Hi there everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. We are less than five weeks out from the race. Getting pretty excited. This is, it looks like it's actually going to happen. There's, they've got this special permit for us to get into Austria and some of the cross border stuff is still a little bit dicey but things are opening up, loosening up and we, my team and I are all heading over in just a couple weeks so that is pretty exciting. It's all down to the wire here. Just got done with four days of wicked acro training over the water with Dylan Benedetti and his team out there in California. I'd heard great things about what he was doing, so Ben Aruzzo and I, one of my supporters, went out there to train with him, and I think his whole group, other than us, had never—there was a first time SIV for everybody, so we kind of got to see how he, how he takes them through the course, and it was really terrific.
Uh, high marks for that whole team and very impressed with how they run things, and actually, I was so impressed that got Dylan on the show afterwards. He spent a bunch of years out in Nepal; he's a super talented acro pilot, pilot, and former competition pilot, and so you'll hear him on an upcoming show here, but... But thanks to that whole crew and highly recommended. It's pretty hard for us to get good over-the-water SIV instruction here in North America, and they do a really good job. A little bit of housekeeping. We've just received a big, huge box of new Recaps hats from Onika, and they are beautiful. They're really up in their game there. They've got these seven-panel trucker hats and cotton front hats that are really beautiful.
So check them out, cloudbaseman.com. Go to our store there and get all set up for the summer. We've also got a whole new batch of Patagonia pocket t-shirts; these are all sustainably sourced and made and really nice fit. So those are, those are nice as well and all new, so check it out on the store and get set up and send me your orders here shortly, because I'm going to be gone in Europe for a month and I'm kind of a one-man show when it comes to that stuff. This Show man, I just went through and listened to it again to To give Miles the edit notes with Mitch McAleer is just unbelievable. Bill Belcourt called me up when I was out in California back in March training and said, hey, we really have to get Mitch on the show.
And I said, well, I agree, but I can't do it. I just don't know the history. I haven't been around in the sport long enough, and you do. And so Bill kindly got on an airplane and flew out to California from his home in Salt Lake and ran this interview. you. You're not going to hear me much in this one, but we went up to Mitch's Sowing Cave after a day of really good flying where I basically never saw the top of Mitch's glider. He flies the R12 these days and just an amazing pilot. I think he's got almost 60 years now. He was an early adapter of paragliders, flew in the first world cup. And he was also unbeatable for a number of of years in aerobatics and hang gliding, proper legend, and his stories and history, he's got an encyclopedic mind when it comes to names and history and has a lot.
He's spent most of his time, he will say, he's more of the, you know, in the business of flying than in the, in the, in the comp flying scene or just being a pilot. He worked for years at Wills Wing, living out of his car, and in up back when they had the Comet and they were kind of dominating the hang gliding world. But there's, there's a ton of history here, and as I was listening to this, kind of slack-jawed the whole way through, and Bill and I talked about this afterwards, we are all truly, those of us who are in the sport now who weren't in the beginning, are truly standing on the shoulders of giants. People like Mitch, who shared in many ways much more than tears and hard work. They also spilled a lot of blood and have seen a ton of their friends pass to making this sport what it is today.
And I think we all need to be mindful of that. There's a lot here, of course, about risk and when things go wrong and how to really try to get it right. But I think we all need to be a lot more knowledgeable and mindful, at least I do, after listening to this about where it's come from and how this history can help us go forward and be a better community. So, to pull you in, because this is a long show, but I think once you start listening, you're going to dig it and stick with it. But to pull you in, our top of the show tip this week is actually a little segment from the show. So Bill was flying with Mitch a bunch of years ago out in Elsinore and Mitch had this shirt on and said, if you, if you, if you die, we split your gear.
And he wanted to ask him about that. That's pretty harsh. It's kind of in your face. And Mitch's answer is, is pretty eloquent. And again, it's on this whole thing of risk. You know, he didn't want to see his buddies die. And so he wanted to remind them that, Hey, this is important. Focus, get, get here. here, be here today, fly this glider and fly it safely. And so here's a little tip that I really enjoyed from the show. And then we'll get into the actual show.
Here we are on the margins of more than 9 million people and the 10th largest financial power in the world is right there. And we're on the edge of it. And me, you, you know, Linda, How many people out of that would take a hit like that and come back? It's like me, you, him, Linda. That's how many out of nine people. That, that brings me to tears when I think about who we are and what we've done to get here, you know? And it's like, I don't want to see my friends hurt, and if I have to wear a t-shirt that's sort of not politically correct, then yeah, then it's worth it, you know?
If I, if I have to appear to, to be a monster to some people and frighten them away, it's worth it, because I'd rather them be afraid of me than have to pick them up off the ground and sell their gear, you know? Fix their, their wreck and stuff. I just, you know, how do you address that? How do I look at myself as the guy that provides the gear to someone that gets hurt? You know if I could go back in time and avoid that, I would, but you can't. There's no going back. So what do I do going forward?
I make no illusions that what we're doing, suspending ourselves under a puffy bag of mostly air under string, is extremely dangerous. And you can make it safe, but you have to work hard to make it safe. There's a whole bunch of work and wisdom that has to go into being safe. And you're never going to be safe flying a paraglider in midday convection. I don't care what you say, you know, I watched a video of Ganesho coming into land at Chelan, you know, where his glider does the snake 30 feet off the ground, you know, and I've had that happen. I've watched friends here get hurt on Mojos, and that—that the—the cardinal sin of letting the thing turn. I watched a guy here coming in doing S turns behind the candy cane there, and the thing takes a 50 percent collapse, which you know is on a Mojo, you should be able to keep it straight, but he didn't.
You know, it turned 90 and pitched down and broken female just that aviation like the sea is incredibly unforgiving of those small mistakes. And yeah, how if I can wear a t-shirt that impresses people of the reality what we're doing, that's cheap, that's free, you know, it doesn't cost anyone anything, hope
You enjoyed that, and I hope you enjoy this show with with Bill Belcourt and Mitch Mackler.
Mitch, I've heard the stories about your first hang glider flight, but you tell me, uh, what was your first flight in a hang glider?
The first flight was flying to Eric Fair and telling them I knew how to set up and break down the glider, and um, he let me take it home because I allegedly was going to practice setting it up, but instead we went out to Suicide Hill at Corona. It's right at the 1591 junction, right there, faces right into the onshores, and I hooked off of that and went straight into a thermal. It was like 1500 over, and then like typical two o'clock in the afternoon has happened there, it started picking up and I started backing up and trying to speed up. And pretty soon I'm back down to about 150 feet over the, my car, which is right on the summit of the hill.
And it didn't look like I was going to make the windward side of the hill. So I turned around backwards and, and, uh, flew through the rotor and got the thing turned around just in time to be swatted out of the ground about 30 feet. And I just woke, I remember blinding flash and waking up in the clover. So everything was kind of all green and red and glowing white, and glad it was like flushed down on top of me, and I'm face down in the clover and, uh, yeah, I just basically got it turned into the wind. I got swatted out of the sky for about 15 or 20 feet, woke up in the clover. Flight number one, flight number one. Flight number two is after I put down tubes on the glider and then went and showed Eric Fair that I knew how to set it up and fly it in Salt Creek.
So I had a little, they just flew off Salt Creek and it wasn't sorbals. I just like flew down about 15 to 20 feet, kind of went like this and like this and landed it, you know, on my belly. And and he's like, "Yeah, whatever, you know I paid for it," so it was mine, and I left and that was it. I had just gotten off the boat, I had 12 grand in my pocket, in a brand new glider and went flying all summer, so you know what you know what What attracted you to the sport?
That's the bigger story. I grew up in Newport and East Bay off of MacArthur was this gentle slope that hosted some of the early hang on and meets. There was a meet that was sponsored by Any Green Springs and Easy Wider rolling papers, where they threw a bunch of money and invited a bunch of guys to come out and had prizes for flying your bamboo and plastic and whatever. There was everything from bamboo and plastic to Volmer Jensen's VJ10. It was a 15 to 20 to 1 foot launch sailplane with a hand cage and a three-axis stick control, kind of a rectangular, slightly tapered, um, unswept wing with a cruciform tail. So there's Volmer Jensen in this thing, it's like 20 to 1, you know, stand up armpit hand cage control stick thing, along with guys doing bamboo, doing plastic off the East Bay of Newport thing.
And I saw that me and my cousin were coming home from church with our parents, they would drive the back bay road and look at the hang gliders and shit. I remember being up on launch and find this little balsa wood glider about like this that had gotten—they had somebody, you know, one of the soaring geeks had thrown it and lost it, and me and my cousin found it and spent, you know, that afternoon after church throwing this thing off, and it was trimmed perfectly. Just go out and start soaring these big circles and climb out two or three hundred feet over the bluff and disappear into the weeds running after it. And so that was grade school, that we saw gliders flying on the East Bay after church. In '72, that was... well, no, I went to... I started high school in '72, so this was the 60s, the late 60s.
We saw that, and then in high school would have been '74, '75, when my cousin was graduating. He was a year older than me, so he got a car right away, and he, you know, he wanted to fly really bad, and he found a glider that was just kind of sitting in this neighbor's side yard, so he just grabbed it off the fence and threw it on his car and went out to go fly it one day. And turns out, it was this custom painted glider; it had like this M.C. Escher geodesic sphere thing on it, so it's a total custom painting, you know, because like, opens the thing up and it's like, "Oh shit, I can't fly this thing," you know? So he folds it back up, takes it back, and gives it back to the guy, and then eventually went and bought a glider, and I went with him to Tory when he was flying a Sun Standard when Bennett had already come out with a 6D.
So the 6D was a pretty high aspect floppy sail with fiberglass battens, but compared to a standard, you know, the Sun Standard was a 90 Renault's angle standard Gorgalo, and I went down to Tory and watched him fly that. He sorted around for a while and landed at the beach, and we talked about it's like, "Wow, look at that! Look, Phoenix 6D." He's like, "Wow, I'm gonna get one of those," you know? And that was the first time I saw the soaring thing. I wasn't flying yet; I was riding dirt bikes. Um, I'd broken my elbow skateboarding up at the concrete wave in Ventura after it was closed. I went off, I pushed off from the coping one of the deep pools and landed flat on my back on the flat with my arms back like that broke the corner of my elbow off.
So my cousin asked me to drive for him one day at Elsinore after that tory run, and uh, he had just gotten in his new glider. He just got in a trampoline seed wings center 210, and I'm riding around on my BMX bike in a cast, watching him fly around, and I just had this dawning on me where maybe if I get away from wheels on the ground, I'll start stop slapping into the ground so hard and we'll get hurt. And that was kind of a decision I made. I was watching my cousin fly around San Anz, else another one, a broken arm. Um, I got that boat job, got off the boat with 11 grand and bought a hang glider, bought all brand new kit from Eric Fair right across the street from those women
went and worked another flew all summer. That summer 79 went back to work on the boat. Um, October through April, um, 7980 and the boat and me went separate ways. I was drinking and doing drugs and not not doing well on the boat. They wanted me out and I wanted out and I Sold the Raven and bought that 510 for 1,300 bucks, and when I went to go buy a shipping tube to send the the Raven to Texas to the guy that bought it, I walked into Wills Wing and they didn't have shipping tubes. They were waiting for a truck, so they asked me if I wanted to wait. They said, "Sure, wait a couple hours." And I noticed there was this Japanese guy, sketchy looking Japanese dude.
He was like sick and kind of scrawny and weird looking. And he was filling out a job application in the front office along with some other guys from Gary Applegate. And I was done with the boat. So I asked him if I could fill out an application. And he said, yeah, sure. So, you know, we got talking. I got to talking to somebody, Pearson or Kells or someone. on, and uh, they're just like, "We want this guy." I went to work that day, I helped him unload the truck, and got stuck there for seven years. And then, "What got you into aerobatics?" That was the crucible. I mean, I'm in Wills Wing, and the president of the company encouraged me and coached me, and Kel's, and the the other part about doing aerobatics was the the weekend scene at
Elsinore was dominated by the Up Factory and Up at that time. 8081 was top of the world; they were the king. The Comet went everything. The Comet had the unfair performance advantage. It was the first really good stable bomb-proof high-performance double surface glider at the time Wills Wing was still competing with the harrier which is like exposed crossbar and the Comet just cleaned up everything. It had a walking speed performance advantage over anything else out the day. I mean, they were competing against gliders that still had deflexor leading edges, the big wire struts with wires and tiny little inch-and-a-half tubes for the leading edge, and the Comet was inch-and-three-quarters spars and had bigger, heavier everything with the enclosed crossbar.
And I just remember going out to the E one day with my Raven, And it's light wind, and the raven's tail heavy and really slow. I'm like, "Fuck, this, I can't launch." No wind at the E or the tail heavy gliders, but I just sat there. I remember watching a gaggle going up a couple thousand feet, and two guys peel off the side of the gaggle and just do wing hovers like falling leaf, you know? Two thousand feet, just wing hovers all the way down the side of the gaggle to a couple hundred over the saddle, and then just right back up again, you know? And I just, I watched that for an hour, just, you know, along with everything else that was going on. I remember trippy looking gliders from Japan, some trippy guys from Japan with wires that were coated in this weird pale blue plastic shit. Just one of those moments when I, I, you show up somewhere and everything is new and the colors are all more rich than they should be or something, and and And I just had that moment watching that
aerobatic routine. And then one day I was going out to Hidden Valley because I was a thousand foot south facing windward site that gets that California eddy. So it was a cliff launch. So I can launch a tail heavy glider from the cliff, just huck off this rock. And that was where I spent most of my first year. And I went out there one day and saw Dave Gibson, who was kind of their lead nighttime loft guy. As I'm driving up to the launch site, I see Gibson going just above launch, from below launch like that, doing these 90-degree wing overs, we hammerhead just above the ridge like that, and then dive below the ridge and come up over on the other side like that, and hammerhead just back and forth like that, disappearing and appearing like that, and doing these hammerhead wing overs back and forth in front of launch.
So that was my environment, that was what I saw all the time around me when I went flying. These guys doing aerobatics, and it was all the the the A and B team from uh from up the A and B teams were the top two teams that were in the manufacturers league meet, which was the end of May, the Memorial Day big meet at the time. It was world meet, Moise Bennett up Wills Wing had three-man teams, so there's the A team and the B team, and then there was the E team. The E team was a bunch of guys from Elsinore that were up factory workers and good pilots, but they weren't good enough to be selected for the A team, but they were good enough to to win the day, you know, and and fly competitively.
But since they weren't, you know, compelled by the factory, it was kind of a
More like a party team where they flew well and could win days, but didn't care enough to be serious about it, and was more like kind of the beer-drinking team that could win the win the competition but didn't care to be that serious about it. That's kind of where the e-team thing came from. Now, it's good I never knew that. Yeah, and so once you start competing, uh, in aerobatics, yeah. Well, 79 started at Wills Wing in the loft and I was living in Costa Mesa at this little rental party house that we had near Santa Ana River. Got my second DUI. So I moved from that party house into my van in the parking lot at Wills Wing.
And then that was it. That was my my entire life was work. And Friday night, I would bail and go to Elsinore and find the party Friday night, fly all day, Saturday and Sunday, and then go back to work at Will's. And I started doing aerobatics in that Raven. But once I got the 510, that was different. You know, Kells actually encouraged me to go out and do sort of a test contest he had at Crestline out here one time. And I entered in the 510, and he, you know, I was doing like 130 degree maneuvers to the right and like 90s to the left, and Kells, you know, sat me down and said, "Here, this is what you're doing." That's when he started coaching me, and that's when I started refining things, and then I blew blew up the sensor, uh, doing my, my first reserve deployment on, uh, um, the ESS 25.
And then I just started flying employee gliders. They had a, uh, 180 duck that they put some prototype laminate, um, scrim on the trailing edge. And that was the Wills Wing employee glider. So I started flying that thing all the time and kills, you know, continued to coach me. I was was continuing to do production test flight. So production test flying was kind of like aerobatic training school. I'd go through the production test flight on the glider and make sure it flies straight, flies trim and the sails clean and everything and then do a couple of wing overs and Kells would watch me and I'd land and we'd talk about what I was doing on the way back up the hill. So it was just three to six flights a day of coaching and stuff like that.
And then whenever I would go out and fly with the wheelswing guys and do aerobatics, Kills would watch me and coach me and help me, and plus he gave me the tools to learn how to progress in the beginning to the four things, um, heading and and pilot input in the dive, heading, pilot input and glider attitude at keel level at the initiation of the maneuver, heading, pilot input and attitude of the glider at the apex of the maneuver, and then every same thing at the exit of the maneuver. So most people at the time, you know, when you think about doing pen glider aerobatics, just go out and wang the glider around and you end up doing some kind of spiraling 270 thing or whatever, but the way the aerobatic scoring system that Kills and Dan Reconnelly and the other guys that were involved in aerobatics prior to the, like, in '79, 80, 81, early Telluride years, when they started doing aerobatic competition at Telluride, they developed a scoring system that was loosely based on freestyle skiing kind of thing, where you have difficulty points and style points and versatility points.
In hang gliders, there's four maneuvers. A loop, a climb over, which is entry and apex more than 90 degrees different. So that's a climb over. And this is a rollover. So entry and apex less than 90 degrees off heading like that. And then a loop is just everything lined up. And then a spin. So that's it. four versatility, or you know, half a point for you know, two versatility points. Um, bank angle at the apex divided by 10. All right, so 180 degrees inverted is 18, and that's how the scoring system worked. So, in order to score high, you have to have, you know, 180 at the top and all four maneuvers, and that was it.
I just—he taught me how to, to win meets by flying the scoring system, by winning the score. Um, you know, to do that, you have to basically do enough loops and line them up, and then have the other three maneuvers, all in a routine that looks good from start to finish. It doesn't have discontinuity or stops or fuck-ups and side slips, anything like that. So, that's what I would do. I would just go out at Elsinore and practice. Do a 3,000-foot climb over the E, pull out of the thermal, do a routine back down to launch level, climb back out, do that for like two and a half hours or so, about five or six routines, and I'd be thrashed and tired and going inland and then off to Telluride.
The First year was 1984. Went there with a highly modified 180 dog and got second place behind Eric Raymond. Um, yeah, I just kept going back and I won it every year from '85 to '88. I won... well, I didn't win '87 because I quit. I quit Wills, and I kind of consciously didn't give about winning that year, even though I was flying a Wilson glider. Jamie Lasser had loaned me his, uh, his HP2, and the HP and HP2 was a major paradigm shift. The duck had a keel pocket.
It's a foot-tall keel pocket. So the, the lever, the control bar is like a foot longer than, than it, than it is just a couple years later in 1985. And in 1985, when Wilson came out with the HP the it was so much faster and had so much better pitch control. It went from being really difficult to do a loop in the 180 duck just being really easy to do loops in the one in the um the hp170. So that was when I started doing multiples like, uh, there was uh Tom Tatum film double high that was shot at Telluride in 1982 when everybody just shit themselves when Ron Young did four loops in a row and it can't wait 85 at the meet. Nobody had ever seen multiple loops in a hang glider prior to of that, and Ron went out and did four perfect loops in this 185 Comet in front of Tom Tatum's camera as a Telluride in '82, and uh, and I saw that, and Eric Raymond was one of the loops in the comments and rigid wings.
He was flying the sunseed, the sunseed. It's this trippy rigid wing thing that had a dihedral root and anhydral tips and he was practicing in 1981 out here to to win by doing a maneuver that no one else had done because the the the sunseed would tumble, he could actually like forget what it was, I think he would just like slow the thing down and jam both of the rudders on which I had like tip, uh, aileron kind of things. The the anhydral tips had control surfaces on them, and I think what he did is he just slowed the thing down and slam the rudders down, and the thing would pitch over forward, just go kaboom like that and recover.
So he was planning on doing that at Telluride, and by doing a maneuver that no one else could do, you win the meat. You get one extra half point for that versatility that no one else can do and win the meat, but the glider folded up, it like went around once or twice and then started rolling, rolling, and after it went round once or twice and rolled, it just went fucking wings clapped together and broke, and he went spiraling down, sandwiching the wreckage, and bounced off a steep face of the canyon at marshes somewhere and survived without a reserve. So when did you first compete internationally? 88 that was the the after the resurrection of up In 87, Yoichi Onosuka came out.
He was publishing a really slick, really pretty air sports magazine. And he showed up at the E with an axis that JC and Larry had built in Japan with Yusuke Yamazaki's money. Um, Yusuke, that's a whole interesting story. Yusuke was a young, fairly wealthy Japanese guy that came over in the early days and flew off of the 1500 escape country and climbed out in some funky old single surface glider and, uh, um, drifted up and back and couldn't make it back into the valley at launch, so he landed in overhead chaparral, quarter mile, half mile behind the launch at the 1500.
And it's like an August day and west side of the uh, the Cleveland range. It's probably 100 degrees. He was completely lost and disoriented and had no idea how to get out, and it was in overhead manzanita and sugarbush and that kind of stuff. So he basically sat himself down to die, you know, to die a good samurai death in the wilderness after an epic flight. And George Fullman was this guy who's a gregarious sociopath kind of guy who watched Yusuke go up and back and land in the bushes and live there and flew there all the time, and he went and got him. So Yusuke's sitting down there, you know, saying his prayers and getting ready to die of exposure, and uh, here, here comes George Foreman, helps him break the glider down and hump it back out to takeoff.
So Yusuke set Fulman up with UP Sports at the Y, just on the north side of Dana Point. A million-dollar piece of retail property, Yusuke and UP Japan set Fulman up there with a sailboarding shop for 30 years, from the mid-'70s through probably the early-'90s, I think, before the whole thing kind of folded up and disappeared. It's something else now, but for all those years, as you were driving south along the coast highway in the north end of Dana Point, there's a UP sports shop, and that's how that came about. It was George Fullman who saved Yusuke's life, but where Yusuke inserted himself into the UP story was that in 78, 79, Brock and UP were in a lot of trouble.
Financially, they weren't doing well, and you, up in Japan, was doing well. Yusuke was a competent businessman, and he understood the market there, and he had put together a flight park and a bar and a place for people to hang out. So there was a up sports bar in Tokyo. It was a up sports facility, a large area with a container storage area and a container dressed out like a Malibu beach house with a bar in it. And so he had the social scene worked out in Japan really well. And they had a big market in Japan for teaching and kiteboarding and hang gliding. And when Brock got into trouble in the late seventies, Yusuke came over and gave him 15 grand and got him back in business.
And he hired Roy Haggard. Haggard designed and built the Comet, and by late 1980, mid-1981, Up was the biggest and best manufacturer in the world. And then they mal-invested in the ultralight market in the early 80s, and the ultralight market collapsed. And there was also a lawsuit where some guy had badly or incorrectly assembled an older Firefly, which is a single surface deflector and oil glider, and he had put it together wrong and crashed it and either gotten paralyzed or dead. So there was a civil suit and malinvestment in the Aero ultralight, and that was it in late 83, 84.
up the once biggest hang glider manufacturer in the world folded up and was stuffed in a storage unit in Temecula, and Brock was done, and I was working at Wills Wing. I've been working at Wills Wing in the loft since, you know, late '79, and watch that all happen, and all the world-class pilots were Up pilots by 1985, were all Wheelswing pilots, and then Yoichi shows up with that Up Axis that he and Larry had built in Japan, and what had happened is like sometime late in '86 or early '87, Yusuke had contacted JC, who had been working the last years with Brock and Haggard in Temecula.
So they invited JC and Larry to go over there and build UP hang gliders to design and build a modern UP hang glider in Japan. So they came up with the Axis 15.
Then 87, Yuichi showed up with that glider on launch at Elsinore with a giant hard case full of thousands of dollars worth of Nikon camera equipment, and I just walked up to him and I said, "Wow, it's a cool glider. You know, it's like, can I fly it?" He goes, "Yeah, it's like..." Can you mean you knew who I was? So he said, "Can I put a camera on your glider?" I said, "Sure. It's like, I'll give you all the rights to the photos if you give me a trip to Japan. I want to go fly in the Yamaha Sky Grand Prix." It was a $2,500, $5,000 prize, um, hang gliding kind of short course competition, competition in Japan that had been going on for a while. And I'd read about it and thought it would be cool, you know, to go race in this Yamaha Scrag Grand Prix.
So I, I extorted a camera mount and some loops on that axis for a trip to Japan and then went back to work at Wills and I didn't think anything about it. And I was working in the loft at Wills at the time. And, and, uh, three or four months later, Yoichi shows back up again with a plane ticket. It's like, we're ready to go. I didn't have a passport. I panicked and got a passport and showed up at LAX without a visa and had to go back and get a Japanese visa. And then I went to Japan and I showed up at Tokyo Narita with instructions on how to get on a train and take a train to Osaka. So I was on my own for a while, which is pretty, pretty interesting, dumbass gringo in Japan.
So I managed to get to the hotel that they, they booked for me in Osaka. And they came and picked me up the next morning and took me to launch at this place called Iwakuni, which was just idyllic Japanese fishing village, little island and a little crescent bay, bitchin' little beach and bitchin' little houses, Japanese fishing village. and about a 2,000-foot ridge with this amazing expanded steel ramp built on the front of a little cluster of towers on the top of the hill. And this glider was sitting there. It's a shiny, brand-new Axis, all mylar, top and bottom, laminate cloth. It was pink, bright fluorescent pink UP inlay on the bottom.
And I had my harness with me, and I'd pull my harness out and hook into the thing and huck off the ramp and just boated right up to about 1500 over and did three or four loops into the wind right over the launch ramp and boated right up to about almost two grand over It was getting better, and so I pushed out in front about a half a mile and then started doing this back towards launch, and on the third loop I was right over the ramp about 100 feet and the thing broke. You know, classic 25 degrees nose up like that where all the highest lift loads are, right side leading edge broke, and there's—remember that moment—you hear this clunk and the glider goes like that, and I look over, there's no right wing, and it's like, "Oh, fuck," and I
Look down and grab the chute, fire the reserve out behind me like that. The brakes come on, the glider swings under the reserve, does like one, two, crashing the top of the trees and, uh, it was gentle. It's like, it's like better, softer than a stand-up landing, you know? Just little jungle. It's like 15, 20-foot-high trees on a super steep slope, so the ground is like this far away from me and I'm perched in the tree. So I just climb up in the bar and unhook my harness and climb out of the harness and throw the harness down, throw my helmet down, climbing out of the tree and here comes this wave of Japanese people coming down to rescue me and they just, they whisked me away.
It's like I just climbed out of the tree and it's like, "No, you know, you're not gonna get the gliders, we'll handle that." They just, I'm in a truck off to the factory. So that's when I got to the factory that they were, where they were building the axis in Japan, and they were using this really trippy way of building the sails where they would roll the fabric out on the floor and then take these mylar patterns and lay them over the top of the fabric, and then the mylar patterns had the the shape of the panels cut on it, but with little holes and segments along the panels they would do, they would make pinholes. and then take these magic rulers with pieces of mylar with a real gentle curve on it, and then connect the dots. And I took one look at that and said, "This is retarded.
You guys are taking twice as long as it takes to make a sail. The way wheelswing does sales is, you put the pattern on the floor, and the pattern has this pattern tape on it, which is like masking tape except it's like three or four thirty seconds thick. So you lay the fabric over the top of the tape, and then you use the the edge of the tape to guide scissors and the pencil. So you draw lines with the edge of the tape, and then you cut along the edge of the tape with the scissors." And so I told them, "I think I can make a sale in half the time you guys are making sales," and I offer it, so you guys will start building up sales again. Let's talk about it. So I went home, and I boy, I got I got to fly the next day.
They came up with another glider for me. It's just a regular Dacron axis, and I flew around a little pylon course and landed and had a little barbecue in the afternoon and went back to the factory and talked to him some more and and then went home, and I was still working at Wills Wing And I talked to them about what I was doing, and Meyer told me that he kind of had a problem with up supplying the gliders when I was working there. So we started really earnestly talking with JC about maybe making some kind of a future. So JC put together a contract proposal to go back to Japan for six months and work 24/7 and design 12 gliders—three different models in four sizes each—and put together a, you know, proposal to make decent money and work seven days a week to build all those gliders and certify and everything.
And we wrangled over that all through the fall of 1987, and when it looked like it was going to happen, I quit. I quit Wills, and all of a sudden the Japanese just stopped communicating with us, and JC later came to realize that it was all over this like 300 yen per diem thing that he had tacked on there, just so that we weren't going to be out of pocket with a bunch of of food and stuff like that. And he realized later on that the Japanese style of doing business requires some sort of back and forth and bargaining concession thing. And he hard lined him on the contract. So they just stopped talking to him.
And then three months later, Yusuke shows up in Elsinore with a suitcase of $50,000 in cash and wants to start a hang glider factory, and JC and I talked about it, and I wasn't comfortable running the entire show or designing a glider from scratch, so I, I knew of Bob Schutte, who'd been designing and building gliders in New Zealand for a while, and he designed a glider called the Kia, that was a really nice high-performance glider, so I, I suggested that JC and Bob and I get together and produce the Axis 15 and the Kia as the Axis 13 in Elsinore. And we started out in a little thousand square foot unit right by Main Street and made a few gliders and did some vehicle testing.
And the Japanese, Yusuke and Matsuo, came back with more money and said that they want to get serious about it and they want to start pumping out gliders. So they rented a 2,500 square foot brand new tilt up right at the 74 and 15 freeway junction that they had just built. It, brand new tilt up, still had that fresh paint smell, and they rented that thing for 2,500 bucks a month. I started hiring people, we built a mezzanine in the sail loft and started pumping gliders out and they Bought Mark West's test vehicle. Mark West had this old Dodge truck that had his first computerized vehicle test system on it, that fed two load cells—a vertical and horizontal load cell—down that attached to the keel of the glider, and then it had another load cell that attached to a separate fixture to the base tube of the glider and the boom that suspended the glider about 15 feet above the ground off the front of the truck, and that was the hang glider wind tunnel, poor man's wind tunnel thing.
And that was the most advanced test vehicle at the time. Wheelswing was doing the same thing, a truck with a boom, but they were using spring scales and you just hook a fishing scale to the base tube and pull it back like that and film it with a 16 millimeter camera, and and that kind of thing. But Mark had put electronic load cells in there that fed into a little palmtop Toshiba computer running a basic program that he had written himself, and it would do, you know, like like 10 readings per second for lift, lift and drag and pitch force from the base to, but you, that was driving the truck at the speeds, holding onto this thing, standing on the platform on the top of the truck, driving at speed with the glider.
That was how we did the pitch test back then. And, uh, um, so I learned about that stuff. I can learn to, To fix the code when it malfunction, you know, JC and I were out testing all the time. We did the axis 15, the axis 13. I started on the intermediate glider, the comet of regurgitation. Of the comet without a keel pocket is an intermediate glider, so I was really busy and learned a lot about glider stability running the vehicle. Me and JC out there monkeying around on the top of the truck and had all kinds of adventures. Late after we had done the axis, I was doing the load testing on the comet 3 185 and figured out that as soon as the sun goes down, the conditions for testing are perfect.
As soon as the convection stops, all of a sudden the air is totally smooth and all the readings, the airspeed readings and everything, would just flatten out. Because what we've been doing was getting up at dawn and testing until it got convective, and then you couldn't hold one airspeed; you got to hold an airspeed constant for three or four seconds with the target loads and target speeds and everything. But when it starts getting convective at 10:30 in the morning, airspeeds all over the place and you just have to stop. So I was there all day with the comet doing other stuff until late at night, and I'm doing one of the load test runs and just noticed that the airspeed is just dead smooth the whole way through. So I started testing at night And I forgot there was a stop sign down at the end of the road. One time we were doing the negative 130 test, which is the glider mounted backwards, and you don't have to go very fast, and they have to go about 30 miles an hour.
But when you get going, the tips go from up like this, they just bends straight down. It's the aggravated worst-case load scenario. So when the tips came down, I was kind of in the right-hand lane and forgot there was a stop sign there, and it's dark. It's like I haven't fucking take out the 4x4 and wiped out the whole right side of the glider leading edge. Anything little adventures like that, but yeah, low testing was really fun. I mean, JC was was really amazing to work with. He's really sharp. He'd been hang gliding since he was 15, ran away from home and really had a head for aerodynamics and testing. It was just really, just
awesome to work with. And we did stuff that nobody had really done. We did high speed pitch tests, which was so really useful because of what I was doing at the time, doing aerobatics and the glider. but we had a few days where we went out and drove the vehicle like 50, 60 miles an hour and ran the glider at low positive angles and found some strange things happening with the sail. And 60 miles an hour, the sail would try to rotate forward around the spars where the bottom surface kind of pushes down and back and the top surface lifts up and tries to rotate forward around the sail, and and the pitch readings would just go all over the place. As soon as the bottom surface kind of pooches down, the pitch force would go away.
And it was really interesting dealing with what happens on king-posted gliders. As the glider goes from a few degrees positive to neutral, to zero angle, that's the nut to crack. It's how to get it to come back nose up. And that was the the difficult part of building gliders back then: is having the static stability system function at low positive angles without being engaged at trim, because if the static stability systems are engaged at trim, it's like bolting the sail rigidly to the frame. It's rigid, and it becomes a dangerous handling issue, you know, where if the the reflex bridles, which were lines that attach from the top of the king post to the trailing edge of the sail, if those are tight when you're a trim, it's like having no flex, and a flex wing, it makes an extremely dangerous handling characteristic.
So that was we were trying to find that line with the vehicle test and especially at high speed, figure out what was actually going on and stuff there was, I mean, how other, how what other way can you ever do that but stand on the top of the truck? But at 60 miles an hour, holding on to this glider, moving the pitch through these low angles and watching the sail, everything's flapping and the wind's roaring. And you watch the sail just go like that, do this weird mutation. And you watch the pitch force just reduce by like 30 percent or so. And there's no other way to get that experience. There's only a small handful of people in the world that have ever done that. Me, the Wills Wing guys, the guys at Icaro, you know, there's a small handful of people that have done that level of testing.
Bernd Schmidler, the DHV guy there, the truck there. But, yeah, those kind of things are invaluable. It's warped my perspective. perspective, you know, when I talk to recreational people who can't remember the making model of their glider, or what size it is, or anything like that, you know... that's not my planet yeah and so um how was the scene different in europe and so that was the scene here you went over and did some and the international aerobatic competitions in Europe. And, you know, how does this seem different?
What were those like? Europe is really amazing. The Japanese sent me there in 1988 to take over,
not take over, but to introduce their UP distribution people to the new company, to the Axis. So I went over there with Axis Demos, and Heidi Blumhumber was running Up Europe, and they had been marketing a glider that was, uh, Up rebranded, and I can't remember who built it, but they had a nice little king posted glider or something back then. And oh no, it was a, yeah, JC had designed the Glidezilla before Pete Brock's Up went out of business, and they were marketing, uh, European made Glidezilla over there, and it wasn't going well.
They were selling a lot of them, and they didn't carry the same reputation as the American Up brand. So when we came over with the Axis, we had a glider that was tested extremely robust, and we knew it, you know, and it would—they wanted that reputation. So we just replaced the the Up Europe Glidezilla with the Axis, and I went over there and and competed in that Rock Bruin. They had the Elinks. It was 88 over the bay there in Rock Bruin. The same place where they land the X-Hops. Right there near Monaco. It was a meet called Elinks. And they invited me over there in 88. And I won that on the Axis. And then I think it was the next year.
Like 1990. 1990, I went to another meet that was in the Alpago Valley in Switzerland. There was a real small meet, and it was kind of Enrico Egley and Heinz Swissig were Swiss pilots at the time. They kind of made it happen, so we towed up out of this little airfield behind a big old Atlas hang glider on a trike thing and did this aerobatic meet over the Alpago Valley. Just, just beautiful place in Switzerland. Um, I got like second place, I think, behind Heinz on that one. Amazing thing about Europe was how Friendly, everybody was. I ate at French farmhouses, 500-year-old French farmhouse. I ate family dinner with pilots.
I got to listen to them, you know, one of the guys was cool enough to, to translate for me where they were, they were making fun of one of their friends had a southern French accent, so it was just cool to listen to them talk and explain to me how they're making fun of their, their southern French friends, southern French drawl and stuff like that. And sitting in a farmhouse with these massive hand-hewn timbers, just one another, one of those moments where the colors are richer and the place is just like magic when you've never been there before. Um, yeah, that was all part of the European experience with up. I went to Saint Hilaire and got a flight off the ramp at the top of Saint Hilaire.
It was a crappy day and like sort around like below launch and stuffed it in where they have the big venue, the big party thing. I was flying around kind of level with that and got up just high enough to where I kind of came in side hill, landed there. It's Another thing, just green grass. It's so alien to out here; it's everything brown rocks and cactus. Another one of those moments was the sky was bluer, the grass was greener, and then, uh, you won, uh, uh, hang gliding world aerobatic championships like six times, something like that. That's what they called Telluride, because there really wasn't anything else consistent.
But yeah, I won, uh, 85, 86. I got third in 87 because I'd quit and Wills Wing and purposely just didn't get. I was not hitting my loops on heading flying Jamie's glider, and then, uh, I won 89, 99. I won three in a row after that, and I don't have it here, but there was a little trophy that we've been passing around. I think it was 85. One of the Telluride locals that was involved in organizing the meet just jumped up on the bar and the black diamond one day and pulled this thing off the shelf that was some Brazilian guy had brought and donated to the fly-in and it was a piece
of thick teak and about a foot square, with this really nicely, um, like three really nice natural terminated quartz crystals with a silver wire and a handmade silver comet and a hang glider attached to this wire, which is just a beautiful trophy of quartz, you know, terminated quartz crystals with this silver glider, you know, over the top of it, you know, it spun on the wire, so you put it upside down and so it's like a handler doing a loop thing. And, uh, this guy Nick, after I'd won in 1985, he just jumped up on the bar and pulled that thing off the shelf and gave it to me, said, "You won, you have, you should have this." So I took it home and, you know, I brought it back in '86 and took home in '86, brought it back in '87 and gave it to Aaron or John, whoever won in that year, yeah.
And then came back in '88 and got it back in '88. And then I won it '90 and won it in like '91, and then I had a kid and I just pushed off and I, I just, I won it three times in a row. I'm keeping the trophy sort of like the president, like the Schneider Trophy; if you win it three times in a row, you get to keep it. So I kept it, I still have it. But I went back in the last Airmen's Rendezvous in 99 and won that one too. That was the last Airmen's Rendezvous at Telluride. And then, why don't you get into Paraguay? Yeah, that was part of the UP scene. We were building gliders in Elsinore, and sending them to Japan, Japan, and Matsuo, Matsuo Tsushi, Matsuo was the Japanese principal that was kind of our CFO, and our liaison with the, with the owners of the company in Japan.
He was sort of like marketing and development guy in Tokyo, and he got the, the word from on high that UP wanted to get into paragliding in like 89, probably 90 around in there, so they scrounged up whatever paragliders were available to look at rebranding whatever was popular and good back then. So we had a gen air, which was, uh, well, it put Matsuo in the hospital, broke his back, broke the fuck out of his back, and put him in the hospital for six months. And that was a trippy, super ancient glider. It had five open cells in the middle, and three closed cells on the tip, and the super low, like, low aspect glider that's really not much evolved from a skydiving square.
And then I had a randonneuse 13 cell, and then some weird nine cell, and some weird speed seven cell glider, and we start Matsuo's office folded up when he was in the hospital for six months, so entire contents of his office landed in my office at Elsinore. And I sat—I knew the story—and I sat and looked at those things like poisonous snakes in my office for a while, until finally we got up the nuts to go and start flying them off the little the training hills in Elsinore. And then we survived our training hill flies, so we started flying them off Edwards, and they weren't good enough to make the landing zone at Edwards, so I landed in the bushes. I tattooed my forehead like I came up just short of a burned manzanita that had run, you know, I'm overgrown again, and was reliving it.
And I landed just short of it and kind of crashed into it like that and got a burnt stick, like, boom, right in my forehead. And I had a little black dot right there for a couple years and had some ridiculous, sketchy launches because we had no instruction, no reserves, nothing. A real simple board and strap arrangement. One of the first times, I think the first or second flight that I flew off Edwards, I actually hooked into the adjuster fucking things; it had the pass-through buckles, right? And there was like the big webbing thing with three bar tacks in a big loop for adjusting the shoulders. I'm looking at this thing, I don't know what it is, and here's a loop and the carabiner fits in there. So I hooked the carabiner into there and flew off Edwards, and didn't figure it out until later that it was the adjuster buckle on the shoulder shrug, the adjuster thing, you know, the pull tab on the two slot buckle, yeah.
Yeah, shit like that. There was a—there was a cliff launch just to the right of the E, and we did a couple launches where this looks good, there's just enough to lay the glider out and get a couple of steps, you know, and go off about a 20-foot drop-off, and then the E, you know, 1500 feet of nearly one-to-one. And I remember the glider's up and I step off that edge, bounce off a couple times before the thing starts flying away from the ridge. Yeah, we put Bostick on that random News 13 cell off Edwards one time, and and the way those things were trimmed, you had to pull like quarter break on to get best glide. So, um, I told Bostick, "It's like, yeah, you got to pull a little bit of break on or you're not going to make the landing zone." And he takes off and he's fully hands up, so I go, "Break." And he pulls a little break on, I go, "More break," and he stalls the thing.
Yeah, and then recovers, you know, this is all 20 feet away from Edwards, just nasty. And yeah, that was—we had no idea. There was no, no beta, no instruction, no nothing back then. Yeah, it's amazing we survived. But two years later, Greg Smith, yeah. And you're two years later, Greg Smith, and then you're at the PWC, first PWC into Owens in '92. Well, before that, the when Greg Smith came on the scene, we hired Scott Grassett, and Grassett did an Aveco van tour and handed out the Airman Vector, which is Jen's design that was made at, at Daikyo, at Adele, and that
Went okay, but at the end of after that season, Greg had been doing really well with Condor and had won the the Nationals up in the North Side that year. And the the powers that be at up heard about him. I had never heard about, I didn't know anything about. I knew Scott, but somebody had suggested that Greg could do a lot better job, so they hired Greg and I hooked up with Greg. We got along really well, and he came up with, uh, Comet CX, which was a pretty well-evolved glider. Booker had won the Worlds on it in Europe that year. Andre Booker, yeah, it was a—it was a semi-elliptical, pretty well-evolved past the other crap, the Randonneuse, the Gen Air. It was way evolved past that.
And uh, Greg takes me up to Saboba to, to do my maneuvers clinic. And uh, on the way up there, he's like, "You hang glider pilot assholes, you just, you throw your reserve every time you know anything goes wrong with your main. So you're not going to get a reserve, you're going to, you're going to learn how to fix the main." So he throws me off at like nine o'clock in the morning, and I go out and do a frontal and a full stall, and with what, you know, no reserve. And I, my full stall, I think, goes behind me. I freak out, I go hands up, thing goes past 90, and I fall slack line past it like that, and it opens up symmetrical. We go down and land. And, and uh, yeah, do that again one more time.
You know, that full stall was a little bit, you want to hold the full stall a little bit before you let it up. And so we go up again the second time, and now it's 10:30 on a regular day, and the next thing I know, I'm a grand over, and the thing, I start taking hits, and I'm not moving forward. The thing has, has trimmers on it, but I'm too retarded to, you know, speed the trims up and get in front of launch. So on my second flight that day, my maneuvers clinic, I get blown over the back at Cebola. So I go a thousand feet up and start going over the back, and then start taking hits. So I start trying to go that way and try to start get out the canyon to the left, and I didn't get very far, like a half a mile. Now I'm definitely way in the rotor, so I took a bunch more hits.
You know, when I'm right behind the ridge in the worst part of the rotor, and then I got down below the rotor and it started getting smooth again, and I remember there was kind of clear ground underneath me, about 15 feet underneath me, looked like a place it wasn't a giant pile of rocks, and I was like, "This looks good enough." I just buried the brakes and installed the thing and went in about 10 feet, landed on my ass and jumped up. Survived my maneuvers clinic on the reserve. How did it go? Go from there to being in the PWC in '92? Yeah, Greg went to Korea and worked with Jen and made the Katana. He came back with the Katana and handed me one of those things, and we were off to the Owens.
So I was the start of that, that two-year, um, Owens Valley Nationals, the first PWC Yeah, 91, I was in good shape. 92, I, I, I got injured and I was still in a cat, or I had a air cast splint on my ankle in 92, but 91, I just went there, couldn't launch. It was like a total hack, incompetent let launch. And then Bob England had been training, you know, so he was really good, competent ground handling. And he was also Bob. Ted Boyce and me were the only three hang glider pilots in the meet.
We're the only three guys that out of 25 or so that year that had any experience time over distance racing. Everybody else were climbers and skydivers, and we were the only ones that knew how to basically, basically work the column where you're climbing quickly, you know, don't top anything out, just do the quick climb so you can get to the next point and I Remember, I'm following Bob. Like, I, Bob was really good. He was, he was way a better pilot than me, but I had a walking speed performance advantage. If I could see him, I could catch him. So I would try to launch with Bob, and Bob would just totally, totally graceful off. He goes up, he goes off towards, towards Piute, and I'm like, three or four attempts later, I'm getting really pissed crashing my glider and the bushes below Gunner.
And finally I get off, and Bob's like the far side of Piute, but I caught him. You know, I caught him before we got to Benton and won. And just every day, if I could, I just followed him, and I just kept catching up to him every time as long as I could keep the glider open. And, uh, yeah, that was when Greg, Greg broke the seat board over, over Piute that one day. Yeah, I was up at 11 behind Piute, and Greg was coming right over Piute, and we started out about like nine or ten or so, and I was in weak kind of choppy climb, not really doing good, and we were on radio, we're supposed to to be team flying, and I look over and I see Greg like doing the F-16 mock to, you know, like this just climbing at a 30 degree angle, and uh, I
call him on the radio, I'm going, "Hey, you're, you're supposed to tell me when you're in lift, you know, I'm flying that way." And Greg's like, "Fuck, fucking fuck like that," and I get in the thermal and, you know, we climb out and we finish the course, and I started talking to him later in the day about what had happened, and I'm working choppy lift at about 11 grand, you know, a couple thousand feet above Paiute, and as he comes in on Paiute, the glider just went, "Whoa," just went underneath him. There's no warning at all. He said he looked down, he saw dirty bits and clean bits, and as he's falling past the glider and swam, the thing came back straight, and he's like, "Wow, okay." And then one, two seconds later, boom, does the same thing again, goes underneath him again, wham, goes, falls past slack line, falls past it, and the second time he fell past it, it broke the seaboard, and then he had this really cool, very like some brand new prototype Flymaster thing, so it immediately fell back underneath the thing like that.
The glider rocks back, and he recorded something like, well, over 2,000, 2,200 per minute lift, and you know, and then he's climbing out and I'm calling him on the radio, chastising him for not telling me where the thermal, yeah. And then, uh, since you were one of the early adopters of paragliding, or made the transition, or at least flew both hang gliders and paragliders, uh, there was a dynamic, especially in California, about, uh, paragliders showing up at the hang glider sites, uh, and I would say we had few supporters in the hang community.
You were one of them, and I remember Smitty, Greg Smith, sending you to various places to sort of break the ice, if you will, between the hang gliding community and the paragliding community, by flying your paraglider, um, at the hang sites. That it was, uh, it was forbidden, but, um, the hang community wasn't gonna ask you not to. Yeah, Funston was really bad, and there were a few years where the, the hangings tolerated paragliders at the fort, and then, um, then Kelly died, and that was it.
That was all the ammunition they need. Kelly was one of the, the guys that was training there and was working with Green Bomb at the shop, and he fell over and hit his head on a rock at the in front of the stables. which is right next just to the left of the fort, and that was it. That was all the ammunition they need, and they banned paragliders to the dumps. But yeah, there was, there was a lot of contention and hatred. I was just talking about that, about Rick Masters. Oh yeah, yeah, because JC and I had gone with Rick Masters. He had, he had taken us with axes up to Mazurka and thrown us off, and we had a cool, you know, bonding moment. That was a fun day.
It wasn't a good flight, I don't think it got. Barely getting level with launch and barely getting level with the Indians, but uh, right when we got there, just up there looking at the scene, it's this beautiful huge meadow, little tiny cluster of towers right on the west side of the rim, and we're standing there, just, just kind of got out of the truck and just unloading the gliders, and an F4 came from the west below the ridge, just popped up over the ridge, descended down over the meadow like that, put the thing in a bank like that, and then descended into a canyon, disappeared off the east side of the Indians. That's always, you know, that just blows me away anytime you see fighter aircraft like that. Out in the owns cabin, a couple times at Horseshoe, you get f-16s come through the canyon.
You go out across the valley and stuff; I love seeing that stuff, so that was my introduction to Rick Masters, and he was all cool, and he had done the film on the 1980 Owens Valley Classic, the aoli comic clones and pod people. It's, you can find it on YouTube now, but it just shows the classic during when it was a world-class. Me and Gunter was just carpeted in gliders, most of them comets, and a dust cell would roll through and just take a comet out of the pile and throw it up in the air and spin it around, throw it back down in the pile, and another one over here, a little bit as it rolled up the hill. Another comment would like pick up out of the pond, spin around, crash back into the pile of gliders.
That's all in that movie, in this original movie, but what happened in uh 1991? When we introduced paragliders into the U.S. market, people started crashing, and Rick Masters was there and saw some of it happen and saw some of his friends get hurt and just went on the war path and just hated on paragliders, said they were dangerous and without a rigid structure you should never fly them at all, and just went on the hate path against paragliding and is still there. His website is still up today, so yeah, I, I couldn't deny they're dangerous, you know? I, I piled in early
'92, yeah. Early '92, Greg had left UP and had gone back to work with Adele because when UP had moved off to Utah, they were trying to pigeonhole him off into only doing R &D and whatever and then kind of taking him out of sales and running the whole show. So he went and talked to Mr. Sue. Mr. Sue hooked him back up with the U.S. distribution rights for Adele and got me a glider and got me $1,000 a month from Adele USA because I'd won the nationals on the UP Katana. And I was interested in, I owed my loyalty to Greg. So I told Greg, you know, if you're not happy with UP and you're going to go with Adele, I'll go with you.
And he got me a thousand bucks a month for a year and a half just with flying Adele gliders. I had an infant kid, I really wasn't marketing, I wasn't touring, I wasn't selling anything. It was sewing repairs, flying meets, and just being an Adele guy, and that was amazing. Nobody had ever given me money to fly. I'd worked at Wheelswing for 10 years at the time, and they didn't give me nothing, never had a glider. It was always a shop glider, you know? I got paid for my work, but they never paid me a fly. I pay my own expenses, the comps—that's how Wheelswing is. They don't, they don't pay comp clients, they don't give away gliders to comp clients, so their, their business plan always has been known as well.
And so I, you know, I owed a huge debt of loyalty to Greg and stuck with him through the Adele years. Um, that worked really well for him. He turned Adele into the biggest brand in the U.S. He's selling more than 300, 300, 500 gliders a year in the U.S. Yeah, we were all on the team. Yeah, Chris, David, Robbie, Robbie Bridges, all those guys got their start with Greg. So I went up there when Greg was going insane. I went up there with Dave Frank in 98. Met Mr. Sue. Mr. Sue handed me an energy.
We all went flying. Mr. Sue flew off Baldy. Had a crappy flight. Landed up half kind of in the trees, down the ski run. Didn't even make the landing zone. So we got this huge panic to go find Mr. Sue. do. It was an amazing time.
It wasn't long after that, I took a hard look at what I was doing and I wasn't marketing. I didn't feel like I was providing value to Adele, so I voluntarily terminated my contract with them. After a year and a half, I said, look, I really appreciate the money, but I don't feel like I'm earning it.
So I just stopped and stopped up taking their money and, uh, just went back to making glider bags and custom gear on my garage. And then, what got you into being meat director? Well, it was all part of that whole time, too. We went up to flight Greenhorn. Was it Ed Stein who ran that meet? That first meet off of Greenhorn in '91, there was the core group of guys there: me, Greg, Chuck, Smith brothers, yeah, there was Bouchard, Bouchard, Ken Byer, there was a hand lolly, it's another one. There was a core group of guys that sat down at the end of that meet and said, "Here's what we want, and we want something like the PWC." Xavier Murillo had done a good start on the PWC at the time, and the the nationals that Greg had won year before, like in 1990, was a duration spotlighting contest.
You know, it's like a barbecue weekend, barbecue thing. They weren't thousand point competitions; they weren't oriented towards time and distance and any of that. And Xavier Murillo had adopted the thousand point, you know, soaring racing system into the PWC scoring system. So we just sat down at the end of the Sun Valley meet and said, "Look, if we want this to happen, it's going to be somebody here." Right, so there's that unpleasant silence, and I put my hand up and volunteered to run that meet. So I went home and drew up this cool cartoon. It was a, um, what the hell was it? I can't remember. The first year, I think it was some skull and crossbones thing, you know, with bat wings and everything on a cover page or on the header, and then just the meat: announcement, 50 bucks, t-shirt, a dinner, film, and processing, and filled
it up. I limited it to 30, but we did 35 the first year, and then the next year I limited it 35, I got 40, and Used Jerry Murillo's system. Jennifer Toms put that system into an Excel spreadsheet, and off we went and ran the meet. And the first year, Gosinski had been flying this Excalibur and had, uh, had gone across the lake and then was on his way back when it was blowing down really hard and came in in the lee of some, some trees and snapped his ankle. So I got him to run the meet the first year in '91, and so
I got to fly. I think I was flying the Katana at the time. Yeah, so flying a Katana and of course, everybody's watching me, so I'm off first, and I climb out and I go north and get the perfect cloud over the middle of the north end of the lake. I left the lake at the right time. We got high, you know, north of the lake connected
with the cloud in the middle of the north end of the lake there, which usually there's nothing, you have to get all the way across the lake to the hills on the east northeast corner of the lake. And it was an epic spring day. Base, base at Elsinore was about 6500, but by the time I got out to Paris airport, um, over the drop zone, base was up around eight, so it was way over the top of the March Arsa. Is 6500 at the top of the March Arsa, 6500, and I sailed over the top, but I was doing B lines and come out of the clouds at eight grand, sailing over the top of the Paris DZ, the March Arsa. Um, little did I know it, it blew it out behind me and everybody's following me, so that cloud that I got that connected me, you know, to the cloud street that went all the way to Suboba dissipated, so everybody was 45 minutes at least behind me, got stuck in that blue hole
And when I got to the landing zone, after you know, getting retrieved from goal, there were two air traffic control officers there waiting for me because I was meat organizer of record, and I'd gone to March and Elsinore and all the DZs and told them where we were and where we were going and everything. So they were waiting for me when the story that there was enough time for the Air Force colonel to get in his 170 and take off and orbit a cluster of gliders that was from 100 feet ground level. Right, lined up with the march runway from 100 feet up to 5,000 feet. There was a gag lined up with the runway, guys following me. I told them, you know, we stood on launch and and it said, here, there's March Air Force Base.
Here's where the ARSA is, you know. Know your airspace things. And they just flew right into the ARSA. Big column from the ground level all the way to 5,000 feet, lined up with a runway with enough time for this Air Force colonel to look at him with binoculars, walk down the taxiway, get in his 170, go fly circles around the junk infesting his approach pattern, and then fly back and get my information. send a couple of lieutenants to the Wilson or LZ that afternoon. Yeah, that was... I had to, you know, can't trust the little weasels. I had to run all the turn points south of them. I ran this, all turn points had it down near Bundy Canyon, so they couldn't get into the march arson
Yeah, the same year, a couple days later, I was flying in the meet again and I was in a gaggle with a couple other guys and Lee Kaiser, remember? I was with Lee, and we're over Bundy Canyon east of the freeway, and I look over and here comes a KC-10, just looking straight at it like this, it's climbing, it's way underneath us and way far away but it's like this, it's pointed straight at me it's like every circle, It's still pointed straight at me, and I come around again and Lee peels off, and I do one more circle, then I peel off and he just then goes right by me like this. And right, we were in—we were in the lead gaggle, and he goes right through the next gaggle. The next guy was just down Bunny Canyon Road, a little ways, you know?
He just pointed right at me, went right by me about 100 feet away, and then just went right through the middle of the gaggle like that, just showing us who's boss, I think. Yeah. Never had any more incidents until much later, when Apprentice flew right over the the Elsinore DZ, when there was a jump plane in the air. Jump plane was full of SAS guys. They send SAS guys out here to do jump training in the winter and stuff. So Apprentice was high over the south towers and didn't want to detour around the water. Like, we're we're okay if we go over the south end of the water, but Carl doesn't want us anywhere over the dirt south end of the lake. So Prentice, you know, thought he was winning, and he decided to go straight from the towers across the lake, right over the runway, because he saw the Otter on the ground.
Right, well, there's two Otters. It's like one of them's a 12-5 for the SAS guys. They came looking for you. Yeah, there were those issues and that's what what compelled the United States Hangar Line Association to establish the meat steward rule. Because I would play a little fast and loose with the rules and didn't disqualify the day because I couldn't identify the guys that were in the approach pattern. I didn't want to spank Prentice for flying through the meat. So I let stuff like that slide and Kaiser and a few of the other guys thought, no, that's no good, we can't do that. So they established the meat steward thing and started refining and making the rules a little more hard and fast and consistent because that was the early years.
I have no regrets about playing fast and loose and making those meets happen because no one else was doing it, not until way later, not until 1995 with Gulizinski and Bill Gordon when they ran the Nationals at Chelan. That was when paragliding competition in the United States really came up on the plateau that it's on now. You know, they ran a good meet. You know, they had EMTs. You know, Zizek was there as a meet steward.
Robbie was there. Yeah, you were meet director and that put Chelan on the map. That was the first Chelan competition. And it put America on the map, too, as a place where there's a venue that's at least as good as Europe. You know, it's arguably Chelan. Yeah, Richard Gouin was there. That's one of those stories. We were telling those stories the other day. Bridges going around the outside of some thermal. It was already ridiculous. I climbed late and watched this Robbie fly into the dirt in a prototype Proton. That was a prototype Adele glider. Yeah, it had to be like a Sector. Because the energy, I think, was 95.
The Sector was 96. So it had to be a Proto Sector. either proto sector or an energy, I think it was an energy. No, it was an energy because I was flying a rainbow and Jennifer Toms was flying a rainbow, right? And I didn't get my energy until '94, yeah. The energy was earlier, I mean, the uh rainbows earlier, yeah. So that was rainbow years, I think. And yeah, Robbie, Robbie, like uh Richard Gallant and Sebastian Borquan just blew me away. They were on a whole different level for me and for most people in the U.S. Like '92, Sebastian came in fun flying, practicing on one of the last couple of days of the nationals when we had a uh, we went up past White Mountain Ranch and then came back and landed at White Mountain Ranch.
It was like Gunter to Line Street somewhere north like Benton and then back to White Mountain Ranch. And me and the Smith brothers and a couple other guys were all thinking, "We're bad ass making gold." Here comes a bunch of the skydiving guys. We were laughing at them; they'd come right 90 degrees to goal on the ridge, top out at 15,000, and then fly out over the valley, and the guy's like 5 grand over the ground over goal, and we're just laughing at them. We had left 3 miles, you know, we've got a long diagonal, and you know we're getting the goal at under a thousand, and um, so we're—we're just laughing at all these guys. And then here comes Sebastian,
just coming out to land with us, a goal. He didn't run the course or anything, but he does a, you know, deep spiral to a tip drag to a stand-up landing, and I was just blown away. I said that I had never seen anything like that huge. I just, I was blown away. These guys were so good. I'd heard that Earth's RE, or one of the other really hot ship pilots that was there from Europe, had just landed on the talus below White Mountain Peak because he kind of got in a weak cycle and he didn't want to fly out into the valley. So he just lands on the talus, but the white mountain hangs out for half an hour or so until he gets another good cycle and pucks back off and gets back up, flies the rest of the task or whatever, flew back to to line street, you know, the to the car park and everything.
I saw what these guys were doing and it just blew me away; we thought we were good pilots and we just looked like amateurs. Yeah, that was wild. First interface with them in '92, so I mean, they, they blew me away, and I, I permanently changed Sebastian's life, for sure. Richard Lawn, Sebastian will never, never, never forgot that, because we had really good pot, and a couple of bad weather days, we went out to the Buttermilks and did some bouldering and stuff, and smoking, you know, solid pot, really good California, Cincinnati. They're, they're Europeans, mix it with tobacco, so they, they had never smoked pot like that before, and they were, how they were all having religious experiences out of the Buttermilks.
And then I'm jumping around here a bit, but Bridges told me that you, uh, uh, you looped for his high school graduation, or was it the college graduation? Whatever, college, college graduation, so you had done loops over the, you know, over the ceremony for his college graduation. And then when him and Othar Lawrence were running those sort of Red Bull Nationals in Aspen in sort of the mid to late '90s, uh, then they invited you out to do aerobatics at Goal, uh, at the end of, of the day to entertain the crowd. And there was one particular, uh, session that I was at where you basically gave us all a haircut, at about 80 people dropped their burgers, right?
The camera guy dropped his camera. We all hit the deck. I know my, you know, I know what it was like for me to watch, you know, that last slow loop where you buzzed the crowd from your perspective, because you've always had a different eye for what is possible in terms of aerobatics. Describe that for me from what it was like for you to set that up. No, because he had so much energy. He just gives us all the haircut behind the snow fence because they had the little orange snow fence, you know, to keep the crowd back. And so he comes right at the fence when he bottoms this loop out at about, you know, 10 feet off the ground.
He's doing 80 miles an hour and he just like rockets at us and climbing, you know, like mad. but from our perspective he was just gonna decapitate us all god
the sound must have been, yeah.
And then he just comes from, so we all just instinctively like hit the deck, even the guy with the big shoulder-mounted camera. Everybody hits the deck, and then he just comes like, you know, it sounded like an F-16 coming right over your head. It comes over, over our head, freaking does his, does his base leg. He just lands in the field, you know, because he climbed out like, you know, 50 feet, you know, with all the energy, and it was like just like, no. And so we were all, we were all going, "That was the most awesome thing I've ever seen," uh, and then O-Farm Bridges were like, "Well, probably shouldn't have to do that."
Not too much margin left there to play with.
No, no, it's like, uh, you know, I would say the town isn't quite ready, you know, because it's not just competitors out there. It says town isn't quite ready for that. The 2000, the velenu, that was I think the last aerobatic meet you've gone to, isn't it? Yeah, um, yeah, tell you right into the 03 or 99, that was the last aerobatic meet, and RC Dave and I had started training judges here, and I'd done practice runs here, and then we had the the Crestline Massacre, and Sauterquist blew up a side wire on his lightspeed. He was flying with spinning race wires, and he knew one was damaged.
And then there was that guy, I can't remember his name now, but the guy came down from Santa Barbara. And R.C. Dave and I had vetted him. We talked to John Greenhold and some of the guys that had known him for a while. This guy had been flying sensors for 20 years, and it just bought a T2 and I didn't know him, Dave didn't know him, so we—we talked to you guys, we knew we talked to Granel and Granel said, "Yeah, he's been doing crappy wingers for 20 years, he should be okay." So we had me and Heinie and Chris Boffin, you know, all of—all of the top competitors around Southern California were in reverse scoring order up on Crestline and we were sending guys off.
We had eight guys, I think, with smoke, so we were running it like a competition, but it was a judge's training thing and it's just fun. So when the guy in the window pops a smoke, the next guy is off launch, right? And first couple of guys are like dusties flying a Falcon, you know, and then, uh, the more advanced pilots started, you know, coming up in the queue, and this guy, because he had a brand new talent, was about like number five, and then Dino was behind him, and Eric Clockboy was behind him, and then it was Chris and John and me and
I couldn't see what happened; it was hazy enough to where I couldn't see what happened, but But my girlfriend, Doriandra, was in the landing zone. And this guy from Santa Barbara goes up and does a couple, three crappy wing overs. Because he got about 130 degrees over the top, but he just sat there with the bar out. So the guy would go to 130 degrees and then not pitch around. And it would just kind of side slip and get a couple of these really horrible 130 degree maneuvers that ended up in nearly 90-degree sideslip like that until one of them stayed 90 degrees like that. It went from 130-degree bang to 90 degrees knife edge like that for about five seconds. And then it tucked on and just clapped the wings together like that.
I'm not sure exactly what happened. If he fell into the bar and hit a wire or a bar, and that's what caused the failure. But he ended up sandwiched between the wings. And then the thing kind of tumbled like that and went like this, with him on the outside, and all I saw is his right arm out and him at the end of the clap together wings like that, doing the maple seed spin all the way to the ground with no attempt to get a reserve, and then the next pilot was Sauterquist Jotterquist has the damaged wire. He does a couple of loops, a spin, and then exits a spin from the stall with a really big dive.
And the thing broke, barely nose up. It had almost no load on it. It's like 10 degrees nose up. Sidewire fails on one side. Claps the wings together like that. It does some sort of weird little permutation like this and rips the keel out of the glider. Now he's skydiving with the control bar and throws his reserve. and does a near-freefall deployment.
They both died?
No, Sarkozy survived. The other guy died at the scene. But then I went to Villeneuve. I guess the two events are somewhat unrelated. But I took 154 Talon with the shorter wires to Villeneuve and did the twister thing that they all freaked out about. They loved seeing that. The announcer in the Guillermo Barros video thing. It's like, "Oh, la la la la la!" Twist air, you know? They're just freaking out, you know? Typical, probably drunk announcer, but nobody ever seen anything like that. And I was getting that glider to roll 180 just effortlessly, and I love those things. I mean, they're doing a buck 20 straight down, and I can push the nose up and climb 150, 200 feet, and still have airspeed and control and nail roll, and the thing would roll just, yeah, just do these amazing rollovers.
I get 180 rollover right in front of them. The thing just snaps around; it looks really cool. So they, they love that. And I'd never competed over water before, so on Saturday, I experimented with setting up over the water and landing on the raft, and then on the raft Saturday, and then crash Sunday. But I'd done several other flights with the camera somewhere. I got 35 millimeter film, uh, pointed straight up like this over the lake Geneva, looking to the east on that glider, and, uh, yeah, I'd done, I'd land in this—like, there's the, the raft and the little harbor, and then there's this pile of rip rap with a about 100 yards by 60 feet wide of flat ground right next to it with the marsh and the lake and eucalyptus trees, and I stuck the thing in there a couple of times, mounted my camera, looped as low as I could
squeaked over the mass of the marina, and then stuck the thing into that little field right there and did that like Thursday and Friday, and then Saturday I'd land missed the raft and did that one loop where I started doing loops, you know, over the raft and came down and kind of finished up about three or four hundred feet up, and then moved where I pointed straight at the crowd and And I did one more, and I was still really high. So I did one more, and I was still really high. So I did one more, and on the second one, I pulled up about six feet off the water like that and still had enough energy to do a 180 and overshoot the raft by like 100 feet. And that was Saturday. And then Sunday, I thought, well, I'm going to line up a little farther away.
I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to keep doing the maneuvers. So the last maneuver is like at Aspen, you know, I complete the one maneuver and I decide, okay, this one is the last one. And when I come over the top, as soon as I pick up the ground, as soon as the glider gets about 20 or 30 degrees nose down like that, inverted, I can pick up the ground and start judging and extending that dive. And I extended the dive, kind of thinking that maybe I put my hand down and dragged my hand in the water at a buck 20, and I was... I remember starting to pitch up, I remember looking up at the trees like that, and the reserve container hit the water as I was pulling G's like that. You can... I've looked at the video really close, so you can see it, the reserve, my chest hits the water first and then the base tube, and then, you know, as soon as the reserve container hits the water, she's...
everything came to a stop just instantly. And, uh, yeah, and I just... I remember, vaguely remember, floating up in front of the leading edge going, "Oh, fuck, what just happened?" You know, and then they fucking... then the boat's right there, and the worst injury that I got at the whole event was when they dragged me up over the rail of the boat. It's like it's one-inch aluminum going along the boat and just got my side got all fucking gouged up, and it was, it rung my bell pretty good, but I had, I had broken up with a girlfriend I'd been seeing, Stephanie, for four years, and that had just kind of all exploded. And, and uh, Cyrus had come over, so I've been wearing dark glasses, and on the way out I took him off and put him in the harness.
So there's a bunch of like fucked-in-the-head and perception things that I had done to sabotage myself, you know? That's what it was. It was, I literally had thought that I'll drag my hand in the water 100 miles an hour, missed by that much. Borson's called it my Maxwell Smart move.
So, Mitch, let me ask you a couple just rapid-fire questions. You don't have to answer them fast, take your time, but just a few things. You've heard the show a bunch, you know these are coming, but if you look back at your incredibly long career, what would you change if you could?
That's a tough one. I don't know, everything or nothing, it's hard to say. The career is such a big picture, you know? The career doesn't, isn't just me. The career was my wife, my child, you know, all the people around me. I mean, there's a few things that I would change, but it would be bigger picture stuff that's actually not like career things. I would have bought a house cash a lot sooner, unchained myself from a mortgage a lot sooner, and had more time, because one of the things that I really like about being up here is that I have time to help other people and not expect anything in return, turn, you know, I would love to do. I wish they were dirtbag pilots like I was back then, but there aren't now.
It seems like a more affluent community, and you know what? I, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hedegar story at the peak of my powers, and they sent me, Adele sent me to Verbier. The pre-war was in '93 and I wasn't ranked, but you know, I'd won the U.S. Nationals, and that was the only one that wanted to go, me and Jan the only ones that wanted to and could go, and uh, I'm Not ranked, so I'm way back in the line, and it's huge—means 170, almost 200 people—and it's windy, and it's late on launch, so I'm behind some guy who screws up his launch and goes careening off the side and slams into me, hooked into my racer in a rosette, and I, I grab him and stabilize him, and he gets his glider sorted out and then proceeds to get plucked from the top launch at Verbier.
You know what that's like. It's steep. It's fucking windy. He just gets ripped off the ground with the leading edge of my racer hooked over his vario. So I'm kind of belaying him out like this until he gets near the end of the lines. Every time I kind of tighten up and tug on the lines, I hear tearing sound until there's like no more lines left, and I just belay him around the glider.
destroy this, blow the leading edge off of my glider down in the mouth, get on the chairlift and ride down in the parking lot. And, uh, Andy Hedegar's got a little motor home there in the tabletop sewing machine, and somebody directed me, was pointed over there, and I walked from the bottom of the lift to Andy's little motor home, and he's like, "Yeah, I can fix that." And I go get him a six-pack of Lombra on 30 bucks, and I got to fly the rest of the meat, you know, so he didn't have to do that. I'm an Adele pilot, he's paratac, you know, he had absolutely zero reason to help me. So I like doing that, you know, when people come up here and the snowbirds fuck up their wings, I give top priority to stuff that I can turn around in one day.
I drop everything, you know, I got a pile of basket cases out there that got 10, 30 hours on, you know, not done with, but somebody comes up here with something that I can fix in a few hours or in a day. I love doing that. Buy me a sandwich, you know, I'll turn you straight across for a good meal from down the hill. You know, I haven't run across somebody too broke yet, but I would love to, you know, help people if there were dirt bags in the sport, like I was, I would help those people in a minute because I know, you know, From desperation comes the most sincere desire most often times. That's where I was. I had nothing. Two DUIs and I just folded myself into my van in the parking lot at Wills Wing and just gave Wills Wing and my flying everything I had because there was nothing else.
Literally nothing else. Those were some tough years.
Would I change any of that? I would probably not be trying to steal used tires drunk, which is how I think the cops found me and got my second DUI. Followed me from the used tire store, something like that, you know? Yeah, I would go back and change things like that, but seven years living in the parking lot at Wills Wing, working every day, I don't know if I would change that or not. I mean, that was some desperate dirt, dirtbag times, but I was living in my van when I won the aerobatic competition and telluride in 1985. Um, you know, I had a somewhat a strange relationship with my parents in 1984, but my dad gave me a bunch of money to put, uh, the logo of the unifly boat company that he was repping on the bottom of my glider.
And I took that to telluride in 1984 and got me second or third place. Um, you know, and I didn't actually move into an apartment until 1987. Would I change anything like that? No, especially not now. And the people that I know, the people that I admire that have come back around to, to be my good friends now, Larry Tudor, um, for one, We all live in our cars for some period of time. We all poured our lives that deep into the into the sport where it became all-consuming to the expense of almost everything else, including family and relationships and everything like that, and I don't think there's any other way to do it and do really exceptional things now.
maybe there is, you know, I there might be people, I'm sure there are people like, like more Chrigel, more, and you know, these guys that are somehow capable of doing everything right and surviving long term, and they, they put in the work too. I understand he teaches and all that kind of stuff, so you know, my hat's off to those people. I'm not one of them. I, I fucked up, I crashed, I survived, and I kept coming back, and that's me. I'm still like that, I still up, I forgot to hook up my speed system last week, you know
If you could only have one more flight, where would it be? Somewhere...
Green, I had so many amazing flights. I just, if I were to pick one out to repeat, I can't. There's no, there's no way one
Of the most amazing flights I had was at Zillertal, when I was in Europe with Up. I helped Up Zillertal on an axis and did 96k. I made that gap and then got it was a northwest day, so it was just like effortlessly bouncing down the north face of that ridge all the way to some little town, and there's a lake and a little grass strip with a couple of sailplanes parked next to the grass strip in this little two-three-story building. So I landed there and walked in, and it was a school building. It's like a grade school building, and I walked in just as school was getting out, so it's this wild scene, like something out of a movie where the kids just—ah, the screaming kids come down the steps out the fucking door past me like that, you know?
And then there's like one or two little kids standing there, and I'm a retarded gringo that doesn't speak much, you know, French or German, and I just—one little kid's kind of standing around wondering what the hell I'm doing, so I go, "Hey, can you help me? I need to make a phone call to call my retrieve driver." And the kid's like, "Yeah, no problem." He goes over to the phone, "What's the number?" and I give him the number of the retrieve driver and dials it up and hands me the phone, and I tell the retrieve driver where I am and get the ride coming and hang the phone up and thank the kid for helping me out, and I complimented him on his English and he puffs himself up and goes, "Yes," English is the language of the world from this little grade school kid, little things like that, I would repeat that
or
any number of things I don't know, the crappy flight that I had at St. Hilaire, I landed on that bench and then drove down with the guy that was one of Heidi Blumhuber's little workers doing up hang gliding business back then in Europe, and just practicing French on them, you know, using the words like the sky and the sun and the clouds and the things that we, you know, that we deal with every day and flying. I mean, those are the amazing moments, talking to people like that, you know, trying to break the language barrier in five minutes and just, yeah, the combination of the people and being high and up in the rare air with, with a few guys like you, I, I
Don't care, you know, yesterday be fine. I'd repeat, yesterday is my last flight. You know, I'd repeat a a sled ride on a smooth day, or you can close my eyes, or you know, or one of the days I was test flying it at Elsinore, when I was running the Wills Wing thing for a couple of days where I'd take three or four gliders out there. Wills Wing has a policy of test flying every production glider. So I was required to at least kite every paraglider that I sold. And I would take four or five gliders out to the E and just do top landings, test fly them all, bag them back up, take them back to the shop and ship them out to dealers. And usually by the last test flight, it's booming, you know, and I can't get down.
So a couple times, I just get up and see how long I could close my eyes without freaking out, like in a sport, you know, a b-cell glider, something that's not gonna bite me. I trained myself how to do SATs on an XL sport, like a big glider, was really easy to do SATs, and you know, super like an XL. And there were a few times, you know, it's just up and it was hard to get down, so I'd stop trying. And I remember I took my shoes, my shirt off one time, just kind of enjoyed the flight there, get a tan, point into point into the west and close my eyes, take, take my clothes off and sit there for a while and put my clothes back on, you know, go in and land you
know, I—I mean, let's put a whole like five or six of those together, and that would be a good last flight if
You had anything recently in, by recent say, last 10 years, something that's happened in flight or something that you've learned about flight that's just completely blown your mind? My
First flight off ORD with the Enzo 2 extra small. I had done extensive repair on it, you know, Zion had put the thing in the trees and it was really badly damaged, so I put a lot of time into it. It's one of the more extensive repairs that I'd done just because that glider's so difficult to work on; cells are only like nine inches wide, so to work on the thing I gotta pull out a huge amount of ribs and rods. So I spent a good part of a week, you know, on and off fixing that thing, and then I think I flew it once or twice here just to kind of got it sorted out, and then it went with Gavin Revis ORD. And the first time I flew it there, the stab on the right side broke, so I there was, it was mellow enough to top land at once, and I tried to do a fisherman's knot and relaunch it again from that gap where the hangar is launched down below.
We were launching off the peak above the hangar gap, old launch. Um, I landed at once there and everything, the landing went right. We launched again and it broke again right away. And typically I'm launching really early, right when it's starting to crack off; I'm usually the first one off. And the second time I came in to land and it was just like, "No, you're not going to land here." I was just like, slalom, you know, like 30 miles an hour going to that broken shale stuff. It's like, "No, I'm not, not going to land this up here and fix it again." So I went out to the landing zone and, uh, got there pretty high because it had cracked off, and I just get to the landing zone and I'm just kind of relaxed, and there's a big thermal, so I climb in it, and I look over, and I'm level with the top of the gaggle of a launch.
So it's like, all right, fuck it. There's a road that heads dead north and goes to a liquor store, so I went there, and I'm still at eight, nine grand. And every time I push on the bar, the tip's just like, just making this big flopping sound, and the whole stab, lines trailing in the breeze. And uh, so I get to the north end of of the Hesperia area, and I'm stupid high, and I stop over this liquor store because Linda knew where that was. She had driven for us before, and I, I climbed out there before, and so I climbed out there, and then I went to that big mine where the windmills are north of the Victorville airport, and I got kind of low there, but it I'd circled out and went back up like 10 grand there.
Then I was looking at Slash X. I was thinking maybe I'll land at Slash X. And I got there and now it's like booming. I wasn't even thinking about going down anywhere near Slash X. So I just continued on to the north side of Barstow. And north end of Barstow right there where the town is here. And then the Daggett Marine Base is there. And the road goes off to Calico. And there's 30 miles of nothing on the 15. So I augured down there, I'm just like, "No, I ain't going farther than this." So I just spiraled down there and landed, and it was dead. It was like swirling, there's nothing, there's no wind. There's a 10 foot by 50 foot American flag that's like glued to the pole. When I came in and land, it's 100 degrees, just hot, high density altitude, you know?
I come in and land, the Enzo, pack it up, go get ice cream sandwich at the Arco station. The guy was really kind to me, let me use their phone, and I called the retrieve driver and got Linda on her way, and sat down in the shade of this abandoned restaurant to eat my ice cream sandwich. It was 20 minutes later that that flag moved, so I got there 20 minutes ahead of the west release in that glider without ever using the bar more than about a third and Then, and with the west release came Phil Weffinger and a couple the other guys. I'm sitting there, and here they come, you know? The flag just cycles up once, and you know, and then then kind of stays lightly ruffling out of the west 20 minutes after I hit the ground in that glider.
So that to me is astounding, you know? I'm I'm at the top on that thing and 20 minutes ahead of the west of these at trim, it's just crazy there. I want to fly one of these gliders against—I have some late 80s high performance hang gliders, so I'd like to get somebody get you guys and go get one of my old king posted hang gliders and go do some racing.
I'll see what
That would be like, I want to take the GSX too. I have the GSX here. I want to take that and glide that against a Mojo, because I think a Mojo will smoke the GSX. And not only that, the Mojo will basically, basically the worst possible malfunction you can basically go to sleep and the thing will reopen and turn less than 90 degrees. So that, that to me is really astounding, you know? When you can have two gliders that look pretty close to the same, I mean the GSX is big, wide open holes, kind of low aspect, chunky looking thing next to a Mojo, where the Mojo will save your ass, the GSX just wants to kill you.
So I remember first flying with you because we had all known of you, but I don't think I really got to fly with you until I started hanging out with you a bit at Elsinore back in the day. And you had this t-shirt, this black t-shirt, uh, I remember, and it, it just was a black t-shirt with these white letters and it said, "If you die, we split your gear." And you'd just be setting up your shit on launch, uh, while wearing that shirt, and I was like, "Whoa, that's really just saying what no one wants to admit."
and because there was a mentality that went with that because it was a totally true statement statement, but there was, you know, I felt with you, there was a, there was a seriousness to go and flying and an acknowledgement of what could happen whenever you do go flying. And, you know, that shirt was, was basically putting it out there in the open. If you're going to pull the shit out of the bag it's on and so on if you don't mind talking about your mental approach to flying
Well, you know, my mental approach is my
attitude that's evolved from my history in the business, and you know, I say business because I never really was in the sport. You know, I've always been in the business. I went right from my first year on the raven to working at Wills Wing for seven years, and I went through a burnout phase and got to experience witnessing death firsthand at 1985, um, at Chelan on the way up to Grouse. I was riding with Kelz and we went off to the the Chelan airport on after a flying day or on a, on a non-flying day and started playing around with the Duncan brothers had come out with the first prototype airborne trikes.
And they were nice, big, heavy, powerful trikes. And we all tried aerotonic. I tried aerotonic. We had no idea what we were doing. We had four loops of 505 leech line, 500 pound leech line in four loops as a weak link, and it was like me and Ken Brown, a handful of other guys, were just going, "That looks about right, you know?" And off I go, and I was like, third or fourth, you know? Dewey was there, a bunch of the top pilots were there, so I got a tow, and then Chris Bulger got a tow, and Pendry was flying the trike, and they were out near the edge of... from the airport, between the edge and the river, there's like groves, and then the edge and the river, and they were out over that edge and hit something late in the day.
It was like way late in the day, and I just remember watching Pendry kind of lock out like this, and then right, just instantly, it just went like that, and then he popped off and the trike went kabump kabump like that, and I'm sitting there with me and Crazy Wayne were standing in there about halfway through a 16 ounce can of Budweiser, and I watched this happen, and I looked over at Wayne, and everybody just, boom, gone from the landing zone. And I mean, the trike hadn't even hit the ground yet, and we were standing there with our thumbs in our asses and beer in our hand, and everybody's gone going after the wreck, so I just thought, "I'll stay here." And and what had happened is, as soon as the trike tumbled, Chris got spit out about 1500 AGL
and felt his death.
So that's one of those little things that goes in the bank. And then
paragliding. Paragliding starts with Matsuo in the hospital for six months. And that shit shows up in my desk in Elsinore. So right away, we know these things are dangerous. We know these things will put you in the hospital. And then the early years in paragliding was like the early years in hang glider killing 30 40 people a year, and you know, the gliders were dangerous back then. You know, I crashed the racer head flagstaff, broke my ankle, and broke my back, and early 92, so yeah, I mean, I was lucky that I walked away. I didn't walk away, and I'm lucky I was able to walk after that because people we know, you know, Huey, better pilots than me had it.
So, yeah, it's a discussion I had just recently with Linda and Dusty. Dusty Rhodes is a guy here where I was doing demo days in 2001 when I went to work at Wills Wing to run their paragliding department, so in swing and airwave. Dusty had demoed a sport, the airwave sport. It was a high b earlier in the day, but he wanted to fly the magic, and Rob McKenzie said something to him that kind of warned him about it, but he's like, "No, it'll be okay, I'll just fly it late." Well, 5:30 in August day isn't exactly late, and he got a couple hundred over, took a big hit, went around twice, and splatted, hurt himself really bad.
And then, you know, Linda's hurt herself really bad and had some bad crashes and hang gliding, and I just thought about—I think about it all the time—that here We are on the margins of more than nine million people, and the 10th largest financial power in the world is right there, and we're on the edge of it. And me, you, Linda, how many people out of that would take a hit like that and come back? It's like me, you, him, Linda. And that's how many out of nine people? That... that brings me to tears when I think about who we are and what we've done to get here. And it's like, I don't want to see my friends hurt.
And if I have to wear a T-shirt that's sort of not politically correct, then, yeah, then it's worth it. If I have to appear to be a monster to some people and frighten them away, it's worth it because I'd rather them be afraid of me than have to pick them up off the ground. and sell their gear, you know, fix their wreck and stuff. I just, you know, how do you address that? How do I look at myself as the guy that provides the gear to someone that gets hurt? You know, if I could go back in time and avoid that, I would, but you can't. There's no going back. So what do I do going forward? I just, I make no illusions that what we're doing, suspending ourselves under a puffy bag of mostly air under string is extremely dangerous.
And you can make it safe, but you have to work hard to make it safe. There's a whole bunch of work and wisdom that has to go into being safe. And you're never going to be safe flying a paraglider in a midday convection. I don't care what you say. You know, I watched a video of Ganesho coming into land at Chelan, you know, where his glider does the snake 30 feet off the ground. You know, I've had that happen. I watched friends here get hurt on mojos and that the cardinal sin of letting the thing turn. I watched a guy here coming in, doing S turns behind the candy cane there. And the thing takes a 50 percent collapse, which, you know, is on a mojo. You should be able to keep it straight. But he didn't.
You know, it turned 90 and pitched down and broke and feed. Just that aviation like the sea is incredibly unforgiving of those small mistakes. And yeah, how if I can wear a t-shirt that impresses people of the reality what we're doing, that's cheap. That's free, you know, it doesn't cost anyone anything. It's
An amazing group of people; it's a rare group of people that do this, and it's really amazing to see what you guys have been doing, because I never thought paragliding would go that far. You know, the FR that I had, it was Buck Rogers science fiction world compared to the Gen Air and the Randa News 13 cell. It's just astounding. The R12, it's like, oh my god, if you had pulled an R12 out in 1991, what would people thought? I've thought about that. It's just like, what would it have been like to pull one of these out of the bag? You know, the collective conscious back then would have been unable to deal with the handling to start with. Yeah, probably. But still, you know, as you're zooming around on these things now, you're just like, yeah, these things go pretty darn good, and they don't collapse, and they're relatively predictable.
But as a conversation that I had with Robbie after I bought the R10, I just thought, well, this is a fascinating circular paradigm shift we've just experienced here where where in 1992, they gave me the GSX, who was known unrecoverable from more than about 60-70 % collapse. They put five Korean test pilots in the drink before they thought, let's give it to Mitch. He'll race it in the 92 Nationals.
So I called Rob and I emailed back and forth with Rob a little bit after he got the R10-2. I said, "This is, this is a fascinating moment in history where we're now flying gliders that are known unrecoverable from big events like the 92 GSX was known unrecoverable from big collapse events." And his response was, "I love my R12, I love it. Just as long as I'm high, it's the greatest glider ever." So...
It's like he's not disagreeing with me, you know? And then, you know, your story too, we talked about how I got the R12 where at VIA, and what was it? 2014. There was like 14 reserve deployments, and that was it. That's too many. We got to have a CCC glass, no more open class glider. So next year, 2015, 2016, with CCC gliders, there's 16 reserve deployments. Yeah, yeah, I think the transition was like 2010, 2011. And then, and to me, the gliders weren't the problem, you know? So you're not gonna regulate the problem them away, you know?
Because risk homeostasis, and I think the famous example of that was, uh, it was, it was like Romanian taxi drivers. So there was a certain accident rate that they had, and, and so they gave them all anti-lock brakes, and for a short time, the accident rate went down. And then they just started to go faster. And so then the accident rate was the same again. Yeah. So so there's just a certain amount of risk that people are willing to accept. And so you can give them something safer. But if that's where the line that this particular group wants to go to, they'll just start, you know, they'll start taking more risk.
And so whatever safety you gave them will be negated by additional risk taking. And so you're not going to regulate it away as much as you might try. But at the same time, I'm really impressed with the advances in gliders that have happened, even with the additional requirements. requirements but at the same time you know for the last couple days we've been flying with mitch on you know the R12 I gave him, and I have not seen the top of that glider very much. I was gonna say maybe once I got
completely taken to school yesterday is what I felt like, yeah.
And and so, you know, so you know, that's the last of the open class gliders, or the last of the V8s a la Mad Max that I like to call it. Uh, it's still a magnificent glider, and I haven't seen you take one hit, and I know that glider's solid, but that's a good glider. And uh, and what we're flying now isn't any better than that is. And that glider is, uh, it's like 2011, 2012, and here it is, 2021 in 21. Mitch,
can I ask you a question about going back to the t-shirt? That was totally the opposite answer I was expecting. And what I mean is, in my eyes, you guys were a different caliber of taking on risk. The early generation, like you guys did, was just cowboy. And we're always he's talking about safety and risk and fear and on the show. And it's some, sometimes I just feel like, God, are we just being totally, you know, we need to take, we probably need to take on more because of what these guys showed us that they had to do. Is your, is your generation just
more willing to take on that kind of risk or was, was, was fear just as a big a deal as it is for us now?
I think it's an individual thing. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how to answer that question really. I mean, I was 10 years late into hang gliding development, right? When I started, when I bought my Raven, that glider was stability and low tested, right? And before that, all the principals at Wills Wing had gone through those ugly years of gliders that would left dive, I, you know, had structural problems. I mean, there were, you know, the 30 to 50 deaths per year in the United States was a testament to how little people knew about hang gliding in the early years. And I've had this conversation, too, an interesting conversation with a few different people. The most analogous conversation, I think, to answer your question would be a conversation that I had with Tammy Burkhardt.
She was a female hang glider pilot that actually won an aerobatic contest at Telluride when I wasn't there, and one of the years that I was there, I think it was '99, that last year somewhere in there, but I remember we were up on Gold Hill and late in the day for the evening run, and it was light and or like starting to catabatic down the front, so we decided to launch off the back into Bear Creek. And she had a pod harness with a sidemount reserve and went running down the back side of where that the flag is on, kind of the lower part of the Gold Hill launch area, and you got about like 75 feet of that super steep one-to-one, and then there's a road cut, so there's a notch, right?
And in no wind, and a hang glider, you come up on that really fast. So she runs off there, and on the way down, the reserve catches on one of the rear wires, so she has to kind of let go with one hand at full run with a hang glider approaching that road cut, and kind of mushes the glider over the road cut, and then unhooks the wire from the reserve container and flies away, and perceives that like, "shit," herself for like four years; like, it really bothered her. And and then another few years later, when I was trying to find Axon, Mark Axon, to to do an interview with you, um, I I talked to her because she'd been, um, she'd been going out or living with Axon when Axon's been in Santa Barbara before he went to go take care of his mom in Albuquerque.
And when I contacted her to find Mark, she just goes, "Hey man," she tells me this story about that and how it really fucked with her head for a long time. And I thought about that for a few seconds and I realized that that kind of shit happens to me all the time. I just deal with it, you know? Like I've—I've hucked off test production test flights with Wills Wing and had stuff like that happen, like the front pin comes out of my reserve, I gotta push the reserve back in and fly down with one hand on the reserve, or—and it's just all through my career there's been a million different things where those little life and death things have happened and you just deal with it. Yeah, they're—they're maybe like a core group of French lunatics who are willing to jump into that level of unknown and just deal with it, you know?
And that's one Of the things that I think is really different now about what's happening with paragliding is that there's this really, there's a bigger separation between, um, getting the glider and going flying in hang gliding than there is in paragliding. You can just get the glider and go flying, and so you don't get like 20 years of lore and history in the, the extended training period and stuff. You're just like, you're in the air, you bought your gear, it's, it still smells new, and you're flying. You know, a couple hours at ground handling, you're doing a sled ride off the hill late in the day, and so, you know, how can someone mentally prepare themselves for the really big chaos that happens in midday convective lift?
There's, there's such a huge gap between the, the early years of any kind of flying in convective air and the reality of, of midday in August. The, the danger is so orders of magnitude different. You can train for it by flying all the time, but you can never train for the chaos when it happens like that flight with, with JC off of Mazurka with Rick Masters. I was flying the Axis, I've been production test flying for several years. I come into land and I'm slowing down and trying to hit this little salt pan. It's about this big, like that, and I'm just about to flare like that, and the glider goes up 10 or 15 feet and turns 90 degrees, and it just spits me out and I'm going that way and I'm
Like with a Paragon, like that video of Ganesha landing it at the Chelan Lakeside Park, it's like you can't train for that. You can train for it by doing maneuvers and everything like that, but you can't train for a wad at 25, 30 feet AGL. It's like, no, you have to to have confidence and the ability and the training to deal with that stuff. And if you're not, if you don't have that, then I think you're operating inside a delusional world where sooner or later, the illusion of safety is going to be shattered. Either that, or you'll go your whole career and be lucky. You know, um, I've been unlucky. I've slammed in in 92, you know, Launching the racer off of Miriam Crater.
I managed to do two meets in the Owens and never had an accident. Both of those meets in 91-92. On Thursday, as I'm driving up 395, there's a helicopter pulling a body off a gunner launch both times. I'm not good at launching. And that was Patrick Segru took a frontal right off a launch in 91. one and forget somebody else, you know, took a big wad right off the launch in 92. And both years, there were really bad accidents there, but somehow I survived, you know, I did a 3,500 foot, nearly 3,000 foot plunge right next to Gunter in 92 on, on the GSX. I was at 11.5, Just crossing and over the middle of the canyon south of Gunner, way behind the lead gaggle, and, uh, the thing wadded…
just— And I looked up just in time to see about five cells of the tip twist over my head, and then the thing goes back and I fall, and then it pitches forward, and I was doing this back-spinning fall with the risers-twisted thing for 2,500 feet, going right down the middle of the canyon, the south of Gunner, and I got untwisted and got the thing out, level with launch, and then flew out the canyon, and you know, crap myself and clean my shorts out. Marcus Meyer, the Smith brothers were landing on the spine right next to the south of Gunner to fetch a badly injured Marcus Meyer, one of the top German pilots. You know, it's like, yeah,
it's... I got exposed to so much death and injury and mayhem in the early years. There's no way I can escape it or remove it from my collective consciousness and paragliding. And I see what's going on here now with the recreational crew, where the van load of 13 people goes up at three o'clock in the afternoon with mojos, and they all survive year after year after year. It's, it's amazing, but it's a testament to, you know, Russ and and the guys at at Ozone, and all the guys that are involved in designing gliders, that they've designed something to fit at that market that saves people's lives, and that the crew here, you know, Marcello and Noak and all the guys that are training here have a good
Enough understanding of of what low time pilots can do on a glider like the Mojo on high a low b, you know, a level gliders to where they're pulling out off, and that's that wasn't my history, you know, the early gliders that I grew up with, like we're not safe to fly midday, not even close. And now it's, this is a whole different world. You can fly a glider like the Mojo in midday and be relatively low skilled and survive way better than 99 of the time, and that's enough to keep a small handful of instructors going here. And so, you know, given all that, why do you still do it?
Because it's flying, it's a dream of flying. When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream of running off of the Newport Bay cliff and waking up in, in midair at the edge. Every day I fly, and every day I get a good climb, I'm ecstatic, fucking giddy, and laughing. I'm like, when I was circling around with you—no, it wasn't you, it was circling around with Dad and Gavin over the arrowhead. And that's just, to me, that's just spectacular when I'm with people like that and we're in lift and we struggle from below the terrain to way above the terrain. And you get that last 500 to a thousand feet where the lift tends to coalesce right before it hits the top of the inversion.
You know, It's just like that last little kick in the pants. It's like, yeah, you got it, you're in it, you know? We're topping out, and I just love that. I love getting up to the top of the inversion, looking over the top of the oreo cookie. It's like, yeah, this is as high as it goes, because they can see—I can see over the top into the clear air above the inversion. Just all those things are just, I think, what the human species should be living for, because paying a mortgage and working as an insurance broker is not what you're supposed to live for. Then I could come up with a whole list of things that everybody out there does that is not what you're supposed to live for. It's like they're living for the weekend so they can go ride their dirt bike or
relax and watch TV all weekend or something. But it's like I'm jumping off a mountain and going two miles up in the air with nothing but the energy of the Sun, a bag of nylon, and I'm not gonna trade that for anything, not ever. So Sumo is here, he's like 78, he's still doing it. He's doing this air hog thing. It's like every time he comes out and flies, like one of the last ones to land and stuff like that, and that's what I want to be doing on a xeno in about 10 years, something like that. Because what else am I gonna do? Sit here, watch TV, play video games? That's not living.
It's like, no, you have to get to a lot of hang gliding history before we could get, you know, to the philosophy of the man and so, you know, because not everybody Everybody can put it like Mitch can put it when it comes to, I would say, mental toughness and sort of the attitude to bring to flying, considering what's at stake. And there's a lot at stake, obviously, when you're in the when you're in the learning phase and there's a host of unknowns, you know, you don't know what you don't know. So to the outside, it can appear to be way more reckless or cavalier than it is, just because hindsight's always 20-20.
And what I learned from Mitch in the early days is that every time that thing comes out of the bag, it can kill you. And if you're not approaching the sport just like that, you're not approaching the sport the right way. And being that the burn hand teaches best, you often have to learn that lesson the hard way. And and Mitch had already learned it the hard way before before I did, but I would say hanging out with him was sort of, uh, you know, it was, it was a wake-up call, sort of reality check. And I had already had a lot of experience as a climber, but flying was new.
And it turns out, at least back in the day with flying, it was even more important to come with the right attitude than the state climbing was in at the time, which was far more mature. And I totally agree that maybe that attitude is a bit lost now that the sport has matured and the gliders have improved improve quite a bit, but you know, the risk is still there, uh, just because we're doing more than we ever have before, which means that, you know, as the gear became more capable, you know, we pushed the fucking boat out a little further. So the attitude and the approach has to be the same. And then we've all gotten, I
would say our tests of fire. I've only broken my neck once due of parabolic, but nothing else gives you peace. And so this, you know it, you can in life, you may never find peace; you may never find something that gives you peace. And when you find something that gives you peace, it's the whole point of living. And if there's risk associated with it, so be it, because it's too special to let go, and you're not going to find peace again if you let it go. And then if that is what you lose, then what's the point of living?
Mitch, that was special. Phil, thank you. What a treat, man. Thank you. Thank you both.
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