145. Standing on the shoulders of giants - Mitchell McAleer

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's 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, it was the first time SAV for everybody.

So, we kind of got to see how he takes them through the course. And it was really terrific. High marks for that whole team and very impressed with how they run things. And actually, I was so impressed that I got Dylan on the show afterwards. He spent a bunch of years out in Nepal. He's a super talented acro pilot and former competition pilot. And so, you'll hear him on an upcoming show here. But thanks to that whole crew and highly recommended. It's pretty hard for us to get good over-the-water SAV 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 nice. 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. CloudBaseMam.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 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. So, that stuff. This show, man. I just went through and listened to it again to give Miles the edit notes with Mitch McLeer. It's 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. He got on an airplane and flew out to California from his home in Salt Lake and ran this interview. You're not going to hear me much in this one. But we went up to Mitch's sewing cave after a day of really good flying where I basically never saw the top of Mitch's glider. He flies the R-12 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 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 in the business of flying than in the comp flying scene or just being a pilot. He worked for years at Wills Wing. Living out of his car in UP. Back when they had. The comment 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. It mean 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 spill it. Also spilled a lot of blood. And I've 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. And 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 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. Bill was flying with Mitch a bunch of years ago out in Elsinore. And Mitch had the 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 him that, hey, this is important. Focus, get get here, be here today, fly this glider and fly it safely. And so here's a little there'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 margin. We're. We're on the edge of it. And I'm talking about the millions 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, 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. Not 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 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. You know, fix their their. I don't want to be a wreck and stuff. I just. How do you address that?

How do I look at myself as the guy that provides the gear to someone that gets hurt? 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? 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. 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. I watched a video of Ganeshio coming into land at Chelan where his glider does the snake 30 feet off the ground.

I've had that happen. I've watched friends here get hurt on mojos. 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 % collapse, which on a mojo, you should be able to keep it straight, but he didn't. 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. It doesn't cost anyone anything.

Hope you enjoyed that. And I hope you enjoy the show with Bill Belcourt and Mitch Mackler.

Mitch, I've heard the stories about your first hang glider flight, but you tell me, what was your first flight in a hang?

The first flight was lying 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, um, suicide Hill at Corona. It's right at the 1591 junction right there. Face is right into the onshores. And I hooked off of that and went straight into a 30 feet. And I was like, Oh, my God, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. And I was like, Oh, my God, I'm going to die. And I was like, Oh, my God, I'm going to die. It was like 1500 over. And then like typical is 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 ground about 30 feet. And I just woke up, 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 fucking sky from about 15 or 20 feet, woke up in the clover flight. Number one, number one flight. Number two is after I put down tubes on the glider and then went and showed Eric 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 and kind of went like this and like this and landed it, you know, on my belly. And, and he was 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 and a brand new glider and went flying all summer. So what, you know, what attracted you to flying? What attracted you to flying? What attracted you to flying? What attracted you to the sport?

That's the, the bigger story. I grew up in Newport and the 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. Speaker 2 everything from bamboo and plastic to Volmer Jensen's VJ 10, it was a, uh, 15 to 20 to one 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 a Volmer Jensen in this thing.

It's like 20 to one, you know, stand up armpit, hand cage control stick thing, along with guys doing bamboo and plastic off the East Bay of Newport. Speaker 2 that me and my cousin, we're coming home from church with our parents. They would drive the back bay road and look at the hang gliders and shit. And I remember being up on launch and find this little balsa with glider 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. It would just go out and start soaring these big circles and climb out two or 300 feet over the bluff and disappear. Speaker 2 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 sixties, late sixties. 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 won. Speaker 2 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 it turns out it was this custom painted glider. It had like this MC Escher geodesic sphere thing on it. So it was this total custom painting, you know, and my cousin 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.

Speaker 2 eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually and watched him fly that. And he sorted around for a while and landed at the beach. And we talked about it. It's like, wow, look at that. Look, Phoenix 6D. He's like, wow, I want to get one of those. And that was the first time I saw the soaring thing. I wasn't flying yet. I was riding dirt bikes. I'd broken my elbow skateboarding up at the Concrete Wave in Ventura after it was closed.

And I went off. I pushed off from the coping in one of the deep pools and landed flat on my back on the flat with my arms back like that and broke the corner of my elbow off. So my cousin asked me to drive for him one day at Elsinore after that Torrey run. And he had just gotten his new glider. He'd just gotten a Trampinol Seawings Sentra 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 slapping into the ground so hard and we'll get hurt. That was kind of a decision I made. I was watching my cousin fly around Santa Ana at Elsinore with a broken arm.

I got that boat job. I got off the boat with $11,000 and bought a hang glider. I bought a brand new kit from Eric Fair right across the street from Millswood. Went and worked another, flew all summer that summer, 79. Went back to work on the boat. October through April. 79, 80. And the boat and me went separate ways. I was drinking and doing drugs and 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. And when I went to go buy a shipping tube to send the Raven to Texas to the guy that bought it, I walked into Wills Wing.

And they didn't have shipping. They didn't have shipping. They were waiting for a truck. So they asked me if I wanted to wait. I said, sure, I'll wait a couple hours. I noticed there was this Japanese guy, sketchy looking Japanese dude. He was like sick and kind of scrawny and weird looking. He was filling out a job application in the front office along with some other guys, 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 to talking. I got to talking to somebody, Pearson or Kells or someone.

And 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 Kells. And the other part about doing aerobatics was that, the weekend scene at Elsinore was dominated by the UP factory. And UP at that time, 80-81, 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 an exposed cross. 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 bigger, heavier everything with the enclosed crossbar. And I just remember going out to the E one day with my Raven. It's light wind and the Raven's tail heavy and really slow. I'm like, fuck this. I can't launch in no wind at the E with 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 wingovers, like falling leaf, you know, 2,000 feet.

Just wingovers 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 yeah, I just had that moment watching that aerobatic routine. And then one day I was out going out to hidden Valley because I was, you know, I was in the!!

I was in the! I was in the! I was in the!

I was in the! We were in the hood in front 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 92-way wing overs. We'd 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 and just back and forth like that. Disappearing and appearing like that and doing these hammerhead and wing overs back and forth in front of launch. So that was my environment. That was what I saw all the time around me. We were in the hood and in front of these 92-way wing overs and kind of kind of kind of flying this guy's doing aerobatics and there 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 moyes 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 to be selected for the a team but they were good enough to to win the days 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 in the b team and they were good enough to be selected for the a team 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 and so when'd 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 we had a couple of years ago and i was living in costa mesa and i was living in fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation

fermentation fermentation 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 uh 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 tell me 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 up the sensor uh doing my my first reserve deployment on the ESS 25

um and then I just started flying employee gliders they had a 180 duck that they put some prototype laminate scrim on the trailing edge and that was the Wills Wing employee glider so I started flying that thing all the time and Kells you know continued to coach me I was continuing to do uh production test flight so production test flying was kind of like aerobatic training school you know I'd go through the production test flight on the glider make sure it flies straight flies trim and the sails clean and everything and then do a couple of wing overs and Kells watched me and I'd land and we'd talk about what I was doing on the way back up the hill so it's just three to six flights a day of coaching and stuff like that and then whenever I would go out and fly with the Wills Wing guys and do aerobatics Kells would watch me and coach me and help me and plus he gave me the tools to learn how to progress in the beginning too the four things um heading and and pilot input in the dive um heading pilot input and glider attitude at key level at the initiation of the maneuver heading pilot input and attitude of the glider at the apex of the maneuver right and then every same thing at the X of the maneuver so most people at the time you know when you think about doing hang 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 Kells and and Dan Reckonelly and the other guys are doing is they're doing a lot of things that were involved in aerobatics prior to the like in 79 80 81 the early Telluride years when they started doing their bad 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 continuity or stops or up 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 and land and

off to tell your ride and and then the first year eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually 1984 went there with a highly modified 180 duck 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 willsman glider jamie lasser had loaned me his uh his hp2

and the hp and hp2 was a major parish time shift the duck had a keel pocket it was a foot tall keel pocket so the the lever the control bar is like a foot longer than 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 fast that it was so much faster than the the the the the the the the the the the the the the 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 it'd be really easy to do loops in the winning in the um the hb170 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 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 that and Ron went out and did four perfect loops in this 185 Comet in front of Tom Tatum's camera at Telluride in 82 and I saw that and Eric Raymond was doing loops in the Comets and rigid wings he was flying the Sunseed

it was this trippy rigid wing thing that had a dihedral root and anhedral 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 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 aileron kind of things the fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation Sanhedrin tips had control surfaces on them. And I think what he did is he just slowed the thing down and slammed the rudders down. And the thing would pitch over forward. Just go a couple of times 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 meet. You get one extra half point for that versatility that no one else can do and win the meet. But the glider folded up. It went around once or twice and then started rolling. Rolling. And after it went around once or twice and rolled, it just went. Wings clapped together and broke. And he went spiraling down sandwiching the wreckage and bounced off a steep face of the canyon at Marshall somewhere. And survived without a reserve. So when did you first compete internationally?

88. That was 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. Yusuke, that's a whole interesting story. Yusuke was young, fairly wealthy Japanese guy. He was a 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 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 in west side of the valley. And the Cleveland range, probably 100 degrees. He was completely lost and disoriented. And had no idea how to get out. And was in overhead Manzanita and Sugarbush and that kind of stuff. So he basically sat himself down to die. To die a good samurai death in the wilderness after an epic flight. And George Fullman was this guy.

He was a gregarious sociopath kind of guy. Who had watched Yusuke go up and back and land in the bushes. And lived there and flew there all the time. And he went and got him. So Yusuke is sitting down there. Saying his prayers and getting ready to die of exposure. And here comes George Fullman. Helps him break the glider down and hump it back out to take off. So Yusuke set Fullman up with UP Sports at the Y. Just on the north side of Dana Point. Million dollar piece of retail property. And he was a real man. And Yusuke and UP Japan set Fullman up there with a sail boarding shop. For 30 years. From the mid 70's through probably the early 90's I think.

Before the whole thing kind of folded up and disappeared. And it's something else now. But for all those years as you were driving south. Along the coast highway. And the north end of Dana Point. There's a UP Sports shop. And that's how that came about. George Fullman saved Yusuke's life. And he's still alive. So 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 UP and 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.

There was a UP Sports bar in Tokyo. And 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. So he had the social scene worked out in Japan really well. And they had a big market in Japan. For teaching and kite boarding. And hang gliding. And when Brock got into trouble in the late 70s. Yusuke came over and gave him 15 grand. And got him back in business. And he hired Roy Haggard. Haggard. The guy who was the head of the company. And he hired Roy Haggard. And he 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. It was a single surface. A deflector and an oil glider. And he had put it together wrong. And crashed it. And either got paralyzed or dead. So there was a civil suit. And mal-investment in the aero ultralight. And that was it. In late 1983, 1984. UP. The once biggest hang glider manufacturer in the world. Folded up. And stuffed in a storage unit. In Temecula. And Brock was done. And I was working at Wills Wing. I had been working at Wills Wing in the loft since late 1979. And watched that all happen. And.

All the world class pilots that were UP pilots by 1985. Were all Wills Wing pilots. And then. Yoichi shows up. With that. UP axis that he and Larry had built in Japan. And what had happened. 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.

Yoichi 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. That's a cool glider. You know. It's like can I fly it? He said yeah. And he knew who I was. So he said can I put a camera on your glider? I said sure. 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 $2500 - $5000 prize. Hang gliding. Short course competition in Japan. It had been going on for a while. I'd read about it. Thought it would be cool. To go race in the Yamaha Sky Grand Prix. So I extorted a camera mount.

And I put the clips on that axis. For a trip to Japan. And then went back to work at Wills. Didn't think anything about it. I was working in the loft at Wills at the time.

And 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 even 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 was like. I'm going 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 was pretty interesting. Dumbass gringo in Japan. I managed to get to the hotel. That 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. A Japanese fishing village. A little island. And a little crescent bay. And a bitchin' little beach. And bitchin' little houses. And a Japanese fishing village. And about 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 shiny. Brand new axis. All mylar. Top and bottom laminate cloth.

Bright fluorescent pink UP inlay on the bottom. And I had my harness with me. And I pulled my harness out. And hooked into the thing. And huck off the ramp. And just boated right up to about 1,500 over. And did three or four loops. Into the wind. Right over the launch ramp. And boated right up to about almost 2,000 over. It was getting better. So I pushed out in front about a half a mile. And then started doing loops 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 I remember that moment.

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. Crash into the top of the trees. And uh. It was gentle. It was like.

Better than a stand up landing. You know. Little jungle. Like 15, 20 foot high trees. 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're not going to get the gliders. We'll handle that.

They eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually 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 sale 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 30 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 in 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 that you guys are making sales and i offered it said you guys want to start building up sales again

let's talk about it and so i went home and i well 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 that 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 wheelswing 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 to build all those gliders and certify them and everything and

eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually

eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually 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 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 hardlined 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 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 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 went, started pumping out gliders.

So they rented a 2,500 square foot brand new tilt up right at the 74 and 15 freeway junction. 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, it was a very good vehicle. It was a very good vehicle. It was a very good 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. Wills Wing 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 that kind of thing. But Mark had put electronic load cells in there that fed into. A little palm top Toshiba computer running a basic program that he had written himself. And it would do like 10 readings per second for lift, lift and drag and pitch force from the base tube.

But that was driving the truck at the speeds, holding on to 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.

So I learned about that stuff. I learned to to fix the code when it malfunctioned. You know, JC and I were out testing all the time. We did the axis 15, the axis 13. I started on an intermediate glider, the comment of regurgitation of the comment 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 and monkeying around on the top of the truck. Had all kinds of adventures.

And late after we had done the axis, I was doing the load testing on the Comet 3185 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. You. You've 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 1030 in the morning, airspeeds all over the place and you just have to stop. So I was there all day with the comment 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 bend straight down. It's an 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, man, fucking take out the. Four by four wiped out the whole right side of the glider leading edge and everything.

Little adventures like that. But yeah, low testing was really fun. I mean, JC 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. And it's just really. It's awesome to work with. And we did stuff that nobody had really done. We did high speed pitch tests, which was really useful because of what I was doing at the time, doing aerobatics and the glider. 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. The bottom surface. Kind of pushes down and back. The top surface lifts up and tries to rotate forward around the sail and the pitch readings would just go all over the place and get as soon as the bottom surface kind of pooches down and the pitch force would go away. And that 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. The that's the nut to crack is how to get it. To come back nose up. And that was 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. Now, we're at the reflex bridles. Which we're going to talk about in a minute. But this is a really good example of how to get the So that was, we were trying to find that line with the vehicle tests 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 at 60 miles an hour. Holding onto 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 % 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 wheelswing guys, the guys at Icaro. You know, there's a small handful of people that have. That have done that level of testing. Bernt Schmidler, the DHV guy there. The truck there, but yeah, those kinds of things are invaluable. It's, it's warped my perspective. You know, when I talk to recreational people.

Can't remember the name, make and model of their glider or what size it is. Or anything like that. Yeah. That's not my planet. Yeah. And so how was the scene different in Europe? And so that was the scene here. You went over and did some international aerobatic competitions in Europe and you know how's the scene different? What were those like? Europe was 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 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 a European made Glidezilla over there and it wasn't going well. They went and sent 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 and extremely robust. And we knew it. And it was, they wanted that reputation. So we just replaced the UP Europe Glidezilla with the Axis. And I went over there and competed in that Rock Bruin that had the Elinks.

It was 88 over the bay there in Rock Bruin, 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, I went to another meet that was in the Alpago Valley in Switzerland. It was a real small meet and it was kind of Enrico Egli and Heinz Zwissig were Swinz pilots at the time and 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 a beautiful place in Switzerland. 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. One of the guys was cool enough to translate for me where they were making fun of one of their friends. Had a Southern French accent. So it was just cool to listen to him talk and explain to me how they're making fun of their Southern French friends, Southern French drawl and stuff like that. And sitting in a farmhouse with these massive hand hewn timbers.

Just another one of those moments where the colors are richer and the place is just like magic when you've never been there before. Yeah, that was awesome. I was all part of the European experience with UP. I went to St. Hilaire and got a flight off the ramp at the top of St. 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.

Nothing to say about that. Just green grass. Just so alien to out here. Everything brown and rocks and cactus. Another one of those moments where the sky was bluer and the grass was greener. And then you won a hand 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. I won a World Aerobatic Championships. I won a World Aerobatic Championships. We were in the Grand Prix in 1985-86. I got third in 87 because I'd quit in Whirlswing and purposely just didn't give a shit. I was not hitting my loops on heading. Flying Jamie's Glider and then I won in 89-90 and I won three in a row after that.

And oh, I don't have it here. But there was a little trophy that we've been passing around. I think it was in 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 like three really nice natural terminated quartz crystals with a silver wire and a handmade silver comet hang glider attached to this wire just 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's spun on the wires and put it upside down and so it's like a hang glider doing a new thing and 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 took home in 86 brought it back in 87 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 said I'd won it three times in a row I'm keeping the trophy so they're like the president like the Schneider trophy if you win it three times in a row you get to keep it

fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation

fermentation fermentation

fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation

fermentation them to Japan and Matsuo Matsuo Itsushi Matsuo was the 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 a gen air which was uh well it put Matsuo in the hospital broke his back broke the 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 randonews 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 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 overgrown again and was reliving and I landed just short of it and kind of crashed into it like that and got a burnt stick like spoon right in my forehead and that little black dot right there for a couple years and had some ridiculous sketchy launches because we had no instruction no reserves nothing the real simple board and strap strap arrangement

one of the first times I think the first or second flight that I flew off Edwards I actually hooked into the adjusters things and had the pass-through buckles right and there was like the big webbing thing with three bar tacks and 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 the adjuster thing you know the pull tab on the on the two slot buckle and yeah 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 1,500 feet of nearly one-to-one and I remember the gliders up and a step off that edge a couple times before the thing starts flying away from the ridge and yeah we put Bostik on that randonous 13 cell off Edwards

and the way those things were trimmed, you had to pull like quarter brake on to get best glide.

So I told Boss Dick, it's like, yeah, you got to pull a little bit of brake on or you're not going to make the landing zone. And he takes off and he's fully hands up. So I go, brake. And he pulls a little brake on. I go, more brake. And he stalls the thing.

And then recovers. And this is all 20 feet away from Edwards. It's nasty. And yeah, that was, we had no idea. There was no, no beta, no instruction, no nothing back then. Yeah, it was 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 in the Owens in 92. Well, before that, when Greg Smith came on the scene, we hired Scott Grasset. And Grasset did an Aveco van tour. And handed out the Airman Vector, which is Gin's design. It was made at Dyke Yo, 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 Nationals up in the north side that year. And the powers that be at UP heard about him. I had never heard about him. I didn't know anything about him. I knew Scott. But somebody had suggested that Greg could do a lot better. And he did a great job. So they hired Greg. And I hooked up with Greg. And we got along really well. And he came up with Comet CX, which was a pretty well-evolved glider. Buker had won the Worlds on it in Europe that year. Andre Buker. Yeah. It was a semi-elliptical, pretty well-evolved past the other crap. The Randonneuse, the Gen Air. It was way evolved past that.

And Greg takes me up to Cebu. But I'm not sure. We were in Cuba to do my Maneuvers clinic. On the way up there, he's like, You hang glider pilot assholes. You throw your reserve every time anything goes wrong with your main. So you're not going to get a reserve. You're going to learn how to fix the main. So he throws me off at like 9 o 'clock in the morning. And then I go out and do a frontal and a full stall. And no reserve. And my full stall. It 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'd 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 trimmers on it, but I'm too retarded to, you know, to 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 Seville. So I go a thousand feet up and start going over the back and then start taking hits. So I started trying to go that way and try to start get out the Canyon to the left. And I didn't get very far. I'm at like a half a mile. Now I'm definitely way in the rotor. So it took a,

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. It 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 land on my ass and jumped up, survived my maneuvers clinic. How did it go? From there to being in the PWC in 92? Yeah. Greg went to Korea and worked with Jen and made the Katana and 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 an air cast splint on my ankle in 92, but 91 I just went there, couldn't launch. It was like total hack incompetent, let launch. And then Bob England had been training, you know, so he was really good, competent ground handling. And, uh, um, he was also Bob Ted Boyd.

He eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually can get to the next point and I remember I'm following Bob like Bob was really good he was he was way 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 just totally graceful we we off he goes because off towards towards Paiute and I'm like three or four attempts later I'm getting really pissed crashing my glider and the bushes below gunner and fun day get off and Bob's like the far side of Paiute 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 like long as I could keep the glider open and

yeah now it's when Greg Greg Greg broke the seat board over over Paiute and I was like I'm gonna get him I'm gonna get him I'm gonna get him I'm gonna get him Paiute that one day yeah I was up at 11 behind Paiute and Greg was kind of right over Paiute and we started out about like nine or ten or so and I was in We kind of choppy climb not really doing good and we were on radio and we're supposed to be team flying and I look over and I see Greg like doing the f-16 Mach two you know like this just climbing in a 30-degree angle and I call him on the radio and 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 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 piute and as he comes in on piute 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 gliders wham 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 them again wham goes falls past slack line falls past it and the second time he fell past it he broke the seaboard and then he had this really cool very like some brand new prototype flymaster thing so immediately fell back underneath the thing like that the glider rocks back and he recorded something like well over 2 000 2200 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 is

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 uh and i remember smitty uh greg smith uh sending you to various places to sort of break the ice if you will uh between the uh hang gliding community and the paragliding community and the hang glider 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 fuston 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 animation they need

And Kelly was one of the guys that was training there and was working with Greenbaum at the shop. And he fell over and hit his head on a rock in front of the stables, which is right next to the left of the fort.

And that was it. That was all the ammunition they needed. And they banned Paraglider City dumps. But yeah, 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 taken us with axes up to Mazurka and thrown us off. And we had a cool bonding moment. That was a fun day. It wasn't a good flight. I don't think we got barely getting level with launch and barely getting level with the Inyos.

But right when we got there, we just sat there looking at the scene. It's just beautiful. Beautiful, huge meadow, little tiny cluster of towers right on the west side of the rim. And we're standing there, just kind of got out of the truck and just unloading the gliders. And an F-4 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 and disappeared off the east side of the Inyos. That's always, you know, that just blows me away. You know, anytime you see fighter aircraft like that. And out in the Owens, cab it a couple times at Horseshoe. You get F-16s come through the canyon, 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 AOI Comic Clones and Pod People. You can find it on YouTube now. But it just shows the classic during... And it was a world-class meet. 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. Another one over here a little bit as it rolled up the hill, another comet would like pick up out of the pile and spin around, crash back into the pile of gliders. That's all in that movie, in this original movie. But what happened in...

1991, when we introduced paragliders into the US 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 a warpath. He just hated on paragliders. Said they were dangerous and that 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 couldn't deny they're dangerous. 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 them off into only doing R &D and whatever, and then kind of taking them out of sales and running the whole show. So... They eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually 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 for 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 Wills Wing for 10 years at the time, and they didn't give me nothing. I never had a glider. It was always a shop glider. I got paid for my work, but they never paid me to fly. I had to pay my own expenses to comps. That's how Wills Wing is. They don't pay comp clients. They don't give away gliders to comp clients. Their business plan always has been one as well. And so I owed a huge debt.

I

owed a huge debt

of loyalty to Greg. I stuck with him through the Adele years.

That worked really well for him. He turned Adele into the biggest brand in the US. He was selling more than 300, 300, 500 gliders a year in the US. Yeah, we were all on the team. Yeah. And Chris, Robbie, Bridges, all those guys got their start with Greg. So I went up there when Greg was... Going insane. I went up there and worked 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. So there we go. That's fun. Yeah, it was amazing times.

It wasn't long after that, I just 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 just said, look, I really appreciate the money, but I don't feel like I'm earning it.

So I just stopped. I stopped taking their money. And I just went back. I went back to making glider bags and custom gear out of my garage and all that stuff. And then what got you into being meet director? That 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, the Smith brothers. There was Bouchard. Bouchard. Ken Beyer. There was a handful. Fred Lawley. There'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. We want something like the PWC. Xavier Murillo had done a good start on the PWC at the time. And the Nationals that Greg had won the year before, like in 1990, was a duration spotlighting contest. 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 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 down. I put my hand up and volunteered to run that meet. So I went home and drew up this cool cartoon. It was a.

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 meet announcement. Fifty 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 Xavier Murillo's system. Jennifer Toms put that system into an Excel spreadsheet and.

Off we went. I ran the meet. And the first year, Gosinski had been flying. This Excalibur. And. Had.

Had gone across the lake and then was on his way back when it was blowing down really hard and came in and the Lee of 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. I was flying a Katana. And. I was flying the Katana. I was flying the Katana. Of course, everybody's watching me. So I'm off first. And I climb out. And I go north. And get. 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. I got to the lake. fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation and March ARSA.

Little did I know, it blew out behind me and everybody's following me. So that cloud that I got that connected me to the cloud street that went all the way to Subova dissipated. So everybody was 45 minutes at least behind me and got stuck in that blue hole.

And when I got to the landing zone after getting retrieved from goal, there were two air traffic control officers there waiting for me because I was the main 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. It was a 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. The guy's following me. I told him and we stood on launch and I said, here, there's March Air Force Base.

Here's where the ARSA is. Know your airspace things. And they just flew right into the ARSA. Big column from 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 airport, go fly circles around the junk infesting his approach pattern and then fly back and get my information and send a couple of lieutenants to the Wilson Rail Z that afternoon. Yeah, that was, I had to, you know, I can't trust the little weasels. I had to run all the turnpoints south of them. I ran all the turnpoints down near Bundy Canyon so they couldn't get, you know, to the March ARSA anymore.

Yeah, the same year, a couple of 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. Yeah. And we're over Bundy Canyon, east of the freeway. And I look over and here comes a KC-10. It's 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. It's like every circle. It's like still pointed straight at me. You come around again and like Lee peels off, right? I'll do one more circle. Then I peel off. And it just 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 gaggle was just down Bundy Canyon Road a little ways.

You know, he just pointed right at me, went right by me about a hundred 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 Prentice 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 Prentice 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, the 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 full of SAS guys.

They came looking for you.

Yeah, there were those issues. And that's 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, you know, for flying through the meat. So I was, I let stuff like that slide. And Kaiser and a few of the other guys thought, no, that's not good. You can't do that. So they established the meat steward thing and started refining and, and making the rules a little more hard and fast. And considering. And I think that's what made it so consistent because that was, that was the early years. And I, 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 95 with Gluszczynski 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. They ran a good meet. You know, they had EMTs, you know, Zizek was there as a meat steward.

Robbie was there. Yeah. You were meat director and that put Chelan on the map. That was the first Chelan competition. And it put America on the map too, as a, as a place where there's a venue that's at least as good as Europe. I, you know, it's arguably Chelan is. Yeah. Richard Gauhan was there. That's what those stories. We've, we were telling them stories the other day. Bridges going around the outside of some thermal already ridiculous. I climb late and watches Robbie fly into the dirt and a prototype proton and, or no use. That was a prototype. Adele glider. Yeah. It had to be like a sector. Um, cause the energy I think was 95.

The sector was 96. So it had to be a proto sector. Either a proto sector or an energy. I think it was an energy. No, it was an energy because I was flying a rainbow and Jennifer Tom's 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 Golan and Sebastian for Quinn. Just blew me away. They were on a whole different level. Me for most people in the U S like 92, Sebastian came in fun, flying, practicing.

Um, 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 going to her 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. Well, yeah. But we're all thinking we're bad-ass making goal. And, uh, here comes a bunch of the skydiving guys, you know, we were laughing at them. They top out, they'd come right in 90 degrees to goal on the ridge top out at 15,000 and then fly out over the valley. And the guy's like five grand over the ground or a goal. And we're just laughing at him. You know, we have left three 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 at goal. He didn't run the course or anything, but he does a deep spiral to a tip drag, just 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. And these guys were so good. I'd heard that. Urs, 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. Cause he kind of got in a weak cycle and you 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 it 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 were just look like amateurs. Yeah, it was, it 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. Cause we had really good pot and couple of. Bad weather. Days. We went out to the buttermilks and did some bouldering stuff and smoking, you know, solid pot, really good California since the man they're the Europeans mix it with tobacco. So they, they had never smoked pot like that before. And they were having, they were all having religious experiences out of the buttermilk.

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 and sort of the mid to late nineties, uh, then they invited you out to do aerobatics at goal, uh, at the end of the day to entertain the crowd. Yeah. And there was one particular, uh, session that I was at where you basically gave us all a haircut at about 80.

Uh, drop 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 low loop where you buzzed the crowd from your perspective, because you've always had, uh, a different eye for what is possible, uh, in terms of aerobatics. Describe that for me from, from what it was like for you to set that off now, because it was, he had so much energy. He just, he, he just, uh, gives us all the haircut behind the snow fence. Cause 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.

Yeah. He's doing 80 miles an hour and he just like rockets at us, uh, and, um, climbing, you know, like mad. But from our perspective, he was just going to decapitate us all. God,

the sound must've been awesome.

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. Frigging does his. Does his base leg just lands in the field, you know? Cause he climbed out like, you know, 50 feet, you know, with all the energy. And it was like, oh, 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 Othar and Bridges were like, well, probably shouldn't have them 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, cause it's not just competitors out there. It's just, the town isn't quite ready for that. The 2000, the Villeneuve, that was, I think the last aerobatic meet you've gone to, isn't it? Yeah. Um. Yeah, Telluride ended in 03, or 99. That was the last aerobatic meet. And R.C. Dave and I had started training judges here and I'd done practice runs. And then we had the Crestline massacre and, uh, um, Sauterquist blew up a sidewire on his light speed. He was flying with race, spinning race wires and he knew one was damaged.

And then there's 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 awhile. 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 know, guys we knew. We talked to Greenhold and Greenhold said, yeah, he's been doing crappy wing overs for 20 years. He should be okay.

So we had me and Heine 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 was 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 fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation The more advanced pilots started coming up in the queue.

This guy, because he had a brand new talent, was about number five. Dino was behind him. Eric Clockboy was behind him. Then it was Chris, John, and me.

I couldn't see what happened. It was hazy enough to where I couldn't see what happened. My girlfriend, Doriandra, was in the landing zone. This guy from Santa Barbara goes up and does a couple, three crappy wing overs. He got about 130 degrees over the top, but he just sat there with the bar out. The guy would go to 130 degrees and then not pitch around. It would just kind of side slip. He did a couple of these really horrible 130 degree maneuvers that ended up in nearly 90 degree side slip like that until one of them stayed 90 degrees like that. It went from 130. 130 degree bang to 90 degrees knife edge like that for about five seconds. Then it tucked 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. He ended up sandwiched between the wings. Then the thing kind of tumbled like that and went like this with him on the outside.

All I saw was 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.

The next pilot was Sauterquist. Sauterquist 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. Side wire 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 free fall deployment.

They both died?

No, Sauterquist survived. The other guy died at the scene. But then I went to Villeneuve. I guess the two events are somewhat unrelated. I guess the two events are somewhat unrelated. But I took 154 Talon with the shorter wire, so Villeneuve, and did the twister thing that they all freaked out about. They loved seeing that. The announcer in the Guilherme Perrault's video thing is like, Oh la la la la, la twister! They're just freaking out. Typical, probably drunk announcer. But nobody had 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 do these amazing rollovers. I get 180 rollover right in front of them. The thing just snaps around. It looks really cool. So they love that. And I had never competed over water before. So on Saturday, I was like, I experimented with setting up over the water and landing on the raft. Landed on the raft Saturday and then crashed Sunday. But I'd done several other flights with the camera. Somewhere I got 35 millimeter film pointed straight up like this over the Lake Geneva. Looking to the east on that glider. And yeah, I'd done, I'd land in this, like, there's the raft and the little harbor.

And then there was this pile of riprap with about 100 feet of rope. And I landed 100 yards by 60 feet wide of flat ground right next to it. With a marsh and a 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 300 or 400 feet. And then moved where I pointed straight at the crowd. 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. And 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 would put my hand down and drag it down.

And I dragged my hand in the water at a buck 20. And 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 Gs like that, I 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, it just.

Everything came to a stop just instantly. 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, and 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 they dragged me over the edge of the boat. It was, it rung my bell pretty good. But 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 Cirrus had come over. So I'd been wearing dark glasses. And on the way out, I took them off and put them 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. I literally had thought that I'll drag my hand in the water at 100 miles an hour..

Missed it 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. 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. Unchain 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. You know, I would love to do. I wish they were dirtbag pilots like I was back then.

But there aren't. 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 Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. And, you know, what I really love about the sport and what I love being a part of now is my Andy Hediger story at the peak of my power. up his launch and goes careening off to the side and slams into me hooked into my racer in a rosette

and i grab him and stabilize him and he gets his glider sorted out and then proceeds to get plucked from the top launch at verbiates you know what that's like steve is windy he's just he just gets ripped off the ground with the leading edge of my racer hooked over his vario so i'm 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 and 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 and 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 lone bra 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 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 i've got 10 30 hours on you know i'm 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 and that's where i was and 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 that was those were some tough years you know i don't would i change any of that i would have been a little bit more of a 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 sure 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 bag 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 like 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 i'm sure there are people like like more Chrigel moore and you know these guys that are somehow capable of doing everything right and surviving long term and they've they've 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 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 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 um 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 was this wild scene like something out of a movie where the kids just ah the screaming kids come down the steps ah they're out the door past me like that you know and then there's like one or two little kids standing there and i'm a gringo that doesn't speak much you know french or german

and i just this 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 and 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 retriever 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 because yes english is the language of the world you know it's from this little grade school kid you know little things like that i would repeat that you know or

any number of things i don't know i the crappy flight that i had at saint hilaire i landed on that bench and then drove down with the guy that was one of the heidi bloomhuber'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 and i'm 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 and 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 where i can close my eyes and

eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually

eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually eventually 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. Usually by the last test flight, it's booming, you know, and I can't get down. So a couple of 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 going to bite me. I trained myself how to do SATs on an XL sport, like a big glider. It was really easy to do SATs in like an XL. And there were a few times I was just up and it was hard to get down.

So I'd stop trying. And I remember I took my shoes and my shirt off one time. I was going to enjoy the flight there, get a tan, point into the West, close my eyes, take my clothes. I'd sit there for a while and put my clothes back on, you know, go in and land.

You know, let's put a whole like five or six of those together. That would be a good last flight.

Have you had anything recently in by recent, say the 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 board with the Enzo II 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 is so difficult to work on. Cells are only like nine inches wide. So to work on the thing, I got to 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 I went with Gavin to Revis Ord. And the first time I flew it there, the stab on the right side broke. So I, it 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. 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 through that broken shell stuff. It's like, no, I'm not going to land this up here and fix it again. So I went out to the landing zone and got there pretty high.

It had cracked off. And I just get to the landing zone, just kind of relax. 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 the launch. So it's like, all right, fuck it. There's a road that heads dead north. It goes to a liquor store. So I went there. I'm still at eight, nine grand. And every time I push on the bar, the tip's just like, just make this big flopping sound. And the whole stab, lines trailing in the breeze. And so I get to the north end 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 had 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 I circled out and went back up like 10 grand. And 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'm not going farther than this.

So I just spiraled down there and landed. And it was dead. It was like swirling. There was nothing. There was no wind. There was a 10-foot by 50-foot American flag that was like glued to the pole when I came in and landed. It was 100 degrees. It was high density altitude. You know, I come in and land the Enzo. Pack it up. Go get an 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. We got Lindor. They're on our 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 Westerlies in that glider without ever using the bar more than about a third.

And then with the Westerlies came Phil Weffinger and a couple other guys. I'm sitting there and here they come. You know, the flag just cycles up once. 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 at the top on that thing. And 20 minutes ahead are the Westerlies at trim. It's just crazy. I want to fly one of these gliders against. I have some late 80s high performance hang gliders. So I'd like to, you know, get some. I'd like to get a buddy like get you guys and go get one of my my old king posted hang gliders and go do some racing.

That

would be. I'll see what

that like. Like I want to take the GSX to have the GSX here. I want to take that and glide that against the mojo because I think a mojo will smoke the GSX. And not only that, the mojo will 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 is 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. And I remember hanging out with you a bit at Elsinore back in the day. And you had this T-shirt, this black T-shirt. 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 just be setting up your shit on launch 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. But there was, you know, I felt with you, there was a there was a seriousness to go and fly in 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 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 realized. wasn't a 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 at Chelan on the way up to Grouse I was riding with Kells and we went off to 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 airtime I tried air time 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 link and it was like me and Ken Brown and a handful of other guys we're just going that looks about right you know and off I go and I was like third or fourth you know Huey was there there 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 in the river and they were out over that edge and hit something late the day it was like way late in the day and I'm just remember watching Pendry kind of lock out like this and then right just instantly 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 there about halfway through a 16-ounce can of Budweiser and I watched this happen and I looked over at Wayne and I said I'm somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody

somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody somebody Chris got spit out about 1500 HEO and felt his death.

So that's, that's one of those little things that goes in the bank, you know, and then paragliding paragliding starts with, you know, Matsuo in the hospital for six months. And that shit shows up in my desk, you know, in Elsinore. So right away, we know these things are dangerous. We know these things that 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, gliders were dangerous back then. You know, I crashed the racer at Flagstaff, broke my ankle and broke my back and early 92. So, yeah, I, I was lucky that I walked away.

I didn't walk away. I'm lucky I was able to walk after that, because people we know, better pilots than me had it.

So, yeah, this is a discussion I had just recently with, with Linda and Dusty. Dusty Rhodes is a guy here where I, I was doing demo days in 2001 when I went to work and at Wills Wing to run the, their paragliding department. So in swing and airwave, Dusty, had demoed a sport, the airwave sport 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. Dusty's like, no, it'll be okay. I'll just fly it late. Well, 530 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. 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 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, Linda, how many people out of that would take a hit like that and come back? It's like me, you, him, him, Linda. That's how many out of nine people. 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. You know, if I, 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, their rack 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? Just, I admit no illusions that what we're doing,

suspending ourselves under a puppy, a puppy 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 Ganeshio 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've watched friends, 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 % 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 feet. Just that aviation like the seas, 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. Yeah. 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. As 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 Jenner and the random news. 13 cell is just astounding. There are 12. 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, 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 in 1992, they gave me the, uh, the GSX.

It was known unrecoverable from more than about 60, 70 % collapse and put five Korean test pilots in the dream before they thought, let's give it to Mitch. He'll race it in the 92 nationals. And, uh, so I called Rob and I, I emailed back and forth with Rob a little bit after he got the R, uh, R10 too. 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. It just, as long as I'm high, it's greatest glider ever.

So it's like, he's not disagreeing with me, you know? Um, and then, you know, your story too. We talked about how I got the R12 where at VIA and, uh, what was it? 2014, it 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. Uh, and then, and to me, the gliders weren't the problem. You know, so you're not gonna regulate the problem away, you know, cause 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, it went down and then they just started to go faster. And so then the accident rate was the same again. Yeah. So, um, so there's just a certain amount of risk that people are willing to accept. Uh, 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, uh, will be negated by additional risk taking. And, and so you're not going to, you know, 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, uh, that have happened even with the additional requirements. But at the same time, you know, for the last couple of days, we've been flying with Mitch on, you know, the R12 I gave him. And, and I have not seen the top of that glider very much. I was going to 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 glass 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. Yeah.

Mitch, can I ask you a question about the, the going back to the t-shirt that was totally the opposite answer I was expecting. And what, what I mean is, uh, in, in my eyes, you guys were a different caliber of taking on risk. You know, the early generation, like you guys did was just cowboy. And we're always 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 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 longevity. It was a fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation fermentation the most analogous conversation I think to to answer your question would be a conversation 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 or 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 the kind of 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 knockout 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 she's back in the game and she's like I don't know what to do with this thing and she's like I don't know what to do with this thing 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 was like I don't know what to do with this thing 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 there there may be 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 happened with paragliding is that there's this really there's a bigger separation between

getting the glider and getting the fermentation fermentation fermentation 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 extended training period and stuff. You're just like, you're in the air. You bought your gear. It still smells new and you're flying. You know, a couple hours of 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 such a huge gap between the early years of any kind of flying in convective air and the reality of midday in August.

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. 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 paraglider, like that video of Ganesha landing at, at the Chelan, Lake side 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 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 the delusional world where sooner or later, you're going to be in a, the illusion of safety is going to be shattered. Either that, or you'll go your whole career and be lucky. You know,

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. You know, both of those meets in 91, 92 on Thursday, as I'm driving up 395, there's a helicopter pulling a body off a gun or launch both times. You know, I'm not good at launching. And that was Patrick's grew, took a throne right off of launch in 91 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 for nearly 3000 foot plunge right next to gunter in 92 on, on the GSX. It was at 11, five, just crossing 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, you know, crap myself, clean my shorts out. Marcus Meyer, the Smith brothers were landing on the spine right next to the South of gunner to fetch, to fetch, uh, a badly injured Marcus Meyer on the top German pilots. And I was just 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 or the van load of 13 people goes up at three o 'clock in the afternoon with mojo's 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 that market that saves people's lives. And that the crew here, you know, Marcelo and no act 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 were not, not safe to fly mid day, not even close. And now it's, this is a whole different world. You can fly a glider like the mojo in mid day 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? Well,

I think it's 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 midair at the edge. Every day I fly and every day I get a good climb and I'm ecstatic and giddy and laughing. I'm like when I was circling around with you, no, it wasn't you. It was, I 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, 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, fuck 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. You can see, I can see over the top and 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 in it as an insurance broker is not a good thing. It's 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. 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 going to trade that for anything. Not ever. Sosumo 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 going to do? Sit here, watch TV, play video games. I'm going to be doing that. That's not living. It's like, no. You have to get to a lot of hang gliding history before we could get to the philosophy of the man. And so, you know, because not 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, you know, every time that thing comes out of the bag, it can kill you. Yeah. 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, you know, it was it was a wake up call.

So the reality check and I had already had a lot of experience as a climber, but flying was new. And it turns out, you know, 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 quite a bit. But, you know, the risk is still there 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 test of fire. I've only broken my neck once. I've only broken my neck once due to 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 if that is what you lose, then what's the point of living?

Mitch, that was special. Phil, thank you. What a treat. Thank you. Thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So if you can support us financially, all we've ever asked for is a buck a show. And you can do that through a one-time donation through PayPal, or you can set up a subscription service that charges you for each show that comes out. We put a new show out every two weeks. So, for example, if you did a buck a show and every two weeks, it'd be about $25 a year. So way cheaper than a magazine subscription. And it makes all of this possible. I do not want to fund this show with advertising or sponsors. We get asked about that pretty frequently. But for a whole bunch of different reasons, which I've said many times on the show, I don't want to do that. I don't like having that stuff at the front of the show.

And I also want you to know that these are authentic conversations with real people. And these are just our opinions. But our opinions are not being skewed by sponsors or advertising dollars. I think that's a pretty toxic business model. So I hope you dig that. You can support us. If you go to cloudbasemayhem.com, you can find the places to support. You can do it through patreon.com forward slash cloudbasemayhem. If you want a recurring. Subscription, you can also do that directly through the website. We've tried to make it really easy. And that will give you access to all the bonus material, little video casts that we do and extra little nuggets that we find in conversations that don't make it into the main show. But we feel like you should hear. We don't put any of that behind a paywall. If you can't afford to support us, then just let me know and I'll set you up with an account.

Of course, that'll be lifetime. And hopefully you're being in a position someday to be able to support us. But you'll. Find all that on the website. All of you who have supported us or even joined our newsletter or bought cloud based mayhem merchandise, T-shirts or hats or anything. You should be all set up. You should have an account. You should be able to access all that bonus material now. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your support. We'll see you on the next show. Thank you. Bye.

Bye. Bye.

Bye.

!

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Thank you.