myself as well as pass on that knowledge as I love doing. And. I, I'd done a bit of training with Fabian before. If I. uh SIV wide and i got talking to him from point of training me to then be able to train the race academy and that year i was following the comp scene around um europe so i got talking with fabian and he he said yeah come along he's trained a lot of SIV instructors um and we started our trip in annecy and then went around europe and ended up back there and the wife i knew i wanted to emigrate but the wife wasn't so sure and she kind of got into the groove as we as we traveled around and funnily enough she she said all the way around like yeah i think in portugal the first time she was like yeah i'd live here but something about france i don't live in france and we were all the way around and then we ended up back in annecy and she's like you know this is probably the nicest place we've been i'd move here so combining that with the fact that i could do some training with with fabian um just meant this was the obvious place to to emigrate to and when i started with fly it was very casual it was basically fabian was gonna you know train me to to learn the dark art of SIV uh instructing and then the more we worked together the more we wanted to work together so rather than me you know going off and doing my own thing i was um i brought into the business and have i've been here ever since and
and was that your business in the uk too or is this your first paragliding flying business yeah
it was i've had a few businesses in the uk but my last one was um in energy efficiency and um carbon trading that sort of thing and and throughout that business was when i was getting more into competitions and it afforded me the time off to do comps and do the training i i needed to do and
i mean our comp our comp uh season and year kind of got shredded this year with covid but is that still kind of high on your priority list i know you just added a little one to the family you've got a little one-year-old at home is it still it is is working at flyo and doing all the instructing allowing you to still chase comps
yeah for sure i didn't do one comp uh this year this year has actually been the worst year since i started paragliding for my own personal development for my own personal flying in august we were super busy doing tandems i did 340 tandems in those two months but yeah so we were doing nine ten tandems a day and but my brain doesn't compute that that's like flying so my own my own personal flying i did less than 10 hours like combining acro hiking fly and cross country so you know i usually do 200 or at least and 90 of that flying in in comp so it's been a weird year where i haven't you know i've plateaued i'm not not progressed so
um having a baby i've got a really supportive wife she's awesome so um that just adds to the uh the complications when i'm at home but i still get to go and um still get to go and play this
will be a question that's annoying to the listener because i know they're all you know scratching the bed to get to you know two liners and comps and SIV and stuff but i ask is when we were we you know we stayed in du sard and i i've you know i kind of cut my teeth in anisee back in the day in terms of you know flying in the alps as an american it's just one of my favorite places in the world and i think i would align with you if i you know just had to choose right now to live somewhere else i think i'd try to and we actually looked at a place there and we were kind of getting all excited about potentially buying a place in that zone kind of sard area because it's you know cheaper than anisee of course and uh but is it hard to immigrate there was that tricky coming from the uk is that not a big deal no
i mean at the time we were doing our our europe trip when brexit was was voted on um i mean that's years ago now so we we moved over and we brought a house we brought into the business i've got leila my um i've got a five she's in french school you know we've done all the all the right things before brexit's happened but up until brexit we've got the freedom to move and live here without any visas any any problems at all so it was it was a very easy move i'm now we've got our cart de sujour um which is now changing and being called a brexit card which is much worse um it hasn't really changed our
before we can get full residency which we'd like to do um but no it was it was a very easy move the language um on the other hand is uh it's going to be a lifelong project for me yeah
i was going to say so how was your french before you started and how is it now yeah
my french before was like pretty non-existent and now i my comprehension is pretty good but the problem is like you can get to a point very quickly where you can go into the shops and order things and and and do that sort of stuff but language is about conveying emotion and talking in the past tense and the future tense and and all that sort of stuff and the reason why it hasn't progressed is if i was people can't understand how you can live in a um a country and not speak the language well but in flyer everyone talks such good english that i can especially when i'm teaching it's such long days and i just talk english all day all day and then i'll go home to an english wife and speak english yeah you gotta be forced to
do it you need a french girlfriend you just need to get the i
tell my wife that
she's not interested she's so unsupportive so surprising she's so so supportive in other ways malin you just gotta bend the curve there a little bit well i i mean so so are most of the students that fly you english speaking i i would i would have thought you guys had a lot of french students and stuff too or just just just fabian just take them
which yeah so we've been a team of 15 so with holy smokes
really yeah
eight or nine instructors and then the rest uh working in the office so we're we're about a 70 30 split 70 french to to 30 english or english speaking anyway because so i i take on everyone that um doesn't speak french basically so from all over the world we get people from india or asians americans canadians like that you know everywhere um so yeah i i do with that the other the french instructors deal on the on the french side but we are changing a lot actually next year um we since coming on i've doubled the we've doubled the size of flyer in the last three years that was that was part of me coming on was using my business experience from before and um you know polishing things up so we could we could increase what we do and me and fabian have now decided after this weird year that actually we we both want to downsize rather than
go bigger we just got to the point where we were organized enough um that we could do that and um and we just thought we haven't had time to do what we used to do like i used to test a lot of reserves over the lake we used to have like a lot of chats and meetings about pedagogy and and how we want things to progress and what i love about the ethos here and about fabian's and especially when he was training me it's never he never told me how things were it was always me discovering it for myself and he was as eager to hear my advice as as i was his you know and after 20 years and you know he's one of the best instructors in the world he wanted to be challenged and and that that ethos is is what i think makes things evolve um and it's like
it's so important i think that's why SIV has evolved here and maybe not so much in in other places because you know as soon as you think this is it and this is right you're never going to question you know other ways and uh that's yeah that's really important for me it
seems like you too i mean i i've spent you know not a ton of time but enough time with fabian to know that he's just got this this just awesome personality he's just so magnetic and enthusiastic and inspiring it seems like you guys have threaded this needle of getting into the business that you shouldn't have gotten in into if you love flying i mean we hear that all the time right you know don't make your passion your job uh but it seems like you guys are have figured that out i mean i love hearing that you're you're both trying to downsize because it's it's certainly you could you know you could make it about the money but then that road leads to nowhere yeah
exactly and um it's going to make us more creative again downsizing and we was yeah we were spending so much time like managing and keeping this big business going that the pedagogy are kind of creative side and how we wanted to really give more back to the students um that's the thing that's we've been lacking in the last couple of years so for next year we're dropping down to me and fabian and then two instructors who will help us on um on launch um and they will do the initiation and perf courses so like your p1 p2 courses and we've still got some single skin mountain courses that they'll run but it will mean that me and fabian can work kind of week on week off and on the week off we can we can do some testing we can
you know go into the mountains we want to develop some more specialist courses mountain courses and but it's it's that time that you really you uncover you know new things to be able to pass on to students whereas if you're just working the whole time boom boom boom you just get into a rhythm and nothing changes and
i'm i really want to get into sav but before we do i'd love to understand just more about the business in terms of if you had if you broke it down and in terms of the gear sales and tandems sav instruction pilot instruction is it all pretty even or what what's the what's the biggest thing that flyo does
um SIV probably and then a small margin under that tandems but tandems are just july and august because SIV is banned over the lake in july and august so there's no oh i didn't know yeah there's no yeah no SIV at all so we switch um full on to tandems um and that's actually still going to be a focus for next year we're still going to run a team of eight for tandems next year um but be less involved like ourselves with it
and is that just because it's a team of eight and it's a team of eight and it's a team of eight and it's a team of eight there's just too much traffic on the lake or there's just too much traffic in the air why do they ban it uh
yeah it's both that it's the beaches are packed the there's boats on the lake there's um i think in august there's something like two and a half thousand takeoffs every day from four o 'clock so yeah if you add like in in like april may and june we can have up to 10 so there's not
even space to do sav it's
just too many people there's too many foreign students uh people coming to to to learn or on xc courses and things like that you you can't add uh groups of uh of SIV as well
wow okay all right so let's let's let's switch to sav now and what um you you started off by getting involved to improve your own skills and you know becoming a better comp pilot what have you learned between that period and now in terms of how how people learn what they should learn what's the best way to do it what's the best way to do it what's the best way to do it what's the most critical stuff and we've all seen some of seiko and charles's uh videos which are all done there in annecy as well um you know i mean it seems like this is something that's dynamically changing to me yeah
um what's been the hardest thing well after setting up the race academy and for me that was really about creating it and then russ and um guy got involved and and they were bringing more the the pedagogy side of things so you know i i i was more the pencil pusher with that um the the hardest part for me from i i shadowed fabian for about a year pretty much learning the ropes which i'm so thankful for because you know people that just you know good pilots that then just set up and and start teaching SIV is the hardest thing for me was becoming a good instructor instructing is an art in itself and i think there's
there's a bit of a culture now where good pilots become SIV instructors and even though they're good pilots they're missing the art of instruction how much
how much does i just got to cut in on this because they're i for me i've never done any SIV instruction but how how helpful is it for your own flying to become a good SIV instructor because it's you know i sometimes you're
trying to explain from the ground what somebody needs to do in the air the things are happening so quickly or you certainly feel like they do when you're new at it that must be i would imagine that really translates to understanding uh what you're doing much better as well going through that process of uh seeing it from the ground yeah
it's a very different form of instructing to normal instructing so so when um
they want to add SIV as as a part you you know the very good french instructors they then come in and do a bit of s on destructing and it's then you notice the differences because when you're doing um a beginner course and someone's gently coming down doing you know gentle s turns everything's happening very slowly and they've got plenty of time to talk to the student and you know it's not that quick but when the student's in the box and you're doing dynamic things you have have got to be on the button straight away and you've got to be able to it takes a lot of experience to know in what situation what different things can go wrong because you need to know okay they're doing this maneuver so these amount of things can go wrong so and the more you do it the more you just you just instantly know that when the the wing makes this movement that's going to happen so you can be bang on it straight away because it is a much more fast-paced form of of instructing but fear comes into it a lot more as well so the people's approach to SIV instructing should always be from understanding how we behave as as humans under stress that's how everyone should should really base their courses because when you are overloaded with stress as a human you get the tunnel vision there's a lot more research into this in in skydiving where even instructors have hit the ground without cutting their main away because when you get overloaded you get the tunnel vision which is the same as getting memory loss because you're so fixated object fixation on something everything else drifts into the into the background so if you push your students too hard they'll end up not absorbing any of this information so it's as much you know one of the the skills you could say is being is being quick
that's not you know that's just one one skill of instructing the whole philosophy behind it is far more complicated in terms of how how to deal with humans in that scenario and
how are you how are you able to read that on the fly are you able to just see that you know okay so do an do an asymmetric frontal collapse and they're they just kind of do it weekly like they don't they don't do it with full authority and then you can kind of tell okay they're really hesitant or is it more are you figuring that out on the way up to launch you already kind of know just by reading them by looking at them seeing how fear how much fear is is overriding their ability yeah
we so in in the morning briefing when we sit down and we have a chat if they've had any problems in the air how long we've been flying um what they want out of the course um that that whole part gives a bit of an indication and then we start we do a lot of um work on rotations because unwanted rotations to the ground is the biggest killer in our sport so learning about how to fully master rotations exit from a rotation is really important so you gently build into deeper and deeper turns and spirals and um a maneuver called the rapid exit is the best single maneuver to judge your pilot's proficiency um so you know when i say
let's do a tight turn to your wing gets to 45 degree mark you can instantly see how a pilot's feeling by how readily they they want to go into a spiral how much energy they're willing to to take on it's you know within the first run you know how timid a pilot is are
you still getting a lot of people locking in i mean is the spiral still i mean other instructors i've talked to in the past of they get they get a lot of uh not awareness isn't the word i'm looking for but just the the spiral still kind of spooks them in terms of teaching it because people can so quickly get like you said tunnel vision or even black out yeah
it's because um we teach spirals very i don't know differently here but for the last 20 years or so a spiral was taught that you go to nose down you hold it for you know four or five seconds and then you come out and like well done that's what spiral's like and no one is going to maintain a stable nose down spiral um any recreational pilot is going to be able to hold that for about four or five seconds so we by the time they get to spirals we we teach a regulated spiral by the time they get to that point they've done a lot of rotations so rotations from rapid exits are really learning about what breaks speeds up a spiral and then they're going to be able to which break exits and then um collapses and rotations because it's the same rotational family how to exit with a cravat so by the time we're doing spiral regulation they've already built up um knowledge of being in control of a rotation with the exit break with their weight shift so people generally don't get out of control by that point because we don't move on to a maneuver until they've demonstrated that they have an understanding of what's going on so then when we do regulated spirals they dip in a little bit past their comfort zone which might be a 60 angle then they slow it down and before they're going to get thrown out so they've still got trajectory with their body and enough movement to drop back in they drop down back in past their comfort zone they squeeze the outside rate they release it they squeeze it and release it and you try and get this rhythm going where you're going past your comfort zone they're nearly out so you're taking a breather
and the whole time being situationally aware of how your vision's going you know you're tensing your leg muscles stomach muscles buttocks hyperventilating throughout that and um you know people feeling control and they're generally people are scared of spirals because of the unknown it's like how deep does a rabbit hole go what happens when i go nose down and it's also feeling of lack of control so when you teach your when they've got an understanding of rotations and then they do that and they realize how nimble their glider is and how actually if they're uncomfortable they pull out a little bit and go back in for me it doesn't matter if they're not going completely nose down and regulating from nose down to 60 nose down like a really high descent rate if they're playing at like 45 degrees 20 degrees 45 20 it's not overly impressive um
but they'll go and use it and the key thing about SIV is for people to be able to take certain maneuvers and go and do them because if you do a maneuver four or five times in a on a course and then you don't do another course for a year you're back to square one whereas if you can go out the next day and say oh i've got a bit of height to lose those spirals are great and you can just play with that energy then over time you will build up more and more confidence and more and more um resistance to the g-force so it's not about proving to me that you can go absolutely balls to the wall it's about proving that you're in full control and then you will go and use it as a tool
what what are the what are the kind of critical and maybe this is just different for every pilot but what are the critical things that you know when you give a high five at the end of the course you feel like people have gotten what what are the most important skills that pilots need to get out of SIV
um so we teach the four fundamentals basically and that is what i look for in a pilot in a good pilot so there's there's those and then the the key things that they should understand are rotations and the four fundamentals for me so that the the first one is is your body position and all of these fundamentals go and they look at how we behave as humans and we do things instinctively um under stress that are detrimental to our flying so our body position in our harness our harnesses are designed that you should be leaning back and fully supported and a natural instinct of ours when we get scared is we lean forwards and that completely changes the geometry of the harness we then have a strap that's slack and you get this forward and backwards um movement like you're on a on a rocking horse and that makes you feel like you're much more unstable and much more likely to lose your balance that leads into the second fundamental i could go into much more detail with this but that's actually
i want to pause on that that's actually really important because you know we were often taught that you know to to keep yourself from getting twisted up you know to sit forward and put your feet up underneath you and and you're saying really it's it's important to keep your body i'm assuming you still want to do that if you're if you're about to get up and get up and get up and get up and get up and get up and get up and get twisted up but but it's it's important to remain relaxed and sitting back in your harness like they're meant to be flown well
even with twists if you even the pod harnesses these days like back in the day there was some some super supplying ones but nowadays your upper body position in a pod harness is actually quite similar to a seated harness yeah good point and and when you bend your legs the equilibrium between where your knees are to where your head is is quite is actually quite easy to do that so i think that's a really good point so i think that's a really good point the trouble when you lean forward and you get that forward and back rocking motion is and you can try this next time you're you're sat in a simulator if you try and just twist your risers there's quite a lot of force reacting against that but if you rock forwards and backwards with your body and then try and twist your risers it it can be easier so it's really important actually to
to stay leaning back and comfortable and you've got to think of it as like a rally car driver so if you've got a rally car driver you've got to think of it as like a rally car driver in a bucket seat that can just lean back and relax and they're fully strapped in your arms are completely free to in in in that case drive the car and in our case use the brakes as soon as if you put that rally car driver on one of those inflatable exercise balls as they're trying to drive around the track they're going to be losing their balance and grabbing the door and grabbing the dash and things like that and we do exactly the same thing we try and find usually brake pressure to catch our fall so it's the foundation really is we use our harness um and that's again well part of our body position is not putting our legs out because it doesn't a lot of people get hung up on on pods and that they're so much more dangerous but you can watch any SIV video of students in just normal seated harnesses and their legs are flying all over the place like karate kid and it's and as soon as you've got a seated harness and your legs out you're in a pod you just haven't got that material around your legs
so your body position is the same way you're in a pod you're in a pod you're in a pod you're in a pod if your legs are flung out and you're in a seated harness then you've got that extra leverage to get to get twisted so the the most important thing it doesn't matter if you're in a pod or a seated harness is that the first sign of trouble you tuck your legs in and you get your heels under your bum and then you also lean back because you're you're gonna want to try and lean forwards um and then you're much more stable you're much more stable in your harness that then leads on to not losing your balance because ever since we had little toddlers we we've learned that if you're stood up and you fall over it's a good idea to put your hands out and catch your fall and not use your face um so we've we've had a whole lifetime of perfecting this skill of putting our hands out and you see it in people that are leaning back on their chair when they lose their balance suddenly your arms start to flap around and we do exactly the same thing in the air if we go past a 30 degree tip angle arms start to come out and we need to
dissociate our arms from our body because you shouldn't be able to do that if you're in a pod you should hope in your flying career that you never actually put your hand out and find something to catch your fall because you'll be in trouble yeah
right that's super valuable i haven't ever heard that uh i want to come back to harnesses but that's a really important point here that you've just brought out i mean when when i have seen people overreact and and do you know just do way too much it's it's because they when they start flailing their arms are much much lower they think they are you know you'll you'll talk to them afterwards and they'll say yeah my hands were up and you're like no they were blow your ass but
because the strange thing about um about these actions we do these um is that they are they are they're not actions we have to think about they're instinctive actions and it's so it's it was such a strange thing for me to get my head around that my arm will do something that i've not told it to do like when i'm when you fall over you put your arm out you don't think you don't have to think oh i'm falling over i better put my arm out it does it without a conscious thought and in the air when you see people and you know it's it's all going a bit funky and they start pulling you know two foot of brake they're not consciously doing it they're losing their balance and putting their arm out to catch their fall and they're finding pressure in in the brakes to try and help stabilize himself
your body keep them up to the pulleys and it's very strange the first time you actually do that um you fall and you don't need your arms and then of course you know your body rights itself because we are we're strapped into a harness um but it's it's still it's fighting every urge you've got to put your hands out yeah
it really is i mean this is this is the thing to me that i don't know is i don't know if the if underappreciated is the word for it but we hear you know the acro guys you know Pal Takats when i'm on the show they all say the same thing you got to do at least 300 stalls you know before you're even it's just got to be a non-event it has to your heart rate doesn't have and most people almost all are never going to get that many stalls unless they're practicing acro right but there have been so many times in my own flying in cross country in really rowdy conditions that kind of thing where if i didn't have that knowing i wouldn't be able to do that so i'm not going to do that so i'm not going to do that so about when a wing resets i would sit there and look at my wing going what the hell's going on what's going on my hands are up my hands are up but they're not you know what i mean it's it you have to make this super conscious effort to let the wing fly again you know you're trying to control it and it's only that SIV that teaches that we're getting way far ahead of the fundamentals here but um well actually
that's that's the that's the lead on from uh so the first one is
second is dissociating your arms so fall without putting your hands out and the third is brake range and and i always start the talk at the beginning that actually most people think about beginner pilots not using the full brake ranges in the deeper parts but what gets most pilots in trouble is not using the zero to ten percent of the brakes um in um you just mentioned pal and and his um his awesome videos the the mastering um paragliding videos he he in the the intro to the the stool he shows a couple people falling out the sky and and uses that an example of why people should learn to stall but actually in both those instances if if the pilots had put their hands right up to the pulleys they wouldn't have got themselves in that cascade event in the first place right and then and the majority of videos i see on youtube where someone starts to spin it and it goes parachute all and blah blah it's all going funky and it shoots they don't catch it it stalls all these cascade events because people are just pulling a little bit of brakes and that if you put your hands right up to the pulley you you'll fly away you won't get into a cascade event which will then need lead to to needing to stall um and when we get used to as pilots pulling a certain amount of pressure when we go parachute all that pressure changes slightly and we we bring our hands down to find exactly a pressure we're familiar with rather than it's all mental it takes no more skill to put your hands up to the pulley it's
all mental it's all mental it's all mental it's all mental
as it does to pull them down and try and find the pressure but to say okay something's going wrong i'm gonna give my glider full energy it it's it's really mental to say okay i'm gonna give it full energy because i've got the power to then boom catch a dive and take that power away and people the natural instinct kicks in they grab the risers or they pull to a pressure there they used to and it gets them into more trouble and
theo's been putting out great videos on this you know and his novas you know if you're on an enc or lower and we're gonna we'll jump to two liners here we got a lot more to go with this iv but you know he he just proves it he gets his wing in every possible scenario and goes watch and he just puts his hands up and you fly away you know and but it's it your your mind is messing with you there and it it really is not instinctual it's not it's it really is something that has to be trained and more so you have to be able to see you have to be able to look up and understand what's going on with your wing and that there's a at least for me there was a i went through a period where there's confusion it's like why why does my wing look like that why isn't it going oh my hands are down my hands aren't in the pulleys yeah
and and it can take very little break very little to stay in parachutal you know people think the you know the stool position and parachutal you to keep a glider in tailslide is you know carabiners or a round bear but actually to stay in parachutal is you know is nearly up to the pulleys yeah
right i wanted to mention one more thing about the harness aspect too that has always been a really good signal for me that you know when i start feeling my shoulders come up a little bit it that okay breathe dude breathe relax that that's always been that's kind of like the first signal that i'm getting tense and we don't fly very well you know we don't fly very well you know we're tense so i love i love this this thing about you know number one fundamental make sure you're just relaxed and sitting back because i definitely do that i start pulling forward doesn't matter the harness but i start pulling forward when i'm when i'm getting freaked out and that's just okay four seconds just breathe in breathe out breathe in just do four of those and i'm right back in the saddle and everything's okay yeah
so i've got an acronym for that the acronym is is fear
but fear so f is the feeling so the physical feeling you've got so that it's very hard when we're stressed to analytically discover we're stressed but when you realize that there are physical manifestations to our stress it's much easier to to identify a physical manifestation like you say you you will notice first of all your shoulders rather than going hey man i'm i'm stressed here so the feeling first of all and then e is i so when we get stressed we take in less information we'll quite often get the object fixation so to change what you're looking at so if you're thermaling and it's rowdy and you're just fixated on another pilot thermaling try and just look somewhere different and then a is affirmation so like you you said just breathe four times someone else if they get stressed because they're low could be feeling say an affirmation of you know i'm gonna get out of here or i'm light as a feather or something like that and then r is to relax and you can do all of those things in in one motion the second you get that physical feeling it's okay switch what i'm looking at because that that switches the brain into task switching to like okay i've just been focusing on this guy let's look further ahead let's look up at a cloud that's taking different information because that will change my brain say the affirmation boom relax back into your harness and then you'll snap out of it
so then we just get a t you that little thing between our ears it's just about attitude in it yeah
exactly yeah okay
keep going with the SIV stuff that was great um
yes the fourth thing is the situational awareness because you can't use these these newfound skills if you don't know which way is up or down and when you've got when you've got situational awareness of what's going on it's like a glimpse into the future you know that if you get this feeling that then this is going to happen next um and when you're lost it's quite paralyzing you don't want even if you're kind of i think this is the right thing to do you don't want to make a massive input in case you make it worse whereas when you're full situational awareness and something's happened you can confidently do an input and if you're in an aggressive situation sometimes it's an aggressive movement you need um with that situational awareness you will be able to do the right input at the right time um
so then tying all that together is basically what we look for in the course so it doesn't matter what maneuver you're doing if you're displaying the fundamentals while you're doing that maneuver it could be a stool it could be a spiral it could be frontals it could be anything if you've got the good body position the full break range and you're inputting at the right time then it means anything in the wild can happen to you and you'll reap you know you'll be able to repeat those um those things one
of the tricky about SIV is you you know you get you you go and you you get your brain you know i've done it enough now where i'm really excited okay this is great i get to brush up on these skills uh you know i've i've learned over the years that i don't need to be too afraid of anything and um you just get in this mode where okay stall stall stall stall whatever whatever you're working on and it's it's all awesome and then the next day i go to fly you know where i don't have the water and i don't i'm not in that same frame of mind and thinking about doing a lot of that stuff is is a little it's scary it's like gosh i gotta you know and i'll i'll do it tomorrow you know i'll do it the next day and it's it's funny that it's uh it it it still weighs down on me even after all these years i mean it must be um i would i would think it must be much trickier for pilots with a lot lower hours that you know that find this stuff pretty challenging yeah
for sure and and that was a big shock actually when i i came here and i saw you know i joined flyer with amazing instructors you know infinity tumbling flying hundreds of kilometers and after the winter we'd go out and we'd go out to train and it's like okay yeah we're gonna we're gonna do some stalls and it was like well why does that matter you've you know you've done thousands of them and it that never changes like recreational pilots quite hard on themselves about that is it doesn't matter how good you get if you have a layoff there's always an element of apprehension about doing something for the for the first time or getting back into it and then of course it only takes one or two stalls and you remember that oh yeah it's just a stall and then you carry on but it's no big deal but you know even when you haven't flown for six months just taking off there's a higher level of apprehension than the normal so you're going to have that for maneuvers as well but recreational pilots don't don't realize that and the likes of acro pilots if they've done a couple of months in organia and finished on twisted tricks they don't come back to organia after six months off and go oh yeah what did i do last oh yeah twisted infinite let's do that first they have a they have a you know a plan of this week that week how do i how do i get myself back and if recreational pilots did that and they
don't know how to do that it's a kind of a So you know if even if you're just in a in a thermal thermaling like not leaving the ridge for an hour how much to do you have in your body is your stomach muscles like killing you how much information you are you taking in because if you go over the back in that state in that mental state you're not going to beat your pp you're just going to land short and then kick yourself about it so why not build yourself back up go to the hill get yourself back in the frame of mind that you finish the season on so that does mean then on the first good day you'll have your maximum bandwidth if the first flight you have is in when you're trying to have a good flight your bandwidth is going to be so
so thin because you're not going to take this information in and you're going to be tense you're going to be you know a small bubble you're not going to be making cross country decisions because you're going to be focusing on your wing or people that are close to you that sort of thing so that's really something that needs to change with recreational car yeah
i think i think this is one of the reasons why places like vaillé by so many people is it's you know it is strong you don't often have a ton of room between the trees and cloud base there's usually some kind of wind factor but all those things are totally manageable if you're doing that in august at home you know for northern hemisphere pilots that are listening to this you know you're you're fine no problem but usually we go down to vaillé in january you haven't flown you know thermals at least i mean some people will have done some sled rides and maybe some SIV if they're lucky but you know they won't have been flying too much uh and and then boom you're in a comp day one you know and uh i think we need to really respect that i mean i know for me here in sun valley in the spring uh you know you're so excited to go and it's one it's freezing you know so you're battling feeling really cold temps and the the thermals are really sharp uh tends to be you can often get these high pressure days where you know it's only they're two meter climbs and it feels like 10 meter climbs it's just rowdy and uh yeah it's scary it just it doesn't you know you you're not at the end of the summer you don't have the hours you don't have the you're you're just everything's spooky
exactly yeah people don't put any sort of training in place to to mitigate that you know what you want to turn up on the hill on a banging day and and try and do what you did at the end of the season rather than thinking uh actually if that if that banging day is then then the two weeks before that i've got to try and get some flying and i've got to try and be analytical of my my mental state my physical state in there to just try and get some i mean part of its currency but you know currency is going to increase your is going to increase your bandwidth to be able to then perform well on a on a good day you
live in a place now i can't remember what you just said some insane number like 2500 launches or something in a normal summer day um you live in a place where there are obviously a lot of accidents because it's just numbers it's a numbers game um what what could eliminate a lot of those where are they happening what's the what's the number one two three reason um
oh just so so many people turn up without training in france you don't need a license to fly
so that you know it's not regulated but so you have people from all over europe coming here to fly and you know you could have a someone turning up from russia who's just brought a wing on ebay and trying to launch into five meter a second thermal like i've seen um yeah then he blew what we've seen that
a lot
exactly yeah it's it's crazy i mean we we do like an hour rotation for tandems and every time we turn up and it'll be like booming there'll be like five six meter seconds ripping off the front and we're just we're we're setting up to launch and there'll be someone in a full flight suit like they've stepped out of the 80s setting up for a ford launch and and the regulator's got to be like what what are you doing and it's so you're kind of like this is gonna happen i don't know what you can do about that okay
well what about what about the people who are listening to this show and actually have some skills that must be pretty entertaining in a scary way but um what what about the more kind of traditional i wouldn't imagine what is it landing is it spinning on landing is it one of the more kind of the ones that you see over and over again um
here there's a lot of people getting plucked out the trees up on the up on the mountainside um yeah that's that's that happens you get the helicopter out once or twice a day probably in the in the height of the summer geez and is that just
people not understanding uh you know glide and the just spacing out it's
quite busy you've yeah just losing control of the wind flying or flying too close to the trees and being in thermicare you know for the first time or trying to share a thermal with 30 or 40 people and um it's you know it's it's the level of the weather compared to the conditions that's what it's what gets people you know you shouldn't in in strong conditions if you're a beginner you know don't take off until well i've gone up with a group actually on a cp plus course so that's people who've got their um licenses but they're they're real beginners and i've been up on launch at 7 p.m in july and it's still been too strong for them right you know that's that's a seven o 'clock at night so um you know take off if you're a beginner and you want to fly in july time take off like at 9 a.m or after 8 p.m and you'll get lovely restitution but don't take off at 2 p.m when people are getting hoovered off launch right it's um it's not going to end well how
much in an ideal world uh you know your your typical kind of enc pilot that's got a couple hundred hours um how much SIV is the sweet spot how much would you like to see them come to a course like that course um
until they're a good pilot and really i mean i would like to see anyone regardless of what wing they fly do you know i mean people there's a stigma about SIV but you know call it an advanced training camp call it what you want but um i think pilots should do that until they they're good pilots and there's such an array of people that come you know you you get people full of fear really timid um that after three sivs are gonna have progressed less than someone who's coming with no fear who's young who's eager um after two or three sivs they're gonna be a much um higher level because they've um they take in more because there's less fear but they push themselves harder so they discover more in the first place so there's no there's no amount of sivs you should do and then the other thing
is is currency if you do an SIV a year later you've forgotten most of that a bit like a bit like what we were just talking about about having a plan to get back to where you were so
in one sense you do an SIV to learn new things but then if you leave it long enough you're relearning the same things to get back to a stage where you can then learn more things if you see if you see what i mean because because if you just go oh well i finished that survey on that so i want to jump in at something else your vision is going to be so small your bubble is going to be small nothing's going to be taken in and you're you're not going to learn anything you're going to have to spend the time to get the feeling back from what you learned on the first one to then be able to progress onto the second one so there's no there's no amount of sivs that that people need to do that's kind of what amazes me as well the the things you hear about SIV is like well someone did an SIV and then he siv'd himself to the ground that proves sivs don't work and then you're going to work or but an SIV is like a three-day course or four days if you heard that someone was doing some p1 training or beginner training and they only did three days and then they they cocked up a launch you wouldn't be like oh my god i can't believe it he's not he's not amazing at launches this is it's the same with wing control if you do three days of wing control then i've got no doubt that if something dramatic happens to you in the world you're not going to have the skills to to deal with it
even even after a two-week beginner course which is where people get their license in the uk after two weeks you're still a very basic pilot so after two weeks of SIV training i i would have more faith that you could deal with something in the world but it's not it's not given yeah
for sure what you you said you said to make a good pilot what makes a good pilot
dialing in the um the four fundamentals basically if you if you can in any situation you have control of your arms your body your situational awareness it doesn't matter what situation you're in because you're not gonna aggravate the situation and make it worse so we we fly aircraft that collapse so we always have events that can happen to us but it's about not causing a secondary event through pilot action that makes a good pilot i mean there's preventative measures you can do once you get good at active flying you're going to prevent most of these things from happening but it's when okay we've had an event happening a bad pilot will create a secondary event or let a secondary event happen again in action is it's just as bad as wrong action um where's a good pilot will do the right action um another um thing you hear a lot about SIV or this this area is about putting your hands up to do to do nothing have you heard that a lot just put your hands up yeah um and that gets to me because in some instances the right thing when people ask me what's the right thing to do it's the right thing and in some instances putting your hands up is the right thing to do and in others it's exactly the wrong thing to do if you've got a cravat and you're winding into a spiral putting your hands up is exactly the wrong thing to do sure so there is there's no there's no blanket one thing it's in every single situation you need to do something
and being a good pilot is is not only not aggravating a situation it's being able to adapt quickly so really a good pilot can look at the situation and as it's changing react to those different changes rotations are a great one for that where quite often people will have a preconceived idea of what they have to do and um when when they do that and nothing happens they then don't do anything else and when we have a an action that we use with a brake we should get a reaction from the glider so if you're in a rotation and you pull some brake and you're still in a rotation you need to pull more keep pulling keep pulling until something happens but like if you're flying towards a tree and you pull some brake and you're still flying towards a tree i'd like to think you'd keep pulling that brake
until you avoid the tree but when it comes to other maneuvers they don't they don't do that they think if i do that that'll happen and when it doesn't they're then stuck so to be a good
if it gets more aggressive be more aggressive as things start to calm down then we need the subtleties of um of a difference of reacting but you've got to know the whole whole range of what to do and when to then be able to adapt to those different situations one
of the one of the things that i came away with in in one of my earlier sivs that i wasn't i guess anticipating was that you
know when i started flying you know higher end gliders and you know putting myself in places that are you know with less escape was knowing when things went wrong knowing how long it took to deal with that that that seemed to be one of the more valuable takeaways uh early on in my SIV practice that i still use all the time now i'm constantly thinking okay if and i'm not in a negative way but i'm constantly thinking about margin and height and if something happened now how much time would i have because there are certain configurations and this really came from heli practice you know getting all spun up going okay this is going to take a thousand feet to deal with and that becomes really handy um in combat in real combat xc situations you know when you're not over the water and you're not in a kind of a protected environment i found that that was really one of the most valuable things is okay
that's going to take x and that's going to take this much height and that's going to take this much time and
when you've done only one or two sivs you've got no idea of your height loss exactly and um and that's the thing again of like how many sivs should you do well you've only done one two three sivs there's still a chance you could SIV yourself to the ground because you haven't your situation awareness isn't at the point where you're doing stuff automatically and looking around like if you if you can't be in a nice tailslide and just looking around and checking your height and and you're still just completely fixated on the wing then you know of course that could happen so yeah that that sort of awareness takes time and um you they can only be built through training you've got you've got trained to then be able to deal with something whilst checking the wing checking the ground checking the wing and then deciding if it's time or not but what you just covered on of like
heights to deal with when you know it's just a fact of our sport that actually we quite often fly below a height where if you take an 80 percent whack you know you're going in and that's why you and you are never completely safe from from a however good my wing control ever got i know there's certain configurations i could get into within a certain height that you just you're just in trouble like i've i've had um frontals on comp wings before where you know i've been really low 100 meters and got away with it and i know that had i been half that height there's just no recovering from from it that's just a fact of the sport but your your red zone your your the better you get as a pilot the more that height is squished and squished and squished
um to i mean on the opposite side of things you see videos on youtube people at cloud base and they've got they've got thousands of meters and it's still not enough right right
um that that's a good segue i mean we could just leave the whole show to SIV we could keep going with that because you've got so much knowledge there but you've written i'd like to switch to two-liners a bit just because you've written about them quite a lot and i know you're you know big fan as i am i haven't flown something other than a two-liner and acro stuff and years and years um sexy wings wonderful wings uh amazing wings what they can do um talk to the audience a little bit about what you've been writing about and your thoughts on them and i guess the biggest one is you know when when a pilot is ready to make that switch yeah
i think being ready as in having the skills to be ready and being mentally ready are two are two different things because i can train you know if you give me a student for three weeks i can get them to the point where they're doing you know nice back fly on a two-liner but they wouldn't be able to control it in a thermal so it's all once you've got the skills to fly paragliders then it's all in the head and people can get the skills quicker than they can get confidence that that is the right wing for them if you get what i mean because it's very different being in rough air and being completely like a matter to you know that there's there's there's pilots i know would have the skills to deal with things on that type of wing but i just know haven't got them the mental you know they haven't told themselves yet that they're actually ready um so yeah at the moment it's just powerful gliders that are two liners and it would be nice if that technology kind of bled down more but there's a limit to to how low it can go when you haven't got that many lines you're much more prone to cravats and cravats for lower end pilots so
not something you want to be getting um but they're amazing machines i think flying on the bees is far safer than you know the the kind of um three liners now that are kind of joined with the bees is it's getting better it's getting there but there's nothing like the command you have when you're flying at speed by having some bees in your hands like you can cut you can use them as an extension of your brakes you can catch collapses on them and a couple of years ago when i first got onto the enzo2 i i i thought how far could i push it on the bees and in that year i'd never had so many fun tools but i i basically coined the phrase of pussyfooting around where i do everything on the bee so once if i'm either at half bar full bar once i've locked my legs i do nothing with my legs i do everything with my hands um and i noticed that i would come off bar like
a front going and i'd come off bar and use the bees and i realized that was just all in the head because i can do it all on the bees so i really kind of pushed the limits of how how far you can go just with the bees and i was getting collapses and uh you know a lot more because i was i was i was refinding the limits of uh of what was possible um but it's exactly the same you can come back to trim speed on the bees you can go right back to full bar and you you can regulate fully with your it was fear that was then you know coming off the the legs as well as the the hands and over time my efficiency just got much much better because once you come off with your legs you've then got to push back on um and balance that with the hands it's much easier to just do everything on the on the bees yeah
it was it was something that at first i i i didn't really get my head around until i washed it and then went out and did it a bunch but you know Chrigel put out that video that basically said you know on a tune liner you should just be flying around full bar all the time and just and then just totally regulate everything with the bees you know just make your canopy efficient with your hands yeah
and when you when you end up trusting the bees even just cruising slowly along a ridge using all the little bubbles you know i will i will go from the brakes to the bees and just be piloting it with the bees even if i'm not using speed bar so it's um yeah once you get that connection on the bees you don't want to turn back you don't want to lose that connection to the wing yeah
and i would i would say i think that this is the biggest learning uh arc for people that are switching to a two-liner is that takes some time to earn that trust is that the the glider just gets more and more bomb proof with more bar but it man it's hard to convince your head of that it it at least for me it took a while and and and every spring or when i'm flying and rowdy conditions if i'm not racing i i'm never using enough bar i know i need to use more and i can't make myself do it you know because you just feel like something's gonna go and but you know when you learn you learn this this is an aspect of two-liners that i think really comes from racing you know you just you have to use a lot of bar when you start racing you get dusted and you learn when you're using a lot of borrowing wow this thing's really pretty bomber yeah
and quite often when you when you reach a ridge and you know you've been on bar and you reach a ridge and you come off bar you realize how rowdy the air is right
and it's horrible you
get back on the brakes it's all squirrely and you're like oh i'll get back on bar because this is yeah this isn't this isn't a stable i don't like this so then you just push a bit of bar and it becomes much more solid again um
talk about the skill side of it that in yeah like you said you need the confidence side of it i would totally agree with that um but the i don't know if this is backed up in the data at all maybe you you because you see so many more people flying but one of the things i've always been a little bit concerned with just as a as an observer is that two-liners are just way more collapse resistant so i think a lot of pilots that make that jump it's easier for them to get a little bit too complacent you know in other words you jump to a xeno oh my god this thing never blows out um but when they do they are you they require uh active piloting as opposed to what we were before where you can you know on enb usually can get away with doing very little um is this something you worry about see talk about with fabian yeah
of course yeah and and through training um you know he's he's trained uh the french team a lot but we get the the race academy guys out you know british team members out here and any any training on two liners we see like i can
if i know pilots or like i know people in the race academy i know other people i i could write a list who will be fine the next big collapse they have and and who won't because you need a certain amount of skill to um to deal with the energy they have and it's amazing the amount of pilots fly those level of wings and they don't have the the skill and every every now and again 200 hours 300 hours they have a big blowout and it's you know it's reserve time or or worse there's been quite a few accidents this year i think with lack of currency but it's all you know it's pilots you can honestly say well whether it was this year or another year you had a big blowout did did they really have the skill to to deal with it um so yeah i can i can see it from from a mile away the the lack of training there was quite an interesting video recently on a facebook group the paragliding forum of a of a pilot doing SIV and in another country on a on an enzo i don't know if you saw it and he got a little cravat and went into a spiral and and hit the lake hard no i didn't see it it was really interesting because there was complete lack of control but what was interesting was the chat afterwards people obviously saying like oh he shouldn't be flying that level of wing and then his friends trying to back him up saying well you know he's flown 400k in um in brazil and blah blah he's a really experienced pilot and that that really that culture is kind of ingrained in us is that we will call a pilot experience
fly 100k even if they have got far less SIV or wing control experience than someone you know if i have someone who's got 30 hours and i can get them to the point where they're doing nice back flies and you've got someone that's been flying for 10 years and can do 100k but has never done an SIV then to me they're not an experienced pilot they are just an accident waiting to happen they're just very good at keeping their wing open but the next big thing that happens you know they're going in and then it's like a big shock in the community it's like oh my god he was so experienced he's been flying for 15 years he's just done an amazing 200k flight it's like well yeah but what what does that mean that's not that's not experience because he's got zero experience when it comes to wing control yeah
this this is a big one to me i mean not not to knock the flatlands too but you know i my my buddy cody and he's not the only one that has said this i mean i think rafael saladini or frank brown or any of them would say the same thing you know these big days that we're going through and we're going through and we're going through and we're you know 400 500k is 85 the day i mean there are a lot of pilots in the world that could make that happen and again i'm not knocking it you know but um you know i've flown the surtout i've flown texas um you know it's it's really the day matters a ton it doesn't necessarily mean you're a very good pilot because you could fly 400k obviously you've got some skills but um but yeah i mean you could you know a pilot could have done no SIV ever not one and and do that and like you said it doesn't mean you're necessarily very skilled you know it's uh you know you're flying really good days yeah
well it's one thing being an experienced pilot in cross country but it's another thing being experienced in wing control and if you've got to that level in your cross country and you're not as experienced in wing control then you are an accident waiting to happen and it's you know we just shouldn't even be calling those pilots experience
they've got their level of wing control but it should be much more frowned upon in our community to be that level of pilot and not be the same when your wing isn't flying you know it should just be like i can't believe you're doing cross country flights on a hotter wing or on any wing and not know how to recover it it should be a taboo and yeah it's not it's um it's really quite ingrained in our in our culture and i think certification has got a lot to blame through no certifications fault um has got a lot to blame for that for how this this culture has evolved
i i remember the the first time i was really struck by the whole you know uh glide ratio and span and you know it was the first time i i did a an nxc with you know Nick Greece and a couple other really good pilots in in europe i can't remember now um and we took off from the one of the sites south of saint hilaire and you know the goal was to fly up to anisee you know which back then for me i was i was on the arctic this was years it was a long time ago but it was just super exciting and you know the other pilots were on enzo ones or the i think it was the ice peak six and we got to that you know saint hilaire to the net is it chambury over chambury
crossing yeah
and you know so we all left cloud base it was this beautiful day and uh and i'm on the arctic and we got to the other side and they were gone you know and uh and i was down below the cliff and i had to dig out and uh and they just glided right across it you know it was no big deal and i thought holy cow you know it was it was just so in some ways so discouraging but then at the end of the day you know i made it all the way to anisee and it was you know took me a lot longer and it was just incredibly rewarding it was awesome but that was the first time where i was
or anything um but i think that that really gets people especially when they start flying their first comps is just you know getting dusted on glide and so you have this real itch to oh well that's the wing i need to but you know like my buddy jeff shapiro always says you know getting a better wing doesn't make you a better pilot this is that's a really good one to me is that you have to you do have to go through that process and that um and i'm not trying not to be preachy here but it's uh that you know the the the urge is strong to move to that wing i think too fast yeah
i mean it depends how you approach it if you if you want to move up through the wings then do a lot of of wing control and and you'll be there but then you might still cook yourself in in really strong conditions if you haven't at least spent the time like i when i first started flying i moved up through wings really quickly but then i focused all of my attention on wing control so the first time i stalled the two line i had like 85 hours but i was already tail sliding and managing the span and i had full understanding of that but i i had to be really careful of then when i flew in thermic air like was i okay with it and i was always really mindful of moving up too quickly in terms of that mental aspect um and so yeah it all depends some people have got a lot of time to do that and i've had a lot of time to do that three four hundred hours and they're not going to be ready um other other people if you put the time in the training at least you're going to be safer on it whether you can then mentally handle it or not as a you know there's another thing but yeah when you when you if you start doing comps or if you go out on people with high performance but is it it suddenly becomes very obvious on those long glides i remember my first comp when yeah you just get left for dust and you're dropping and they're just they seem to be going straight
and it's when when you do comps it does become really important so like through the race academy we try and get people up to um they're flying up to a level where they can handle a comp wing because you can be as good as another pilot you can make exactly the same choices as that other pilot and if you're on a lower rated wing you're gonna come 40th and they could come first through no fault of your own through through literally every glide you lose 20 places lose 20 places and especially the higher the level comp you go the more places you lose per per glide so yeah it's a fine balance between moving up too quickly especially if you don't have the skills to control it um but yeah it's it's going to be through no fault of your own that you end up losing places and comps because of your wing
malin i want to be mindful of your time and i know you've got a a one-year-old at home who uh mom wants you back here at some point so i'm going last question isn't probably great for the full audience but it's something i've wanted to ask you you know i started doing the you know kind of like the double move stall after watching charles's and seiko's videos which is important on the on the on the two liners but i've never done it in combat and i just can't imagine doing it that way in combat because it would be you know it'd just be such a mindful boom boom you know i would i would imagine in combat i'd still just do a quick acro stall and get out of it what's your thoughts on that is it is is that wrong thinking is it something i just really need to get down the double and for those that are listening you don't know what i'm talking about it's basically you know you're you're you're almost getting to the stall point with the glider and you're letting it fly again and then going down so it's basically keeping your tips from cravatting you know done sexily i'm not sure
you're you're going to stall the glider much more symmetrically and keep your tips from collapsing do i have that right yeah
it's it's just span management basically at the end of the day it's um and especially on the higher rated wings it it becomes more and more important um it depends on what dynamic situation you've got yourself into um and how much situation awareness you've got so if you get a big boom a big frontal on a comp wing and you've just buried the big bees as far down as they'll go or even switch to the brakes and just bury the and then put your hands up and it's behind you you'll get a shoot like a rapid exit in which case you can just catch deep um and fly away or if you've buried the brakes and it's come back over your head more in like a stool configuration as soon as you feel it hunting in front of you and you get that pulling sensation you need to be resisting and then releasing if you haven't got that and you've got a feeling of flying backwards quite fast like in a tail slide then you need to start aggravating that that exit window so
it's you know a stall is not just a mechanical up down here it's again about being adaptive pilot if it's all going crazy it's having a glimpse of like it's going crazy but it's behind me so the next thing that's going to happen is going to shoot so do i want to put my hands up now and let it shoot because actually letting a glider shoot aggressively is good especially with a two-liner because quite often you'll have cravats that act like air brakes and so you can let it dive even further and they're doing most of the braking and then you over exaggerate the catch and it's it's that over exaggeration that will pop the tips out so you can fly away with a clean glider we call it cleaning um or if you've really noticed that it's all it's all going funky but then the glider's at the horizon and you're trying to rein it in oh well now's my opportunity to just release and fly away so you know a stall isn't going to look pretty when you do it in the wild and it's not going to be a mechanical on off it's going to be a looking at the glider and and deciding what you do from there like you're not going to want to just bury it and you know even if you're in tail side you don't want to overstall it because then you'll get the really big back ears and with the um the enzo3 and the xeno you can actually get this
irrecoverable situation if you stall it too deep and you get these really big ears um if you put your hands up too quickly the trailing edge flicks over and acts like an air brake and then the ears come in and rest on the ground and then you've got a really big line of lines and then your brakes don't do anything and you'll come down in kind of like parachutal where the glider won't go forwards because of the the cravats at the front and it won't drop back because the trailing edge is has flicked over and you can get this kind of like stable parachutal so oh
wow and you can't get it restarted again
yeah um yeah we've got quite an interesting video of that um that's that that takes a real overstall and then a very quick hands up and the glider starts to dive but the ears plunk back in and because the hands have gone up so quickly the trailing edge flips over to the the rear beer attachment point basically and then you're there so yeah as as far as like i haven't stalled my glider for a long time um even with frontals and stuff because the second i get a frontal and i'm watching it i'm you know you're you just you're banging the brakes or the bees to keep some sort of span but then i either if if i've caught enough spam to letting it shoot and then cleaning it in front of me if i've caught it late then you've got to um to to deal with that energy a little bit more efficiently and then with cravats i i like to um i teach it on the course of cravat clearing it's also a spin appreciation or collision avoidance where you bury one break as maximum as it will go and your wing first of all you get this peeling and then you get the wing starting to fly back so you're basically stalling one side
you're spinning one side and that for me is far more effective at clearing a cravat than a stall because quite often people go through a whole SIV never getting cravats and then they get to stalls and then which people think is what you need to clear a cravat and then they start getting cravats all the time um it's not the most efficient way of clearing a cravat yeah on a comp wing i just did this really
for the first time this was uh just recently doing some SIV training with with cody down in utah and it's incredibly efficient and really mellow uh you know i i was doing it on the evox and i just found it it's lovely just spin it hard and then as soon as it kind of dives let it go and you're away that's really it's uh i i didn't have the right appreciation for that before i'd heard about it a lot but until you know i started doing it it was like oh this is great this is terrific and
and if you ever get a big whack if you do that same movement before the cloth has even touched the line so if you can see like you should see every single collapse you ever have sure that's something that's something russ russ often taught me when he was teaching me SIV years ago is that um you know have a word of yourself if you ever have a collapse that you don't say have a word of yourself because it takes a split second to look up right so if you're flying a wing and and you're looking up and you see it curling down and it's gonna get on the lines and cravat if you bury your break boom 100 it didn't want to happen it's gonna it won't happen it's gonna it's gonna hit the lines then you feel it kind of going off off the lines and curling back out and then you release and it's gone so you will
like when i learned that that not only the spin to get rid of them but that kind of i mean you'd spin something if it was there but it's collapsing but actually you then limit the size of the cravat or you just get rid of it completely that that kind of changed my uh cravat experience right and you certainly don't need to be stalling out of cravats you probably just end up with one on the other side right
just change your angle of attack real fast and it'll probably be okay yeah
yeah exactly yeah so
malin tell me about uh you know you kind of had this list of things you wanted to go through with with SIV and i'm sure we've missed a ton uh what haven't we talked about that you want to
um so the kind of culture all the um the kind of what people think about SIV like there's quite a strong culture in the uk or it's really changing i think all across the world about you know whether whether you should do one or not or when you should do one and and for me when you you have a course like ours where it's completely tailored like i i'm happy to take students just out of of their of their course because there's there's a kind of gap at the moment where you get your license and then you start doing your hops at your training field and then you you get some flights on your belt you do 50 flights you do 100 flights but you'll you'll get you're getting ingrained bad habits like bad body position
and then you kind of start flying at a different time of the day and it gets a bit more rowdy and then you'll scare yourself and then you might even start going cross country and then usually people come to me then once they've got these ingrained bad habits and they've been in thermic air maybe and their bandwidth is just fully taken up with a wing because it's doing things that they they don't know about you briefly cover some wing movements in when you get your license but you don't really understand it fully so for me if i can take a student straight out of um of learning their beginner course how early is too early well if that's if they're still really stressed out about taking off and landing it's not a good time but if they've got to the point where they've done some flights and and now they can take off and land autonomously they're happy with that
then at that point you should come and do it would be kind of even pre-pilotage if you see what i mean so there's so much to learn about roll pitch your break range body position and that stuff doesn't get focused on enough because if you build that foundation early on you just become a much much better pilot like i've got people that have come to me on SIV and they've they've been in sierra and they've just done 100k flight and they come to me and we'll be doing some maneuvers and they'll have no idea about roll control and it's like if you can do 100k and you don't fully understand roll you probably could have done 120k in the same time like it's been hindering you your whole flying career whereas if you're more a beginner pilot and you learn that you learn about how to aggravate and cancel roll if you learn about pitch movement and the break range and your body position then you go away and you start doing that and then you're like oh i'm gonna do it top to bottom flight you're gonna get in some rougher air and you're gonna instantly oh my wing's done that before i like i know how to cancel it it's not gonna start to freak you out and plant that seed of fear fear of the unknown so then you'll start venturing into
air that's going to cause those movements boom boom you'll be canceling them out you you're taking the first steps into your active flying um and then there's just a big gap at the moment where people do it in the opposite way they know nothing they've learned essentially how to take off and land then they build up a bit of fear and then they'll do an SIV but they've got to kind of like get over all that um again so i think if an SIV or call it an advanced training um course or whatever is done right and you take these beginner pilots it's not even about collapses it's just about learning the bit in the middle between takeoff and landing you'll build a really good foundation to then go on to start doing some collapses and rotations and and all the other things that you would think of as a as a traditional course and on that beginning course as well you can learn about how you work under stress and all the other things we teach
and i think that will really excel you project you on to learning the rest down the road much quicker this
seems like a massive gap and i i realize there's probably different systems well not probably there are there's different you know there's a happy system there's the every country
car license of course and you know this is it's a very familiar system you can learn all the different things and then you get into a world that's a given experience that's a i think that's where the you know the the real reason why i think we need to focus a lot of time because it's you know as we go forward over the next 15 years is because we need to be sort of doing where everyone is and we need to keep up with everyone else and you know that's the real
thing that's the real thing that's the real thing that's one of
the the real thing that we need to maybe work with it's it's not encouraged and it's it just seems like there's this i mean i remember it in my own you know in my own learning you get your p2 and then okay go have fun you don't know exactly
yeah because because you get taught it's so focused on the takeoff and landings and the bit in between is is actually like a really important part and there's there's nothing at the moment to um to deal with that and it was the same in the uk like it was very much doing if you want or not and i think the old school method of SIV of day one big years day four stools is completely the wrong thing to do if you've got five or ten hours um and and even if you've got a thousand hours and you're a timid pilot you know it couldn't it can overcook you right um but that's why being a good instructor and really um figuring out what that pilot needs and when and when to push them and when to when to come off of it is is really important and i i created these um these levels the pilot proficiency level because i saw that there's such a difference in in teaching in different countries and um and it would be good to have a more uniform level of going back to that thing of when is a an experienced pilot an experienced pilot if you had proficiency levels of like i'm a you know i'm a level two or level three you would instantly understand actually how good they are at wing control and and the different levels of proficiency levels of like i'm a you know i'm a level two or level three levels are the movements of the glider so the roll pitch the yaw then level two is more where we come in with SIV so it's the the fundamentals the body position the break range level three is then moving on from departing from flight your stools and your more dynamic situations and level floor is the kind of the gateway into mastering span like if you're going into two liners or the gateway into acro and that sort of thing and the hardest thing about those levels it was easy to create the hardest thing would be if other instructors wanted to do it the training the instructor would need to be able to tease out the different levels of the pilot so like okay do they fully understand the role movement we'll give them this maneuver to do and that one to do and then combine it with this to see if in these different situations they can cancel the role or aggravate the role or are they master of rotations this you you can do this and then this and it's it's really complex to to teach to it but it's it would be all pilot focused so they would have to prove that they can complete that level there's a real
stepping stone here that you know you go through this to get to this to go through this to get to this i remember i remember fabian saying that on in his show that you know he's taken like veteran world cup pilots and they can't do a clean 360 exit you know they're just like they've skipped a whole bunch of those levels yeah
and when i when you know when i got here and i got better and better instructing i could do big big wing overs but i had no idea how i could do them and it took becoming a good instructor to be able to break it down to the point where i could then describe it but then you've got to also add a level of complexity to okay the student is going to have tunnel vision when they get to this size so how much information do i need to give them to start with because the rest of the information is going to be relevant so they need to get to a certain size of wing over before you then give them an extra bit of information then that bit and like okay now you felt that well now let's try this and and so on and so forth
yeah the wing over is a really critical one isn't it i mean it that one that seems to be one that the veterans bring up a lot you know russ ogden and fabian you know that that's a very good sign of a good pilot is doing
really nice controlled big proper wing overs is it that those skills translate into everything and the wing management into thermaling seems to be that one comes up a lot yeah
and it's all it's also the gateway to so many acro maneuvers to have that straight entry gate so with your wing level with the horizon when your body is swinging through it's the it's the gateway to a lot of acro moves and it is a dynamic situation so if you are in control of that dynamic situation then it leads on to um yeah being much more aware when you when you get into a dynamic situation um in the world so it's really it's it's a good it's a good thing to practice you
you mentioned i mean i remember jockey saying that uh this one i was surprised by this but it sounds like you you maybe agree that you know maybe SIV is not for everyone is there it can can you be a pilot and and not do it and you know enjoy flight safely no
i think old school SIV is not for everyone yeah as in
because yeah the checklist the the being pushed because you know some if you've just got a sunday flyer full of fear um you know you've got to do multiple courses with them and you you've got to bring out that courage in them and that only comes from them um knowing that they're safe and fully understand that they're safe and fully understand that they're safe and fully understand the situation and they only do that through repetition and and time and they they'll get their toe a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper and over time they'll become better pilots like there's there's no doubt that you will you will like i could i could create a course that would make you a better cross country pilot and not bring safety into it at all just through about your body position and understanding the role picture you're if you are an efficient pilot if you're cancelling role and pitch efficiently um your cross countries are going to get better and that's before we've even delved into then collapse control and all that other sort of stuff so there's stuff you can learn on a tailored course that's going to directly translate to becoming a better pilot without pushing you into dynamic things like stools and sats and all that other stuff
let me ask you something i'm gonna take you off take us off left field here a little bit um our community as you know and i it seems like this is just always now but it seemed like it's been a really rough year in terms of accidents and bad accidents uh you've got a one-year-old at home i've got a three-year-old i get asked this a lot is this are we all kidding ourselves you know can this be done safely for a lifetime
um yeah that's a hard one to answer like us we were talking earlier you know the kind of red zone the height you're at where there are certain things that will happen that you you just don't have the height to recover from if you're coming into land and you're 10 15 meters and you get a full frontal or an 80 collapse or whatever it doesn't matter how good a pilot you are you can mitigate that to to the best but you're gonna have a hard landing or you know or work so but it's and then the things that really get um people also it's just sometimes you just make mistakes you know you're flying along and you're maybe the sun's behind you so you're squinting to look in your gps and boom you hit a power line or yeah just you know there's some things that sometimes it's just like oh man that was just uh an accident literally an accident um we had um wayne seeley recently in the uk um passed away by hitting a power line at his local site that he's flown thousand times that was a massive shock to the community such such a nice guy and um
just what it's like it's it's a very unforgiving sport when you have something like that happen you can be the best pilot in the world and you can just take your eye off the ball for one second and uh it can lead to fatal consequences so none of us are immune to that i say to my students it's not a very good sport to be bad at yeah um and and that's talk that's talking about skill level but you can have the best skill in the world and you can still take your eye off the ball for a second so deep then you get you get into the counter argument of yeah you can get run over across the street if you take your eye off the ball and then it gets back into quality of life and all that sort of stuff
do you ever um do you guys talk about that do you ever have people that come that are just clearly shouldn't be taking on this sport i mean do you have the frank conversation with with people that like hey i you know you should probably play golf there's
been maybe two two students in the last three or four years that have been that level of of complete lack of understanding and complete lack of wow of of of of knowing that they're that bad you know because i mean you don't know what you don't know in general the kind of the dunning curve effect but um yeah you know just people that are clumsy trip over all the time no coordination but it's just completely unaware of it and you have all of those combinations and um it's it's not a good thing um boy
that'd be a weird combination that'd be an awkward conversation to have yeah
yeah sure but it's the thing that usually people understand like oh i'm not i'm not very good at this am i but it's when that they're completely blasé and they land they're like i am awesome
that's when it becomes uh yeah interesting
okay well back to your let's let's spend a few more minutes on on some of your SIV stuff like i said i'm gonna turn you over to you what's the other metal gear okay do you want a bit more of an i know you've got a long list there and i think there's there's endless learning oh
yeah um one other big thing um when talking about kind of misconceptions or or things you hear um another one about uh what to do with an asymmetric collapse and people have got all sorts of different ideas about there's a lot of talk about not over controlling the open side because you'll pull too much brake and you'll stall the open side so you can deal with that by grabbing the riser or weight shift alone is enough or they there's lots of these blanket statements and again it comes back to being um adapting as a pilot but if you try and i think most things with flying you can translate to a car so if you ever said to someone how do you turn a corner in a car but just once you have to turn it like maybe 20 degrees like is that going to deal with every single corner you ever come up against of course it wouldn't it would be completely stupid to go like oh yeah corners yeah i've got this yeah just turn it 20 degrees boom you'll be around the corner it it doesn't relate but in in our sport it seems like oh yeah you just grab the the riser or you just pull
you know 25 and you'll be fine you know it's if you're having an 80 collapse in a five meter a second thermal when there's five meter a second down shaft it's going to be a very different action you need to if you're in a two meter a second thermal and you just hit a little shear layer or if you're already leaning one way or the other so you've got to assess the situation and react just like when you're driving a car and you go around the corner and then the corner straightens out a little bit and then goes tighter you're just driving the car you're moving your hands and the same thing in a collapse if it's shooting aggressively you pull aggressively if it's not you don't but there's no there's no one thing you can do you have to if the glide is directly above your head and it hasn't even started turning yet of course if you bury the brake you're going to stall it but it's not the right thing to do but if it's at the horizon and ramping into an auto rotation then you're going to have to pull the brake really hard so there's no there's no one thing you can do with that so if people ever say there is a blanket thing you can do with collapses ask them what type of collapse you're going to have because there's a million different
sì that
sounds like the answer is it depends yeah
it depends you know the right thing to do is the right thing and that changes with everything that happens like we said before putting your hands up is exactly the right thing to do in some instances and not another but just adapting to the situations there is is the most important thing mm and the other thing that really shocks pilots is is certification and it's an unfortunately bred a culture where it's acceptable to be um to not have the skills to fly the the aircraft because but when was the last time you flew a um a low-end wing an a or a b has it been a while over
10 years i mean unless unless you count like an acro wing or single surface or something but x xc i haven't flown a c in 10 years yeah
yeah and i mean for me i like when i get back on an a or b wing and try it's horrible but these you know you've got these big long spongy brakes and and because they've got big oats cell openings they breathe more so you've like you're just wallowing through the sky on a big potato um but certification is it there's loads of skilled people that have got it to where they are today all the test pilots are amazing but people say that they don't need the skills to fly the aircraft because they have a safe wing and i think that has been really detrimental to our sport in that the way we should view wings is that an ena is dangerous and an end is even more dangerous rather than this is a little fluffy kitten and that is an aggressive lion it should be like that's a lynx that would still eat you and that's a that's a lion sort of thing it's um you
know we
it's and and not but not from a position of fear because there's all there's a lot of like you know you're like oh you shouldn't do that you shouldn't use the bar and this you shouldn't go internally you shouldn't not from a position of fear but just like oh you're joining this amazing sport like this is the the safest wing that we do but get your skills up and and let you know learn to fly it quick because this sport is going to open like a whole new world for you so in a positive way like and that's most people die on ena and b wings um and they're relying fully on the passive safety and it's not it's not going to reproduce the results you think in thermic care god
this is such a critical point i'm glad you brought this up alex robey and both stefan bernard and i'm sure others brought this up but it you know like stefan it was a well now he's commercial pilot but he was a jet pilot and flew for the german air force and he talks about that you know right from the beginning they teach autonomy you know they teach that they don't teach this passive safety end of things at all they show what these that these aircraft can do and how they can pummel you and yeah this relying on passive safety thing i mean i think it goes opposite of what we're all trying to achieve in
in most other i mean and especially like every other um aviation there's you know it's like incompetency is it's just widely accepted in our sport and in other forms of aviation they you know they think they think it's mad yeah
they drill the rules and and aerology and you're you're you're meant to yeah i mean look at helicopters you can't fly a helicopter and until you can do that what's it called that where you shut the thing off i mean it's yeah it's insane yeah and
and like you know flying in planes you've got to stall it and even gliders and stuff like that you've got to have gone through all of those those things and i think people are shocked that the glider would
and if that was more widely known i think it would completely change people's um attitude towards it like if i gave you an emb or i took in the mb up right now i could get an end result out of it all day just by doing a small movement or um a small movement with the glider or a brake input at the wrong time i can give you the end results from an en a emb glider and you could do the same um and on my course i had a girl last year who we were trying to do auto rotation just from straight and level flight pulling a collapse she was leaning in so it was karma certification collapse she landed and she went oh it's such a safe glider and that revved me up so i was like okay next next flight we're going to do a roll movement away and you're going to pull the same collapse lean in do the same thing and she nearly tumbled the glider it shot underneath her she did a full rotation um i'll have to send you the video actually and um that that's that's that's more
just from a slight roll movement away from the collapse as she pulled the collapse and it's a bit like people can imagine a kayak if you're in a glassy lake early morning and you've got this expert kayaker and he's rocking the kayak left and right left and right with really good balance slinky hips and then he says oh yeah that's a really stable kayak i've got up to 45 degrees that's like yeah that's good if you put a beginner in that kayak and then you put them down some whitewater rapids they're going to capsize they're going to they're going to fall over and it's the same way if you put a beginner on an ena glider and you put them in turbulent air it's just like being in whitewater rapids you're going to get a very different result from that glider than an expert in their field in calm air and there's there's really three parameters as being a test pilot there's pulling a collapse that is the certified collapse so the right kink angle at you know between two two lines and then there's not doing
as soon as you're not a test pilot or you're not in calm air and you you do the wrong thing you can get yeah easily end result you can get on um you know you can get failure results out of your wing and i think people just think that an ena is an ena and that's it it's got me whereas quite easily with the wrong input or a movement from thermic air you get much more aggressive results if that was more well known i think people would could could take it more seriously
yeah i want to run this i want to run this last segment right at the top of the show i think that's super important that's interesting i mean is is it culturally are we doing that because people want to sell gear like it's it seems like we've almost got everything backwards you know you that's like you said that's not what you learn when you go to learn how to fly an airplane they're not they're not going to go this is really safe this plane has you you can't fuck this up yeah
yeah yeah imagine you go you you're doing a course to learn a thing like oh yeah we've just fitted some stabilization to this so we're only going to teach you half the course you don't really need to fully learn how to fly it don't worry because you know we've got some software on the plane they'd never say that you like yeah never it's crazy um i think it's a whole thing of the way sib used to be taught it wasn't for everyone therefore you can't recommend everyone does it it's marketing every
day and it's it's a whole thing of the way sib used to be taught it wasn't for everyone therefore you you know there should be disclaimers on on things saying like you know in brackets uh this ena could still produce in the results or this this passive safety by no means you know some sort of safety caveat to the whole thing um so it's just completely spread through and then it's culture you know you go to a club when you've just learned and they'll just tell you yeah you know get the swing it's safe like so do that it's just it's just ingrained it's and it i am seeing a change it's slowly changing but i think it's most of it is um is ignorance it's it's that you can call a wing safe rather than saying that that wing can eat that a wing will easily kill you and does um so don't not fly but just learn how to fly if you're gonna fly then learn how to fly and then and then the beauty of that is wing's just become tools once you become a good pilot like i can't remember the last time i looked at a certification of a glider like i i fly single skins here i've got an aqua glider i fly my two liners i've just got a zeolite for bulbiv and stuff but i can't remember the last time if i if i want to try a different single skin or whatever i will pick a glider because of what i want to use it for i haven't thought oh i wonder if is that being certified or is it it's like oh i want to do a hike and fly bam i'll take a single skin or like i want to do a comp i'll grab my comp wings
they become tools and because you soon realize if you're not if you're not a test pilot and you're not in calm air then that that little letter on a bit of paper somewhere is is completely irrelevant it's it's how you deal with it that is the important thing yeah
i i almost think you know if we pull back even farther from this is is like you know we all have at every level the instructors the schools the gear sales the shops the the certifications everything we have to stop kidding ourselves that you know i mean it is an amazing sport it is awesome but you know we don't want everybody to get into this sport you know it's not for everyone and we have to stop kidding ourselves it is fucking dangerous it level you know and we see that you know so we obviously wings are getting better wings are quote-unquote getting safer but the accidents don't change you know i don't think the data backs it up right and so um you know still people do make mistakes people are stupid we are human we do forget things um and we're flying aircraft yeah
it's it's unforgiving like but is it i think it's dangerous if if you've got a lot of people flying around that can't recover from even quite basic um situations then it statistically becomes a lot more dangerous if every single pilot was like really hot on their wing control i think we'd have a lot less accidents we you're still going to get all the mistake ones but you're not going to get the accidental spins right which you know and you you're not going to get the pretty benign situations that then end up in a cascade which end up in you know throwing a reserve or crashing into the hill all of that stuff would be would be wiped out and then you're just going to be getting the the things where you misjudge your landing and you know that it's not going to help with those sort of those sort of things or misjudging the
um the meteo conditions or whatever that you know there's other things that can get you but yeah just being a good pilot regardless of what wing you're on um deals with a lot of the horror horror shows you see on on youtube that's for sure
stuff malin we're gonna leave it there because my three-year-old's starting to bang around pretty good back here um we're gonna have to do a part b of this for sure i know you've got a lot more to say this has been super informative uh thank you very much and keep up the good work with there at flyo uh it's you guys got a great thing going in a beautiful amazing incredible part of the world and i wish you all the success we didn't get to talk too much about covid but i know that's a hit for you guys this year and hopefully at some point here we're all going to get to go back to what we love to do in a in a more normal way but um yeah thanks malin thanks so much for helping me trim my glider last year i really appreciate that i hope it was better oh so much better and uh and also just sharing all this with us thank you so much oh
it's a pleasure next time you're in the area pop in you're good to see you again if
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