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 Annecy 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 Annecy, 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 SIV, 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, SIV 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 there's just too much traffic on the lake, or there's just too much traffic in the air? Why did they ban it?
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 SIV, 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 SIV 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 you're saying, really, it's important to keep your body, I'm assuming you still want to do that if you're about to get twisted up, but it's important to remain relaxed. 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 out, you're in a pod.
You just haven't got that material around your legs, so your body position is the same. 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 Pál Takáts, 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 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 as it does to pull them down and try and find the pressure, but to say
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 I.S.F.E.A.R.
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 it's 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 2,500 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, I think Rafael Saladini or Frank Brown or any of them would say the same thing. You know, these big days that we see, 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 certification's 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 Annecy, 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 Annecy 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 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 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 SIV 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 SIV 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 wings 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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