Thank you for watching. I've been in tenure. I've been flying for almost 30. His favorite flying partner is his father, who taught him how to fly. They still fly together all the time. And he's a really fun and interesting individual. But his passion is VR coaching. He's got a company called Flight Coach. And we find out what he's teaching people how to learn when there's no risk through VR. And a really interesting platform.
Something he's super passionate about. And something I hadn't heard of. And he sent me a YouTube video of how it all works. And I watched it and went, yeah, okay, we need to have a talk. So we talk about his past and his history. And some of what he saw were shortcomings in teaching. And of course, in aviation, shortcomings could be harsh on participants. Trying to learn and thought that there must be a way where we could retain more pilots. And have them. And be able to learn a lot of these things that are pretty easy in the beginning. But like Russ Ogden says, paragliders are easy to fly, but hard to fly well. So getting people through those early humps. But the coaching is also very relevant for pilots who have a lot more hours as well.
And is only getting better by the day. So this was a lot of fun. And I think you're going to find it really interesting. Before we get to the talk, just a real quick bit of housekeeping. A couple of events. I'm running this fall. The first is the Red Rocks Wide Open. September 10th to 17th. The registration opens for that April 1st. And it's a race to goal seven day comp. That's the US Nationals. I believe we'll soon shortly be Canadian Nationals as well. We're going to firm that up this week. And a pre PWC. So great way to get letters. We've got a lot of international pilots coming. And it's an incredible venue. And one of the most beautiful places in the world. And at that time of year, you can still expect to get some great pilots. It's super tall. And a nice place to have oxygen. And there's a lot more information.
The registration will be on Air Tribune. You can find it there. Just search for Red Rocks Wide Open. Or in various other places. And the second event, which I'm really excited about. Will be the second X Red Rocks. Which is a three day stage hike and fly race. This last year was a huge success. Really fun. And this year we've got a bunch of the X-Helms European legends coming over. And also giving presentations. Patrick Von Cannell, who was second last year. Aaron Duragotti, the Italian and Paul Guschlbauer are both coming. Between the two of them, they have 11 Red Bull X-Helms races under their belt. And a whole bunch of other stuff. The Dolomites Superman, or Superfly. And the Dolomites Man, and the X-Pyr. And a bunch.
They're both giving a presentation Tuesday night. Before the race. And we've got Tanguy Renaud-Goud, who is the record right now for the most vertical climb in a single day. And flown back down. He crushed that last summer with 13,320 meters. I believe. He also won the UAA Hike and Fly Championships this year. An absolute beast. My buddy Tim Roches, test pilot for Niviuk is coming over. He's been doing really well in the last few years in the Borners to Fly and other events. And we've got a few other big names that I'll be announcing again shortly. So, pretty exciting stuff. So, check that out. Xredrocks.com The application period for that closes April 20th. So, right around the corner. Hope to see a bunch of you there.
Enjoy the show with Boss. Cheers.
Boss, it's great to have you on the show. We've been trying this for a long time. I say that to all my guests. I must not be very good at scheduling things. But I know you're working hard over there on your virtual reality coaching project. So, we're going to get into that. But I thought a really cool place to start was something you just mentioned when we were chatting there before we started recording. You've been flying with your best friend who happens to be your dad. That's a cool relationship for 27 years. Let's start there. Well,
first of all, I'm stoked to be here. I'm very happy with us doing this. I've been flying with my dad for 27 years. I've been flying with my dad for 27 years. Man, that's a long time. I actually started with hang gliding. You know my dad, he's a skydiver originally, making formation jumps. He always was into the high energy of the jump and of the free fall. And he actually got suspended over a cornfield and he asked his instructor why it took me so long to get down. What the hell was that? And the instructor told him, that's a thermal. They're very nasty. They make you take longer to get down, takes longer to get back into the airplane. So he said, no, I want more of that. What can I do to get more of that?
So he got into hang gliding and I went with him from the age of like 8, 9. I went with him, watched him fly and I made my first flight on a hang glider at the age of 12. Wow. A tandem or solo? No, it was a solo flight. It was just a ground winch flight. And from that moment on, I was hooked with flying.
What was it like for your dad to get you into it at such a young age? I mean, he obviously knew the risks back then. Did he have any reservations or did your mom?
Yeah, that was... We can talk very long about that actually. Let me give you the short lay of the land. I think he was he was convinced that it would be fun to do this, that it would be exciting and that I would be being the responsible young man that I was, that I would be able to deal with this in a relatively safe way. One of the things he did to actually keep me safe is he told me, son, you can only get your license. We have different licensing levels, but let's say the first level is the intro level and then you are able to make some turns with a hang glider under the supervision of an instructor. And with the second level, you can fly locally without an instructor being present.
And he told me, I will not let you fly unsupervised and do all the practical examinations before you've done your theoretical examination. You have to do that first, which was not like an official rule. Most people, they first got all their tasks done and then did the theoretical examination and studying at the end as like a last thing to do to cross off the list. But he said, no, I really want you to study hard, to have this as a basis for everything that you learn in practice. So actually that meant doing stuff in reverse, learning about a lot of things that were not being offered to me in the actual flying, in the practicality of flying at that moment in my career. And that made me, that really helped me a lot.
It saved my life actually once. Wow.
Let's hear about that.
You want to hear that story too? Yeah. I was 15 years old and we were flying in the mountains in France and I was still in training to get my second level of licensing. And I was standing there with the instructor ready to go on that ramp, you know, the horrible ramps that the hang gliders take off from. It's a weird thing when you come to think of it. You know, when a hang glider commits to take off in that sort of a condition, you start running, you commit to take off before you have full control over your glider. Yeah. Because you got to have proper airflow over the wing to really be able to steer it. So the windsock was like dangling down and then the wind was coming towards us a little bit and was dangling down again.
And then we had some wind from the back, some tailwind, which is obviously horrible. And the instructor told me, okay, boss, are you ready? Yes, I said. Go, go, go. And I started running. And then I was halfway down the ramp. And he told me, no, no, no, stop, stop, stop, stop, because there was a tailwind. And because I did all this studying, I knew this guy is talking complete nonsense. You know, because it's, there is one golden rule when you start running with a hang glider down the ramp, whatever happens, you don't stop.
Yeah, commit.
You have to commit because else you can't stop like 30 kilos on top of your head, you know, it's dragging you down. So you got to run into it and get, make the most out of it. So I got airborne and well, one wing was stalling. So I was tilting towards the mountain and I knew this is not going to be good. It was like a granite wall 700 meters high. And I saw like a bunch of trees on the
slope. And then again, the theory came to mind and I had like such clarity at that moment in time. And I thought, okay, I can do two things now. I can go with my urge to steer away from this rock face. And then I don't know what's going to happen. Probably I don't have enough air speed and I'm going to crash somewhere where I cannot aim at where I'm crashing. Or I can go full speed on and try to regain control and steer it into those trees at like maximum speed. And I decided that option B was the best option. And I'm convinced that because of that choice by me at that moment in time and my dad's choice to have me focus on the theoretical aspects of flying, I'm able to talk to you now.
Did you hit the
trees or did you get so much speed that you were able to turn towards the hill and away from it again? I was able to get
enough speed to get control authority with the glider, but that meant really facing the rocks and steering towards the trees. So that those went in tandem. And this allowed me to get to crash where I wanted to crash, so to speak. So I flew into the trees and I don't know if you've ever seen the leading edge of a hang glider. That's a pretty sturdy there's a pretty sturdy beams. They were all broken in like six pieces. There was really nothing left of the glider. And I only had a mild concussion and a big well, flesh wound on my arm. Man, fast
thinking dude. That was nice. I can visualize that whole thing. I saw a very similar thing when I was getting going when I was just learning. And it was also under instruction. We were, and I've talked about this on the show, but we were on a ridge outside of Annecy on a really bad day. Tons of over development, a lot of cells coming through. And so Annecy was just going to be way too windy and too exposed. And so we went down to this place where the instructor thought we could kind of ridge soar between these cells coming through. And it just wasn't a flying day, you know. And one of the pilots who was pretty low hours, I think he was 50 hours or something, and he didn't really have
very fast descent techniques. Got, you know, flu and we were all ridge soaring and then it was really clear the cell was coming and a couple of us just got lucky and bombed out. And we're on the ground when this thing hit. And when it hit, the instructor and my buddy Bruce, who supported me in the first couple of X-Alps, kind of got blown over this thing and were able to run and land in front of this gust front. And this other pilot, just all he had in his toolkit was big ears. And you know, so he put in big ears when this gust front hit and it was just like watching a butterfly in a windstorm. It was terrifying. And we were all on the ground. And, you know, at the time when I was watching it, I thought, ditch it into the trees, ditch it into the trees, ditch it into the trees.
You know, that was, he had this beautiful slope behind him that was this really nice canopy and branches almost all the way to the ground. You know, so it was one of those things where he could have just you know, it would have been suicide to fly towards it. It was blowing really, really hard. But if he just let the wind blow him into the trees and you know, it probably would have busted the wing up, you know, maybe would have broken an arm or something. But for the most part, you know, again retrospect, looking at it in hindsight, you know, but as I'm watching this, I was thinking, okay, what would I do? What would I do? What would I do? And the trees are your best option right now. And what he tried to do was stick it, was try to land. And about 50 feet off the ground he totally, his wing went parachutal and he didn't recover it and hit the ground really hard.
And you know, the rest is history. He survived, but massive injuries and had to be air flighted out and stuff. And it was really a good instructional thing at his price, obviously. I mean, obviously would have been better. None of that had ever happened. But you know, it was interesting to watch from the ground to, you know, like in your incident that there's the shit's going to hit the fan in the sport at some point. And you know, it's really just a matter of thinking really fast, you know, what are what's option A, B, C, D right now and do
it. Know your options and be prepared to let go of option A and then be prepared to let go of option B. Yes,
and it's often, you know, Nick Naden said, one of his things is, you know, hey, if I get in a really bad place, the best option may not be to land, it's to fly somewhere else. You know, go somewhere else. Deal with it for the moment, you know, stay high if you can. And rather than exposing yourself to, for example, more valley winds or more of the gust front, you know, it's often better to stay above that stuff and just go top land, go somewhere else. Wow, and did that change things for you at all? I mean, did it, were you then kind of, I mean, I'm sure before then you were completely fired up about flying, you're 15 years old, you don't think you can die, you know, nothing's going to happen to a 15 year old. Did that kind of, whoa, wait a minute, did it change your
Great question. Yeah. Approach? In hindsight, it was one of the elements that added to my decision to switch to paragliding actually. And you're right in your assumption that being like a 15 year old guy flying for three years, I had not seen much, but I had seen some accidents already happening, also up close. So yeah, it was one of the things that planted like this little seed in my mind. I've been flying for, I think it was like 10 years after this incident happened. I kept on flying, but it did not change things like in a huge way, but it put something in motion.
Yeah. And then did your dad switch over to paragliding as well or is he still hang gliding?
No, we switched together. You switched together? Yeah, that's another fun story because I got deeper into the hang gliding. One of the things I did is I got, I became part of the support crew for the Dutch Open competition which was usually organized together with British pilots, like a competition somewhere in the Alps, British and Dutch pilots participating. And I was one of the start officials. This was, I think around 2006 or something. 2006, 2007. I was also, some days I was a retrieve driver, some days I was a starting official for the competition, the hang gliding competition. And my dad came to visit me because he was on like a camping trip with my mom. And the conditions were not great to launch.
So we had like a long halt. And at the other side of the mountain was somewhere in Italy, Montecucco maybe, there were paragliders flying. You know, paragliders until that moment in time were like, well we did not say it out loud, but they were like far inferior, naturally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cold air balloons.
Yeah, they were like, yeah, we really, and I'm almost ashamed to say it, but maybe it's good to say it out loud, you know. We were looking down, on them. Like they were, they were slow, it was dangerous because they could collapse. And we had all these like really, I think that was pretty widely
held and probably pretty legitimate
belief then. Yeah, some pretty legitimate and most not at all. Ill-informed, so to speak. But that was our perspective and we thought, let's go watch these fuckers. Let's see what they, what they are up to. We sat down there on that mountain and we saw them like inflate their wing, and do a few steps, and then put it back on the ground. And then it happened, it happened a few times and like, our mind was like blown. Because suddenly we realized you only launch a paraglider when it's actually flying. You have a go, no go decision, which you make, if you do a proper takeoff of course, which you make when you have control, authority over the glider.
Which was so fundamentally different from what we had experienced with hang gliding, what was the cause of my accident actually, that we, we, they got a new found respect in that instant. And we saw these guys like launching, making nice takeoffs, making average takeoffs and also aborting takeoffs and that opened our mind to like the beauty of paragliding. And then at that point in time we told each other, you know, let's give this a try. If this is something that we have not seen all these years, maybe we've been blind to other aspects of the sport as well. Which was true. And we've been doing it like parallel for like three, four years. We've been flying hang gliders and learning to fly the paraglider. And then the transition to paragliding came very natural.
It was mainly founded by two things. One, safety. Because by that point in time we'd been flying hang gliders for 15 years. Well, I should speak from myself, but the same thing goes for my dad. We came to the conviction that paragliding actually was safer than hang gliding. Why? Is
that the speed?
Well, it's speed. Maybe it's basic physics, you know? Do you want to go 70 kph with your head forward? Or do you want to go 35 kph with your feet forward?
Now, wait a minute. Want versus should you is a different thing. To me, flying 70 kph an hour prone like a bird, that sounds pretty sexy. It
is terribly sexy. The feeling that you have with a hang glider when there's no care in the world, so you're not launching, you're not landing, and you're not in difficult conditions, it's awesome. It can be a little bit better than on a paraglider. That's my experience with it. The sensation of being a bird, being able to get it into a real nosedive without spiraling, that's an awesome sensation. Watching
these guys do the whole ground effect thing too, when they're coming in at 100 kph an hour, and just oh, man,
that looks good. I love the sensation of landing with the wing, making like a spot landing with a hang glider. That's... I still get excited and happy about that. That's a stressful thing for many hang gliders, by the way, but I always loved landing with the hang glider. So yeah, it has its beauties. It has its beautiful parts, for sure. Do
you guys still... Do you still fly hang gliders, you and your dad? No. Was it just a transition there for a few years? We had this few
transition years, and then we sold our gliders and have been flying solely paragliders. But yeah, the safety aspect, it's like a kinetics thing, you know? Accidents, unfortunately, they do happen. I believe you should do anything to prepare yourself in that way that you reduce the chance of them happening, and you reduce the effects of when something bad happens. But the basic physics come down to the... Hitting the ground with 70 kilometers per hour with your head first, or 35 on average, of course, with your feet forward. The chances I think are just better. And I know there are many people that would love to debate me on this, and they do that all the time, the hang glider pilots. But hey, I've seen too many accidents.
Yeah, it's a hard... I think it's a hard thing now to scrub data from because the numbers are so skewed. It's really tough now. I mean, obviously paragliding on the face of it looks way more dangerous, but that's because there's way more people doing it. I think it is pretty tricky to delineate all
that. If you look at the statistics, I'm sure that on average, paragliding is less safe, because the barrier to entry to paragliding is way lower. The expenses are lower.
It's so easy to fly a paraglider, it's so hard to fly it well.
That's one that I kind of... Yeah, yeah. I have great respect for hang glider pilots. This was just a personal choice. After seeing a lot of accidents, mainly on takeoff with the hang glider, that was the safety aspect, and then came the practicality aspect for us. You know, when you go fly cross country, and I'm not talking about a competition, but just for fun, you go fly cross country with a hang glider, it's so much
hassle. Yeah, there are logistical challenges, for sure.
And that's the... And then added to that, but this is something that we discovered later, you can't ground handle a hang glider. And the entire ground handling aspect, I'm a great fan of june soaring with the paraglider as well. You know, dragging your feet or your hand through the sand, that's awesome to do with a paraglider. You can just land anywhere, land on a slope, land somewhere on top of a mountain, go make a full bivouac. All those things are completely out of reach for hang glider pilots. Do a hike and fly. Yeah,
yeah. The hike and fly aspect is... It's also... I think this is the new wave of paragliding. I mean, this was something that was incredibly niche when I got into bivvies. And now it's... I mean, that's the number one question I get, is about bivvy gear and light wings and the X-Alps has really... And then all these other races that are... There's a million of them now. And it's really... It's exciting. It's super exciting. And you're right, that's logistically more challenging. There are hang gliders that will say they can do it. And they've got cool little carts that they've worked out and lighter weight stuff. It's pretty neat. But yeah, when it comes down to it, it's awful nice to just put it all in a bag.
Yeah.
And I love the mobility aspect. Just being able to take off and land virtually anywhere that adds so much to the experience, which to me is... It's not just the flying. It's not just crossing distance. It's just being part of nature. Enjoying myself, pushing my own boundaries, having fun by myself and with others. And yeah, the entire lifestyle around it. Yeah. So that makes transition.
I asked you about what was it like for your dad to get you into it. How old's your dad? That's a great question. I think he just turned 64. Yeah. Oh, geez. He's young. Well, but I was going to say that let's reverse that. What's it like for you? You've been flying 27 years. You've seen it all. You've instructed. We're going to get into your project here in a bit. But no problem. You also know how dangerous this is. What's that like for... I mean, I used to watch my dad get into sailing when he was at basically your dad's age. And let's just face it. Older people don't learn as fast. And he's been doing it a long time, so he's probably fine. But we are more brittle.
We aren't as... We don't learn things nearly as well as we get older. What's it like for you to watch him now? Do you worry about him or is he not at all?
Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes I worry about him. Yeah. Yeah. The main thing is that we are a lot alike, but there are also differences in how we approach stuff. You know, he has really quite binary approach to everything in life. It's either horrible or it's fantastic. And for me, I'm more kind of a gray zone guy that I'm trying to... You know, I see you laughing. Yeah. And this led us to have some very how shall I put it? Very interesting conversations. One of the rules that we have when we go fly together, when one of us thinks the conditions are not suitable to go fly, we both decide not to go.
That's a smart one.
Like a sort of buddy system. And that has saved us from a lot of stupid flying decisions. One of our most stupid flying decisions I made a YouTube video about that as well, when we almost got sucked into a huge converging cloud. At that day, we both thought it would be a great idea to go fly, which it was not. But yeah, seeing him go through his space, of course he's been flying for a long time as well. He started before me, so he's been there, done that, and at the same time not got the t-shirt. We keep having this mindset that when you think you understand flying, that you know it all, that's a great point in time to stop flying.
Because then you're going to become very unsafe to yourself and to others. We know
enough to know what we don't know, what we can't do, and we keep running into our own limits. We are a mirror for each other in that. We keep reflecting on that, and sometimes I tell him that you should not do this, or that, because of this and that reasoning. He does the same in my direction. So, yeah.
Wow, what a special relationship. It almost sounds like you've got this mentor-student that's both ways. It's really nice. It's nice to have a touching stone, isn't it?
It is.
It's something that I wish that everyone has. Of course, you don't have to have a dad or a mom or a sibling or whatever for that. If you have a proper, equal relationship with another pilot, a buddy of yours, preferably, you can have that. And if you have that transparency and you're willing to tell the other person, I think you're doing this for the wrong reasons, then you have a really essential conversation going that helps you fly safer and with more fun eventually.
Yeah, interesting. Tell me about your instructing. You got into instructing a while back. Is that where you're from? Where's home base for you?
Well, I live in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. So I have my business here as well. But I consider the Austrian Alps my home base. Is that because of proximity? That's because I learned to fly over there and I love flying over there. The entire Alps region. I go to Italy, I go for the Dolomites. I've flown in Switzerland, Austria a lot of times, France, went to Morocco, a lot of countries over the world. But the Alps, like the vast majority of the weeks I've been flying, because then of course it becomes like a flying holiday. You know, you go to the Alps for one, two weeks and multiple times per year.
Yeah, for me it feels like coming home when I'm there. And that's the way most Dutch pilots that learn like mountain flying with a paraglider, well we don't have any mountains here. I believe our highest mountain is like 60 meters high. So yeah, we get in our car and we drive to the Alps. It's like a one day drive. If you put a pedal to the metal, you can do it in two days. But most people drive in one day and then you're in the Alps. Great flying, great people. Yeah. So that feels like my home base.
And boss, you've got pretty good dune soaring
there, right?
Near Amsterdam? Yeah. Do I have that right? Okay.
Yep, yep. Within 20 minutes I'm on the beach and when the winds are well facing the shore, northwesterly, we can do hours of dune soaring. That's of course what we can do. No mountain flying in the Netherlands, but we can do towing. So winch flying, ground based winch flying. And we can do the dune soaring thing. So yeah, that's awesome. That's one of the things that I got into right after taking my first steps with paragliding. I learned to fly from a Dutch school in the Alps. And after a few weeks of training, I also started learning dune soaring. In which there was like no official training program. You just find a pilot that's a little bit worse than you in dune soaring and see what you can make of it. Yeah.
Do you find that the dune soaring is a good way to kind of brush off the cobwebs before you go to the Alps? Or how do you, you know, I would imagine there's pretty long periods where you're not getting thermal flights and heading to the Alps in March can be pretty spicy. Yeah. How do you tackle that? Or how do you imagine it's often a group of you guys that goes down together and you know, you have a week or two weeks together. I think this is something that spanks a lot of people. You know, you're just not really back in the saddle and going to fly in the spring. This is just a good subject for right now because it's spring. We're heading into that season.
This is also but we'll get into that later. That's also one of the main reasons I started doing with my company what I'm doing now, what I'm offering to the market, to the pilots. But it's something that happens worldwide. As you say, when the season ends, it takes a few months before the next season begins. And in that downtime, yeah, what can you do? You can read books, you can watch Moyes, you can maybe do a little bit of, in our case in Holland, you can do a little bit of towing, even though in winter usually due to like wind conditions, the conditions are less often okay to go fly at the winch. And you could do dune soaring, but you know, brushing off the
webs at the dune as a preparation for the mountains, in my opinion, these skills are so different. You know, the thing you can practice at the dunes are mainly like technical skills, like handling your
glider in strong wind, making a takeoff, but after you've done that, what else is there? You can practice a bit of turns, the specifics of dune soaring, like picking the right line, how to cross behind the building, how to cross a gap in a dune, how high can I go, how far back can I go, where is the lifting area, all these technical things, they are all not, there's not much overlap with mountain flying and dune soaring, in my experience.
What I do like about it is the high wind aspect, and you're still, like you said, knowing how far back, how far up, where is it dangerous if you go back and land in the lee, these are things that come in awfully handy in the mountains, because you can kind of visualize the air, I think a lot of people that don't spend a lot of time in high wind scenarios, especially in a place like the dunes where it's relatively safe, I mean, I know accidents happen everywhere, but boy, you learn a lot doing that, and I use that kind of skill, I'm properly in the mountains, I don't have places like that, but I always try to spend a lot of time especially when I'm training for the X-OPS in places like that, because it really does, it can transfer in ways where you've suddenly got to stick it in on a top landing or something, it can be okay, these are winds that I have dealt with before, I understand what they do, I understand how the rotor works,
anytime you can visualize something that's invisible is good.
Yeah, you're absolutely right there, it's really the element of the dealing with strong wind that has a strong overlap, yeah, for sure. On the other hand, like visualizing the rotor and stuff, when we go dune soaring, we never ever ever go behind the dune or into the rotor, so of course there are two classes of pilots, as we always say. Yeah, people that have been blown over the dune, and people that still have to get blown over the dune, those are the two categories that we have. Those you have, those you will. Yeah, and once you've had that happen to you once, and of course it's happened to me, you know where not to go and how to deal with it, so that's something that is like baked into your mind, and then, yeah, the added value of dealing with high winds, maybe dealing with crosswind, what that does to a turn, you know, we have very specific incidents happening with dune soaring, those are very different incidents than we see happening with mountain flying.
People that like spin their glider on crosswind soaring, that's one of the major causes of serious accidents.
Airspeed. This is a big one. I think that this is where ridge soaring pilots can really get in trouble in the mountains, because they're used to these low ground speeds, high air speeds, but low ground speeds because of the wind. Yeah. So suddenly they take that to where there's very little wind, and forget about wing pressure. And like you said, then you can spin or stall super easily. Yeah, that's a big one. You just said visualization. This is a great transition to VR. Tell me about your project, because this is something I've been learning and trying to practice more and more. I even did a podcast recently on just the visualization practice.
Yeah, that was a great one, actually. I think this is important for us as a community to spend more time doing it. Mitch Riley was the first one to really make me think hard about it. I think we can learn a ton from it. I think, and you can back me up on this if I'm right or not, but I think the science has proven that it's almost the same in terms of learning. Visualizing is damn near as good as actually doing it. Our brains don't know the difference.
That's exactly true. That's like the physiology behind it. For our brains, it's no different. If you actually jump over a wall, or visualize that you're jumping over a wall, and there are still so many people out there that think, just think of me jumping over a wall. Okay, now I don't have to do it in real life anymore. That's not the case, of course. But it helps you build confidence. It helps you, it actually helps you give your muscles the impulses at the right point in time when you're actually doing it in real life. This is something I'm a firm believer in. Science, it's always nice to claim science says something, but
there's a lot of science that says it works this way. So I'm completely with you on that, and I've seen the examples of that many times in practice. And of course, it's also not for nothing that all the professional athletes in any kind of sport, they do a lot of visualization. Yeah. Because it works.
Yeah, this was something that came up. Again and again and again, I read a ton of books going into this year's race about sports psychology and training and nothing specific to paragliding, but it doesn't matter. It's this basketball, football, baseball, it doesn't matter what you're doing. The best of the best, they all talk about how much they practice in the mind. So I know literally nothing about virtual reality. I've never put the goggles on. I challenge you to articulate what it is you're doing to try to fill this visualization gap. And it's pretty exciting.
Well, the interesting thing is, Gavin, actually, that there are many people that have had a virtual reality experience and because of that, think that they know what virtual reality is and what it can do for them. They are actually a harder group to talk to than a more difficult audience than you are. So I'll try to explain this to you. I'll of course keep this in mind. We were talking about the hang gliding and at that point in time, I was still in what you'd call high school. And I thought I'm nearing the end of high school. I love flying my hang glider, so I should become a pilot. At that point in time, that seemed very logic to me. Like flying a hang glider is fun, so flying jumbo jets is fun.
So I applied for their training program, the KLM Flight Academy, and I got admitted into that training program. I did my theoretical, the ground school stuff for around a year. And then I moved to Fort Pierce in Florida for the practical training. During that training program, I got involved with simulators a lot, which has been normal for decades in commercial aviation. In military aviation, they use simulators to train you for basic maneuvers. They use simulators to make sure you get to the level of what we call a type rating, learning a specific new aircraft. When you do your prof checks every half year, you do that in a simulator.
Why? Because visualizing or actually recreating a situation and then dealing with it, it's just as good as the real thing. Now when I started teaching paragliding 10 years ago, I thought why is there no way we can learn as paragliding pilots to fly as they do it in commercial aviation? Why are there no simulators for this? And I started asking around and I got differing answers, but they were all along the line of, do you have any idea how expensive such a simulator would be? And no, flying is something that you can, flying a paraglider is something you can only learn actual, only when you're out here in the air. And I didn't believe any of that. I think that there's just not been anyone that has put all the pieces together and make something that is
usable and that is, that has the potential to be embraced by a worldwide audience. So that's what I started envisioning, but I'm not like a super technician. Around eight years ago, I started writing a syllabus, training plans for if I would have that simulator, what should it be able to do, how should it work, and how will I teach with that? And from that, I like this I distilled a couple of hardware requirements and I started looking for someone that could help me make that dream become a reality. But what I could not do was like make the aerodynamic models of a paraglider. I could do part of the hardware design but for the other parts I just was looking for someone. So at every event I went through, even completely paragliding unrelated, I started telling people my dream.
I started telling them I am looking for someone that has specific knowledge in simulator design that can help me build a paraglider simulator. A guy told me yeah, my brother is a professional simulator designer and he's also getting into paragliding. Maybe you should meet him. And for the past two years he's been my business associate. His name is Hans Joren. I also mentioned him in one of my videos in which I introduced the simulator. And he's like the technical brains behind how this simulator works and why it responds as realistically to the pilot's inputs and to the conditions that we simulate with it. As it does now. So what the simulator is actually it is a computer generated environment.
So visually it's the same as being in your cockpit I guess. Actually,
yeah. It's exactly the same. Of course the difference is that it is a computer generated image so it does not have the exact same detail as the real world. It's not like indistinguishable from the real world but it doesn't have to be.
Right. Gotcha.
It doesn't have to be.
Do you have brake handles and the whole thing? Yeah. You're flying a paraglider.
Yeah. That's what we recreated. So we have like a setup that's an H-shaped frame with risers hanging from that and brake toggles. And these brake toggles they're connected to sensors just as the entire frame. So you can steer the paraglider in the simulator the same as you would steer a real paraglider. Namely using weight shift and using your brake input. Then of course we have the speed system. So do
people sit there and move around? Yeah. Yeah. It's hysterical.
Yeah. You should check out my video on the YouTube channel. There's some footage of people flying in there and it's insane. It's truly insane. We've been working with this for two years now and when we did the first closed alpha testing with a group of pilots all under NDA, they were amazed. They were amazed that they, within a few minutes they felt like they were actually flying a paraglider. And of course there was still a lot of fine tuning to be done. It's come such a long way what we can do with technology. One of the main defining things that makes paragliding different from other air sports or general aviation is that you're completely out in the open facing the elements and that things like estimating height and distance and speed for when you're trying to stick a proper landing.
Those are very important. They are actually way more important than they are for someone flying a general aviation airplane. So we really tried to tailor the simulator to that. Like simulating different kinds of trees and houses to have. We recreated a couple of landing fields from the Alps to just give ourselves a challenge. Can we make a one-on-one replica in the simulator of say Greifenburg, which is a known landing field near the Weissensee, known flying area in Austria. The field where I actually learned to fly with the Dutch school, Airtime. I thought let's recreate this to the finest detail possible and see what happens when we train people to land in the simulator.
One of the first pilots that I had fly this landing field was my dad actually. I knew he was notoriously bad in landing there when the wind was a bit cross and strong and gusty. Because he'd always end up in the cornfield next to the landing field. So I thought let's recreate these conditions in the simulator. Not tell him anything except that these were the conditions. Put him in a spot where he could fly his entire U-shaped traffic pattern and let's just see what happens. And I kid you not, he landed in the cornfield next to the landing. And he yelled at me, this is always what happens to me in real life when I'm flying here in these conditions. I said yes.
Then now we have an accurate simulator. The essence of this is how do people learn? And in general you can see this in its most purest form when watching your four year old. You know, I have little kids too, four and six. When you see little kids learn something they try something. And then there is a certain outcome. And then they try something else. And then there is usually a very different outcome. And then, like mentally speaking they build this relation between cause and effect. Action and result. And that's a great way to learn. And we've built all kinds of interesting concepts around this. Getting older with experience and stuff.
But in the basics it still comes down to what do you do and what is the effect on what is the end result. Now in paragliding that's something that is notoriously difficult. Because when someone is learning how to fly a paraglider, for instance you're learning how to make a proper u-shaped landing pattern and make a spot landing, you get some instructions over the radio. You're on the ground, your instructor takes you apart, gives you some more tips. Maybe say Gavin you should make an extra turn make an extra circle next time because you were way high. Now when I'm looking at a situation that goes for most of the flying areas worldwide if everything goes super smooth and super fast it will take you at least one and a half hours until you're ready to make your next landing.
That day. If you even make two flights that day. Because you have to pack your glider after getting this feedback from the instructor. You maybe have to wait for the van and the other students. You have to drive up the mountain or go with a cable car or whatever. You have to unpack your glider you have to wait in line to launch. Maybe you have to wait for weather. And then let's say it's one and a half hour later, you're ready to land again. The conditions will never be the same as they were one and a half hours ago. But your instructor told you, well you should make that extra turn. Well is that a good decision at this point in time? Maybe you should not make that extra turn. Maybe you made an extra turn like five minutes ago because you did some other exercises. So what I'm trying to say with this is the relationship between what a pilot does or does not do and the outcome in this example of the landing it's very vague.
There are a lot of things that have influence on the outcome of the flight other than what the pilot does. Even if the pilot would be able to follow all the instructions to the letter the thing that makes it very difficult to learn such a skill and the same goes for thermaling or june soaring or whatever, is that there may be a different wind. Every flight is
completely different.
Yeah, every flight is completely different. And of course that's the charm and the beauty of flying as well. That's something that I embrace as well. But from a purely from a didactic perspective from trying to learn and trying to get new skills or keep skills current that's actually a very bad thing. So what simulators do in general and ours in specific is that we are able to bring you as a student into the exact same conditions time and time again. And when you notice that you started high on your downwind then I can ask the student well what would you do again next time?
Yeah, maybe I should make another circle in my positioning area. Okay, well let's just rewind. Then we rewind put the student back at the beginning of the traffic pattern. Okay, make an extra circle, see what happens. Oh no, now I'm way too low because I lost like 30-40 meters extra. Okay, so making an extra circle was not the decision. How else can you fix this? Yeah, maybe I should not make that extra circle and just extend my downwind a little bit. Well okay, give it a try, see what happens. Hey, now I made a spot landing. Okay.
Wow, so you can just totally short circuit the time it takes to, you know, you don't have to pack it up, get in the van, go to the top, you know, you can just rewind a little bit, let's do it again. Yeah. That's amazing.
That's the beauty and that's not something I invented by the way. This is something that is typical for simulator instructions. Yeah, we just built one specifically for paragliding and paramotoring in which we do this and we tailored our teaching methods to this. Of course, that's the beauty of paragliding as well, being in nature, being involved in this process. I don't want to take anything away from this but just from a learning perspective, the huge limiting factor in paragliding is the weather and all the hassle around it. And then there's the third point of focus. I have seen this happen with hundreds of students. They're about to get licensed. They're at the level that they can get a license to fly without an instructor, but usually for them the problem is still making a proper landing
approach pattern and sticking it in different conditions. And if you can just zoom in, not just on the landing, but on what that specific pilot needs to work on, because these can be different things. I noticed, I've been teaching with the simulator now for a little over half a year, and what I've noticed is that like, looking, the looking technique is actually very important. Now you're moving forward with roughly, if there's no wind, you're moving forward with roughly 36 kilometers per hour relative to the ground. That means if you have not looked in a few seconds, you're like dozens of meters further down the track. So when you're flying downwind, you have to look at the area that you want to land, that where maybe the spot is that you want to aim for. And that's something that we can train to the, in a lot of detail in the simulator.
For some people it's this looking technique. They just keep watching where they're going. They don't turn their head a lot. I see that a lot happening. But also the combination between leaning into the turn and using the proper amount of brake input. For some people it's just that. For others it's the decision making. Even when we crank up the conditions, make the wind more gusty, make it variable in direction, make it from a suboptimal angle, have some obstacles. You see people make really, from a perspective of an experienced pilot, make really stupid decisions. But that's just because their brains are not able to process it all.
Yeah, sure. You've turned up the complicated Which is normal in
learning. And when you do this, when flying actual and flying outside, there's just this one instance in which you get a try in these specific conditions and that never comes back. So when you talk about it with your instructor, what I've seen happening as being an instructor myself, is that I ask my students, well I don't ask it this way, but I'm thinking, why did you almost end up in that tree? You know, if it's someone that's been making five flights, that's my responsibility. It's always my responsibility by the way. But when it's someone that's close to the level of being a self-supporting pilot, you give them way more margin as an instructor to make mistakes. And you only intervene when safety is at risk. To make them learn those lessons. And what I see happening all the time and I do it involuntarily, maybe subconscious, is that they make excuses.
I ask them, why did you almost skim that tree? Or why did this spot landing not work out for you? Why did you have an overshoot of 100 meters? And they come up with all kinds of reasons. Yeah, the wind shifted a little bit. There was this pilot that crossed me that I had not anticipated. I got sinked on my base lag with a lot of sinking air or there was rising air. I've had that happen in the simulator as well. So I asked them, why did you not stick this landing? And they came up with these reasons. And I tell them, come look at the instructor station. And I show them my monitor. And I say, look at your exact track log, because we can rewind it second by second. You can see the exact wind conditions.
You can see what was where and when. There is no gusty wind now. The wind is laminar. There is no sink. There are no thermals. This was all you. So I also call it like the ego destructor. So you're really
teaching people to take ownership of where they are and how capable they are.
Yeah, but not because I think they're assholes. No, no, no.
But you can say, no, this actually was poor piloting. This wasn't conditioned. Yeah, this was
poor piloting. And this is something that instructors world wide run into because there is always this unknown. As an instructor, you know that there was no sinking air or rising air or whatever. But when the student is convinced that there was, it's like the end of discussion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's why. It wasn't me. That
was why. And yeah, maybe I should have turned a little earlier or maybe I should have done this. But
there's no enough ownership and that's limits the learning potential of the student. And in the simulator, we turn this around. So we literally try to fry your brain with decision making in rapid succession and help you see the effects of what you do on the outcome of your flight. And I've been talking about landing now for a while, but the same goes for thermaling. You know, when I practice, when I teach people thermaling in the simulator, a lot of pilots, they when we crank up the wind, they get blown out of the thermal by the wind. And the first response, as is in real life, the thermal suddenly vanished. No, dude. You just got blown out of the thermal.
And these are like if you can't in actual flying, it's very difficult to really connect to the brain of the student because there are always these inner convictions that keep telling them, no, this is also what happened. And it was not all me. And even the students that are very eager to learn, to develop, to get the most out of it, they also have their own convictions of what was going on. And we can just take that all away and make it a very pure experience in which there is a one-on-one relationship between what the pilot does and what the outcome is.
Yeah, that's fascinating. So take me through that. I'm in the simulator. I'm coming in for land and you can just dial up the crosswind. Boom. How do I sense that? I can tell by the motion of the glider. I've got a cockpit with some instruments. Because I don't feel it like you would normally kind of feel
it. You're right. The simulator that we are currently operational with, it's an input device. So it transfers what the pilot does to the simulator and then the wing in the simulator responds to that. Of course, it all goes instantaneously, but that's sequentially what happens.
So when you lean to the right, the glider starts going to the right. And when you brake, it also has effect on the wing. And the feedback that we have on the brake lines, normally when the wind is going over your wing, you can feel that in your brake lines. You can feel that in the harness, of course. We don't have that yet. So the brake pressure that you feel is now simply being caused by elastic bands that you're pulling against. So more pressure down here is not because of some aerodynamic principle, but it's just because there's more tension on the rubber band. But the next version of the simulator, which we already have in a prototype version operational, there is no rubber bands, but there are like servo motors that translate movement of the wing to the pilot's brakes.
So I've been practicing in that. We've been flying spirals with it. We can go up to like 7 G's. And you're really feel these engines like pulling your hands up, but you want to keep them down. You really feel this. It's awesome. And it adds another level of
immersion. But
it is not strictly necessary for most exercises. So you asked me how does it go. You have a simulated instrument. You have a simulated or you use a Syrite instrument for that. And we have a simulated Syrite CisNav. We have a little cooperation with these guys. We have a Syrite CisNav, which you can see your ground speed. You can see your magnetic heading. You can see your vertical speed and your altitude. And of course you see the landscape moving. So you have the perspective change. There's a fan blowing air against you to have the sensation of flight and orientation. In our next version, that's what we call an active fan. So the fan is also controlled by the air speed which you're flying with.
So if you're like making dolphin moves, you feel good.
Wow.
So if you take an X-OPS pilot and put him in your system, somebody who's been flying 20 years and done a ton of comps versus a P2 25 hour, is it just the X-OPS pilot going to get into your system and just crush it? In other words, do they, can you given someone's history, okay, they're just going to be totally way more natural. You can just tell. Absolutely. Okay, so it's very relative to the real world.
Absolutely, yeah. Oh wow. We've had hundreds of pilots in it now and the general consensus is that it is extremely realistic both in how it looks and especially in how it feels and how it responds. And I've had pilots of that first group you spoke about, really extremely experienced people flying it and just yelling. I'm flying, I'm flying, what's happening? It's like real flying. Wow. Yeah. There is not just a lot of potential but the things that people learn, they can one on one put that into practice when they go fly. So I adjusted our business model to that and we're actually now the first and for as far as I know, only paragliding training installation in the world that offers a result guarantee.
So I tell my students, when you want to look at how to learn how to thermal better, you buy our Thermalink package. It's usually three sessions of an hour because we can just very specifically target what that pilot needs to learn to thermal better. For you it will be something else than the next guy. And on average people take three sessions to get up to the level that they can core a thermal in different conditions, different kind of winds, different altitudes that they know how to deal with. Close to the mountain you make figure eights and then all of a sudden you transition to making circles. All of these skills you're guaranteed to possess them at the end of this training program. And if you don't, you get extra sessions for free. So you don't buy the
experience, you buy the result.
It's not, so it's more, it sounds like it's right now at least it's more technique, not so much strategy. Is that right?
Yeah, when we take it to three levels like technique, tactics and strategy, it's at the tactics and technique level. I've had a very experienced cross country pilot flying in it and he said, well, I'm really missing the feedback of my glider. He started steering by moving his brake inward, breaking the outermost part of his wing to turn more flat. That's something that we cannot do in a simulator yet. So if you move your hand vertically up or down or inward, doesn't make a difference for the amount of wing that you deflect. Such subtle differences, of course these are important for people at the top end spectrum, the top 1 % of pilots. So at this point in time, for the top 1 % of pilots of which you're one of them, obviously the simulator is not that interesting because the things that you want to train,
we can't simulate that yet. I'm targeting 80 % of the world's pilot population, maybe something in the 15 % above that, but I'm not aiming the simulator at the top 5 % because when you are that good, I think you'll benefit most from actual flying.
Boss, tell me about your company Flight Coach because we haven't talked about that.
I'm very glad that you're asking me this because this is the main question that school owners keep asking me about the applicability, the usefulness of the simulator training in practice. We've been operational since beginning of August last year, so there's not like a heap of data of Excel sheets that I can show you. What I can share with you is the great stories and feedback that I get from all the students that have flown in the simulator and went flying outside again, went flying actual as we call it, to put what they learned in the simulator into practice. And the story that everyone tells me is identical. It helps hugely. A practical example of that is a student that came to me with a question. He said, boss, when I'm trying to do soar, I can't fly longer than maximum 30 seconds or a minute because I keep bumming out.
When I am trying to make a turn, I leave the lifting area. And I'm also very afraid of being blown over. So, how do I fix this? Because I've been practicing for days at the beach, even under supervision of an instructor, but it's not clicking in my brain. So we did a training package of a few hours with the result guarantee, and even after the second session he was showing huge progression. We kept practicing the stuff, rewinding, changing the wind, changing the conditions, improving his turn coordination, and finding the ideal line. And a few days later, at the beginning of the evening, I got a phone call by a number that I didn't recognize. And as soon as I picked up, someone started yelling, started screaming in a very happy, frantic voice to me, saying, yes, I finally did it.
I just landed. I've flown for over two hours. And then I asked him, Jos, is that you? And he said, yes, yes. Oh, sorry. I was so into the moment. But yeah, the training helped me to actually fly, and I've just done my first real soaring flight. Well, I was happy for him, but I'm also really happy about this as one of the many examples of what the simulator can add to practical flying. That's the whole idea, to help people sort out what the thing is that they need to learn at that point in time, to really focus and work on that, and plant it as a nugget in the brain that you can work with from there. For the next time you go flying,
your brain recognizes the situation and thinks, oh, I've learned how to deal with this. So it's really a huge booster, a huge accelerator for flying. That's the whole idea. That's the added value. And I have many more stories just like this one about thermaling and landing and making outlandings, making maneuvers. The feedback is huge. The feedback is real. Pilots are very happy with it.
You talk about future additions. Is this something, Bos, that you could... Are we going to see these in other parts of the world? Is this something exportable? It's the VR glasses. It's the simulator that you're sitting in with the... It is. Okay. It is. It's just a software update. If I'm a school, which I'm not, but if I'm a school, this just sounds, to me, this sounds amazing. What an incredible way to teach. Or to add to the teaching that you need. You need the real experience, too. You can have this, like you said, to get more than six minutes a day of landing. Yeah. If I buy this, can I just get the update for the... Eventually the thermals actually come off real triggers. Whatever. I'm just making that up.
Absolutely. Oh, wow.
The thing I envisioned when I started with the simulator training pilots, because we have a simulator room now in Amsterdam, what I wanted to do is actually set up other schools and flight parks for success. And I knew when I make a simulator that is great. I was already convinced that it was great because we've been testing for one and a half years with all levels of pilots. I knew that it did what it had to do. We were convinced that this simulator would do great things for students and for people that are trying to keep current because we've been talking about students now the whole time. But the big problem with the majority of pilots, again, is that they fly a few weeks per year and then they don't fly for a few months. And their currency, it tanks.
Yeah, it ain't riding the bike.
Yeah. So, I need to get that back up and that's what the simulator can do as well. But I thought, I don't need to convince myself that this works. I need to convince school owners, flight park owners, whatever, that this is a teaching aid that they can use successfully to train their students but also commercially, which is also commercially viable. It also needs to make money. So, I thought that the best way to do this is to just start a simulator training facility which I did here downtown in Amsterdam and I just started experimenting with different kinds of business models. Looking how, what is an average price that someone here from, people from Germany and Belgium and Holland in the simulator,
some from the UK as well,
what are they willing to pay? What is this training worth? Because being an entrepreneur you always think that your own product is going to be freaking awesome. But the best test is see what customers pay for it. How many refund questions you get, that sort of stuff. So, and then I started building a case and I have a lot of data. I know now what people are willing to pay these fixed price result guarantee training packages. They cost 649 euros. On average, people take three hours. Sometimes they need four. I've had no one that needed five hours, by the way. So, on average that makes me 200 euros per hour.
And people throw the money at me, laughing. So happy that they could improve their skills this way. And I kept sending out this message into my network and I've now found the first
business customer, a large flight school that also trains in the Alps. And we installed another simulator at their facility a month ago. And I'm currently training their instructors on how to teach with it. And my, and our vision, I should say, is that within a few years in every country there will be one or more simulators.
Yeah. I mean, it's a very, it's a riskless way to learn a really risky sport. I mean, that's why they have simulators. I've been thinking about this a lot lately that, you know, when I talk to people like you who have a commercial aviation background,
they're a bit baffled. You know, Stefan Bernard at a really high level, he was just with me down at the World Cup. And, you know, he flew fighter jets, you know, for Germany and now he's flying for NetJet, you know, the private thing. Yeah. And, you know, he was baffled when he got into this sport, as you were, that they don't have more of this kind of checkbox type learning, you know, that you do this and it's a step, it's a process. You can't just skip this stuff in general aviation. You're, you got passengers that you can't kill. Yeah.
You know,
so he, it sounds like this is a really good way to bridge the gap, you know, that you're, you're, this, you know, you're talking about that this is maybe more applicable to the lower hour pilots, you know, the A, B and C pilots and the ones that are, you know, weekend warriors that don't get the hours, you know, but we, but every pilot has to go through that period.
Well, let me interrupt you there for a second. Not just the low air time, our, not just the low air time pilots, but the pilots that really need to work on building their skills to get up to the level of flying. Yeah, but also learning how to thermal better, how to core thermal better so that you gain more altitude in the same amount of time. People that want to practice like things like maybe top landings, we're working on that as well, or hang landings, slope landings. So I think that I'm really aiming at 80 % of the population. Also people that have been flying with a license worldwide for many years, still have this currency problem. That they fly a few weeks and then it, our experience starts to degrade.
And if you're not careful when you, then at the end of a season, you're here, let's visualize it as an 8, and at the beginning of the season that degraded back to a 4. And then during the season you're learning a lot of things and at the end of the season you're at an 8, and at the beginning of next season you're at a 4 again. Effectively, you're not progressing as a pilot. You've had a lot of fun, you've had a good time, you've been working on your hobby, but you're actually not learning. Everything you learn you just use to stay at this flat line.
Yeah, this is an email I get a lot. I almost need an auto response for this one. You know, why does it take me longer to get good than the people that I see around me? And well, how many hours are you getting? It's a pretty easy equation. You know, the people around you are getting more hours. I mean, there is such thing as talent, of course, in this sport, and background and what you've done, but you know, for them, this is a big one. And I say this all the time, I'm sorry listener to hear me say this again, but there's not really any shortcuts. There's not really anything that replaces currency, except this kind of sounds like it might, it certainly helps.
Well, I dare to say that this is as close to a shortcut as we can get. You still have to put in the time, you still have to undergo
the... sounds horrible when I put it like this, but you still have to do the training. In a simulator, it's hard work. I always compare it to like drinking lemonade versus drinking the syrup that lemonade is actually made from. Flying a simulator is drinking pure syrup. I can't teach people for longer than an hour because their brains are just fried. I can see that they're not processing anymore. But I think it's huge that we can put the
bottleneck in the teaching process in the brain of the pilot instead of the conditions. You asked me earlier, Gavin, you asked me earlier, how does it work? Can I buy one? We're actually not selling them because it is something that also just requires a lot of support. And I'm not talking about tech support, but I'm talking about really integrating a simulator into let's say you're a school owner, into your training program that just requires a lot of experience with didactics and what part of your actual training program can we take out and do in the simulator. But it also allows you to add something on top of that, like the influx of new pilots. When we are at parties, we're always the talk of the party, right?
Oh, you're flying. I always wanted to do that. And most people that say that, they actually always wanted to do that. But the entry barrier, even with paragliding, is just too high. This also works as lowering that entry barrier because when you want to have an experience with paragliding, now you have to like book a tandem flight. But then you have to show up at a certain point in time, pay a lot of money, hopefully the conditions are okay. With a simulator, we can get you like to 90 % of the experience of making a real paragliding flight, maybe even more.
That's huge. That's fascinating. I've often wondered this about my peers. People here in Sun Valley are people who live here because of nature and the outdoors and what's possible. You know, the ski touring and the mountain biking and all the things to go do. I ski and mountain bike and do really fun things with a lot of people who are really capable. They know that I launch off a mountain and fly into Montana. They've heard all the stories and stuff and yet they have no interest in doing it. I mean, they have interest. Everybody wants to fly. Everybody wants to be a bird, but they're scared. And the barrier of entry is too high. Whether that be cost or just the
weather, the place, the gear. It's all these things. So that's the fear. Yeah, exactly. Wow, that's really cool. I hadn't thought about that.
Because it has that many
things that you can do with it, that you can use it to actually, as a school owner, change your business model, change your business model. The model that we have chosen is that it is a subscription. It's a license and rental subscription model. So you can rent the simulator starting from a few months up to longer periods of time, of course. But since we expect people to start using it and keep using it, it's a monthly subscription for which you get the complete hardware to use the simulator, but also our proprietary models that we built for this that are these paragliders that respond as close to real paragliders as it gets. You get the landscapes, the training areas, you get the syllabus on how to actually train pilots with the simulator.
Of course, you get an operating manual and some of these things also need specific advice. Every school has a different way of training their pilots. So it's also like coaching or consulting that I do with the perspective of business clients. Let's have a look at your syllabus. How do you use to teach? How can we integrate the simulator? How can we make sure that you get more new customers? How can we help your existing students progress faster? So that's the model that we chose. And yeah, it's available worldwide. And anyone that's interested, please let me know.
Well, boss, fascinating stuff. You must be a very busy person. But this is terrific. I mean, what an amazing adjunct to this sport. And I can't... I'm excited to see where the future takes you as well with this. It's fantastic. So we will have all the links, those of you listening, in the show notes for everything boss is talking about. Thanks for sharing this journey with us. And best of luck to you, buddy. This was great.
Thanks a lot. It was really great talking to you. Thanks for your interest and your enthusiasm.
Aw ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya 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.
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