134. Martin Henry and a lifelong pursuit - Martin Henry

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cloudbase Mayhem. I have a truly awesome show for you today with Canadian hang gliding paragliding pilot Martin Henry. He's been flying for almost 50 years, and truly, he just took me out of my seat. I was laughing so hard a few times, so you're going to really enjoy this. Before we get to it, I've got a few little bits of housekeeping. The first is the last show we put out a couple weeks ago with Malin Lobb was a huge hit. I got a ton of thanks and appreciation for that one. It's filled with fantastic information, SIV and risk and wing control and at whatever level you're at. So please go back and listen to that one. We are going to do a follow-up Ask Me Anything show, a bonus show with him that we'll release.

Well, we'll record and release sometime after the new year. So if you have questions for Malin, please shoot him to me. Prefer it via email. Just go to the website, go to the contact page, shoot me an email. If you don't have my email, I don't track things quite as well in Instagram and Facebook and stuff and social media. It's much easier to get lost there. But send me your questions and we'll line up another show with Mallon. And I also mentioned in that one that we put out a survey a few weeks back that is at cloudbasemayhem.com forward slash survey. If you haven't done it yet, it only takes a few minutes. And we've gotten tons of responses to this. I was really surprised and some fantastic demographics and just a lot of information, a lot of great insight and feedback on how we can improve the show.

So for those of you who have done it, thank you very much. I'll be announcing in one of these future shows here. We've got the schwag. We'll do a little drawing here maybe this next week. And for the books, for Bastien's beginner books on paragliding and some Cloudbase Mayhem schwag, it's a reward you all for doing that. that. So thanks so much for providing that feedback. And I thought I'd just, before we get into the show today with Martin, I thought I'd go through some of the stats that came in. A lot of this was really interesting to me. Age was about as expected, you know, most, you know, 41 % were between 35 and 44, 23 % between 45 and 54, and almost 20 % between 25 and 34. And it was kind kind of surprising. So a little bit younger than I anticipated. Years flown, 25 % was the biggest number there between one and three years and 15.2 % less than one year.

And then 19 % between three and five years and 24 % more than 10 years. So pretty wide spectrum there, but again, more numbers at the beginning end than I anticipated, which is awesome. And it just means that I'll keep interviewing the best pilots in the world, but we'll also tweak a lot of shows more towards the beginner, and I think that'll be a lot of fun towards the learning and progression. And 73% are XC pilots, and the big one here that really threw me, in a sense, was the hours per year—almost 80% less than an hour, less than 100 hours. That tells us a lot about the currency, and that, you know, obviously, it's pretty hard for most to chase it, I'm sure, as hard as they would like to.

So that was very telling and, again, will help me orient more towards our listener base. Type hours, 56 % thermal, 27 % ridge soaring. An astonishing 85 % of you have not had an accident. That's great. I hope the show helped a little bit with that. And only 11.4 % have had one accident. So that's great. type aircraft 91 paraglider, so I definitely need to put out some more hang gliding shows, but maybe that's representative of the population these days. And in free flight, I'm not too sure. Actually, most peep 43 all about the same. Actually found out about the show via social media, just slightly less than that through a friend or an acquaintance. Maybe this isn't represented again of the responses we got the sample, but um, very few found out about it from their instructors, which I was surprised about.

Instructors get on it, tell your students about the show, and yeah. A bunch of other stuff that was... that was pretty interesting. Most, almost all of you, agree with our support model. You know, very few of you had no opinion, but nobody didn't agree with it, so that was great. Some people thought it'd be okay if we went down the sponsorship route, but I'll definitely stick with this model. It seems to be working, and a whopping 60 of you that responded to the survey also support the show, which is fantastic. So again, I don't think that's representative of our listener audience. If it was the case, I'd be a very wealthy man and that's, that's not going to happen, but that's, but it's, it's fantastic. And it's, I just thank you again, as I do all the time for making this possible and supporting us when you can.

A reminder, several people had had trouble getting access to the bonus shows. Many of those we have to enter manually. If you, If you, you come to us and you support the show via a subscription service through the website, you're automatically added; but if you support through Patreon, or like a one-time thing through Venmo or PayPal, or you just buy some Cloudbase Mayhem stuff, or you just send me an email, those I'll have to enter manually again. You don't, you do not have to support the show financially to have access. Anybody who's, who listens, can have access. Just let me know if you can't support us financially; I get it, I understand, it's no problem. I'm not going to ask anything. Hopefully someday, day you can, but if you can't, no problem. Just let me know. But a lot of those I do have to enter manually and we just miss them. So I will get you slotted in.

It'll be a lifetime subscription. Don't have to worry about it. And also once you do that, once you have an account on the website, you can subscribe to the bonus shows and that will just show up in your app, your listening app, like the regular show does. If you have any trouble with that, just reach out, but there's instructions on the website under the subscription tab about how to do that. It's pretty easy on both iPhone or Android. But if you have any trouble, just let us know. How to improve, just real briefly here, we did have a few complaints about sound on my guest side. That's because we've been doing it via Skype, and it's just too complicated, expensive, and time-consuming to send out microphones to all our guests because I'm interviewing people from all over the world.

Although we are looking into doing this in North America and in Europe, so might get that up and going here pretty shortly. Nik Hawks has been really helping me out with that. Most of the time, I think it sounds pretty good, but we will keep trying to make it better. And we have not utilized this in the next few couple shows that you've heard, but the last few shows that I have recorded, I've been recording a bunch of shows lately, we're using a whole new platform that is way, way better than we've been doing it on Skype. So I think this complaint will shortly go away. More shows on the basics and learning, more interviews on gear, more shows on weather understanding, more oriented towards middle tier and lower end pilots, some requests for video interviews.

So I'm looking into that and that's about it. There's a bunch of more on design. We've got some design shows actually coming up and there's a few requests for PPG interviews. We haven't actually done one of those. I'm sorry, but we are tapping back into the sailplane community here shortly, and like I said, and oh, another quick reminder, and then we'll get to this show, I promise. Is that we have our play? A lot of people ask for a playlist with the with the music here at the top of the show that is on Spotify. There's a link to it on the website, and there's also one of our listeners kindly did one for Apple Music, uh, John Bouillard, thank you very much, sir, and you'll find that on our Facebook page, on the Cloudbase Mayhem Facebook page. So follow us on there and you can get that if you listen to music via Apple.

Let's get into the show. Martin Henry has represented Canada and the world and so has his wife. They spend their summers out in Mansfield in Washington, which is an awesome place out on the flats. Those of you who have flown Chelan know this spot, but they're up in Canada right now. Of course, they're trapped on that side of the border with the whole COVID thing going on, But they spend their summers chasing it pretty hard in Mansfield, a very special place in the world, and he describes it very well. This one's, like I said, laugh out loud funny. I really enjoyed this. What can I say? He's awesome. So enjoy the show with Martin Henry, and cheers.

Martin, this is such a pleasure. I've been super excited to talk to you ever since you sent me an email ages and ages ago. And my much has happened in the world since then, but I was just cracking up this morning looking at, you know, the article, the one that everybody talks to, you know, Larry Tudor and all of you legends, the Popular Mechanics June 1972, and it's a, it's this awesome hang glider-ish thing on the cover, and it says, "Air surfing: a new sport takes off in kites and gliders." Just before we started to talk, and you said you've been at this for 50 years, well...

It's getting pretty close; it's starting to round up to the 50 years pretty soon, you

Don't look old enough for that. Did you learn when you were two, uh?

just about. I was probably, um, you know, and I'm like, I say everything's a fog back then, but it was probably somewhere around 12 to 14, somewhere in there, and

Were you in Canada then? Oh,

Yeah, no, I'm—I'm Canadian. I live on the West Coast, and that's—that's where—that's my home. I know that a lot of people confuse me for someone who actually lives in Mansfield, but that's a, that's a ladder thing in my flying career. And that came quite a bit later and, and, uh, no, I live on the West coast, make my, my living here. And, uh, that's how I end up paying the bills.

And you're in Abbotsford. Is that, am I, you said that right? Abbotsford. It's like, is it rude to say that's a suburb of Vancouver? Yeah,

it's all becoming a giant blob that goes from Vancouver out to the Hope area. But yeah, it's just a little bit east of Vancouver. And

you paraglide as well?

Yeah, I also paraglide.

When did that start? But you mostly hang glide? Or what's the percentage?

Well, it's what sport is best suited for what I'm trying to do. Literally for the local flying here now in the spring, when it gets really dynamic and there's opportunity, I love flying the rigid wing. I mean, that's—that's—that's the aircraft I love to fly. Um, it's just they're—it's—it's kind of, you know, I could fly sailplanes, I could fly regular flex wing hang gliders, but uh, the—the rigid wing hangs that I fly right now, the Atos and stuff, they're just beautiful looking aircraft, I mean, and they're enjoyable to fly. They have lots of performance. Uh, but on the other hand, they're a bit of a pain to pack around and hard to get up a mountain. So quite often for the local flying, uh, we, uh, talked in an earlier conversation about bridal falls, do a hike and fly there with the paraglider.

Certainly not going to do it with a rigid wing.

And when did you literally, was this, was this also the magazine that got you you into the sport did you see this and go yeah yeah

Well, I'm, you know, it kind of, it was the catalyst. I mean, literally, if you talk to anybody from that era, they would be looking at the pictures in that magazine and they would be going, "You know, on my budget, I can handle this, you know, black plastic, bamboo poles and and whatever," and I can commit aviation is the whole kind of feel behind it. Uh, but you know, what inspires you to go to start flying? You know, it's everybody's got their own thing. I, I swear, four or five years old, I fell off a sun deck, hit my head, and that kind of might have been the genetic damage that caused me to become a pilot. I don't know, we

All have a little bit of Dane Bramage, don't we?

yeah but it you know that and uh my brother was into falconry and uh He had several birds of prey and being around those creatures, you know, you realize how impressive they are and how capable they are. It's that probably left a little, you know, you know, when you see them soar, it's just, you know, stunning how beautiful they are. And model airplanes. You know, I was fascinated with the space program, just flight. light and, um, and then along came that magazine, and that magazine just kind of—I was literally in school and my buddy brought it to me and said, "Hey, look at this. You know, we can stop building models and we can start doing this thing." And within weeks, we had something that actually got us off the ground, and it was the beginning of the end, so to speak, and

Tell me about those early days, because I, you know, when, when Miguel talks about we've had a bunch of them on this—well, not nearly enough, but you know, he was literally his, he and his brother were making gliders from garbage on the sides of the street, you know, and tarps and pieces of plastic and pieces of rope and no.

Kidding, um, and what was kind of cool about that era was, you know, people got to realize there was no internet, there was poor, there was poor postal service, there was fuzzy television, there was, you know, communications was, was everything happened in isolation. The magazine kind of revolves around what was going on in California, uh, but it was happening in Europe, it was happening in England, Australia, here back east in Toronto, every, there were everywhere somebody got, you know, saw that magazine and started taking off with it and and, and like you said, built stuff out of garbage. Our little thing in the neighborhood was, at that time, everybody had an antenna.

And they picked up their television by antenna. But cable vision started coming around, so the antennas started coming down. Well, the antennas were made out of aluminum poles and tubing. And probably not very good tubing, but it became the core parts for a lot of the stuff that we started building. And then, you know, there would be a little more outside information start to show up. I mean, you would just die to get a magazine with a picture of a hang glider in it. You know, it would be just wonderful. And you'd look at it, you'd measure it, you'd look at it. And then you start to realize, hey, there's somebody I could send a letter to. And communication started to build and so did the gliders. I mean, there was the first decade of hang gliding was breathtaking.

Taking, uh, it was, you know, even as living as far from the big action as as I am up here in Canada, um, it, it grew exponentially and it grew, uh, furiously, and it, you know, sadly, it cost a lot of lives. It was incredibly efficient at snuffing people out. It was just, it was just, and for some, some reason, that risky sort of sport just took off, and, uh, I, I think Larry Tudor mentioned it in, in yours, if you could cut a piece of tubing, you could become a manufacturer. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it wasn't

There were hundreds; I mean, right off the bat, there were hundreds there.

Was a a thing that I I put down on my notes here was, uh, we actually had for a brief period, uh, I think around '76, '75, a hang glider weekly newsletter. Jeez, I mean, you were receiving one? Well, one was. Yeah, it was. It was just like the the flow of information, it was crude, you know? It was, it was, uh, just a folded up piece of couple pages or, you know, double-sided paper, and you got your your stamp on it and it came to you, but you'd gobble that up and in there there was just so many manufacturers that were were that that disappeared shortly after that. Um, there was, uh, I I had a, uh, a local kind of a mentor after the first few years that, uh, uh, was, uh, an importer of a glider from Bill Bennett out of California and, um, he got me into the the first, uh, manufactured gliders, but you know, my first one was, you know, plastic, uh, aluminum tubing and plastic sheet, followed by another one that was a little little more exotic, and then I got a plans for a standard Rogallo and I actually bought a finished wing a sale for it and, uh, that became like a couple years of flying that and then I bought a commercially built glider and then another one, another one, I think I ended up with six or seven gliders in that first first 10 years and, um, the evolution, like I say, was was stunning.

Manufacturers were building stuff that was dangerous, um, that, uh, they were pushing the performance, that that was a real key thing was to try and have something better than the other guy. Um, oddly enough, at the same time there were some pretty respectable designs that started to come out like the the Manta Manta Wings fledgling, uh, that was something that happened at the end of the first decade at, you know, about '78 or so and maybe even earlier, and it was a cable rig fixed rigid wing, uh, but not that easy to fly, so it didn't have a lot of appeal and it was pretty complicated Um, there was a glider that I, I kind of wanted to mention, and it was kind of, it, it created a crossroads for me, and it was a from Bennett, and it was, uh, the Phoenix Mariah, and, uh, you know, rising from the ashes.

Uh, it, it was, it was so cutting edge in, in, in theory. Uh, it was high aspect ratio, it had an enclosed crossbar, it, uh, had a huge wingspan, but the whole thing was made out of like inch and a half tubing. And if you don't know much about building gliders, let's just put it, inch and a half tubing is not really good structural stuff. And, um, not only did this thing excel in performance, but it also broke the, the, the, the, the, uh, it kind of was the first major catastrophic failure of a glider in the sense that we suddenly discovered something that could fly around quite nicely and smooth air, if it got pitched over, wasn't going to recover.

And you guys

weren't using it's not, I mean, like the the guy on the cover here, uh, you know, there's there's no helmet, there's no shoes, it's a webbing harness. He's not in a swing seat. If

you'd seen a picture, if you compare a picture of that to a Phoenix Mariah and know that it's only about a seven-year window that that took place, you'd realize how much the sport had evolved.

It must have been so exciting. So

the decade kind of ended with that glider cutting the next level, going into the next decade where we needed to start making them safer. And manufacturers began to really work on the idea. I know one of the kits that fixed the Mariah was a tail. It's something that took another 30 years before it showed up on a hang glider again. But yeah, I kind of dug this out. I haven't got a picture of it, but there was an early parachute from that era, and it was by Bennett, and there was a few other ones that were out there. Hanbury, I think, made a parachute. But the cool thing on this parachute was a little small label that was sewn onto the container itself, and it was a waiver.

And there was a lot of issues in the very beginning with tubing and fabric and and and Bainbridge didn't want to sell to hang gliding because it was too dangerous and people were getting killed and there was liability concerns and on this little parachute container it had a little deckle just sewn onto the container and it said something to the effect of, "This product can Can," may, and will fail under any and or all circumstances. User assumes all risk. I'm going, I don't know. That sounds pretty bulletproof to me.

As you're

glancing, you're reading this. And it was a ridiculously small shoot. It had like 10 lines. It was a big round thing. It was like being a 10-liner. It probably had, it was more of an impact stabilization device than it was a parachute. And the big red thing would indicate where the crash site was.

Do you think, I'm just thinking about this. I mean, you know, it's, you see Red Bull and you see people these days just pushing, you know, the limits to incredible extremes. So it's not, it's not like humans aren't pushing it anymore. anymore, but I feel like if, if, if we were starting today with where you guys, you know, if the last 50 years hadn't had any free flight rogalo just came out with the first wing and we were starting, I do you think it would happen? I mean, with, with, with, with the way I mean, like you said, and Larry had some of the numbers. I mean, with the, with the number of deaths and, like you said, they were very efficient at killing people.

I feel like the, the, it just wouldn't be, it just would be not too dangerous. Too many lawsuits can't, I mean, it almost seems like it happened right at the perfect time in history. You got, you guys were all crazy enough to take it on. You're in your teens and you're mad and you think you're going to survive. And a lot of, a lot of people didn't, but I just wonder if it would have, it could happen today.

Yeah, it, It would have a very hard time today because even today, what you're running into is you're running into, uh, with property owners. If we had that kind of level of a tragedy going on in the sport, now no one would let us fly there. Um, I mean, as it is now, they, they, they, um, we had a famous pilot who, who was killed, the brother of Nancy Green. And she's a famous skier in Canada. And he was killed at Red Mountain, I think, in southern B.C. here. And it was like 40 years ago. And it wouldn't matter where you were for decades after that. You would be someplace and, oh, didn't somebody die here?

And that famous person. And it would constantly come back. And that comes back now whenever you're negotiating for an access to a land or a takeoff or something. And somebody will always come up with something like that. Or didn't I hear about, you know, so even when we have just, you know, we have accidents. We're not perfect. But those accidents often reflect on our ability to access flying. And in a way, I mean, the paraglider pilots that are doing all the backcountry flying are, you know, The tiger country flying up in the Cascades and stuff, they don't have to worry about it, but the pilots that have recreational, like, their, their thing is they go out to our local site, Mount Woodside, and that there needs to be some level of organization, because if there isn't, the average person wouldn't let you on their property, would it?

Would be very tough for the sport to, unless it was something confined. Yeah, I mean, you know, we, you, you were saying how, uh, you know, hang gliding in, in the early days, was so efficiently ending people's lives. Well, you could say much the same of paragliding when it started, sure.

and maybe

paragliding had a bit of an in in the sense that there was already established flying sites, and I can tell you that's what concerned I was one of those, you know, you know totally against paragliding in the beginning because this people started showing up and they weren't respecting the sites, and there was a lot of animosity back then, but one one of the things that concerned us was, man, you know, we can't start having accidents like this again. It's just not cool. We're going to end up having problems.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's always, that's always the risk, especially with insured sites and that kind of thing. And I know all the Europeans are nodding their heads like, well, we don't have to deal with that, but yeah. I mean, so you, you mentioned you spend the summers in Mansfield and I don't want to jump too far ahead here, but when did that happen? And, you know, for, For people that are listening that have flown Chelan, understand what Mansfield is, but you've got to give the audience at large an understanding of what Mansfield is and where it is.

Okay. Well, that's actually a massive jump. It's like 30 years from when

I started. We're going to go back, but I just want to set the tone of the drive here. I mean, you have lived your life for flying.

Yeah. Yeah, well, it it kind of came down to we were going through very various iterations of where we would where we would fly, what our objectives were. I mean, I kind of followed the natural trend of when I started flying. It was just get a flight, followed by get some airtime, then start doing aerobatics and then flying cross country and reaching out for different levels in the sport. And we were into the cross country when we started flying Chelan. And we're from the mountains, and then suddenly we found ourselves flying a site where you go out onto the flatlands, and like early hang gliding, you had to go down, so you had to start from someplace high. That's the way it was.

Starting from the flats, we left that to the crazy Australians who were towing, you know, and they were doing the boat towing, and it was just like some wild stuff. Stuff came from that era before we really learned how to tow. And I have to say, at about that time, aero towing was starting to happen to open up flying for people who flew the flats. I was involved with a little bit of aero towing here in 1985. And about that time, we kind of went, you know, it's got some potential. It's kind of sketchy. It really was kind of sketchy, but it had potential. And uh, so we, we, we were off searching for cross-country flying and, and I was flying competitively in competitions, a little bit. Canadian competitions, no offense, Canada, but they kind of suck.

And mainly, and mainly they suck is because weather. We just don't have a place where you get consistent. There's, there's been lots of, um, lots of places where we get good cross-country flying, uh, Golden, where they hold the Willy and stuff like that. Uh, it's cool, but they tend to now lean towards an OLC type of contest because trying to have a fixed racing contest in Canada and have five or six days of, yeah, you can't set dates.

It's just too hard.

Yeah, so we, we started, we started flying in Chelan and we thought, "Wow, this, this flatland thing, you don't need a mountain and god, you can get high and god, you can get up from low." And, and god, is it ever rough some days out here? But it's, I, you know, I flew my first hundred miles down there, you know, I like a paragliding flight, I got up and got blown a hundred miles and that was like, "Wow, that was amazing." And, uh, we started enjoying the place and then a typical of Chelan, there was, there was, um, an event that kind of went along the lines of there was some bad fire season, the local club which was trying, trying to keep the site open, was trying to keep us access to the top. It started, you had to have a shovel, you had to fire extinguish, you had to join the club, you had to have USHPA.

And it became a lot of things. We kind of saw maybe there's some writing on the wall here. Maybe we're not going to be able to get up the butte. But God, the flats are sure nice to fly. And we heard rumor of a couple people towing out on the flats. And it was just like, OK, there's some potential. And we talked to a couple of people and guys in Alberta, in Canada, We're starting to tow a fair bit. And I don't know if you know Stuart Midwinter.

Yeah, of course. Yeah,

well, he convinced me to also the guy who introduced us to paragliding. But that's another story on a highlight, too. I think that's what it was back in the 90s. Anyhow, he convinced me we could build a winch. And so, of course, rather than buy a winch for a few thousand bucks, I decided to spend my whole life trying to design one. And about 1990, somewhere in there, we started consistently towing out in the flats. And when we first went out to Mansfield, where there was some excellent tow roads, don't tell anyone, please. You know, I don't want any crowds out there. I'll talk about that in a second. But, you know.

That's a lot of sarcasm, folks, if you're listening to this. Mansfield. No, no, I'm

serious. There's guys out there with guns and everything. You don't want to be out there. Sure, sure, sure. And I'll come back to that. but um, we, we, we went into town and we were kind of celebrities. These crazy Canadians came down; they had this towing system. I had a little tow set up on a trailer and pulled it behind my azuzu trooper and, uh, we had limited—no, we actually had some fairly decent success. We had a small group of people that worked together with the winch and it worked out well, and we would rent whatever vacant house there was in town, and it's a tiny little town at the end of the rails and the The rails got pulled up and left the town just with some grain silos.

What is it, a couple hundred people?

Yeah, between 250 and 350. It's been that way for years, maybe 450 at times. I'm not sure. It's got a big high school there, basically from K to university. I don't know. It covers everything. And really nice people. I mean, really friendly people. We had a neighbor that helped us find a place and some people in town owned the store. And we brought a little money in, not much. It was Canadian money. It was hardly worth anything. But we kind of started basing out of there. And for some reason, it just started getting a little bit difficult to rent a place. And especially if somebody could rent their house, they'd prefer not to rent to us for a month when they can rent to somebody for a year.

So at one point, we had a place that we were renting. And the guy said to us, you know, the place is for sale. You might want to offer something on it. And Mia, my wife, my partner here, who I taught to fly back in the late 70s when we met, she said, well, we should buy the place. I'm kind of hesitant. I don't know. It's a lot of money. I'd rather buy a glider. And then they came and they mentioned, well, I think he only wants $25,000 for it. And it was a house, an old house with a three lots all on it, kind of in the I know it's in the desert, but it is in the floodplain of town. All the water drains in my neighborhood. So in the spring, in the spring, I got a sump pump that's running steady to try and keep us alive.

Right. But it it became our base of operations. We've we've owned the place now for about. Oh, geez, that's gets fuzzy. Everything gets fuzzy about 16 years, 17 years, I think. now wow

Awesome, so you, you, you and your wife go fly out there every summer, every

Summer, we we we've now made it, uh, an effort, with the exception of this year because of COVID, uh, the border's been closed, so we're kind of isolated from the property. But, um, we make it an effort to go down in Easter, open the place up. We're really big into bird watching and outdoors, and so there's just so, so much stuff down there that we, we really, really enjoy that. Um, uh, we'll, we'll go down, open it up in Easter, and we won't be, you know, we'll go back and forth probably 10, 15 times in a year, and it's about a four hour, five hour drive. Well, yeah, it'd be a five hour drive from here, and, um, and, uh, yeah, we would primarily aim for, we'd start seriously flying the tow rig would go down probably, uh, May, May, May long weekend.

And you might book a week there and we'll book like four weeks or something through July and try and get as much, as much as I could get out of my work for holidays, I would go there.

I got to say, I mean, I haven't done a ton of flatland flying. You know, I've done Daniloquin and I've done some flying in Spain. And I mean, I have done some, but the flatland flying in Washington state and particularly right there. And we've had a lot of goals at Vansfield, you know, you go out and do a triangle and you land at Vansfield, is it's just extraordinary. I mean, the the comp pilots I've talked to over the years who have done World Cups and flown all over the world, uh, that it's she lands always number one. It's a special place, isn't it? It's just strong, and you can see the thermals because the dust levels to 12,000 feet. I mean, it's just, ah, it's special. And those arroyos, what is that? What you call it? You know, these these the huge huge washes, you know, the, uh, yeah, the royals, is that what?

It's just, well, there's

There's also, there's the uh, the uh, Badlands that were east of town, the the pothills, that's one of them. And then there's all the like, this they call it the the mini uh Grand Canyon, which is Dry Falls. Yeah, that's an amazing area to fly over. Um, and and the wheat, I mean, you got wheat, you got sage.

Yeah, and you say, "Say wheat too," but like, the Palouse is a—is a photographer's dream. I mean, when you fly, we had that one real famous, and now since then there's been even a longer one, but at the time, it was the longest task, I think, in world history, uh, and it was 226 or something, and from the butte out there, and at the end, you know, you're flying out near the Idaho border, yeah, and you're flying over those fields and you're like, "Def, I definitely took acid this morning. Something's wrong with my—this can't be real."

especially if it's, uh, early enough in the year where the the weed is still green, yeah.

But you have the green and the gold and the red, and it's just wild out there, ah, so special. And you wouldn't really see that flying a

rigid wing, though you, you're looking down, you go, "Damn, which way is that hill? Which way is it?" Sold. But geez, I don't know. And you go on and on and on because you, you, you're at the end of the day, and the air is very buoyant. And if you're traveling with a wind, like, by the way, I, I've always said, I, I don't go open distance on a rigid wing because open, open distance on a rigid wing is actually, it spells divorce, because nobody wants to go and get you after you've gone however far you can go. Not unless you're flying Zapata and trying to break 700 miles or something, but

sure but

no we we like to come back and that's That's, that's the other reason that, uh, the place had the huge attraction for us is that we, uh, we fly triangles. Uh, it's one of the most enjoyable kind of flying that, you know, coming home late in the day, uh, making it even coming up short, uh, just coming back a long ways in a triangle. Um, you know, it's, it's so rewarding. Well, and

that's when a hang glider really makes a lot of sense, isn't it too? Because, you know, 10 K an hour for you guys is nothing. and

I don't know, I've—I've had my—I've—I've had my ass kicked by some PWC pilots down there. They pick lines, funny story about, uh, one of the years with the PWC was, uh, uh, of course we're starting off to the east and they're starting out in the west, and 99% of the time the first thing they're going to do is they're going to—well, and they've started doing a lot of neat northern routes now, but yeah, they've started, they usually head east, you know, someplace, place out to Farmer or something like that. And so I'm—I'm a hot, you know, a hot shot on my rigid wing and I'm flying by myself. It's early in the morning or early in the day and I'm starting off with a westerly leg and I'm going out to Waterville and, uh, towards Badger Mountain or something, and I see my first PWC thing gaggle, this column of—I can only imagine what it must look like to some, some poor guy in a little Cessna coming around the car.

Oh man.

Can you imagine? Yeah, right.

So I'm, I'm, I'm smoking towards it at high speed and, uh, thinking I'll do a little fly by and show off. And as I get closer, I'm going, God, that thing's awful big. I'm going to stay away. There's a little tiny group on the side. I'm going to go bug them and wave at that, but I'm not going near that thing.

Yeah. I mean, I was, my next question was just going to be, you know, You've flown literally them, them all. Um, it must be wild to think back what you were flying in the 70s compared to now. I mean, the the the ships, it's just a different sport, yeah.

It's, um, you know, although I, I have to say, in the 80s, uh, once you started seeing pilots like Larry Tudor and that get on a, um, a double surface glider in the late 80s and early 90s and start to unleash the performance that they had, um, it, it, it was kind of like the, the golden age. Then, in the mid 80s through the mid 90s, when glider performance started to get up, uh, rigid wings were, it to be, you know, to be really honest, a rigid wing right now, the highest performance rigid wing you can get might be getting 20 to 1. I don't know if you, you believe the manufacturer, maybe 21 to 1 or whatever. It's up there, but realistically, 18 to 20 to 1.

And a new, modern, high-performance flex swing with the best harness, a really good pilot, flying the best configuration all the time, probably gets up close to 17 now, 16 to 17. team at at least then you toss in, you know, old senile pilot, high performance glider against some hot shot that's really knows how to fly and picks every good line, can see the air better than I can. I'm at par, it's my compensation device, so

What were? Take me back to that time, so I mean, you're at the 70s. People are falling out of the sky; there's all these accidents, and you're like, "Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and teach this new girl that I just met to get into it as well." Was Was there, was there just massive survival bias going on? What, what, what was the talk at night drinking beers? Cause it just seemed like, I mean, to me, when I talked to Larry, I had the incredible opportunity of sharing some sky with him down in Texas this, this summer. Um, you know, he's flying paragliders now. It just seems like, were you guys just detached from the, was it so awesome that you just had to kind of ignore that side of it or was Was that it?

It was so awesome that you did didn't want to talk about it. Yeah. And and frankly, in in in after I had owned the Phoenix Mariah and I just paid a lot of money for it back then, it wasn't much, but paid a lot of money for it. And all of a sudden I get stories that this thing's dangerous and you don't want to hear that.

No, you

don't want to hear that this thing's dangerous. And you start kind of going, oh, man. And at that time, we lost two pilots on the same weekend in two different spots for two different reasons.

And it kind of affected me. And I pulled back from the sport a bit. I actually took a bit of a break. And that's when I met my wife. You know, she was traveling around from she'd come over from the Netherlands. And I think she was looking for a husband and new citizenship or something. So she she snagged me and we went and did like a half year or whatever out in a bunch of exploring the backcountry of B.C. and stuff. And she she convinced me that it was a good idea that we get married and we went to work on that. And in the meantime, she had driven for some friends of mine and and and I'd started flying a little bit. And it basically came down to, no, I'm not going to drive for you anymore. Or I, you know, once in a while, maybe, but I want to learn how to fly.

And I'm going, oh, okay. So I taught, I taught her to fly. And at that time, well, at that time, I mean, the really, the schools weren't doing much better. So, uh, and we had gear kicking around and she's a relatively gifted pilot. Uh, she's, um, you know, took it naturally and, and did quite well. And, uh, my life was ruined ever since. I have a shameful contest where she actually beat me quite badly and I had a big snit and I regret that to this day. But, you know, it's hard to teach someone you really care for, especially at a time when the sport was getting dangerous and we were starting to understand it was dangerous.

I think what helped us up here an awful lot is that it was dangerous when we started to get outside the envelope, when we started to really push ourselves. But the conditions and flying around this country we're in here is a lot of marine, a lot of coastal air, not that vicious. And if you were learning in some place like Texas or California and Sandia or up in the mountains or, you know, anything big, oh, man, I don't know. There was a lot of people that got killed because the gliders weren't up to the conditions.

Right, sure.

Low to the ground, lots of trees. I mean, my incidents in the early years were trees. You end up in the trees or whatever, and there was a few of those.

I love the—I mean, it just struck me when I was talking to Charlie.

Larry said he's pretty sure that Charlie was the first one to ever thermal. Now, of course, like you said, it's blown up all over the world, so we can't compare it to France and other places where people are getting after it, too. But it's kind of wild to think that, of course, there was a time where you didn't know that that was possible.

Yeah, well, it would have just come from sailplanes. It would have. They were there. They were doing it. They were turning. Oh, of course. And then it would also come from somebody in a contest getting smart instead of just flying to a pylon and back, which was kind of the thing at the day. There was no real soaring. It was like just trying to stay up. And I think Larry had a little story about, well, he was flying out and he hit some lifts. So he stayed in the lift. And he basically went out and kept lapping the course and, you know, won the task. But it was just a case of, oh, well, maybe I should stay in lift because a lot of a lot of the early soaring, everybody was looking for a ridge site. Sure. We got we could get our head around the mechanics of ridge soaring.

Sure. Thermaling. That was a little bit stranger. You know, that was that took a little time, a little altitude. And then eventually it was like I say, it must have come just from the natural evolution from sailplanes. people that were aware of what goes on in sailplanes. I mean, books about soaring have been around for decades prior.

Right. Okay. All right. Yeah, I missed that. Of course, there were sailplanes doing it. So you mentioned you got into competition flying?

Yeah, I flew a fair bit. It was like the next local thing that happened, and we started flying contests where you had to fly to a turn point and then, you know, to spot land, that was the first stuff. And that seemed kind of neat. And then cross country competitions started to come up and they evolved. They, you know, we started talking about using data back cameras and stuff from that, Instamatic cameras for contests. And it was the sense that it was challenging to push yourself to go someplace and come back or go someplace and land there as a goal. And so there was a bunch of that going on. Like I said, unfortunately, Canadian contests kind of suck, and I didn't travel much away from this area.

And you start getting tired of putting in a lot of time just to get to a contest. And then, you know, carrying it forward, the ultimate end of my interest in contests was more or less the 1989 World Championships in Fiche. I put a huge amount of effort into getting there. And and actually, Mia had earned herself a spot on the team. A small side story: there was a pilot who's a very good pilot, um, and he hadn't been participating in the point system and, uh, he, uh, came to the team and asked, you know, said, "Is there any way you can get on the team?" So Mia, who was on the bottom of the list, stepped aside and let she went as a backup pilot and, uh, the guy deserved to be on the team.

It was like we could have been, you know, real jerks and not let him on the team, but the guy's name is Randy Haney. He's one of the first big distance pilots that flew out of Golden, uh, and flew down across to Tego, Montana, or, uh, just across the line, so he flew, you know, 200, 200 miles back in the big days, and I mean flying gliders that weren't that easy to fly, sure, uh, that would have been like the magic three or something back then, uh, so anyway, we We went to the World Championships, and literally the day that we pulled up to the landing field, having spent a whole lot of money to get there and the weather didn't look that great, somebody died in the LZ. And it was not a comp pilot. It was a visiting pilot for, I think, Brazil or something. But it kind of set the tone for the whole meet.

And nothing about the organizers. They did a terrific job, but you get 200 pilots sitting around in bad weather for a whole almost two weeks. It was a week and a half, I think, altogether, eight days. Oh, my God. We were all crawling. We were not. It was great seeing people. Like, I met people I'd heard about for years, but I kind of left that going. And, you know, the whole thing of somebody telling me to go fly someplace on a day that I really don't want to take off. Yeah. You know, Mia, my wife, ran into much the same thing when she was at the Women's World Championships. She actually flew Coast and first. It's about 80 something.

I can't remember when they had the Women's Worlds over there. But she also flew the World Championships down in Chelan and flying off the Butte. And you know what it's like when it gets windy.

Oh, yeah.

There was a push, push, push to get people in the air. There was a push by a couple of the competitive pilots. I think Kerry Castle was one of them and they got into the air. But then Mia was actually on launch and she says, no, I don't like it. I'm going to back off. And a couple of people got in the air. Kerry Castle and a few of the top pilots and probably not a big deal for them. But there were a lot of pilots there that, you know, it would have been a big deal to have gotten in the air on that real windy day. And, uh, it was bad, you know? It got so windy that they couldn't land down at the—I think the soccer field at the time—they couldn't land over at the BB field on the other side. They had to land out front, or they had to try and hope that they could get onto the flats. And, yeah, and the compression was so strong that you couldn't get up.

And she was thankful she didn't fly that day. So, between the two of us, we both started going, you know, contests—not really what we want to do anymore, more um... and part of it, again, you know, you—you look at a Florida contest for hang gliding where they arrow toe, they look like fantastic meats, yeah. And maybe, maybe I'd change my whole psychology, although I—I have a real fragile ego. I don't like getting beat by anybody. Uh, my—my buddy, my buddy, let alone your wife.

sounds like

Yeah, let alone my wife, my buddy out of Spokane, that uh Mike, Mike Bomstad, you see a lot of his videos and stuff that he uploads. Um, you know, he comes out there. There's only two of us flying together out there, but he's driving me nuts because he's right behind me. He's on the radio, and he's higher than I am. He's going further than I am. He's waiting for me to make a mistake. I just fall apart. I can't stand it.

Canadians, you're not supposed to have big egos. You've been spending too much time in the States.

Oh, no, but I'm an old man. I need something to look forward to. Come home with a little trophy on the wall.

Fish can be gnarly. I've spent a lot of time there. I have spent a lot of time in that little town, just, you know, in the rain and the wind and not doing anything. I mean, you're at the bottom of the biggest glacier in Europe. And I've had a lot of everybody who's flown in the Volus has had scary days. And it's going up the

Furka Pass.

I mean, getting

stuck at the top. The Grimsel

Snake. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's always a dicey proposition.

The other thing that we had a couple of nice flights before the contest got going. But a couple of the things that we, uh, uh, started to notice, that man, you get anywhere down in the green, you're done. Yeah, you know, you get down the green and you're finished. You're gonna be in a side valley, that's it, it's over. You're going down the land and you're going to drink beer in a local bar, that's about as good as it's gonna get. Were

You guys, I mean, it's just, again, it's hard for me to imagine were you guys landing right there in fish with all the power lines and everything in in the little village where he was goal somewhere else. Cause I mean, it's a pretty tight little spot in paragliding, but I can't imagine, you know, 50 hang gliders coming in at the same time at goal there.

They broke up into three groups. Um, there was, um, one group went to over the Furka pass on the other side, there was a launch over there that they went to. Uh, and so with the three groups of roughly, you know, 65 to 80 people per group, uh, Uh, and then one at the top where the tram was, uh, and then off to the West, I think was the other launch. And with the three groups, they broke up the groups and they all had different LZs. Uh, I did land like first day I sunk out also made me feel really good about contests with my fragile Eagle. And, uh, I've got a funny story about that day. I, I, I took off scratched around. It was really stable. table. Uh, I didn't know the place that well, hadn't had that much experience, and I sunk out.

I just like, I didn't get it. I just, and I went down with a few people, and I did land right at the bottom, down near the tram. There was a small field down there, and the check, uh, the check team who had sponsored their entire trip with it by taking a bus and filling it from one end to the other with pilsner beer, about two layers thick, I think. The coach came out, gave me a bottle, you know? Maybe, maybe you'll have a better day tomorrow. I was obviously, you know, pouting and having a snit. And a famous Canadian pilot who didn't fly that day, he was on the team, but he went to another launch and they didn't call a task. Came back and he picked me up and his name was Willie Mueller, father of Chris Mueller. And Willie, in his Austrian way, you know, he said, you know, it's OK.

You know, nobody's it's a bad day. Nobody probably got any scoring, and it might not even be a valid day. And as we're driving to go pick up a couple people that did get a little ways away, he says, "Oh, this guy here, he probably, probably broke his arm, you know, trying to land on one of these snow sheds." And and I kind of, "Oh, yeah, okay," laughed. Oh, it turned out he did break his arm, and he was out of the meet. Oh, okay.

But, but he was... Willie was a a really good guy for a coach, yeah. He kind of calmed things down because we were all getting pretty grumpy by the end of that meet, right?

Right, uh, Glad Legends. Um, the, what has it been like flying all these years with your significant other? With you know, I've often thought about that. You know, I took I took Maddie for a tandem a few years ago, and about 30 seconds into the flight, she's careening her neck around, you know, looking at me going, "Hey, did you want to, uh, what, what are our plans for Friday night?" And I thought, "You have no interest in this whatsoever." do you? And she's like, yeah, no, not really. I don't really get it. And I was kind of like, oh, thank God.

Lucky, uh, because, um, you know, then it's, you know, you're always worried about, uh, uh, when we, when we, uh, uh, push ourselves, uh, you, you, you, you, you're pushing your risk and risk management is something that we took a lot of, uh, pride in when we decided to stop flying comp competition. It's that it's one thing to push yourself because like, Mia behind me here, I've got a few of my world records hanging on the wall. Mia's got more world records on her wall in her side because she's a girl, she got got her own records, but but she flew them very well and deserved every one of them. But never really having to push, uh, other than, you know, take on on dynamic days and deal with them.

I mean, that that that was the level of push that we had between us, and it's hard, you know, um, you worry about her, you know, you, I worry about her when she's, you know, a little too far out. We babysit each other pretty good now down on Chelan. We, we drive, we crew for one another. I mean, my day to fly, her day to fly, and I chase her on her rigid wing, and she chases me on my day, and I'm envious. Man, that's awesome, yeah. And we, well, you know, we We do a lot of driving, and we could just go out there and fly and come back. We had one driver one year that basically sat at the house with the radio and, oh, yeah, that's good. OK, if we got low, we'd maybe start packing up a cooler to come out, but we'd have to make it back or we'd be waiting a long time.

But anyway, it's it's it's hard if somebody is in that situation and they're trying to they want their their partner to learn to fly. and their partner has maybe reservedly said, oh, yeah, I'll give it a look or whatever, try and have a third party do the teaching, do the... It's somebody you respect. In my case, Mia learned paragliding from, I'm sure you know him, Alex Raymond. Yeah. I don't know if he's actually a certified instructor right now, but anyway, at the time, he's one of the mentors from the paragliding community that I took on. He was an old hang glider pilot. It's hard to say old and Alex. But anyway, you know, he had been hang gliding in his younger days and moved over to paragliding.

And he had a real hang gliding perspective of paragliding. And it was very nice to have that translation. So she took, uh, lessons from him and I felt a lot better about that. And she did what, what we did in hang gliding, which is a lot of practice, you know, a lot of time on the training Hill and, and that sort of thing. And, and, uh, we, we, uh, I, on the other hand, self-taught with Alex sort of, you know, mentoring me in the background. Uh, but, um, I think, I think of, of, of all the, um, the, The advice that I could pass on to, first of all, for hang glider pilots that have their head up their butt about paragliding, um, and they've got whatever, yes, they collapse.

I got a video that shows you they collapse and they can get a real mess, but I can tell you right now that they complement one another. I, I have the two extremes. I have a rigid wing and I have a paraglider. The paraglider, when I'm flying my little local site, or Mia and I are flying the little local site and we're scratching, catching, you know, you wouldn't want it. Having a rigid wing and then flying my little mount, Woodside, is like having a Ferrari in downtown traffic. What's the point other than a big ego show? And I, I don't care, I just, it's not that, it's not the craft. Whereas on a paraglider, I get a lot more out of it. I, I could feel the air. It's a lot more intimate relationship with what's going on in the air and, uh, it complements.

On the other hand, out for the PWC guys, fine, they love Chelan. I don't think I'd want to fly a paraglider out on the flats. I just don't have the, the, the, the bump factor that takes to fly a paraglider out there. I get these collapses now and I literally talk to the wing and go, "What the hell was that? Why did you do that? You know what was that all about?" I was flying around, minding my own business.

But hang glider pilots need to understand that if you're going to learn to paraglide, I guess some of the negative attitude comes from, I tried paragliding, and oh, this thing happened, and it was just stupid, and I didn't like it, and whatever, and they go away. Well, don't – and I made the mistake of taking some of my hang gliding with me to paragliding. And the biggest mistake is if you're not going full into paragliding and doing the full push, you're just using it to support your, you know, to back up your flying experience in your area to make it easier to be able to just grab the paraglider and go out for a local flight. Go at it with the attitude that I'm brand new and I don't know anything.

Because if you go at it with the attitude, well, I'm a pilot. I know how to fly. No, you don't. And, and my video bad stall is a good example of, yeah, yeah, right about there. I, I gave up the aircraft and I was a passenger, you know, that's, it's, and

I do like that. It seems like both you and your wife, you know, you kind of, you made this transition, uh, and you started flying paragliders for the ease and for, you know, a different, you know, learning again, all those, all those things are really exciting, but you still, it sounds like both of you still, you know, on a good day, you're going to fly rigid.

yeah if it's

still where the passion is. I, and I like that. I mean, I like that in terms of, I, I want hang gliding to still be a thing, you know? 20 years from now, it's just, they're, they're amazing gliders. It's a, you know, being prone is a very different experience. I

Also, you know, I was gonna say, uh, one other little item. I put a note down. It is kind of sad to see that hang gliding is not doing better, given the gear, right? I mean, the the stuff that's being built, Wills Wing and Moise, and you know, I've got, you know, nothing but admiration for some of the high performance stuff that these guys are putting out, arrows and the and the and the uh the combat series and stuff that they're flying. These are these are really good aircraft, and um, and they've become uh like like exceptionally safe in big air, there's still risk. You know, it's not perfect. You can still tumble and break one of these things in big air. But the gear and the chutes and the recovery systems and stuff that are in place, I just don't understand.

And even more so for older hang glider pilots that have started to drift away from the sport because, you know, frankly, the rigid wing that I fly, it's not the easiest thing in the world to land. And I have to admit, there's lots of times I don't quite get it right. It's not pretty. Um, but you know, when they step back, and you can get onto something like a sport three, or whatever version of the sport that's out there now by Wills Wing, they're beautiful gliders. They're easy to fly; they land like a piece of cake, you know? They're just, I, it's just stunning that we don't see the sport maintaining, or improving, or getting more people, um, and and frankly, I think you're seeing a little bit of that in paragliding right now. I, I, I think that, that perhaps it's just not that wild risk that some people seem to thrive.

It's become too mainstream. I don't know if that's the right way to put it.

I'm seeing locally that maybe it's the costs. It's not a cheap sport. And I think one of the biggest aspects for both hang gliding and paragliding for what retains the members or pilots is how much commitment it takes to do it. And frankly, our lives now, everybody's life is just so busy trying to, you know, everybody's trying to get by, get ahead, do that. The pilots that really excel are pilots that pull away from that. And I'm having problems, too, in my life right now where it's like you're kind of you got projects and things that are always piling up on the side. You're getting close to retirement. You've got to start thinking about that. And having the time to get out and go flying is not easy. And if you're a student, like I've, I've often, when I look at the fresh little students sitting around the field out at Woodside or whatever, and I, I give them a hard time and say, you ready to commit, you know, you should have taken up heroin because at least the government has a plan.

They can help you out, but flying, no, you gotta be committed. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, I, when I, when I talked to some of the pilots in Europe where, you know, the, the Brits have the whole race Academy, you know, the juniors program, the French, you you can make a living. You know, you, you can, if you grow, if you come up through the juniors program in France and you work for orange or, you know, some company, part of your income is going to be from the, they have to pay you to go flying. And I mean, it's a, it's a national, there's pride in it. There's a national thing. It's a big sport. And as you know, you've been over to fish and, you know, you see people flying everywhere you go. It's just, it's our, it's not, it's not our NFL, but you know, there, there, there are a lot more people participating and here you really do. It has to be, uh, you have to do it on your own.

You're not getting a lot of support and that's hard to do for an 18 year old coming out of school or a 20 year old coming out of college. I mean, how do you have the time and the money and the.

And, and, and the sites, the access to the sites. Um, you know, we rely on, uh, uh, private landowners for landing fields. We rely on government land for takeoffs in the area where we're from here. And I mentioned earlier a gondola project for a local flying site here called Bridal Falls. And my real reservation is less about the gondola. It's more about the business going up on the hill. You know, are we going to be limited because of business liabilities or whatever? It's like a concern. So, um, you know, having access to flights, I know that the death knell for hang gliding in our area here is just no training hills. There are no training hills.

You can't learn.

And you can learn paragliding from the basic little hills that are around here, but there's a couple of little parks. So once you get the foot launch down and you get a little bit of background, you can go fly off a mountain in light, calm air and it all works out nicely. Where the hang glider, you've got to really perfect the takeoff and landing and there's no place to do that here. People try to tow. I mean, you can try that, but nothing. If you're foot launching, you need to have a training hill and we don't have anything. And it's so hard to find anything to replicate that or do that. that hurts the sport yeah

Sure, and uh, we were talking about insurance stuff before we started talking, and that's too complicated here, and I want to hear more stories, but that's—that could be a big death knell coming, certainly, down in the states right now. It sounds like we're going to be—we're kind of on the cusp of losing a lot of sites. It's just the insurance rates keep going up, and clubs can't afford it. But uh, leaving that aside for a second, you mentioned—uh, you mentioned records for both you. Let's—let's go into that a little bit.

um, sure, um, it's, it's was just kind of, I got to call my competition task on the day when I wanted to do it, when the conditions look right, um, you know, I, I got to pick the day, I got to pick the direction I wanted to go, I'd love doing triangles, I, I find they're, uh, an amazing equalizer and strategy, and there's lots, Lots of stuff involved. So in the flats, when you haven't got a mountain to run into, you can really drive some amazing triangles down there. Though I have to, you know, hats off, total respect for the top paragliding pilots that are driving the big distances in the Alps. You know, even the rigid wing pilots that have been flying there don't quite grab the big backcountry stuff.

off, you know, the real rough terrain and way out in the mountains that the paraglider pilots are doing. And, you know, the fact that you can put a paraglider down practically anywhere is helpful. You can smash a lot of carbon trying to put it down in a spot that's not suited. So we tend to be a little bit more reserved on where we get, even with the great performance. I mean, A good example of that would be something like a big 200K triangle that was flown here in an area that you've flown near Pemberton, and they flew up over the Pemberton Glacier and they flew back over. Yeah, those were just

unbelievable lines, so yeah, those

Those lines are just like, they give me the shakes. Yeah, I'm thinking about my rigid wing and I'm going, I gotta keep like about a 15 to 1 out of here. That's the way I gotta keep it in mind. I just cannot think of ever landing this glider back here; that would be the end of it, right? Uh, so no, it the flats and chasing triangles and then chasing triangles for speed. There's, it's kind of cool when you're, when your only competition is the clock and your head. You know, you're, you're chasing after a triangle, you're trying to drive around it. You know what the speed is, you know like, you know at the time in the day I was chasing 150k and 100k, and those are easy. Those are like, uh, in the sense that I got to do it in two hours for 100k, I got to do it three hours and, and you, you, you, uh, you know, you get a really good thermal and you go, okay, okay, I've got to get a good line, and if I pick a good line or another good thermal or a street or go off course a little bit to pull a street, it's a really fun challenge in your head.

There was a record here actually set just a little while ago in Europe involving the 25K. And again, a real technical task to fly because you're having to not only drive the coordinates of the task, You have to, in the case of the 25k and 50ks especially. Uh, there's a start and finish altitude that you have to, you know. If you start really high, you got to end really high. You know, there's—there's only a certain percentage you're allowed to have for differential. You can't climb to, you know, on a 25k climb to 12,000 feet above the ground and then roar and, you know, just staying up as wherever you have to and then arrive on the deck when you get back. No, that doesn't count. Yeah.

yeah, I didn't think about that. I didn't know that that was involved in the shorelines.

I call it threading the needle. Yeah. You know, it gets, and even the 100K, there is some numbers you need to keep in the back of your head. You need to go, okay, well, I'm going to arrive at this altitude. I should be okay. And you don't want to rise super high in your altitude window either. You wasted time.

And you're going too slow.

Yeah, you're going way too slow. So, you know, between the two of us, we started pursuing triangles out on the flats or out in returns on the flats. And and, you know, from an ego perspective, it's easy because there's nobody else chasing records. I mean, the bureaucracy of chasing records is a whole bunch of paperwork. We're trying to make that simpler. But back in those days, I mean, I some of my records were set using a repugled barograph, which is a thing when you crank it up and it's got a little drum inside, a little needle followed, a little piece of paper that had some sort of coating on it would leave a trace. And it had to be certified. It had to be taken to a an aerodynamic arrow, an arrow shop, to get them to barograph, uh, put it in a barometer or barograph chamber or whatever, and calibrate it.

That all had to be done. And and you could forget to wind it, or you forget to turn it on, or some stupid thing, and you have a great task, and this thing's just got a pointer sitting in the same spot. You go, "Oh, great. So you're so"

You're running that damn thing, and you're taking pictures of the waypoints with the film and

and those pictures of the waypoints actually had to be good enough that you could verify, right? And it's the the funny thing on the flats is, where are your vertical references on the flat? So your pictures are silos, uh, buildings, barns, you know, you do anything to find something with coordinates on it that you could use, and and and and data back cameras, you... And you had to have an official observer. So you, you know, you recruit friends and whatever and get them to write their certification or sign up for an official observer status. And it's not easy. And I just finished adjudicating a speed record in Canada here for a world record guy flying a Swift back east.

released and uh, he, uh, you know, it's so easy now to adjudicate because you get me the g, you give me the IGC file and I'll insert it into CU and I'll, I'll assign the task. I don't even need an IGC data logger, I can just assign the task and I can read it. I can give you your start and finish altitudes when you got to your turn point that the turn point had. The this poor guy had had set, set out on several occasions to set a record and managed to find almost every possible way to screw up, like, uh, the, uh, minimal leg distance that's involving a cylinder. You know, he was navigating his task to the, to the actual waypoint instead of taking off subtracting the cylinder and so he flew this task and it was like, I hate to tell you, but you know, it's kind of like 99.8 kilometers.

You, you fell a little short. It's not 100 K speed. I'm glad he stuck with it because he deserved this last record. It was it looked good. Do you go ahead? Yeah, it's going to say that the FBI and civil could do a lot better in making this simpler. And we'd like I'd like to see I'd like to see electronic declarations. Um, there's sort of this thing now where you have to have a advanced notice via an email or something to your national aero club that could be cleaned up and made simpler. At that point, I don't even know if you need an official observer at your at your point at your start point, but it would be helpful if you make your task declaration in advance. Yeah, you know that, that's that's that's kind of the the crux of proper record setting, you

know the, uh, I kind of woke up to some potential that I never even knew existed. And of course, like you said, the sailplanes have been flying wave out there for a long time, so I just was, you know, I just didn't know about it. It was stupid, but the, uh, you know, what you hear all the time: South Africa, Brazil, Texas, Australia to an extent. Those are the big ones, but what about Alberta? Are we, are we missing something? Do you think something really big could go down there? Is what they went because was that two summers ago? Or actually, it was spring. It was like April or May, um, and I forget how far they went. 380, and they went pretty big, yeah.

It was pretty big, uh, it's, it's, it's never going to be a triangle site, uh, although no, but for

just for just open distance because they're, I think you, I think you run out of

day, yeah, you run out of day, okay.

It's just too far north; it's

Too far north and you run out of day. You know, the the big distance places for open distance will be Zapata, Texas. Uh, uh, that corner out closer to the dry line. Yeah, okay, yeah.

I did, I when I saw those go down, and it was early season. I was—we were still staring at snow here, and I

thought, oh my god, that's awesome, that's

very cool they

They have a miles, and I think it's miles and may thing, a fundraiser thing that they they do. And there's a lot of distance can be flown there. But it tends to always be open distance, although there's a few of the hang pilots and stuff are doing out and returns in that. But it tends to be windy. So it is an open distance thing. And believe it or not, even though it's the great white north and there's nothing going on up here and we haven't really got a military. You know, we got two guys with soft with camels.

The you've got airspace. And the one big difference between Canada and the States, when it comes to airspace and hang gliding and paragliding, is in Canada we're considered aircraft, and in States you operate under it was a 104, 103, or whatever it's called, fr, and uh, your air recreational vehicle, right? So the laws and regulations are quite a bit different. And so there's certain kinds of airspace in the the States that you can fly through that you can't fly through in Canada, and and it does create some headaches. And you know it, it we've got the ability to in Canada to write something called the hagger, or it's a it's an air regular air regulation exam, and it gives you the right to fly within class E airspace in Canada and some other controlled airspace if you get permission.

And there's been been a few flights where there's been some challenges, even of all places, I mean um, Golden, where it's quite possible to get to 14 or 15,000 feet up there, and you would think it would be all uncontrolled, but it isn't. There, there are nav routes that run up there that technically, you know, if you put it in an airspace checker, it'll show you broke the law. And um, yeah, it's, you know, just south of Golden, uh, near Spill Machine and stuff. Yeah, Harrow Gate, I think, down that way. There's there's a couple air nav routes that are up there that involve Revelstoke further to the west and Vancouver over the top out of Calgary. Um, there's a few navigational routes that technically we're not allowed to go in, and they're really confusing, like they're really hard to interpret because they involve glide slopes and altitude at this point, and and uh, you started bumping into to them.

And it's not really critical, but it is law. So, you know, it's challenging. Whereas the only thing we got to watch for in Mansfield is your military can tend to make things a little exciting. I mean, I've actually got some video footage, I think, on YouTube where, actually not military, in this case, it was Boeing, and they're operating a 747. And at first I see a shadow on on the ground, I think, "Yeah, that's that's a big plane." And and then I realized, "That's a big plane, that's a big shadow," because the both of them are right on the ground, and this thing was cruising around a 747 right over the tow site at about 800 feet. Whoa, geez.

Sounds like Marshall, but but with big glow man.

We, we used to regularly see a6s or the whatever e65b prowler thing or whatever it's called, uh, and we, we would see a few of those regularly flying there. They, I think they have something where, uh, you know, Jameson Lake, yeah, well, they shoot a, uh, uh, some sort of approach for, um, sub spotting, like there's submarines down there. I don't know, but they, they simulate stuff into that canyon, so they'll come bombing out there in pairs. Well, the prowlers have been replaced now. Now, I think it's F-18, so they're a little bit more dramatic when they come by.

Okay, that's a good segue then. So when you think back to almost 50 years of flight, most memorable sketchy experience?

Oh, God, my recent crash at launch at Woodside. That was something that was kind of like, wow, that one could have really hurt myself. But, you know, it would probably involve weather. You know, it you know, it's one of those things where you're pushing yourself. And this is really OK. There was one that kind of stuck out was probably back in the late 80s. And we were flying at Mount Woodside, our local marine site. And there was a wind warning up that day. Well, we're hang glider pilots. Wind warning? What was it? This can't be that bad. And, uh, you know, wind warning usually means it's good and soarable.

Good ridge lift, so we were kind of not looking at the weather, and we didn't realize that this weather system was going to be so dynamic. And, uh, I, I, I got to launch, and I was setting up, and yeah, the day looked a little funky at this. There was a lot of streaky-looking clouds to the south, uh, you know, alto stratus, and there was just some, some odd-looking clouds that day that, yeah, yeah, well, they were just, they were, they were getting flattened out by something, maybe the high wind warning, you know, it could have been. So, at, at 11 o'clock in the morning, which would be unusual, uh, I launched into possibly, you know, 20, 25 mile an hour winds, which is fine, but it was early. And, uh, Mia, who was set up behind me, she, she started to move out to launch, and by that time, three or four other people had gotten in the air, and it was starting to blow 25 to 30 on launch.

Oh, okay, that's, that's getting up there. And she got up towards launch, she said, "Nah, this, something's going on." She packed it in and broke down. Lucky for her, uh, about the half dozen of us that got in the air, uh, winds picked up to, uh, you know, I, I'm guessing probably 50 miles an hour, 45 to 50, 50 miles an hour. And it was like penetrating out was a problem because now you're at the top end of your glider, and, and you're not making much headway, and you had to really work the lift to be able to get out to the landing field. And I remember looking down at the LZ and I went, "Going, those trees are just like blowing over, and they're just bending in every direction." It's a bad feeling. Yeah. And so it's what saved me that day.

Well, other than luck, was just kind of an adage that I'd like to pass on to a lot of pilots, which is never stop flying the aircraft. No matter what's going on, don't stop flying the aircraft. In fact, your first rule should be get the aircraft to the ground in one piece. piece, it might break, something might not be the what you wanted for a landing, but if you get the glider to the ground in one piece, chances are you're coming along just fine, right? And it was violent, rough coming in, you know, from no wind on the ground to 35, 40 mile an hour winds and gusting and and uh, about four of us managed to pin it into the field. One of us took a wild ride. I managed to get down in the field, and that was like, once you were there, you got got to get the hell on clip because you don't want to be attached when it starts gusting again, right?

But that was the most That was probably the the worst flight that I ever had for potentially getting in a lot of trouble. Did that have any

Kind of long term, did that change anything for you? Did that have any kind of fear injury? You know, we talk about a lot on the show. Was that—was did that leave any, uh, tendrils of sketch? Just no, that

That that didn't, in the sense that other than, gee, maybe you should pay attention to the weather forecast from now on, just a

Good learning experience, yeah, yeah.

It was a good learning experience, but if there was something that left, um, you know, an incident, you know, now you got me primed up here a little bit. Um, flying in Golden, I was, uh, doing it out, trying to fly some out return record attempts up there, and I tumbled. And normally, if you tumble a hang glider, it's going to break, uh, it's going to break, and or you're going to end up upside down and you're going to have to deploy your chute and come down on your canopy. I tumbled, the glider came around right at itself, and now I was able to fly again. And the thing that affected me the most then was the fact that it just, like, literally came out of the blue. I had you

Couldn't you? Couldn't put it on something you couldn't under it? Didn't make sense, no.

It just slammed the nose, the nose just pitched down, pitch past, and I went, "Holy mack!" And I just hung on, and next thing I know, I'm right side up and flying. And and then the next part of it was, the glider had a turn in it. I bent something, I bent the glider up pretty good on one leading edge. In fact, uh, I know of a pilot too, that very similar spot. This is down near uh that spot I mentioned earlier, Harrowgate. Uh, we nicknamed named it Horror Gate, and uh, the same, another pilot I knew tumbled there and broke the glider on the leading edge, but recovered and flew down knowing something wasn't right, but didn't know what. And when he was on the ground, realized the leading edge was broken halfway between the crossbar and the nose plate.

Wow. Uh, Barry Burr, or Barry uh Bateman, uh, an English pilot that came to Canada and tell spent his whole life telling us about the wonderful green grasses and hills in England. Uh, he he tumbled up there and came under, pair came down under parachute. Um, I was able to get the glider out, and I I was just concerned it was going to break. Uh, I had something broken and I didn't know what. So I actually, at about a thousand feet over the Harrowgate, store, a good landing field there, I put the glider into a bit of a speed and pitch just to kind of load it up, see if anything was going to break, so I'd have enough altitude for the chute to come out. And uh, I was satisfied, okay, it didn't break, so I should be able to run an approach and not risk breaking up low to the ground.

So yeah, that that left an impression with me in the sense that, you know, you you, it happened just so violently out of the blue that you go, "Yeah, this could happen again." And I I'd have similar things after that. And I have to admit, even now, there's um down in in Chelan or Mansfield, there's a line that we drive quite regularly along Badger Mountain to the south. And it can be rough. There's some sort of convergence, sheer thing goes on a lot down there. And some days when you're into like an hour of just, God, it's rough today. That's in the back of your head.

It's interesting that you say that about that incident because Kari brought that up. When she tumbled, she was at a comp in Austria, I think it was. And it was the second time she tumbled, so she tumbled in the Owens the first time, and it was all—it didn't bother because it was so obvious why it had happened. You know, you're—you're in the Owens now, she's in Austria, and it's beautiful, it's perfect. She's winning the comp, she's going up to cloud base, and all of a sudden she tumbles, and it really messed with her head for quite a while because she, like you said, she couldn't—like, even when she's on the ground, you know, she threw a reserve and she didn't—she wasn't able to recover, like you said, she—her glider just disintegrated and she had to through a reserve, but she said it really messed with her for a long time, just like, what the hell just hit me?

What—what caused that? Yeah.

I think something that's like exceptionally on, um, a sudden and out of your control will, if it doesn't leave an impression, I don't know. You're either made of iron or whatever, but you know, you, you've got to keep that in your head and you got to keep, well, what do I do about it? And I, you know, like one of the biggest reasons that I stopped flying the the high-performance flex wings, there were two reasons. One was they're quite fatiguing, especially the early ones. They're fatiguing to fly. So when you fly for six or seven hours, I mean, even Larry Tudor will probably tell you that you start to get carpal tunnel, you start to get tendinitis. When you fly rough air, you grip. You're always gripped. It's my paragliding mistake is I tend to grab my risers.

You know, I start leaning on my risers when it gets a little rough and you get gripped. Yeah, you're psychologically not relaxed. And, you know, when you're trying to so-called relax in big, rough air, bad things can happen because you're not flying the glider. And, you know, like being active as a paraglider, you start just going, oh, I just have to relax. You might be setting yourself up for a big event because you're not feeling the wing. Yeah, you got to find that sweet

spot there, don't you? Yeah.

So, so the flex wings were beating me up and I was, cause I was putting in a lot of hours in very rough air and I had the option of just giving up flying flex wings and maybe going to paragliding. And I didn't really see that as practical for Chelan, not, not the way I felt about paragliding at that time. I, uh, I thought, well, rigid wings, they have aerodynamic controls. There's less stress when you're flying them. And the big thing that happened in that era was they put a tail on them. Um, poor old Davis Straub, who's done a lot for our sport, for being a great communicator, or at least providing a forum that we can communicate. Don't always agree with the guy, but he's actually the guy who got me my first flight on a rigid wing. There was a demo day thing happening in the local area, and he showed up, and I got a chance to fly an Atos B, and it planted the seed for about five years later when I got a rigid wing, but when they put a tail on them, things got a lot nicer.

Uh, you... You can drive some very, very nasty air in a rigid wing and it's, yeah, it's bumps and it's, you can go weightless, but I've never ever felt like my rigid wing was going to ever pitch over on me. The tail and the new design, the latest carbon fiber keel arrangement they've got on the new ones, they're just so awesome in rough air. So it's like now the ATOS that I'm flying now is the excellent choice for flying the rough air of the basin. You know, I feel comfortable on it. You know, there's days when I get flashbacks of the old tumble stuff that's happened in the past. But it's just more, you know, it's got a tail, man. Just fly it.

It'll be fine. Can you

tell me about the psychology differences that you can remember? Obviously, like you said, it does get foggy. It certainly gets foggy for me too. But, you know, when you think back to, you know, when you were learning in the seventies, compare that to now, is it been kind of a wave? Is it an up and down thing? Is it, because I, I definitely feel like I'm paying a lot more attention to fear and I'm having to, I'm having to be more mindful about, you know, keep checking in that this is just an attitude that's going on between the two years. I can change this, but I'm having to work at that more than when I was young and dumb.

And I'm trying to figure out if that's just because I've got more experience. I've seen enough people pound. I know how risky this is; I'm not so stupid anymore, or if it's just age. I got a three-year-old; I'm struggling to understand which, what it is.

Yeah, I a couple things. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to my bad stall video, okay? So, what bad stall doesn't? I think I mentioned something in the comments on it, but uh, uh, you know, that really went, holy crap, I really, really screwed up there. And you know, giggle laugh, you know, kind of like a false sense of security that, okay, I just need to learn to do better, but had I just put my tail between my legs and soaking wet, wandered off and disappeared for the rest of the day? Uh, I know I aged Brad Ganusio at least that descent. I, he must have aged about 10 years. I don't know, he was trying every conversation on the radio and I'm kind of like, you just shut the right up, I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing and I don't know what I'm doing, but you're not helping, right?

Not right now, right? But what he did, that probably did a lot of good for me, was to, uh, come on, get back on the horse. Was the essence of it, you know, you got to go up and do it again. Well, my glider's broken, I tore the lines off it. Well, fly Mia's glider. Mia was flying a, a Gin Sprint, so it's a, it's a, it's a low B or a B wing glider, but it was small, so I was going up to do a stall on a heavily loaded B glider and, uh, he pushed me through. Uh, I think it was four, four stalls on that. A couple weren't that pretty, uh, but I, I managed to get those the same day, another set of stalls out of the way, and I think it did me a huge amount of good.

If, if something bad happens to you and you don't take time to Really analyze what happened. You might not go flying again, yeah? And maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing, but you, you, you need to realistically ask yourself, and it's something as dangerous as that, um, you know, I, you start asking yourself, well, is it worth it? Well, I've always felt flying's been, been worth it through all the years, maybe because I'm no good at anything else, but this is what I do. And I've never considered myself a really good pilot. I'm a mediocre pilot that tries to fly safely. I try and use a lot of the education that I learned from the accidents of other people in the past. I've really tried to carry that with me when I go someplace.

You know, you don't have to fly on a bad day. And I see people with minimal skills, or skills that are questionable, going flying or ignoring a cloud, or ignoring the wind, or or something like that, and I'm going, and then they get away with it, and it reinforces something, yeah, that isn't going to do them any good down the road. Um, you know, it's, but yeah, it, I, I've, you can't ignore it. You, you really have to. There's, there's times when I've towed and I'm going, "Ah, I'm just not in, it's not feeling right today," you know? I'm, I'm just, you know, when we tow out at our tow site there, it's dynamic. I mean, when I flew high-performance flex, it was challenging.

It was like the edge all the time when you were flying under full thermal conditions, dust devils around the tow site. Um, you know, I, I used to call a glider setup or a glider setup and mounted on the rig bait, that's what it is. It's dust devil bait, and I, I mia when she set her her 100k out and return speed record down there. Um, we had, uh, observer, the glider was loaded, she was in the truck, the observer was in the truck, uh, Nicole McLaren, and she, uh, uh, we had a dust devil pop hop up on the road, uh, literally 100 feet in front of us, 200 feet in front of us, and, uh, I said, well, we've got an option here, and that is to back away, and she didn't quite understand, but I, I, I, I carefully backed the truck up and backed it out into a field out away from the dust devil.

Uh, it, it's not an option that's always available, but it was like, gotta be aware, yeah. And, and, and, and, and it's, it's like, if you, somebody was talking about, I think on your, your, with the Dutch instructor that you mentioned something about being able to see the air. And I, I've often said, I don't know, maybe you wouldn't want to fly if you could actually see it. Oh, I think

it'd be terrifying. That'd be awful. Yeah, the

Columbia, the Columbia Basin, if you fly there, uh, anywhere, Chelan out towards, uh, Wilbur. Oh God. But if you fly there in September, the ground is as dry as it can possibly be, and the dust content is as high as it possibly can be, and the number of dust devils that you see, it's probably no more than it is in June and July, but you could see them all, yeah.

No, I had—I had a newer pilot contacted me one time, just over, you know, over the internet, and said, "You know, wouldn't it be awesome if Google or one of these companies could make glasses where you could see the atmosphere?" And I just said, "Well, that would totally wreck the sport. A, I mean, that's the magic is not being able to see all that. And B, no one would fly. Be terrified if we could see what was going on in the sky, we would never go. I"

I think where it would be kind of cool is if, um, uh, back to the my hated dreaded gifted pilots, uh, uh, you know, a pilot, there was a pilot at one of the, the, uh, uh, Chelan Classic, Joe Bostick, famous, yeah, hang glider pilot, yeah, um, said something like that nobody could understand why he took this crazy line, uh, of Lehi way up over Pearl Hill, way out to Chief Joseph Dam, and then kind of curled back into Chelan and landed after doing like 180, 200 kilometer triangle, triangle, and nobody, nobody else had any reasonable luck that day. And he said, well, I could see there was convergence up there, and I'm going, how, how do you see, how do you see convergence?

Okay.

There are, there are eagles in our sport, Manfred Ruhmer and Chrigel, and they see stuff. I don't know how they do it either. Yeah, no, I, yeah, he's, he's, you know, a really talented pilot. Well, so what? But you mentioned, I'm going to get into some kind of rapid fire questions here in a sec, but you mentioned that there was a lot of crossover. What do paragliders who haven't flown hang gliders, what do they not know? What are some of the things that you've picked up over the years from hang gliding that are transferable that maybe aren't as obvious? Because I like, one of the things to me is watching hang gliders in Brazil, who I flew with Jeff Shapiro down there.

He's really good at picking lines. I think hang gliders get really good at picking lines, maybe maybe because you got the better glide and so you can get this, I don't know, but it seems to be that you've got a better feel for, well

It might, it might have something to do with, um, you, you pick a better line or a stronger line, or, or, or, uh, uh, an advantageous line because you don't thermal as good as a paraglider, so you just have, you know, even in, even in atos, um, I, I can climb, you know, I can out climb a paraglider if it's the right day in the right circumstances, but as far as being able to adjust and, and pick up on the, on the tiny Any core or something, not as good as a, you know, it's like an evolutionary comparison. If you have a paraglider pilot in the middle or a hawk in the middle, a paraglider pilot, a hang glider pilot, and then there'll be a sailplane doing a stately turn around the outside. And everybody's going up at the same speed because somebody had to give something up. The sailplane's got massive better sink rate, but he has to fly a big circle.

He can't get right in there. If he banks it up in the middle, he can't climb as good. Good point. Yeah, good point. But carryover, you know, like from a paraglider pilot that wants to learn about hang gliding, it's more about speed management, learning, you know, fly slow. A funny story, I've flown other aircraft. I've flown in sailplanes. I've flown in powered aircraft. And kind of for powered aircraft or sailplanes, knowing where aircraft stalls is a big Denali mean, that's really important to how you, you fly. You, you know, if you're flying by feel, you got to know where the thing's going to stall, not just by looking at the airspeed indicator. You got to know how the aircraft is telling you you're getting close to stall.

Well, in a hang glider or a sailplane or a power plane, when you stall other than a spin entry or something, you're, it's a fairly straight thing, straightforward thing. It's fairly not dynamic whatsoever. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm telling my instructor, Alex, about, you know, I was kind of seeing how slow the glider would fly and he kind of turned pale. Please don't do that. I was trying, he's going, don't do that no more. Right. And then of course you do, you do a bad, you do a stall and you go, holy crap, that's a whole lot different. Yeah, that's dynamic. But so, so speed management, um, I think, I, I, I think you, you, you've used the phrase a couple of times. Speed is your friend. Yeah. The other part of that expression is speed is your friend.

Don't abuse the relationship. And that is like I've had people come to me and ask about flying rigid wings. And frankly, a rigid wing is a pretty sweet aircraft to fly. But one of the things you really have to respect is airspeed. Some of the models, I used to fly a glider called a VR, and they will literally fly and accelerate until they explode. A sailplane is much the same. If you put the nose down, you can rip the wings off it. You can intentionally rip the wings off it. My VR, I've had it up to speeds getting close to 75 miles an hour. I'm sure the designer is freaking out now if he hears that.

Glass smooth air, and you let the speed creep up just to see what it's like up there. But, you know, you literally start having to pay attention to speeds not to exceed. And the DHV certification of 55 miles an hour for a rigid wing is kind of that V &E. Do not exceed and fly slower with more flaps if it's rough. Paragliders, the speed just sort of happens. I, you know, I fly low B wings. So, you know, I step on the speed bar and I go, OK, yeah, wow, OK, whatever. Ooh, that was exciting. Yeah. It's just going faster now. I don't know. I guess so. Uh, but it, it, it's speed management is a huge thing. Whereas in, um, hang gliding less about feel, uh, you do acquire a certain natural feel, but when you go to paragliding, there's just gobs more feel the seats moving around.

Uh, you know, I remember I, I took a, um, uh, an Oseum harness for a test flight with with no seat board or anything, it was freaking me out, man. It was moving and dancing around. And I'm going, no, no, no, I want a seat board. I want a lazy boy comfort chair. I need stability. It's too nervous for me.

And so when you're a hang glider pilot and you go to paragliding, you have to appreciate the speeds are different. The glides are different. Be aware of maintaining your aircraft in the air is something. Something you know, hang glider, you get it in the air. It's, it's built, you know? You, the joke about paragliding is, you know, it's the only aircraft you take off in reverse, or you, you, uh, taxi in reverse, you assemble during takeoff, and you do in-flight maintenance. I've heard that one.

I thought I heard them. All that's great, you

know, it's just you're constantly having to pay attention, and if, if you don't pay attention, it'll let you know. Yeah, uh, fortunately, you know, and and for hang glider pilots looking at going into paragliding, I can't do it give you much advice the other way, but for um, a hang glider pilot that considers paragliding, go at it with an open mind. Uh, don't take all of your, your, your attitude and and and and and skills into paragliding, think it's going to do anything thing for you, because you need to learn all over again. Yeah, uh, you need to to realize that the aircraft's quite a bit different. There's a lot more feel, there's a lot more subtleties to flying a paraglider. A paraglider is the easiest thing in the world to learn. Yeah, it's just totally simple, but get in trouble and all of a sudden you're a pass

It's like, it's like Russ Ogden says, it's—it's the easiest thing to learn, it's the hardest thing to learn to

Fly, well, yeah. And and a hang hang glider, on the other hand, it's hard to get it off the ground. It's, yeah, there's instructors that would argue with that, but it, it's, it's a much more challenging aircraft aircraft to get off the ground to land it. And that's, you know, once you get those two things out of the way and your ace and that stuff, the flying's pretty straightforward. You know, your typical errors that new pilots make, you know, judging glide and how to fly it.

Martin, if you could rewind the clock, what would you change going

Back, um, I don't know, I maybe, maybe have made more effort to go to other competitions that, uh, were outside of my little backyard. I've had people say that, you know, I should have flown, I should have not gone to Australia. I never did, uh, um, but I once, I went to Chelan. I'm going dirt's dirt, I mean, I go to Australia, choke on the same dirt, sit around 105, 105 degrees, 110, you know, it's the same thing. So I didn't need to waste all that money. I could waste it on gliders and beer.

Hey, before we started talking, we were having a little laugh about our mutual friend, Larry Tudor, and you said you were going to save a good story about him or two. Tell me some Larry stories.

Okay, well, the first one that every American needs to know is that he's a traitor.

uh, he he spent a great deal of time in Canada, uh, trying to raise money for the Canadian team. I, I don't know if that was just to boost his points position as in at the world championship he's the dark

Prince, he might have had some, yeah, he

He came out twice and, and gave great little talks, funny, the same stories that you had, but hang glider pilots, you drink a beer and you'll listen to any story more than once. And, uh, yeah, he did, he did, he did. He was a very, uh, gracious host at a couple of the, uh, speaker at a couple of the fundraisers we did. So just, you know, he was back in the enemy, not that we were challenging anybody, but, uh, and the other, the other story was, uh, uh, when Larry was flogging gliders and he, uh, was visiting the Lower Mainland, and I think a big glider at the time for a recreational glider was a sport, I think there was, uh, I don't know, an HP or something, closed crossbar thing, and, uh, he was, you know, doing the old shilling gliders, selling, selling them at, uh, representing Wills Wing, and, uh, he was running up and down the mountain and we were having a comp, uh, the locals were having a comp, you know, all of this hyperventilating competition pilots and, uh, all thinking like, I'm thinking, I'm really hot.

And so we get up to launch and there's a glider sitting on launch and, uh, it's not assembled, there's just bits and pieces of it laying here and there, and it's sitting in kind of my prime spot. You know, what, what goes here? Whose glider is this? Nobody really knew who it is. I think it's Larry's, but he's not here. Well, if he's not here, then he's not setting up here either, and I moved his stuff off to the side. Well, Larry showed up and, uh, and he kind of walks up to, "Who moved my glider? Who touched, who touched my glider? Nobody touches my guy, man. You don't touch a glider." And the Dark Prince, man, he looked pretty serious at the time. Yeah, and he gave me a stare. I said, "I moved it." You were in the middle of our local competition here. And he just gave me, "You bunch of wankers, damn."

canucks yeah

damn canucks

Hey, uh, I, I need to wrap things up here against my will because my, my girls are just walked back in, but I wanted to, when you reached out to me this spring, and I do not want to talk about COVID and I do not want to talk about politics as that's off the, we're not allowed to anymore. Uh, but, but I did want, you had this fantastic advice that you said, Hey, you know, this was right after the, maybe it was during the lockdown. Can't remember, but you said, you know, what I put out on the forum recently was that it doesn't matter what you believe in this kind of thing. What we we need to be thinking about here is, it's just a distraction. And what I've learned over the years doing this sport, you know, like, like you just talked about, you know, this one flight you're taking right now is the most important flight you're going to take.

I mean, it's, it's we've got to be kind of on the ball, right? Doesn't matter if we're ridge soaring, whatever we're doing, it's, you know, complacency kills, um, and but you, you, you framed it in a way that I really appreciated. That I've thought a lot about this year because I think we're all a little distracted, and it's something good to think about. I thought maybe you could just tell me what you were thinking when you wrote that email and why and...

Oh God, I got to think.

Yeah, you know, there's been a... I was involved with an accident investigation. I was involved in an accident. I was also involved with an accident investigation involving the pilot that took off without clipping the passenger, and and I've I've been involved with other fatality accidents, uh, where I've worked for the coroner and the RCMP, and you know, putting that stuff in the back of your head, um, it makes an impression. Like, it could drive you out of the sport if you spent too much time thinking about it, but it was just so simple and so subtle that led to the death of this passenger, and it was, you know, it it's it's people think that a little distraction can't really add up to most much, and and thankfully our gear and our stuff is so good that, you know, you you can get away with a lot of a lot of mistakes, and often it just it just helps reinforce maybe a lax attitude, and

You start getting complacent and letting stuff happen around you that has no ramifications, like you—you literally get away with it every time. You might have ignored some little deal, and you go up to launch and you're thinking about, "Oh man, I didn't make the payment on such and such," or forgot to pay the bill, or, "You know, this person's been nagging me at work," and you take it up to launch. And sometimes that's the little tiny detail that's—that's going to bite. Now, you can't shut everything out, but you've got to compartmentalize it. You've got to take it, this is not here now. I'm on launch. I've literally told people, because I'm a grumpy old man, I told people to buzz off on launch. They're bugging me. When I'm standing there getting ready to launch and there's conversations going on.

And I've seen pilots that are so tense that they can't have any of that going on, but maybe they shouldn't even be on launch in the first place. Good, good, good, good, skillful pilots can let stuff creep in and it can cause a problem as it did to me. Yeah.

You know, one of the best lessons I learned was literally when I was getting my P2. It was the last day. Jeff Farrell, who was until very recently Chris Santacroce's partner forever and ever and ever. And I was just, I'd had such an amazing week. We were out at the point and I was learning how to ground handle and I was doing my first flights. And, you know, as it is for everybody in this sport, that's where we get addicted and we just can't believe what we're doing. And he took me across the other side of the lake and to kind of like my first mountain site. Cause you've got to get that sign off, you know, and I was so excited. I was going to get to fly off a mountain. It just, I was buzzing. And, uh, and it was with my good friend, Randy Campador. And we got up there and, you know, I, for whatever reason, it was, it was hot, hot, hot, you know, June and it's in the middle of the day.

And I hadn't had enough water and, uh, I just wasn't—I wasn't putting things together, but I didn't know it, you know? And he was just standing off to the side and I had, you know, I was clipped in and I was ready to go, but I just couldn't remember if I turned right or left, couldn't remember which hands the brain was, the brakes, my hands over the top and the top, you know, like all these things that I had done perfectly all week and really had down and really, you know, understood. I mean, for, for a brand new pilot. I'm not, you know what I mean? But I, and he just, he kind of, he came over, tapped me on the shoulder and he said, you're done today. And I was like, what, why? What do you mean? I'm getting to do my mountain flight. And he goes, no, you're done. Unclip, pack away your glider.

And, uh, it was just, I still think about that all the time. I had no, I, I couldn't recognize that I wasn't operating. You know, I was just, I was fumbling around, but I didn't have the experience then. And I was just, I was, I was sapped. I was too tired. I was too much input all week and I was, my brain had had enough and, but I didn't recognize it. And we need to be able to recognize these things. I

will say this too, then, um, you know, There's a difference between an instructor and a really great instructor, and like Brad making me go to the stalls again. Yeah, um, like your instructor spotting that something wasn't right. I mean, not so good instructors just let things go, you know? Yeah, and they pluck their student out of the trees and they give them hell for, you know, why'd you go in the trees? We've trained so hard, but to have an instructor that goes, "Spot, that you weren't, you know, cued in, it wasn't happening for you." Yeah, um, you know, that's pretty cool too. Yeah, we need

we really, we need our instructors, and then we get kicked out of the nest, and we need our mentors, and yep, um, Martin, what a pleasure, man, this was. I've been, like I said at the top of the show, I've been dying to talk to you, and this was just a blast. I'd love to maybe do a follow-up show with you, know the original plan was to do it with your wife and have you both on at the same time. So maybe, maybe we can talk her into another one of these, but I appreciate it. Thanks for all your knowledge and stories. I know we've tapped a fraction of 1 % of them and there's many, many, many more. So we'll have to do a, we'll have to do a round two as I've promised to do with, with Larry as well. But thank you very much. Thanks for sharing your time and, and, uh, and your knowledge and your stoke.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. If

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