Hi there, everybody. Welcome to the Cloudbase Mayhem. I've got a great show for you today with someone you'll all recognize, the great Johnny Duran, Red Bull hang glider pilot, many-time world number one, and someone I've been trying to get on the show for an awfully long time, and the connection finally came through Nick Neynens, my friend at the X-Alps, and he put us together. And Johnny's been on pretty stiff lockdown down in Australia for the last year and a half now. I hadn't been able to travel, so he was psyched to get on the phone and have a conversation, and we had a lot of fun with this. We talked about his many years of competing, his recent foray into paragliding and the differences there, and chasing the the morning glory.
I'm sure most, if not all, of you have seen that footage; it's absolutely incredible. If you haven't, check it out in the the show notes. Uh, big film project he did with Red Bull a few years back, and just unbelievable. And his distance chasing, trying to chase the world record in Texas and in other places, but he and Dustin, of course, were together on the fateful day back in 2012, and Dustin just eked him out at the end to go 761k. And with Sebastian's recent records, there Texas is certainly back on on the map. People are interested, so we talked a lot about Texas and a lot about just flying gliding thermaling techniques. I think you're going to enjoy it. I had a real blast with this, so enjoy this talk with the great Johnny Duran.
Johnny, uh, good to see you in the... in my viewfinder here, man. This is... I've been reading about you the last couple days, and uh, most of the stuff out there I already kind of knew. I've been following your career for a long time, and you know, one of... of the things it did was suck me right back into that Morning Glory stuff you were doing a while back. That's just... we've got to hear about that. But, um, first, tell me where you are and... and what you've been up to lately. I... I, uh, since your world record attempts, it's been a little quieter than usual, so I just want to kind of get caught up.
Yeah, well, uh, thanks for having me on. I'm currently, currently stuck at home in Australia, uh, in Gold Coast, uh, so the first time I've been, uh, in Australia for more than 12 months at a time, I think so. That's, uh, it's been a bit of a challenge, or a bit of a change, I should say, uh, but, uh, no, it's going well. Um, yeah, it's, uh, not a lot of flying has been happening in the competition side, so it's, uh, giving me time to, to do other things, yeah.
I understand from Nick, who was the one the connection here, Nick Neynens, my ex-alps buddy, that you're getting into paragliding. Can we talk about that, or is that all hush-hush?
Yeah, yeah, you know.
well, uh, I thought, um, since there wasn't much hang gliding going on, I would, uh, try out the dark side, as they say. Um, sure, now we have a, you know, we have a very strong club here, Here in Canungra, we have 200 members, the biggest club in Australia. And when I started flying 20 years ago, it was 90-odd percent hang gliding and 10 percent paragliding. And 20 years later, it's 90-something percent paragliders and 10 percent hang gliders. So, you know, the times have changed a bit as far as what people are flying. And um, yeah, it's just... I, I, you know, I've done so many flights and I know the—I guess the whole area as I call it my backyard here.
Um, and for me to go out and go flying on the hang glider by myself, just, you know, it doesn't really do it for me right now. So, uh, you know, I've always enjoyed, you know, obviously traveling the world, competing with my friends, and and then coming home and and flying, uh, with my other friends here and, you know, just having a nice fly with with them and but to to go out there and be flying my hang glider by myself and, uh, you know, seeing the paragliders as you fly past them, it just doesn't really do it. So I thought, well, I guess I'll try try the paragliding and, uh, see what happens, you know? And, yeah, I kind of kind of met up with the Felipe that makes the flow paragliders and, you know, he's based here on the Gold Coast and he told me he was a hang glider pilot back in the day in Brazil and I was like, oh, I said, well, maybe I'll have to get you on the hang glider.
He goes, well, then you've got to fly a paraglider. So we kind of had this thing about a year or so ago and I said, well, I'll try one if you, uh, you know, if you try the hang glider. I've yet to get him in the hang glider, mind you. So, yeah, I had a few flights last year, uh, on the paraglider, just flying on the the a-wing and, uh, Through the winter time, I thought, well, that'd be a good time, you know? And I just thought, wow, I do it when when the thermals aren't so strong and, uh, that, you know, the glider stays above my head most of the time, um, which it did. So I was grateful for that. And then, uh, I was flying with Flipo one day and we had, uh, we both landed together in a field, uh, almost simultaneously, and we were trying to sort of do a low save, both of us, and we sort of—I shouldn't say landed, but we both arrived, and, uh, we were both laying on the ground complaining of, uh, knee injuries and, um, yeah, I, I had a fully blown torn ACL, so I, uh, yeah, it was had to get, uh, surgery and, um, I sort of didn't fly for six or nine months last year from a little...
So just a hard landing?
You know, it wasn't even that hard. I can't really blame it on paragliding. I originally injured my knees motocross many years ago. I had the right one fixed after multiple injuries or multiple hard landings, I should say. And then the left one's been the weak one ever since then. and, yeah, It was just a field that had long grass and was mowing, and I thought I was on the ground, but I just sunk an extra couple inches and just sort of hyperextended my leg, and I think it was, you know, it was just a straw that broke the camel's back really and it was kind of good timing when it happened because it was sort of during COVID and there wasn't much else going on for me.
So I was lucky that I was able to get straight in and get it fixed. Um, but yeah, spent a few months on crutches and, uh, yeah, sort of been a long road to recovery and, um, I've only done two hang gliding comps since my, uh, since I did my knee and I was just flying a intermediate glider and both those comps, um, just because I was afraid of the landings and things like that with it still. So, um, yeah, just sort of slowly getting back into it and, and now it's getting better again. I thought I'd start paragliding again just to have a bit more fun. And, yeah, slowly stepping up in the books and on the gliders that I'm flying. But I don't know. They still scare me.
I was going to say, can you break down for us kind of the main, you know, the sensations? What's different? What's scarier? What's mellower, if anything? You know, we always talk, you know, there's always the two groups. You know the hang gliders? Oh yeah, but your thing collapses and we're always... yeah, but your things go really fast, you know? And it's, it's, it's trickier to land when you're going so fast. What, what were, what are the kind of the main, what were the biggest maybe surprises? And maybe some of the things that were just... oh yeah, that may kind of make sense. What are the big changes? Well,
I think, uh, for me, the the biggest difference is how slow they are. Also, just getting used to the glide on them, uh, you hit that sink and it just feels like you're going straight down, you know? Even when you put full speed bar on it, just feels like you're going down faster, so it's
Right, it's not exactly like pulling it; it's not like
pulling the bar and just getting through the sink and um, getting to that next climb. So, uh, you know, it's been a bit of a challenge, uh, just trying to understand the fact that the glide angle is so much worse and um, you know, the the thermals, I think that I I'm gonna get to—I'm not actually getting to—because they're too far away, uh, so
It's a real readjustment of of how you fly, yeah.
I think probably it's, it's really helped me in the patient side of things. Um, not all hang glider pilots are that patient, so sort of flying a paraglider and flying for four or five hours and doing 50, 60 kilometers going, you know, that's, uh, it's, I would have, I would have landed a long time ago on the hang glider if that was the case. Um, but just because it's something different, you know, it keeps me going. And you know, I've obviously been competing for a long time now on the hang gliding side, and it's, uh, sort of what keeps me going when it comes to flying. Um, having, having a goal and trying to achieve it every time I go flying, uh, so for me to be flying these gliders that are in the
the lower class against a lot of the top guys here on their racing machines, um, and trying to to keep up with them, and it's just sets me a good challenge, I guess. And, uh, I've just kind of been enjoying that side of it lately, and I've been doing quite well. Apparently, they they don't, they don't really want me to step up anymore on these gliders because they're afraid of what's going to happen, yeah.
You'll be kicking their ass soon, is there? Do you... are there any things that you've learned from hang gliding that are not good that that you've brought into paragliding? Like, if you talked about that, you're... you're the one leaning too far forward now because you want to be prone like Brennis, but... but, uh, are there... are there things, you know? Like, for example, I have always found hang gliders to be really good at gliding, especially when they... they come over to paragliding, they've learned something there about the air that, um, sensitivity to the air that I think, you know, the really, really good gliders paragliders have a sense for, but seems more instinctual or I don't know, maybe it's something that's just the years, but, uh, I have noticed that, that it seems like hang gliders have this sense for the line that we often don't.
Is there anything in reverse of that? I mean, I think that's a agree with
That, but that's a great point that you're touching on there. Um, I think when you're hang gliding, you're a little bit more connected to the wing, um, being that you're holding on to the bar. It's kind of like a natural extension of your arms, whereas paragliding, you're kind of just this little pendulum flying below this thing, and you don't get that instant—well, I shouldn't say you don't get that instant—and feel what's happening with the air, because you kind of do sometimes with paragliding. In some ways you get too much
air, right.
But I think you're feeling the air a lot more, especially if you're a relaxed hang glider pilot because you're kind of feeling the feedback of the glider a lot, which might be the case with paragliding. Maybe I'm just not there yet, holding on too tight.
but yeah
I think probably the first thing that hang glider pilots do with their paraglider is hold the risers. I know I'm guilty of that a lot. Um, I'm trying to, trying to be more relaxed and
Uh, just hold the brakes, um, and don't grab the risers when things get scary. Uh, but that's kind of the first instinct is you want to just grab something, and I know it's against all what you—you should do, but uh, it's still something that happens, even even for me right now. So yeah, but that is an
Interesting point that you've got, you've got, uh, and when I had Jeff Shapiro on, he always talks about, you know, wingsuiting is, is truly the only form of aviation where you're flying, you're not flying something, you know, you are the bird. Um, and I guess if we kind of stack things up, that is the progression, isn't it? It's wingsuits and then it would be hang gliders, because you're, you really are connected through that bar and you're almost flying, you're, you know, you're still flying something, but you're very close to a bird. You're prone, you're, you've got this incredible command of the, of the wing. And then, then you go into paragliding, which is a big step away from that. So yeah, I can see that, that connection must be what, must be great to get a sense for the air, yeah.
I mean, they say Superman doesn't fly sitting down.
It's true, laying down and and flying that way is probably the next closest thing to, um, as Jeff says, um, you know, wingsuiting. Obviously, that's, uh, you know, I've had chats with him about that, and you know, he obviously loves it. Says it's the closest thing that you get to flying, and I mean, I couldn't argue with that. I've never done it, but, uh, certainly you, you know, it's just you with a couple of little bits of material under your arms. So you definitely are flying or falling, whatever it is.
Some comment. But, yeah, I think, you know, obviously the hang gliding and paragliding is quite different and the fact of, you know, laying down and sitting down. And I find it interesting that when I get low,
I find I want to sit forward in the harness a lot more, Probably because I'm so used to looking at the ground sources for thermals and trying to just figure out where I want to go for those last thousand feet of my glide, and when I'm in the paraglider leaning back in the pod, I'm kind of have troubles, you know, a lot of the times where you want to go is right where your feet are. So I'll find that I'll actually sit forward a little bit and kind of see what's down in front of me to, you know, figure out which, which part of the ground I want to cover to get my last climb or to stay up, whereas hang gliding, you're always kind of looking at the ground unless you're looking up. So it's a little bit different than that. But just going back on the gliding part, one thing I have noticed, especially flying, you know, I've done a lot of my flying on the E &A wing on the Flow Future and obviously, you know, when I first started flying it, the fleet pair was like, Like, those things aren't even made to go cross country.
They're just a training glider, you know, and I was doing 50-kilometer flights from, you know, from our local site when no one else was getting up. They're all just bombing out, and he's like, dude, that's just not made to happen, you know. So I was like, yeah, but it's, you know, it's still a glider. It flies. It's just really slow, you know. You've just got to take your time, and you've got to scratch.
And then now I've stepped up into the Freedom 2. So that's his high-end B glider, and you know, I'm finding that it's performing really well, and that I'm flying a lot with the the C wings and the D wings, and even some of the guys on their two-lining comp gliders and tailwind, or a little bit tailwind, I'm finding that if I pick the right line, um, I'm actually being able to stay with them all day long, uh, just by picking that slightly better line. Uh, obviously, you know, the sink factors a lot more on the glide on a paraglider just because you're in it so long. Um, so if you can pick that better line, uh, you know, I'm finding that I'm able to to keep up quite well on on the lower performing wing, just you know, just by not losing all that height on glide.
So it's sort of frustrating a lot of guys around here, um, with that, but you know, there is something in it, you know, like you said, a lot of hang glider pilots have good lines, and that may be just from the amount of ground that we cover, the amount of experience we've got, um, in picking lines, um, you know, knowing when, when it's time to race, when it's time to slow down, and, and things like that. And I find that if I'm leaving, you know, I might leave climbs early in the paraglider, and because I can see that there's better stuff in front of me, or I'm going to go up the next couple kilometers under a cloud, or things like that, that really, you know, seem to really help. And, and racing on the lower performing wings, so yeah, there's, there's definitely, you know, I think anyone with thousands of hours in the air is going to be pretty good at picking lines, and, and knowing where the next animal is, regardless of what, you know, what you've done, your hours on really
gliding is one of those things johnny that you know when you you talk to really good pilots like yourself, it, it tends to be one of those questions that gets that, yeah, it's just hours. It's just feel, you know, it's, it's kind of this Jedi thing, isn't it? You know, it's, you know, you're using the force a bit. Um, but can you give any concrete things that our listeners can latch onto in terms of, you know, how to feel out a good line, how to, How to approach gliding? You mentioned a couple things there. You know, hey, if I'm in a climb and I know it's better down the line, leave go, but—and these are a lot of things you learn obviously in racing—but um, I'd love to hear your thoughts on gliding. Is when you can talk about thermaling and technique and falling out on the windward side, and you know, there's real concrete things we can talk about there, but gliding is one of these where it's tricky.
That was—that was a very, very hard chapter to write in the
book, I can't imagine. I mean, it's, you know, everyone asks questions about, "Oh, what should I've done different today?" You know, I was here and I did this and I did that. And I'm like, well, you know, the the beautiful thing about flying is is every day is different and every situation is different. So to try and tell somebody what they did right or what they did wrong on any given day is extremely hard unless you're flying right next to them. So to, like you said, to try and explain to someone how to glide better or how to pick the right lines is, you know, it's extremely difficult because you can never paint the same picture twice. So it really does just come down to knowledge. And I think probably, you know, there's a few things that I like to think that I'm good at, and one of them is awareness.
That's probably my biggest attribute to flying and my eyesight. So being able to, to see things and understand, or seeing the situations where you know you might be in a thermal climbing with three people and all of a sudden you see an eagle or a hawk or something a couple kilometers away, low, that's climbing much better, and you take off, you know, 30 degrees the course line, and people go, "Where's Johnny going? I don't know what he's doing." And you know, two minutes later, I've, I've hit the strong climb and they're like, "Oh, it's over there." Um, and then you're gone, you know, um, or, or the fact that, um, you do, you do see the sky changing in front of you and you can see that if you leave the thermal now, you're gonna, you're gonna have a good line and
You're gonna get to a better climb. Um, you might be low, but if you're confident that you're gonna get that better climb, um, you know, you go. And that's sort of the way to get away from, from the, the gaggle. Um, obviously, with paragliding, it's a little bit different just because it's, you don't really disappear that fast. Um, and if you do leave and you pick, a pick the wrong line, then you know, you can certainly be scratching at treetops while the others go over the top of you, which you know can happen in hang gliding too, but it's, it certainly seems a little bit more likely to happen in the paragliding. For me, being aware of your surroundings, it's not something that you just need to practice while you're flying.
Um, it's, you know, it's good to practice when you're in your car driving to work, um, all day long, you know, trying to just look around and just go, how many people are in my area? Is it five? Is it ten? Whatever it might be, it's great for when you're in big comps with lots of gliders and you just go, okay, there's 10 people in this gaggle, and if I can't see all 10 of them on every circle, I'm missing someone, you know. So just going, well, did that someone go somewhere? If so, where did he go? Why did he leave? Did he see something better? You know, hang gliders kind of disappear a lot easier than paragliders do. The paragliders are very bright and colorful and made like they're back in the 70s, you know.
Hang gliders are stealthy and dark and we like to disappear from our opponents. components, uh, so you kind of got to be a lot more onto it, especially in the competition side of hang gliding, with knowing where your competitors are and and, um, where they might have gone and things like that. So, for me, I like to keep an eye on everybody and everything all the time. The other day, I was sort of somebody, "Oh, you, you did this and you did that," and they're like, "But I didn't see you anywhere. How did you know what I did?" I'm like, "Well, because I keep eyes on everybody. Like, you were five k's behind me, but I still saw where you were and, you know, what happened to you." "Oh, really?" So, you know, it's, it's probably just something that I've, you know, think is very important part of flying because there's too many people I see, especially the up-and-coming pilots that, um, you know, they're just quite satisfied with staying in the air and they're in, they're in a one or two meter climb and they don't want to leave it, or they don't, you know, they're not, not worried about looking for someone else that might be in that slightly better climb that they can get to Johnny.
Are you also, when you're, when you're flying comps, are you mapping who is who or just what everybody's doing? Are you paying attention to which pilot is—are you paying attention to the names, you know? Okay, are you, in other words, do you put more weight into certain people? Oh,
Certainly, I mean, you got to know, I know absolutely everybody in the competition, what glider they're flying, what they look like, um, and that's something I do on the ground. I just walk around. It's a little bit harder with paragliding because you things are all bundled up on the ground, and uh, hang gliding is a lot easier. You know, they're out there, they're on the hill advertisement, you can see what color people have, their harnesses are hooked into their gliders, you can see their helmets, you can. But generally, you know, I mean, I, I can tell even when I can't see someone's colors just by their flying style, how much they bank up in thermals and and things like that. I can just go, "Oh, that's Dustin over there," or "There's so and so." I like to keep a very close eye on my opponents.
I know exactly who everyone is, you know, obviously. You know, I can't give away too many secrets here, you know, but it's, um, not every day is suited for, for your own personal flying skills, or, you know, it might be a blue day and you might go, well, I'm not that great flying in the blue, but who here in the competition do you think is the person that's going to excel today? And I might go, okay, well, it's probably between these three people that have a good chance of winning the day today, so I'm going to keep very good eyes on those few people and, And, you know, just go, well, it mightn't be my day, but I'm going to try and stick with the people that I think is going to do well today.
And, you know, that might be my game plan for the day. Days where I think, well, it's my day. I certainly know there's other people that are watching me and I try to do everything I can to get away from those people because, you know, you're just going to drag them along the goal all day and you don't really want to do that. So if you're going to be the one finding all the thermals, you might as well try to disappear and find them for yourself and not for others you know so yeah it's you know it's obviously a lot of tactics when you talk about competition flying but well
Let's come back to that potentially, because I'd love to talk more comps with you, and I know that's something you've been doing for a long time, but I'd love to get the kind of resume bullet point version of how you got into this and then bring us up to now. You should have been flying for 20 years, but how'd you start? What started all the craziness and then and, you know, kind of I'd love for you to just touch on some of the highlights or some of the springboards that that bounced you to where you are now.
Well, I sort of got into the sport through my father. He actually is from the States. My parents are both from the from the US. I grew up in California and he saw hang gliding back over there in the 70s. and I was really interested in it but didn't really get into it. They decided to move to Australia. My dad was a very keen, very active surfer and heard the surf was good here so they basically moved to Australia. Then I was born here and about five years later, a little while later, they moved to, when they first got here, they moved to the mountains mountains behind the Gold Coast, bought a property.
And my mom went for a drive one day and came back and said to my dad, you'll never believe what they're doing just up the road. He said, what? She said, they're hang gliding. It's like, no way. So it took him a while, but I think when I was about nine, he learned to fly. He got lessons and it was the first time he got lessons, he broke his arm. So he gave it away for a couple of years, years, and then, uh, he went back and did it again. And, um, yeah, so he started flying. Uh, when I was quite young, I, uh, did a tandem flight and kind of got pretty hooked from my first tandem flight, I guess. Uh, I kind of grew up surfing and skateboarding, and it got to the point where it was starting to get quite, quite crowded surfing and driving an hour down the beach to go surfing and get a few waves.
And I don't know, once I, uh, once I started flying, I realized that once you jumped off that mountain, you were free, you know? You could do whatever you wanted, and it was just all down the skill. And the more skill you had, the better the flight you had, you know? So you weren't hassling for waves and things like that, you know? Kind of just got me hooked. Um, so I used to travel around with him. He actually went, uh, six months after he learned to hang glide, he took the whole family back over the states, and we traveled around the states for six months. And, uh, he went straight to the Owens Valley because he's like, well, I hear that's the best place to fly.
so he
Did a month in the Owens Valley, uh, fresh off the boat, and when he's, yeah, he put himself in that's
That's a quick education, he
gave himself a very quick education on hypoxia and all that fun stuff so um yeah but But, yeah, I was, you know, obviously not flying then. I was only 9 or 10 years old. So, yeah, I used to just travel around with him to the comps and every year I'd try to pick up a hang glider and couldn't get the A-frame off the ground. So he'd be like, oh, maybe next year. And eventually I got big enough to get the A-frame off the ground. He said, all right, you can start learning now. And, you know, I'd obviously had runs down training hills and things like that with people holding on to me. And my parents went away for the weekend, dropped me off at a friend's house who was an instructor and said, oh, well, you're going to start doing your lessons this weekend.
And they came home Sunday night and I already jumped off the mountain. It was a pretty fast lesson.
And they couldn't believe that I was only 14. Uh, the instructor already throwing me off the hill, uh, but uh, you know, the great thing was I got the next day off, uh, from school on Monday, just to show my dad that I could actually fly. So, um, yeah, I was pretty fortunate that we had a huge, you know, strong club of hang glider pilots here in Canungra, and, um, you know, we had a lot of Australia's best at the time, uh, lived here and and flew our local sites. So I had some great, you know, great pilots to learn from and, um, watch and listen to, and I was like a sponge. I just sucked up all the information I could from everyone, and obviously, being around the sport for five years or so before I learned to fly, I, I'd already soaked up a lot of information and, um, had a pretty fast learning curve, and probably I think I started competing a year after I started flying.
So, whoa...
It's this like late 90s, early 2000s, uh...
95 i learned
95 okay yeah
So that's it, yeah, just went on 26 years, um, a couple weeks ago, yeah.
So, I mean, paragliding was, was kind of a thing then. You know, mid-90s was getting to be bigger and bigger, you know? Certainly then, you know, hang gliding was still by far bigger, but it was kind of starting to do this, you know. The crossing, um, was that ever of interest to you back then, or was it just because this year was with covet? Is it has it been of interest? If it has just been hang gliding that whole time, I
Have I... um, I actually did learn to paraglide. I kind of of taught myself to paraglide back in the early, uh, early days, uh, probably late 90s, I guess. I used to have an off-road skateboard that I built at school and, uh, I bought into dell space, um, from the 90s, uh, I think in 93, 94, something like that. Pretty old glider, but I mostly used to use it, um, just as a kite, so I was kind of like kiteboarding, I guess, with my off-road skateboard, skateboard. So I learned the, the ground handling aspect of paragliding and, um, we had a, only one instructor in the paragliding back then, Phil Heistick, here in Canunga, and he was sort of the only paraglider, um, and was sort of teaching and getting people into it.
So I used to kind of go out there and sort of ground handle a little bit with him and, um, have a little bit of fun on the skateboard and things like that when he was teaching students. And then a few years later, I decided I'd actually get my license, and he kind of just threw me off the hill because he's seen that I'd kind of done some ground handling and kind of knew what was going on, and I was seeing flying hang gliders. He figured I had some idea and did a few early morning flights and, yeah, kind of got my rating, so to speak, back then but never really pursued it. And then after I won the New South Wales State titles down at Manila, Uh, Godfrey convinced me to stay, uh, for the next week to fly the pre PWC or something, pre pre PWC comp, uh, before the world, I think, was 2004 or 2005, um, comp I did down there in Manila, and he said, "I want to put you in as a wild card entry, um, and I'll give you a glider and harness and everything you need to fly the comp." And I
was like, "Okay, it's 130 pilots and I literally probably I already had five hours in a paraglider over about two years." And I hadn't flown one for about a year. So I basically was an absolute beginner. And he gave me a Sigma 5 to fly. And I was like, are you sure I'm going to survive? He's like, yeah, you'll be fine. And I was like, yeah.
So, yeah, I jumped off the hill the first day and there was literally 100 pilots plus red soaring the western side of Mount Bora. And I flew straight out and landed the bomb out and just went, well, I don't know about this. That was my first flight and new glider, everything was all new, and there's people everywhere. I didn't even want to turn the thing, uh, I went back up and, uh, yeah, I took off for a second time and there was about six or seven other pilots that had bombed out with me and they kind of knew who I was from the hang gliding side of things and, uh, they just thought, we're just going to follow Johnny. I mean, I think five of them plus me made gold. We were the last ones to get the gold that day, but we got there. What?
That's awesome. So, yeah, I kind of had a bit of an entourage following me around the skies there.
But, yeah, I mean, I did all right. I think I placed in the top 40. Wow. That's impressive. From memory. It's a while ago now, but it was a big learning curve. Just, you know, a lot of days I hit the deck just because I hadn't figured out the difference in the glide performance yet, and I'd leave a thermal halfway to base because I saw a cloud form in front, thinking, "Oh, that's a better climb," and find out that five minutes later I was on the ground, two k's from where the thermal was still going. Oh well, that didn't work.
Um, and yeah, I was getting a lot of collapses and things like that, and it just, just, it seemed at that time, you know, the gliders that the top guys were flying were quite dangerous, still in fact that they were collapsing a lot, and there was a lot of injuries and things like that. And being, you know, I think I'd sort of just become world number one at hang gliding at that time, and and seeing the fact that if I wanted to be good at paragliding, I needed to fly something, something pretty dangerous, um, didn't really interest me that much, so I pretty much stopped paragliding. I, I did that one comp. I actually did a little bit more when I, I got back home, uh, to Canungra, just because I'd been so into breaking the, the distance record and the hang glider from our sites, and I was up around the 300 kilometer mark back then, I think, or a little more
and the paragliding record was about 110 or 120 kilometers, and I was like, "Yeah, it's not that hard hard to fly that far. I did 100 miles in the competition at Manila on that glider, and I was like, it's easy doable for me to break the record here." And so I had a few attempts of that, but we got this great dividing mountain range to get across, and it's, um, it's quite challenging. Uh, there's only a few places you can cross it, and there's a lot of trees and high mountains, and I got there a couple of times on the paraglider and never, never managed to venture over it. Um, Um, so I kind of just thought, uh, yeah, maybe there's a reason why the record's where it stands with the paragliders and sort of, yeah, just gave it up basically. And literally had, had a couple of flights here and there, coastal flights over, you know, since 2005, uh, up until recently.
Yeah. But yeah, it was sort of just mainly just focused on hang gliding and trying to be the best in the world at hang gliding.
Yeah. I took you, I took you way off route there. I'm sorry, but you said you were only flying a year and then you got into comps. Let's pick back up with your history because – and I really want to get to the Dustin's – chasing it with Dustin in Texas and talk about Texas because we've had some Texas news lately. So we'll get to that. But yeah, take me up through the 2000s then. So you started flying comps pretty quick and – Yeah,
so I started – I think 96 was my first comp in Australia. So yeah, I basically just started doing the comp scene here in Australia when I was young. I had a skateboarding accident just before one of the seasons, the day I finished high school, actually. I broke and dislocated my shoulder. So that put me out of flying for the season. That was when we had the world champs here at Forbes. And I was sort of the goalkeeper back then. That was about all I could do. So I was there watching and checking, watching everyone come across the goal line. And then, yeah, kind of just started competing. Like I said, around Australia mostly. Uh, when I finished school, I did a little bit of traveling. Uh, when my first international comp was over in Spain, went over for the pre-world champs down in
Algonales in 2000, I flew the Spanish Nationals, which was my first comp just prior to the Pre-Worlds. Uh, I think there was 125 pilots in it, and I, uh, managed to get third place behind world number one and world number four, or something. So, it was everyone classified me as the real winner because everyone knew those two were gonna be first and second in some sort of order. So, it was, you know, I think I was, I was 19 then, and that was sort of my first, uh, big international comp, uh, or first international comp. So, I was pretty stoked with that, and, uh, yeah, went, went on to fly in the Free Worlds, and, um, then, um, I think was 2001, 2002, I was, uh, working in a film industry here on the Gold Coast, and, uh, got a phone call one day from Vicky at Moe's, uh, Gliders, and
She said, "We want to sponsor you to travel the world and hang glide," and I was like, "Right on." I'm, I'm like, well, I'm currently working in the film industry. And she goes, yeah, there's only one catch. You've got to leave tomorrow. I'm like, oh, that's a fast one.
So kind of I went to my bosses directly after the phone call, I guess, and had a little sit-down meeting with them. And I said, listen, you know, this is a situation, and told them. And they kind of looked at me and said, what are you still doing standing here?
Oh, wow, cool. They
said, you know, we can replace you tomorrow, but you'll never replace this opportunity. Jeez. If it doesn't work out, give us a ring when you get back and we'll give you another job. So I had nothing to lose. They said, just leave now, just go. So I just packed up, jumped in my car, went home, packed my bags, and, yeah, I was off the next day. So that's kind of where my adventures started competing full time. And yeah, so I was pretty fortunate that, you know, they, they sent me around, uh, the world flying the comps and, uh, getting me that experience that I needed to, to, to get better. And then, uh, I guess 2000, I'll tell you a funny story actually, um...
Yes, please. More stories when...
I, uh, a lot of people asked me, "How I, uh, how I started with Red Bull and, uh, my sponsorship with them?" And, uh, when Red Bull first hit Australia in the early 2000s, I was just like, oh, wow, that would just be the perfect sponsor, you know, because my dream was just to be sponsored and fly hang gliders for the rest of my life, you know, and I saw their ads, and I was like, Red Bull gives you wings, and I'm just like, oh, that's perfect, you know, what more can I ask for? And anyway, I got an email one day from Red Bull,
and they, you know, kind of started along the lines of, We've been watching you and, uh, seeing the great things you're doing, and we'd like to, um, sponsor you. I'll talk about sponsoring you, and I was just like, "Oh my god!" You know, I, I, I told the whole family, you know, and everyone's just like, "Wow, really? That's amazing." You know, it took me, I think, two days of sitting there on my computer, you know, just going, "Oh, how do I type an email back to this?" You know, like, this is a Red Bull, you know? Eventually constructed an email, and then I got an email back, and this went on maybe for a few days, or a few email exchanges. And one night at dinner, my whole family was like, "Oh, did you hear from Red Bull today?" And I was like, "Oh, they seem very interested in this conversation." And, uh, turns out that my nine-year-old sister had set up a Red Bull, a Red Bull at Hotmail account, and I was obviously not clued on that.
Do you guys have like an April Fools or something down there? No, no. I just
thought it was funny being a little nine-year-old sister. Oh,
my God. That's one of the best pranks I've ever heard. Yeah,
so it wasn't what I was hoping from the emails. But a couple of years later or a year or two later, Uh, I was over the real one. I was over in Brazil, or I think I was in Brazil at the time, and my mom sent me an email and she's like, "Oh, you'll never believe who called today." I'm like, "Who?" She's like, "Red Bull." I was like, "Yeah, we've been through this one before, right?" Um, she's like, "No, really, really," and she's laughing. She's like, "Um, they want you to do an event over in Brazil." I was like, "Oh, okay." And I'm like, "Is this for real?" She's like, "Yeah," and she's still laughing. She's like, "Yeah, but I think You've got to do like a two-kilometer ocean swim and then you've got to do a 50-kilometer mountain bike ride and then you've got to fly down the beach and do a 24-kilometer run." And I'm like, hmm,
yeah. I'm not sure that I'm that sort of athlete. But she's like, well, here's their contact. Get a hold of them. So it turns out that it was actually a real email. And I got a hold of them and they said, no, no, no. We just want you to do the hang gliding part. We were getting the best athlete in every sport from every country to compete. And it was called the Giants of Rio back in 2004, I think it was. And, yeah, so they had the best ocean swimmer, the best mountain bike rider, the best hang glider pilot, and the best runner from every country or from 70 countries. All expenses paid to go to this event in Rio.
So, uh, of course I took that opportunity and, um, yeah, it was, uh, funny, uh, and there was obviously other hangar pilots from around the world that were going and, uh, Kurt Warren was actually chosen from, uh, the U.S. I think they had it was just Kurt. I'm not sure if Dustin was there; I don't remember. I think he may have been. That, I think, there might have been two teams from the U.S., but Kurt was on the the A team, so to speak. And, uh, the two weeks before the event, we had our last competition in Australia and, uh, Kurt and I, uh, were duking it out for first place, um, and we ended up tied after five or six days of flying, uh, you know, we tied in the competition and we were like, Like, all right, I guess we're going to sort it out in Brazil
when we do this race for Red Bull, you know.
And we were stage three of the race. So it was the 2K swim, 50K mountain bike ride up to the mountains to the takeoff. And then we flew down, landed on the spot, and then the runners had to do the beach run. And, uh, you know, 70 teams started out, and you know, we're sitting on top of the mountain and they're trying to stay, just because they all had trackers and it's a pretty small takeoff there in Rio, so you got to, um, only X amount gliders could set up at a time. So they're trying to figure out which countries are in the lead on who to set up, and, uh, Australia and, and the US were, were the top two teams. And then Australia disappeared for a while as track to stop working or something, and it was like this and that, but turned out that, um, Australian was winning, uh, when they got to, to the takeoff, and US was second.
So there, we were out of all these pilots, and Kurt and I were first and second on the ramp, and we're like, "How cool is this? We just tied in the last competition, and here we are standing on the ramp." And, um, yeah, as it turned out, uh, Australia ended up winning, winning the event. And, yeah, I think, uh, the night before we actually had the race, I was out drinking at four o'clock in the morning, still with the, uh, with the Red Bull boss at the time, and you know, he's like, "We got time for another drink." I'm like, "Yeah." So, um, anyway, all the, uh, we actually had the spot land on the beach, and if we didn't land on the target, we had to do a 400-meter beach run, and only, uh, I think only a few of us managed to get the spot out of everyone won.
Yeah, so all my teammates, I nailed the spot, um, and all my teammates basically said, "We won because of Johnny," you know? And, and the guys just go, "Man, if you can stay up drinking to that hour of the day and perform like you did the next day, uh..."
What it worked for you, we
Want to have you on the team for Red Bull? You know, you're the sort of person we like. So, um, not that I could drink until the all hours of the morning, but just to, um, yeah. So, anyway, that was the start of my Red Bull career. Was, um, was, uh, after that event, winning that event, and, uh, yeah, went on to to flying with them for the last 14 years. And, uh, yeah, they helped, obviously, support me traveling around the world as well, and allowing me to, uh, do what I do. I
was gonna say, what are the, you know, I, I got to hang out with Will Gadd and we did the the Rockies expedition a few years back, which was a Red Bull funded film thing, uh, for their Explorer series. And, you know, he was kind of one of the OGs, he's been with them forever. And I know it's more Red Bull Canada, I don't know if you're more Red Bull Australia or if it's, you know, Austria, but you know, as as the years go by, um, do the obligations change? Are there obligations? I know a lot of people would be very curious because it's, you know, it's kind of the pie in the sky dream for a lot of athletes in a lot of different sports to be involved with with Red Bull. I've never been involved with them as an athlete; I've always been involved with them through the Red Bull X-Ops or these films I've done.
But what do you have to do to maintain that? Because I remember Will almost said it was kind of a lifetime thing, you know, you're in, you're in
Yes, and no, I don't know.
if that's more dependent or
Yeah, um, when I first started here in Australia, uh, they had, you know, pretty strict rules of who they sponsored and why they sponsored them. Um, obviously, they, as you can see, they sponsor a lot of the top pilots or a lot of the top athletes in, in lots of different sports. Red Bull's is extremely good at getting the athletes just before they hit their prime. Uh, they're, they're very good at scouting, watching, watching people and trying to get the contract with them before they hit the big time to try and get in at the right price, I guess.
But Red Bull is obviously it's a worldwide based out of Austria, but each country has its own budgets and its own obligations to the world, to the headquarters. And they basically all get a budget from the headquarters quarters, depending on, I believe, how many cans they sell, how important they are, and the athletes really depend on their country. So, I mean, I think obviously, you know, a lot of people don't stay that long with Red Bull. I'm one of the longest-lasting Red Bull athletes in Australia. There is, you know, people like Mcfanning and other people that are still with Red Bull that have been there since since day one, you know, 17, 18 years now, they're probably going on.
But a lot of athletes, you know, they might only do a year, two years, three years with Red Bull and then they move on either because they haven't given them the results they wanted or they've got other sponsors or things like that. But I guess the obligations, they change, you know, every person's contract is different and every country is different with Red Bull. So, you know, for what Will Gadd might be on, I have no idea. You know, every pilot's got or every athlete's got a different contract. But basically, you know, generally it was a salary every year. Incentives along the way, for me, they would give me three bonuses a year if I reached my targets or whatever it might be, winning one of the major competitions or being world number one or breaking a world record or, you know, Things that I would say, well, this is what's important for me this year and this is what I want to try and achieve.
And if I'd reach those targets, they'd give me a bonus incentive, things like that. But, yeah, there's things that you obviously got to do for them. You got to do media stuff. You've got to be on social media. You got to post X amount of times per week or per month. It's not just you're sponsored and you don't have to do anything anymore. Well, you're always got to return some of the favors for people giving you money, you know, so.
It seems like you're, I mean, just in this conversation, it seems like your focus has been mostly comps, but you've dove off into some other interesting things. We got to talk about flying the tsunami wave, the morning glory. I, you know, I'd seen that back when you did it. And, you know, yesterday when I was preparing for this, I got sucked into that again.
Don't get sucked into it; that's the worst thing that can happen. No, no, no, yeah, I
Saw it sucked into the video of it, but man, it's just okay. Two things: could you do it on a really high-end paraglider and then just take us through it? How'd you—how'd you discover it? How did you—I mean, can articulate what that experience was about, and are you still chasing it? Is it still—is it still something you're working on?
yeah so one of one of my things with red bull the contract was I had to supply them with two ideas of projects that I wanted to do every year. So I had to come forward and I would have to say, these are two things that I want to try and do with Red Bull and they would look at them. If they liked them, they would submit them and then if it went through the approvals in Australia and they gave it all the green light, then they would submit it to the worldwide Red Bull to seek permission and funding and things like that to make it happen. And Morning Glory was the number one thing on my list, obviously. There had been a handful of pilots, I think I was the 12th person to fly the Morning Glory, but I...
I knew the the early guys, the guys that flew it first, a few pilots in between that, and just from the competitions, them telling me the story of them flying the Morning Glory and just looking into their eyes and just saying how, how mind-blowing they were when they were talking about it, I guess just gave me that real dream of passion of wanting to go up there and fly it because I could tell that they were, you know, it was the flight of their life for them. It wasn't competition. It wasn't cross country. It wasn't anything like that. But just as free-flying goes, it's, you know, probably one of the most amazing things you'll ever see from a hang glider or a paraglider in your lifetime, you know.
I think when you're so used to looking at clouds and watching them form and dissipate, and to see this thing just rolling through the sky like a tsunami and being right next to it as it's doing it, is something you're never going to forget. So, yeah, it was – like I said, it was the first thing that I wanted to do when they said, oh, listen, you've got to come up with projects. I'm like, well, this is it.
And you said there were 11 or 12 pilots before – you're talking hang glider pilots? Pilots or were these all sailplane pilots that had flown it before?
No, hang glider pilots. So they went up there and the first guys, they were just car towing on the salt flats.
Probably, I don't know when the first one flew it. I'm going to say early 2000, maybe late 90s. Probably late 90s, actually. But yeah, I mean, they just, you know, every single one that flew it, they were just, you could just see that they all had the same look on their face. Like they'd just seen a ghost, and yeah, it was just like, "Okay, that's that's what I want to do." And, uh, convince Red Bull that, you know, that was a project that I wanted to do, and they gave it the green light. I said, "Listen, you know I'm not the first one. They're always chasing something to be the first, the first person to do this, first person to do that." Or I said, "Listen, I'm not going to be the first, but no one has actually documented the cloud." Um, they've taken their 35 millimeter cameras up there and developed film; some were in black and white, some were in color.
Um, and you know, they're just them flying with a little camera, taking photos of each other, and um, no one's actually done a documentary on the cloud and the phenomena that it is and had the amazing footage. I said, "If we get a helicopter and we have, you know, a good camera and good crew, I said this is gonna be a mind-blowing experience, not just for me, but for all the viewers that get to watch it." So they agreed on it. We went up there, spent two weeks in 2008, saw a couple morning glories out over the ocean. Never got to fly one, actually. That would be cool. First one, first one came through the first morning we got there after driving two and a half thousand kilometers, and um, we didn't have the dragonfly set up to to tow me up, and uh, we saw it coming, and my friend Leroy, he was like, "Uh, he was a tug pilot, he's done a lot of car towing.
I hadn't done much. He's like, I've got all the gear here, let's let's go hook you up." And uh, so it took a little while to get sorted, and this thing, watching it come, I'm like, "It's moving pretty fast." And by the time I got ready, the wind just started to pick up from the gust front of it and it was kind of crosswind and I wasn't too keen because I hadn't really car towed in my life and I'm like, oh, this could all go bad. And I'm like, well, just maybe wait a second, see what happens. And within 20 seconds, my dad was holding in front of my glider and I was holding in front of my glider. It went from zero kilometers an hour to 50 kilometers an hour. It's standing there, I'm looking at him going, "Don't let go of me, because I'm just gonna get flipped upside down and dragged along the salt that's in my glider." And then, you know, he's holding the nose that low with the wind that as soon as the front passed us, the wind went the other way.
I nearly got flipped upside down the other way. Um, so there is a lot of, uh, a lot of wind associated with that cloud that
Was probably to be great that you got that lesson from the ground right off the bat, to just give you some humility about what was going on there and just, and some understanding. I imagine you got to kind of see what you're not usually able to see, yeah.
100, I mean, just doing, you know, being set up in my harness, everything connected to the glider, but still being on the ground and having one go over me and seeing what the weather does underneath, it was certainly a good little eye opener that I, I don't want to be anywhere around it on the ground as far as landing or taking off goes. So, yeah, that was a great lesson. But, yeah, we spent two weeks after that up there in what they call one of the most isolated towns in all of Australia
and never got to fly more than glory. And that's what they call it was a reconnaissance trip. You know, we blew probably $50,000 on that trip. And then the next year they're like, all right, what's the project? I'm like, well, I still want to do this one. And they're like, are you sure this thing even exists? I'm like, look, there's videos, there's photos, it happens.
Is it a really tiny window every year? Is it just a certain kind of what sets it up? What is the town?
It's called Birktown. It's in far north Queensland at the bottom of the Cape Ork. You know, it's a weather phenomena that it does, it generally happens at a certain time of the year, which is September, October. Can happen throughout the year randomly. Basically, it's formed on the the peninsula of in the north part of Australia by the two sea breezes coming in from both sides of the coast, and you get this convergence, basically, that that forms up most days. The hot air goes up, midnight starts to come back down, and the main the main sea breeze from from the east coast pushes this phenomena down down down the Cape and down towards this little town of Birktown.
And sometimes it's when everything works out, it's got the cloud with it and it's just this rolling cloud front, basically convergence line that's been pushed from, you know, starts about midnight at night. They call it the morning glory because it pretty much hits Birktown right on sunrise. Sometimes it comes through in the dark. You know, there's some mornings there where we woke up to the sound of 30 knots of wind, and we just knew that it was a morning glory going through. I'm like, shit, we've missed it. It came too early this morning. Sometimes it's a little bit later. But, yeah, I think that's where it got its name was, you know, this phenomena that just happens in the morning up there, and, you know, it's just glorious to look at, you know.
It was mostly the fishermen. It's the biggest town in Australia for barramundi fishing. fishing, so people kind of know Burke Town from that. And then they, they see this cloud that just mysteriously goes over them, and it gets dark and gloomy, and they think they're going to die out in the fishing boat. And then, all of a sudden, it's a beautiful day again five minutes later.
But it's, but unlike it sounds like it's a rolling conversion, so it's, it's, it's moving down the coast. Is kind of one beast, is one animal. It's, in other words, it's not, it's not a stationary, you know, know convergence is typically pretty stationary, you know, in a mountain or something, but this one's actually moving. It's kind of like
a tidal wave, so it's kind of like throwing a rock in a pond and then you get those ripples going through the pond, um, which is basically the effect that it has in the sky. As the the ground heats up, it slows the morning glory down, um, just from the friction on the ground, uh, and then eventually dissipates just because it does. It's not sliding across the the ground like, you know, like it's on ice, um, when when it's cool. You know, it starts out pretty fast. The clouds actually rolling probably a lot quicker in the in the night time, uh, than it is when you actually get to fly it. The first cloud I flew was probably traveling in the 40 to 50 kilometer an hour range across the ground, um, and obviously you're flying sideways along the cloud, so so, you know, I was doing speeds of 70 to 90 Ks an hour, basically to keep up with the cloud as I was flying along it.
Yeah. So I guess to answer your question about flying a paraglider on it, it's going to take some balls.
Really at the outer limits here. Yeah. Because if you come down through it, you're toast. You've got to stay on the, is it like flying wave in a sense? Are you flying the leeward side or you've got to stay on the windward side?
Well, it's kind of not really a windward side because it's just going around in circles. So you're basically just staying on the leading edge side, which is all the lifts going up and then it's going all down on the backside. It's
all going down. So if you get flipped over, you get flipped to the back of your toes. It's pretty
much like surfing a back-to-front wave. wave. Um, so you can just imagine if you're trying to surf the the backside of the wave and you're getting too high on it, all of a sudden you get sucked back over the falls and you're gone. Um, you get the turbulence, the road, or the sink, all that stuff. Yeah, so it's it's kind of a bit unique in that sense, you know? The first cloud I flew was almost horizon, horizon, you know? You just you realize how small you are against this cloud. That's just, you know, you can just see it just just rolling and it's it's pretty incredible to to see from the sky. We'll
have all the links to that. Those of you listening in the, in the show notes, it's outrate. The footage isn't, I mean, most of you, I'm sure, have already seen it, but it's just outrageous. The footage is outrageous. It
Is and I, you know, Red Bull went all out on that, uh, documentary. They, they got absolutely the best of the best, uh, for the production. They flew the director in from Canada; they flew the head. They had cameramen in from New York. They flew, you know, these guys have done all the big adventure films around the world, all the different sports. And every single one of the crew agreed that it was in their top few best projects they've ever done in their life just to see that phenomena. Most of them got to see it from the air, whether they're in the helicopter or in the dragonfly filming or in some other aircraft. A lot of them got to see it from the air. A few only saw it from the ground, but even the ones that were on the ground, they just said watching this thing come, and then getting that, that strong gust of wind and the red bull marquee nearly blowing over sideways and the tripods falling over, and they said it was just incredible to just see this thing.
So yeah, it was, you know, I wasn't the only one that was blown away at the end of that documentary, but obviously did
You get it. The second year was it? How many times, yeah?
so it It was the second year we went up there with the full crew. There was a huge, you know, I said there was a big budget. I think it was day six or day seven. So we'd been waiting and, I mean, I don't like to throw numbers out there, but I think we were in summer and $30,000 to $40,000 a day standby.
So every day I was calling to the head office and trying to convince them that, yeah, this glory is going to come after spending two weeks of the year before and not getting one. It was starting to be quite an expensive project, but once we got that first day, you know, everyone was just—they couldn't believe, you know, the photographers and the director and stuff, they were just looking at the footage straight away, as you can imagine that night, and they were just like, "Oh my god, we have some of the most insane footage we've ever seen in our our life." And anything, and then we got another one the next day, which was a lot different and a lot more scarier. It was—they say the best ones come when it's, it's all foggy in the morning, so the ground, you just have this layer of fog on the ground.
But, uh, the problem we had with that was the dragonfly couldn't take off and fly out to the location, but they just got this small window of opportunity. Um, the fog just broke for a for a little bit, and they took off, landed where we were, and I quickly, uh, hooked the tow rope up. We started towing, and we were literally—we towed into the the bottom of the morning glory. Legally speaking, I don't think it was that legal, because I actually lost sight of the dragonfly. The tow rope's only 70 meters long, and I immediately said, "Do a U-turn turn." Uh, I think we're at the bottom of the glory, and I kind of knew what was going to be associated, you know? Uh, so we spent a little bit of, probably 20, 30 seconds where I was staring at just the tow rope going.
I hope weak link doesn't break, because I can't see anything, and uh, we popped out to basically outrunning the glory, so we'd done a 180 degree turn from takeoff And I looked over my right shoulder, and I looked up, and it was, it was like a 2,000-foot wave. We'd literally just popped out the bottom of this morning glory cloud, and it was fog as far as I could see in front of me, and just a 2,000-foot wave right behind me. And we just towed up alongside this cloud for 10 minutes, I guess. And I was hesitant to release from the plane because, because I still couldn't see the ground, and I had no idea where I was.
There was a lot of forest, and there's a lot of crocodiles up there, and I knew that I had to just fly one direction because of the forest downwind of me. Obviously, there's an ocean there too, so there was a lot of things that were playing on my mind. And the moment I released from the plane, I realized that the cloud was moving that fast, and there wasn't that much lift on it that the speed I was flying, I was, was literally just maintaining. Uh, I wasn't going up, I wasn't going down, but I was just, just keeping up with the front edge of this cloud. And, uh, I kind of spent, I think, 30 to 40 minutes with no visual of the ground. Like, I mean, I had visual in the sky, but it was just, yeah. So I was just flying this, this cloud like it was the biggest ski jump you've seen in your life, right?
On the front edge, give it, uh, and eventually the the fog, you know, once it started to heat up the ground, the fog burnt off and, uh, I flew out from the cloud. I think I did 50, 50 something miles in the cloud that day and, yeah, flew out in front and landed before factor. Yeah, yeah, it is, it was, that was the day my eyes really lit up, but yeah, that was, you know, to get two morning glories in a row and and for for them to be so different. I mean, that day we had, I think, 10 or 11 of them lined up back-to-back. So they came as a big set. So behind the one I had, all I could see was clouds as far as I could see, just lines, just like big waves coming through. Whereas the first one was just one cloud and it was blue skies and everything was just perfect.
But day two was
Were the ones that were all lined up on day two, was it really more like a wave phenomenon? Were they stacked up on top of one another? Were they just –
No, like they were behind each other just like a set of waves coming in. So like two, three kilometers behind the one I was on was another big one and then another one and another one. The helicopter went to 10,000 or 11,000 feet to capture all of them for the doco because they couldn't believe what they were saying. They're like the helicopter pilot said he was that scared flying because he'd never been that high in a helicopter. They mostly do mustering and stuff like that. You know, they fly low level. He goes, "I'd never been to 10,000 feet in my life." It was the first time I went that high in a helicopter. He didn't like being that high, you know? So there's a lot of firsts for everybody that day. The footage they got from that day was just incredible because I, I literally look like a speck along this cloud.
You know, there's a shot where they, they zoom right in. They had the center flex camera, so they had amazing camera, and they zoom right in on me, and then they just zoom out, and they just keep zooming out so they can see the, the full cloud, and I literally disappear. Like, that's how small I am against it. So, yeah, some amazing footage on there. And, um, you know, it's been the most famous thing I've done for Red Bull in my 14 years with them. I, I still do interviews for it. You know, people still call me to do the
Footage is just... the footage is outrageous, and I remember seeing it when it first came out and just having my mind blown. And, you know, looking at it again yesterday, it was kind of the same experience. It's just, Jesus, I mean, I think it's... I'm sure it's a little different for people that fly to... to see you flying, that, you know, because you can imagine it in some ways. You know, you're never going to get the experience like you did, but, you know, I can imagine being in that cockpit just going, "What? This is fucking outrageous." Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. So, I mean, for me, that was... because that was a dream come true, and to do it twice was— to have two of your dreams come true in two days was pretty amazing.
Is it something you would do to just go do now or was that second day enough of a, man, I don't know, is it really right on the edge of safety risk or is it – that was just a really bad day? Yeah,
I mean, obviously for me I had helicopter support, I had medical, I had everything with all the projects I've done with Red Bull. Obviously it's a factor they have to have for me to do it, whereas the guys that did it before me or there's only been one guy that's done it after me and he got swallowed into it. But none of them had anything. They just went up there and hooked themselves to the back of a car and got towed up. So it is something I would do again. I actually was trying to get talked into doing it this year. A friend of mine had a trike and he was going up there and he's like, I got the trike. You could just come along. And it was very tempting and I didn't end up doing it. But I kind of would like to do it on a sailplane just because only one in four actually get to the coast.
A lot of the times the best morning glories are out over the ocean. And I think just to experience in the sailplane, uh, having that extra speed and just racing it 200 plus k's an hour down this, this cloud front in and over the ocean, and things like that would be just something a little different, not to say I wouldn't do it in the hang glider again. I just, uh, you know, it's, I know what's involved. You know, I've spent a month up there and flowing it twice, and it's, there's really nothing in the town, there's nothing to do without it, and there's a, you know, it's a lot of waking up at four o'clock in the morning, setting up in the dark, and you know, there's a lot of effort into flying it, and I've been fortunate that I've done it twice, and you know, like I said, I'd love to do it again, but um, it, you know, it's an expensive thing and
You know, this year was probably a great opportunity to do it because you
were there well
He was there. The main cost was there, which is to get someone to tow you up, but uh, yeah, you know, it didn't happen. And I won't say—I won't do it again—but uh, it just hasn't been that high on my list because I feel like I've already achieved it, and you know, yeah, I've done it, but tick
the box, yeah, well, that that's a perfect segue, Johnny. You mentioned, you said a whole bunch of words there that reminded me a lot of Texas, uh, you know, endurance, nothing to do, bad weather, lots of patience, uh, I don't know if it's hot up there in Cape York. I remember being pretty hot up there when I did the Dane Tree and stuff, but Texas, let's talk Texas. I, Cody and I and and uh, Donna Zette went down to have a go at the world record two summers ago, and that was right after Sebastian went 50 something and and broke the paragliding record, and then this year he went 608 or something. So, uh, Texas has been on everybody's map lately. You've put in a lot of time down there as your buddy Dustin has, and he was on the show, he talked about that day, uh, that when he got the record and you were, you were chasing him hard at the end and just missed out, and you've put in quite a bit of time since then.
But let's talk a little bit about Texas. I'd love to just a get your, you know, because you went back to make a film about chasing the record, um, recently too, and I watched that yesterday, that was good, uh, but didn't have have the weather as we didn't. Sebastian seems to have nailed it. He's down in Dallas and he's gotten it figured out and he just shows up on the day. But for those of us, I live a long way by car away from there. This is a big country as yours is as well, but you have to really invest coming across the pond. It's kind of brutal, man, but it's fun, isn't it? It's kind of addictive in a weird way. I don't know why, but it is. I can't wait to go back, but I'd love to get your thoughts on texas and and uh are you done with that chase or is it still on your mind
Um, I, I think owning the longest flight in the world, uh, and anything is, is pretty special. Owning the second longest flight in the world, well, it's also pretty special.
yep yeah
It's, uh, you know, it's always, it's always been a dream of mine to own that world record, um, and that's why I did. Like, you have put in time in, in Texas, and, and trying to achieve that goal, uh, it's as you mentioned, it's all of the above. It's hot, it's desolate, it's not much to do, and you're only there for one reason, and that's to, to spend all day in the air flying, uh, trying to fly out of Texas. But as we know, that, that panhandle is quite long, and it's, uh, no one's done it yet.
Yeah, you know, it's—it's hard work. It's obviously, it's a lot of planning, uh, for us we need to have a plane there, which requires a lot of money, a lot of time getting that there. And, um, and then, you know, I've always said the hardest thing about owning a world record is being there on the day. So, you know, to—to get to the point of actually being there and able to fly on a potentially world record day is—is half the work. The flight itself, well, that's obviously a bit of hard work. And then, once you achieved it, the—the hardest part is, uh, is actually getting the claim in through and getting it actually ratified.
So, um, yeah, you spend more time trying to do that than you do everything else, I think so. Uh, yeah, but you know, for me, I can't think of anything better than Spending 11 hours in the air and covering a lot of ground, it's um, something that I've always loved to do. And you know, something I chased here locally, always had a battle with my father of owning the site record here. And you know, and that kind of just moved on once I, you know, I've I've got a handful of flights of the 500-kilometer mark from our what we call coastal site here, which was the Australian record for a very long time. And, you know, seeing these guys flying that long distance in Texas always had that drawcard for me to want to go there and give it a crack myself.
So I thought, well, it's got to be much better flying than I have got here in my backyard. So I want to have a crack at going the long distance, you know. Yeah, I guess I went there one year, 2006 maybe, early days. I think Manfred had the record of 700 kilometers and then Mikey Barber flew a little further but not far enough to claim a world record.
He didn't beat it by 1%, I think was the record, the rules back then. He did 705 kilometers and he needed to do 707. um to actually well
I didn't know that rule, yeah.
So he, you know, Mikey, unfortunately, just passed away this year. But, you know, for, for many years, he had the longest flight in the world. Just wasn't, wasn't a ratified one because he didn't go one percent further than, uh, than the previous record. Uh, they eventually changed that over time, but they also changed a lot of other rules. Back then, they were towing to 10,000 feet and releasing from the plane, and it's been a big one, and getting a three a free 40, 50 k's in the early hours of the day when it was the hardest to stay up. You know, you've flown to Parter or Texas, and, uh, you know, the hardest part of the flight is the first hour.
You're flying through lock gates, few landings, cloud base is sometimes, sometimes 1,500 feet off the ground. Sometimes, if you're lucky, I think the day Dustin and I did it was about 2,000 feet. So it's low and you've got to go crosswind a lot of time, cross tailwind on every glide to get around the airspace. It's downwind of you. So it's a really challenging first hour or so. And for those guys that flew the 700Ks, They were towed to 10,000 feet and had a huge head start, which was something that we weren't able to do. You know, they put the rules in that flying to a thousand meters or towing to a thousand meters only, so yeah, there was a bit of a disadvantage. But, you know, it wasn't obviously didn't mean that you couldn't break the world record; it was just, you just had to, uh, do it the harder way.
And I guess on that particular day, or that particular event, that we were down there in Zapata, Texas, Dustin, you know, I, I arrived in the country from, I can't remember where, I was Brazil or somewhere. And, uh, Dustin, um, you know, I talked to him as soon as I got off the plane. I had to drive from San Antonio, I think I was down to Sapata, and he said, "Uh, ah, dude, you guys, you know, it's bad week of weather, you're not going to go anywhere." And I'm like, "Come on down, like this, you know, it's going to be good, we'll have fun, we'll try and go far." And it's like, "It's going to suck, the weather's no good, it's not going to happen." And, you know, prior to that Texas, uh, Texas encampment, Dust and I had broken the, uh, the East Coast record from in Florida, and we flew the whole day together, and we landed together.
We did, I don't know, 480 kilometers or something, whatever it was. So I was like, "Come on, I need someone to fly with, you know? Come on down." He's like, "No, no, no." And then, you know, four or five, six days passed, and all of a sudden the weather started looking good, and I get a phone call from Dust. "I'm coming down." Oh, now the weather's looking good, you're coming down because he was able to drive, you know? He was in Phoenix, he was still a day's drive away, but um, you know, he was able to get down there, and he's like, "But I got no retrieve and I got nothing." You know, I'm like, "Oh, well, good luck." Um, and anyway, you know, we kind of had it—was we only had one tow plane, so it was like, "Who goes first?" and all that sort of thing. And on that particular day, I, you know, I kind of had a priority, and uh, I
Kind of let Dustin go first, I said. Oh, it was kind of a little bit blue, and I just, I didn't want to deck it early, and I said, "Oh, you go first, Dustin." And um, you know, just at the time after he took off, to while he was tired, you know, he just went, "I should have been on the tow rope." Like, the clouds just started forming. He kind of got off right at the right time, I think. Possibly could have gone earlier, um, in the blue, but it was a good time. And by the time the tow plane got back and towed me up, I was 15 minutes later, you know, so we had a little bit of a hop, skip, and a jump on me. Yeah, you know, I was chasing him down the whole day, and I think after three or four hours, I eventually caught him about 180 kilometer mark. And then, uh, yeah, we flew together for a long time.
Uh, it was, it wasn't that great of a day. Uh, we had wind, we had clouds, climbs were pretty average. Uh, every now and again we'd get a good climb. Um, we went through the hill country side by side. He got kind of low, and I, uh, kind of left him behind for, for a glide or two, and then I got low and he came over the top of me, and then we're sort of leapfrogging each other for a while. And then, um, I got low in one glide, and, and I just, from then on, I was just chasing me. It was just like a cloud in front of me the whole day, and I just kept chasing, chasing, chasing, and put myself into a situation, probably around the 500 kilometer mark, I guess, where I ended up quite low, scratching for a while, and then he was gone.
I never saw him again, and I just said, "I just gotta do my own thing, you know, just reset, get high, stop racing from down low trying to chase him, and just" you know, re-establish yourself and do your own thing and yeah, and uh, so I just kind of flew by myself and I got really high on one glide and I was like, "This is it. I can, I can just about make the 700 kilometer mark from this glide," you know, or I've got it, like I just, like, I just got to stay. And I had no idea where Dustin was, um, radio silence, and uh, I just don't glide. It was silky smooth, I think. The clouds, it was like maybe a couple wispies left at that point. I'm just gliding and uh, I think maybe three or four k's before the where the current world record stood, uh, Dustin just popped up in front of me in the horizon.
He was like half a k in front of me and he'd been been climbing from low and I came in and we were like wingtip to wingtip as we circled in about 50 up and we basically, we crossed the the world record line together, um, tip to tip. You know, we were kind of, I don't know, I think his radio had stopped working, we're kind of just yelling at each other, you know, we're that close, we could talk, and we were pretty excited, both of us at that moment, um, and uh, yeah, I was kind of, I had the GoPro on, I was trying to film the whole thing, you, you know, and then we kind of topped out on that climb or the next climb and the sun started to go down and I wanted to capture the, actually before that, Dustin just kept stopping.
He just like kept circling in zeros and 20s up. I'm just like looking. I'm like, I've been flying for 10 and a half hours. We've broken the world record. Like just let's go and land. You know, like I was done. I was just like, I'm over it. We achieved what we came here to do, which was break the world record, and we've done that. Now, do we really need to sit in zeros watching the sun go down? You know, apparently we did. I obviously didn't have the patience, and uh, you know, we were on glide and he stopped, and I was like, I just kept gliding, and I was trying to get the camera going because the sun, the sun was setting, and I wanted to capture that, that sunset moment of being up there all day and breaking a world record.
And, you know, I probably went about 300, 400 metres and I looked back and it looked like he was climbing. So I turned around. I flew back in the wind, which was obviously a mistake on my part. Came in below him, 100 metres below him, and there was nothing there. And then he turned around and went on glide. And, yeah, we basically both glided to the ground, but he had that extra 100 meters on me then, and um, flew that extra two kilometers. And yeah, well, still owns the world records. Uh, yeah, I should have just... I could see
the frustration and
Uh, not not turned around, but um, you know, I, I, I achieved the world, you know, breaking the world distance record, which is what I wanted to do. And um, you know, I've been standing for 12 years, I think, so, you know, I'd gone there. I achieved what I wanted to do. Um, Dustin got the better of me on that last little moments of concentration while I was a little bit distracted, I think. And yeah, I just, you know, a lot of, a lot of people say, well, he should have just landed with you and, you know, share the record together, and that's what the paragliders do. And, uh, you know, you guys wouldn't have done that flight without each other. And, you know, there's not, there's not any part of me that thinks that either one of us couldn't have done that flight without the other person.
You know, I Don't think that, obviously. It probably helped us flying together sped things up a little bit. I would like to think if he wasn't there, I still would have had the same outcome, and I'm sure he thinks the same way. So, but yeah, it was funny because Dustin, you know, we had, uh, and, well, Dustin and I go way back to early days here when he first came to Australia. I'm not sure if you could touch on that subject, but there was a lot of rivalry between Dustin and I for many years.
And so he got one back on me, let's say, on that flight, which was a good one to get me back on, I'm not going to lie.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, you know, like, like I said, a lot of people think that he should have, you know, it wasn't very sportsman sportsman like, and things like that. But, uh, at the end of the day, everybody would have done the same thing, so yeah.
And I mean, it was, it was, um, you know, I remember, I remember him, he, we talked about this too, and I brought that, that very subject in, and he said it was, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't really the plan. You know, you guys didn't have that gentleman's agreement to begin with. It was, you know, chasing the world record, and you know, it's so easy to look back on something with 20/20 hindsight, and, and, but I, you know, in, in my, my own history, which isn't as long as either of yours, it was really the Brazilians, and not until after, you know, they were definitely chasing the world record back in the mid-2000s as well, but you know, they started, they started really doing this team thing in 2007, but really got going on it when they broke the 500 in 2015,
I believe it was. And then there's been a string of them since. But they kind of taught the rest of the world the sexiness of landing together, working together all day and having this and really putting the machinery together for who does what in certain situations. And if you're low, you do this. And if you're high, you do this and, you know, really working together. And then, then you land together. And I don't think that that was something that was on really anybody's radar until they started doing it. And, and now it's very much, you know, because I got to fly with Donajete, who was part of that, you know, record chasing team in Brazil since the beginning.
And he really taught us a lot about that. And so when we went to Texas, that was, it was very much a team thing, but anything else I've ever done with anybody, you're on your own. That's what this sport's all about. You know, it's, it's flying solo and, uh, you know, we've all got egos, but yeah, that must've been, uh, it must've been, it's just like, ouch.
The difference with what the paragliders are doing and our situation was that our record is measured from the time we released from the plane. So it's not from where we took off from. It's from our release point. point, and the odds of dust and I releasing in the same point after being towed for 10, 11 minutes up in the sky by the dragonfly is I hadn't even thought it is probably, you know, a very small chance that we released in the same, you know, same, right?
So you couldn't have really done it as
It turned out we were probably almost in the same same exact distance, uh, point, maybe not the the same exact location, but the same distance. We probably would have flown the same, uh, the same distance, but at the end of the day, it was high odds that even if we'd landed together, one of us was going to have a longer flight than the other. Oh, I hadn't even thought so. You know, like I said, everybody would have done the same thing. I, I would have flown that extra two kilometers if I was above Dustin. Don't worry about that. Or I might have found... Well, you guys want to have a reunion? You, no,
it's a
10-year reunion coming up.
There you go. But, yeah, you know, I've done a lot of flying with Dustin over the years and, you know, we're good friends and once we get to the skies, we certainly like to battle it out. So, yeah, it was one to him on that one. He was quite a few down before that. So it was a good win for him, that one. But, you know, like I said, at the end of the day, to to have both broken the world record and and achieve what we went there to do was um main goal, and I felt like I crossed the goal line, but I just didn't get the extra bonus points at the end, you know? Sure, but yeah, I think you know, for me to to tell people, you know, "Oh, you hang glide? Yeah, so you just jumped on the cliff and you fly to the bottom." I'm like, well, not really.
We actually can go quite a long way. It's like, how far? Like, you know, you probably saw in that in that wind rider a documentary that I did, you know, people you Know, they try to guess on how far you're going to fly, and some say, "Oh, 10 miles, 20 miles, maybe 40 miles." And to think that you can fly that far, um, it just blows people's minds. They're like, "But you have no engine, how do you do that?" Yeah, and for me, it's I know the old world record, the 700 kilometers was. I used to do a lot of flying from Brisbane, been here down to Sydney, or when I travel overseas, I'd always take a plane trip, and that was exactly 700 kilometers. So every time I took off in the plane, I'd get a window seat and I'd stare out there and I'd watch all the territory you got to go over, and I think, "Man, that's a long day in a hang glider." You know, it's a lot of ground to cover, and uh, you know, I do that every single flight.
I just go, "So that's what I got to do. I got to fly that far to break the world record." And for me to be able to tell people around here that, you know, the longest flight I've done, the hang glider, is further than Brisbane to Sydney, they just go, "What? In one day? Or do you get to stop and have dinner and stuff and go the next day?" I'm like, "No, it's just 11 hours straight." That, you know, they just look at you like, "Wow, that's that's a big achievement." They don't really, most of
The time you don't even really understand it, I remember landing in Texas and a guy pulled up alongside. He has a big, huge truck, you know, proper Texas truck, and and uh, "Where'd you come from?" "I came from Hebronville," you know, which is right down near Zapata, and we were, you know, I don't remember. I remember we were north of the Hill Country. It wasn't a huge one, but it was over 300K. And he just couldn't – where did you jump from? Well, Hebronville.
How high was the plane?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they think you're a parachuter. No, no, I came off
the ground. Yeah. You got blown all the way? Yeah,
it was pretty funny. Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's the joys of Texas is breaking a world record. the non-joys of Texas. Uh, you probably saw in that last documentary I did, too, of being escorted out by deputies and police and Border Patrol. And, you know, I had a little interesting landing when I tried for the records a few years ago with Red Bull, and I landed on a big property right on the border of Mexico. And I mean, I didn't look like a Mexican, but they still treated me like I just, just jumped over the border. So, uh, you know, there was—it looked like a funeral possession when I got out of this, this property. There was, I think, 10 or 12 cop cars and Border Patrols and all these
flashing lights going on, and there they were, delivering this hangar pilot, um, back to to the retrieved car that had my passport and all the camera crew there waiting to film it. It was pretty funny, but you know, they had to go through their the protocols and do everything as they do down there. And yeah, you know, you can, you can land out and in Texas and be walking for a long ways. I mean, paragliding is different. I've since found out, you just pack the thing up, stick it on your back, and walk with the hang glider. It's not quite that easy. It's, you land behind a lock gate, and you know, people have had helicopter retrievals because it's, you know, that five, ten miles off the road or behind lock gates, and they don't want to carry of the glider that far.
Um, other people, yeah, walked all day. They've done 10, 12 minutes of flying and spent six hours getting out of there, which they say you can. It's a, you can fly 300 k's there and get back sooner than somebody that flies 10 kilometers, and that's, that's a true story. Yeah, no, we saw
that in our case, yeah.
They land out, and they're in the middle of nowhere with, with no roads and, or locked gates, and they're, they're walking, they're hiking for, you know, all day long in that hot, blistering 40 degree heat. Yeah, yeah.
I, I, uh, when I was down there, I was training for the X-Alps, so you know, I was pretty fit. And you know, like you said, that first hour is the section that's just nasty; it's just mesquite and wind farms and no roads. And the roads that there are, they're all behind gates, and they're not lined up with the wind. And, uh, yeah, I land, I, you know, flew 10k or 30k, you know, nothing, and landed. And, uh, walking out was like, "Man, this is actually life-threatening." It is. Yeah, it was so hot. And so, I mean, a couple times I thought, "I'm just gonna have to leave my gear, I don't think I can," you know, because we're not flying X-Alps gear when we're doing that. We got big, heavy kit, nothing like hang lighting kit, but still little heavy kit.
And just, man, this is, it was torture, it is brutal, no
I've been fortunate, only I only had to land out once there off the beaten track, so to speak. So I've, uh, yeah, I've been pretty fortunate with my Texas, uh, encampments, but, uh, yeah, I definitely tread carefully and I work very hard on every low save because, you know, you know, sometimes every five circles could save of you are now walking, so you know, just getting you to that next road potentially. Um, as you said, the roads don't line up with the wind. You're always crossing roads, and if you can get to a main road, it might be another 10, 15 kilometers downwind of you. If you can just stay in the air for five more minutes, you're going to get glide to that road, and you know, your life's just gotten so much better already. Even if you land, um, you just feel like you've accomplished something.
So, uh, yeah, right. Yeah, it's a hard place. It's, you know, it's a great place to do records, but it's also Can be very challenging if you're on the ground, so yeah.
It's not a gimme, for sure, Johnny. I want to be mindful of your time and wrap things up here. This has been a super pleasure, and I could do this for hours, but before we do, two, two quick questions. They're quite different. Uh, the first is, if you could go back to your 50-hour self, which was somewhere in your early teens, sounds like, what would you do differently? And then I think everybody would love to know when we can start traveling again, what's next for you? What's a goal? What's on your horizon? Is it more Texas? Is it world-breaking encampments or is it something else?
All right. Back to my 50-hour self. Well, I was still at high school, flying on weekends. Uh, still didn't have a license at that point. Uh, so I was relying on, um, my father or friends to come pick me up and take me flying. You know, I guess for me, I was just, I was just so into flying and and trying to fly far. At that point, it was all about going distance. I was staying in the air as long as I could and, um, yeah, I didn't know what I would a change from that, you know, probably taking more days off from school and flying more so
Your advice would be to do more of it. I like it.
yeah, I certainly don't look back and think that I wish I'd changed anything. You know, I've had a great, great life and, uh, yeah, I, I would just probably fly more if I could have back then, uh, because yeah, I had full-time school and, uh, every Every now and again I took sports days off when the weather was too good to go to school. There was definitely several occasions where I got to school and turned around and hitchhiked my way back home just in time to see my father driving out with his hang glider on. I'd be like, how about we go back and get my glider too?
So, yeah, probably would have taken more days off from school to fly.
And what's next? Well, that's a great question. And I've literally been traveling since I was 21, to nearly 20 years traveling the world and competing and sort of just not really having a plan, just doing all the comps. And now that I've been at home for two years, stuck here, it's kind of, I don't know, it feels like that dream of flying all the time is sort of coming to an end. I don't know why, but probably, probably just because I haven't been able to travel for so long. But it's been kind of nice too, just being in one place and not living out of a suitcase for more than a couple of weeks at a time.
So, yeah, I don't know. It's a funny world out there right now, and I really have no idea when I'm going to be able to travel overseas next. I mean, I'd like to think it's next year, but we've still got strict restrictions here in Australia, and, yeah, times are tough. So right now I'm just sort of enjoying and living day by day, seeing what the future holds when they open the prison cells up, I guess. And if that's the case, yeah, I'm obviously keen to go and do some more flying around the world and compete and probably not as much as I was. But, yeah, there's been talks of me trying to do some paragliding comps.
I don't know, uh, I'm quite happy with the glider I'm flying right now, and I don't see me wanting to, to go to more collapsible wings than what I'm in right now. But, um, I think if I did do one, it would certainly be on the glider I'm flying, and, um, it would, you know, just see how I go against the racing guys on, on the lower performing wing, and, uh, something like that. But, uh, that would, would probably be more of a local thing in Australia, I think, if that happens in the next six months or so. But, uh, yeah, fortunately, a lot of times the hang gliding and paragliding comes clash, so hang gliding still got my priority, even though people think I'm just a paraglider pilot these days because that's all I've been doing.
I still, still love hang gliding, and, uh, certainly wouldn't trade it in for paragliding. But, uh, you know, they're just, uh, different gliders in the air doing the same thing, and, uh, I think, you know, I don't personally, I don't know why paragliders don't fly hang gliders. You know, there's, I believe, you can learn, uh, you can learn things from both sports, for, for the sport that you really like to do. And just one thing paragliding's taught me, it's, it's patience. I thought I had patience when I hang gliding, but paragliding's taught me that you can actually have a lot more patience than I thought I could ever have. So, uh, yeah, it's, uh, uh, it's been fun.
Johnny Wicked, man. I really appreciate your time and it's nice to see your smile. And, uh, I hope when things free up, we get a chance to fly together somewhere. I've been looking forward to that for years. So maybe Valle or something, but, uh, good luck with everything. Yeah. Wow. Maybe we'll see each other in Texas one of these days. That'd be, that'd be cool.
Very nice. Maybe I'll be on a paraglider in Texas.
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I know Dustin's been eyeing it, you know? He's flying them now too, so he's, uh, he's threatening to get down there as well. But good luck with everything, I hope you guys get to travel again soon, and, uh, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. No
Worries, thank you if
You find the Cloudbase Mayhem valuable, you can support it in a lot of different ways. You can give us a rating on iTunes or Stitcher; however, you get your podcast, that goes a long ways and helps spread the word. You can blog about it on your own website or share it on social media. You can talk about it on the way out to launch with with your pilot friends. I know a lot of interesting conversations have happened that way. And of course, you can support us financially. This show does take a lot of time, a lot of editing, a lot of storage and music and all kinds of behind the scenes costs. 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. 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 Cloudbase Mayhem. 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, a little video cast 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'll be 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 Cloudbase Mayhem merchandise, t-shirts or hats or anything, you should be all set up. You should have an account and you should be able to access all that bonus material now. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your support and we'll see you on the next show. Thank you.