Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. We have a really cool, very interesting show for you today with Boss Van Duschen. I'm sure I'm butchering his last name. I know I've got his first name right because I had to ask him about that. But Boss has developed, he's been an instructor for more than 10 years, 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 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 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 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 U.S. Nationals, I believe, will 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 it's super tall, a nice place to have oxygen, and there's a lot more information. It'll be on the registration, will be on Air Tribune, you can find it there, for just, 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 ex-Alps European Legends coming over and also giving presentations: Patrick von Cannell, who was second last year, uh, Aaron Durogati, the Italian Stallion, and Paul Guschlbauer are both coming.
Between the two of them, they have 11 Red Bull X-Alps races under their belt and a whole bunch of other stuff, deal with Dolomite Superman and our Superfly and the Dolomite Man and X-Pyr and a bunch. So, uh, they're both giving a presentation Tuesday night before the race, and we've got Tanguy Renaud-Goud, who has the the record right now for the most vertical climb in a single day and flown back down. He crushed that last summer, 13,320 meters, I believe. He also won the UAA Hike and Fly Championships this year, and an absolute beast. My buddy Tim Roches, a test pilot for NIVIAC, is coming over. He's been doing really well in the the last few years and the Borners to Fly and other events. So, 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, uh, 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. That's pretty cool. Yeah.
Well, first of all, stoked to be here. I'm very happy with, with, uh, with us doing this. Um, yeah, I've been flying with my dad for 27 years, man. That's a long time, actually. Started with hang gliding, you know? My dad, he's a skydiver originally, you know, making formation jumps. Um, he always was into the, the, the, the high energy, um, of, of the jump and of the free fall, and he actually got suspended over a, a corn field, and he asked his instructor, "Why, why did it took me so long to get down?" What the hell was that? And then the instructor told him, yeah, that's a thermal. They're like 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, you know, from the age of like eight, nine. I went with him, watched him fly. And I made my first flight on a hang glider at the age of 12. Wow. 11, 12. Yeah, those were different times. Tandem or solo? No, that was a solo flight. Yeah. Wow. It was just a ground winch flight. And from that moment on, you know, 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. Yeah. Did he have any reservations or did your mom?
Yeah. Yeah, that was, that's, we can talk very long about that, actually. Let me give you, let me give you the short lay of the land. I, I think he, he was, he was convinced that it would be, uh, would be fun to do this, that it would be exciting, and that I would be, you know, being the, uh, responsible young man that I was, that I would be able to do with this, to deal with this in a, 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 now. We have different licensing levels, but like, let's, 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, 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, in, in the actual flying, in the practicality of flying at that moment in my, in my career. And that made me, um, that really helped me, uh, a lot.
It saved my life, actually, once. Yeah, wow.
Let's hear about that, you...
Want to hear that story too? Yeah, yeah. I was 15 years old and we were flying in, uh, in the mountains in France, and I was still in, in training to get my, um, to to get to 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've got to have proper airflow over the wing to really be able to steer it. So the the wind sock 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 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 it's dragging you down so you You got to run into it and 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 airspeed 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 the, uh, 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 because I would have... 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? I was able to to get
enough speed to get, um, to get, um, control authority with the glider, but that meant really facing, uh, facing the rocks and steering towards the tree, so that those went in tandem, um, and this allowed me to get, um, to crash where I wanted to crash, so to speak. Yeah, so I flew into the trees and I, I don't know if you've ever seen the leading edge of a hang glider, that's a pretty sturdy, um, um, there's a pretty sturdy beams. They were all broken in like six pieces. There was really nothing left of the, of the glider. And I only had a, uh, a mild concussion and a, uh, a big, uh, well, flesh wound on, on my arm. Man, fast
thinking, dude, that's, that's a, that was nice. I can, I can visualize that whole thing. I had, 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 overdevelopment, 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 just wasn't a flying day, you know? And, uh, one of the, 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 rich soaring. And then it was really clear the cell was coming and a couple of us just got lucky and bombed out. Uh, and we're on the crown when this, this thing hit and when it hit the instructor and my buddy, Bruce, who supported me in the first couple of X ops kind of got blown over this thing and were able to run and land and in front of this Gus front and this, this other pilot, just all he had in his toolkit was big years. And, you know, so he put in big years when this Gus front hit and it was just like watching a butterfly in a windstorm. It was terrifying. And, uh, and we were all on the ground and, And, you know, in, in, at the, 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 bet, you know, it would have been suicide to fly towards it. It was blown really, really hard, but if he just let the wind blow him into the trees and, you know, probably would have busted the wing up, you know, maybe would have broken an arm or something, but, 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, uh, the trees are your best option right now. And, and what he tried to do was stick. It was tried to land and about 50 feet off the ground. He, he totally, His wing went parachutal and he didn't recover it and hit the ground really hard, and uh, 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, to, you know, like in your incident, that there's the shit's gonna 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, and it's often option B. Yeah, you
know, Nick Nanan 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, somewhere else, you know, go somewhere else, deal with it for the moment, you know, stay high if you can. And, uh, rather than exposing yourself to, for example, more, 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. Yeah. Wow. And did that change things for you at all? I mean, did it, 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 um did that kind of whoa wait a minute did it change your great
Question, I don't know. Yeah, well, in in in in hindsight, it was one of the one of the elements that that added to my decision to switch to paragliding, actually. Um, and you're right in your assumption that being like a 15 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 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 I kept on flying, but um, it it did not change things like, uh, in a huge way, but it put something in motion.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then did your dad switch over to paragliding as well, or is he still hang gliding? No,
We switched together, you switch together. Yeah, that's another fun, fun story because I got deeper into the into the hang gliding. One of the things I did is I got, uh, I became part of the support crew for the um, the Dutch Open competition, uh, 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 retrieved 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 We had like a long hold.
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 slow, it was dangerous because they could collapse. And we had all these like really, we had these images in
our mind.
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 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 newfound respect in that, in that instant, and and we saw these guys like launching, making nice takeoffs, making average takeoffs, and also aborting takeoffs, and that 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've been flying hang gliders for 15 years. Well, I should speak for 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—it's awesome. It can be a little bit better than on a paraglider, I should be. Yeah, that's—it's my experience with it. The—the sensation of being a bird, being able to like get it into a real nose dive without spiraling, that's—that's an awesome sensation, you know.
watching, watching these guys do the whole ground effect thing too, when they're coming in at 100k an hour and just, oh, I
Love the sensation of of landing with with the wing making like a spot landing with a hang glider. That's, um, I still get excited and happy about that, and 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. Yeah, do
You guys still, do you, do you still fly hang gliders, you and your dad? Or was it just a transition there for a few years and we had this few
transition years, and then we, um, we sold our, uh, we sold our gliders, and I've been flying solely, uh, paragliders, so but yeah, the safety aspect, it's, it's like a kinetics thing, you know? Accidents, unfortunately, they do happen. I believe you should do anything to, to prepare yourself in, in that way, that you reduce the chance of them happening, and you, You reduce the effects of when something bad happens. But the basic physics come down to the, yeah, hitting the ground with 70 kilometers per hour with your head first or 35 on average, of course, with your feet forward. Yeah, 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 I've seen too many accidents.
Yeah, it's a hard, it's I, 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, and so yeah, I think it's, it is pretty tricky to delineate all
that if you look at the statistics, I'm I'm sure that, uh, on on On average, paragliding is less safe because the barrier to entry to paragliding is way lower. Yeah, like Rosagen said,
it's so easy to fly a paraglider, it's so hard to fly it well.
Yeah, yeah. That's one that I kind of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have great respect for hang glider pilots. And this was just a personal choice. After seeing a lot of accidents, mainly on takeoff with the hang glider. So 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 then added to that, but this is something that we discovered later, you know, you can't ground handle a hang glider. and the entire ground handling aspect, uh, I'm a great fan of june soaring with the paraglider as well, you know, dragging your your feet or your hand through the through the sand. That's that's that's awesome to to do with a paraglider, and you can just land anywhere, land on a slope, land somewhere on top of a mountain, go go and make a full bivox. All those things are completely out of reach for hang glider pilots. Do a do do a hike and fly, yeah, yeah
the hike and fly aspect is, is, and it's also, it's, it's been, I think this is the new wave of paragliding. I mean, this was something that was incredibly niche when I got into bivvies, uh, you know, and now it's, I mean, that's the number one question I get is about bivvy gear and light wings, and you know, the X-Alps is really, and then all these other races that are there's a million of them now, and it's, it's really, I kind of, it's exciting, it's super exciting, and you're right, that's logistically more challenge. There are hang gliders that will say they could do it, uh, you know, and they've, they've, they've got, they've got cool little, uh, carts that they've worked out, and you know, lighter weight stuff, it's pretty, 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 the mobility aspect, just being able to take off and land virtually anywhere. That adds so much to the to the experience, which to me is, it's not just the flying, it's not just uh crossing distance, it's just being being part of nature, enjoying myself, pushing my own boundaries, uh having fun by myself and with others. Uh, yeah, the entire lifestyle around it. Yeah, so that makes you
I asked you about what was it like for your dad to get you into it? You know, how old's your dad? That's a great question. I think he just turned 64. Yeah, oh geez, he's young. Well, yeah, but I was gonna say that, let's reverse that. What's it like from you? You've been flying 27 years, uh, you've seen it all, you've instructed. We're gonna get get into your project here in a bit, but, um, you also know how dangerous this is. What's that like for, I mean, I, I used to watch my dad get into sailing when he was at basically your dad's age. And, you know, let's just face it. Older people don't learn as fast and, you know, he's been doing it a long time, so he's probably fine, but you know, we are more brittle.
We aren't as, you know, 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, yeah. The, the main thing is that we, we are a lot alike, but we, uh, there are also differences in how we approach stuff. You know, he has, he has really quite binary approach to everything in life; it's either horrible or it's fantastic. And, and for me, I'm more kind of a gray zone guy that I'm trying Trying to, you know, I see you laughing. Yeah. And this led us to have some very, how should 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.
So 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 conversion 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 through his paces, you know, he of course, he's been flying for a long, long time as well. Uh, he started before me, so he's, he's been there, done that. Uh, and at the same time, not got the t-shirt. You know, it's, it's we keep have this, 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 gonna become very unsafe to yourself and to others.
So we, we know, um, we know enough to know what we don't know, what we can't do. Um, and we keep running into our own limits, and we, we keep, we are a mirror for, for each other in, in that we keep reflecting on that. And sometimes I tell him that, you, you should not do this or that because of this and that reasoning. Uh, and, and he does the same in, in my direction. So yeah, wow.
What a special relationship I mean to have. It almost sounds like you've got this mentor-student that's both ways. And that's really nice. It's nice to have a touching stone, isn't it?
It is. Hey,
dad, what do you think?
Yeah, 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. Yeah. And where is home base for you?
Well, I live in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Um, so I have my business, um, here as well, uh, but I consider the, uh, the Austrian Alps my home base. Yeah, is that because of
proximity that's
Because, uh, I learned to fly over there, and I, I love flying over there. The entire Alps region, I go to Italy, I go, uh, for the, for the Dolomites. Uh, I've flown in Switzerland, Austria, a lot of times, but also in France. Went to Morocco, a lot of countries over the world, but the, 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 the 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 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. Is that, do I have that right? Okay.
Yep. 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. And 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, you know, thermal flights and, you know, heading to the Alps in March can be pretty spicy. Yeah. How do you, how do you tackle that? Or how do you, how do, I imagine it's often a group of you guys that goes down together and, you know, you have a week or two weeks together. Yeah. I think this is something that spanks a lot of people. You know, you're just, you're not really, you're 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 are less often okay to go fly at the winch, and you can do dune soaring. But you know, brushing off the brushing up the webs at the dunes 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 grounder, like handling your glider in strong wind, um, making making a takeoff. But after you've you've done that, yeah, what else is there? You can practice a bit of turns, the 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 how how high can I go, how far back can I go? So how, where is the lifting area? All these like technical things that they are all not, there's not much overlap with mountain flying and dune soaring in my experience.
I do, I do, what I do like about it is the high wind aspect and you're still, you know, like you said, knowing how far back, how far up, you know, where is it dangerous if you go back and land in the lee? You know, these are things that come in awfully handy in the mountains because you can kind kind of visualize the air. I think, 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 it's, you know, I, I use that kind of skill because I I'm, I'm properly in the mountains. I don't have places like that, but I, I always try to spend a lot of time, Especially when I'm training for the xops in places like that, because it—it really does, it can transfer in, in, in ways where, you know, 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. Yeah, I understand what they do, I understand how the rotor works, and you can—anytime you can visualize something that's invisible is good. Yeah,
yeah you're absolutely right there uh it's really the element of the of the dealing with strong wind that that 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, well, of course, there are two classes of pilots, as we always say. 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. Yeah. But 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 crosswinds, 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 uh soaring uh that's one of the major causes of uh serious accidents
Airspeed. This is a big one. I, I think that this is, uh, 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. Wind, yeah. So suddenly they take that to where there's very little wind and forget about wing pressure, um, and and like you said, then you can spin or stall super easily, yeah.
yeah yeah
Yeah, that's—that's a big one. This is—you just said visualization—that this is a great transition to VR. Tell me about your project, and because this is something I've been learning and trying to of practice more and more, I even did a podcast recently. Yeah, that was a great one, actually. Yeah, I—I think this is important for—for us as a community to spend more time doing it. Mitch Riley was the first one to really make me think hard about this, is that you know we can—we can learn a ton from, and it's the—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—it's damn near as good as actually doing it in terms of our brains don't know the difference.
Is that right?
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, oh, yeah, 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 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 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, you know, sports psychology and training and, you know, nothing specific to paragliding, but it doesn't matter. It's this, you know, basketball, football, baseball, no matter what you're doing. And they, you know, 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, you know, 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, a more difficult audience than you are. So I'll try to, 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 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 in basic maneuvers. They use simulators to make sure you get to the level of like what we call type rating, learning a specific new aircraft. When you do your your prof checks every half year, 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, "But 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 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 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, like, I started writing a syllabus, training plans for if I would have that simulator, how, what would it, what should it be able to do, how should it work, and how will I teach with that? And from that, I, like, 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, do, was, like, make the aerodynamic models of a paraglider. I could do a 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 paragliding 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, uh, business associate. It's the—it's his name is Hans Jorde. I also mentioned him in, uh, in one of my videos in which I introduced the simulator, and he's like the—the—the technical brains behind how—how this simulator works and why it responds as—as realistically to the pilot's inputs and to the conditions that we simulate with it as it does now. So what's what the simulator is actually it 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, uh, 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, um, so you can steer the paraglider in the simulator the same as you would steer a real paraglider, namely using weight shift, uh, and using your brake input, uh, then of course we have the speed system, so do
People sit there and move around. Yeah, yeah, it's hysterical.
Yeah, yeah, you should check out my video on the YouTube channel. There are some footage of people flying in there, and it's in, it's insane. It's, it's truly insane. We've been working with this for two years now, um, and when we did the first like closed alpha testing with a 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, uh, it's come such a, such a long way what we can do with technology. One of the main defining things that makes paragliding different from like other air sports or general aviation is that you're completely out in the open, facing the elements, and that like things as estimating height and distance and speed for when you're trying to, to stick a proper landing.
Those are very important. They are actually 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. 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 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. And I thought, let's recreate this to the finest detail possible and see what happens when we train people to land in the simulator.
And one of the first pilots that I had fly this, this landing field was my dad, actually. And 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 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 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 and 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 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 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 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 might, there may be a different wind, you know? They're like, 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 purely from a didactics 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. 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 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, that's, that's, that's the beauty, and that's not something I invented, by the way. This is something that is, that is, um, that is typical for simulator instructions, yeah? We just built one, uh, 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. And 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, the third point of focus where I have seen this happen with hundreds of students. They're about to get licensed; they're, 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, in different conditions, 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, uh, looking, the looking technique is actually very important. Now you're moving forwards with roughly, if there's, if there's no wind, you're moving forwards 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 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, is this looking technique there? They just keep watching where they're going; they don't turn their head a lot. 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 get 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, yeah, which is normal in
learning, and when you do this, when flying actual and flying outside, there is 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 they 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. dissipated. Um, I got sink on my, on my base leg with a lot of sinking air, or it 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, and I tell them, "Come, come look at the instructor station." And I show them my monitor and I say, "Look at your exact track log, because, because we can like 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 were, there is no sink, there are no thermals. This was all you." So I also, I also call it like the ego destructor. It's so you're really
teaching people to take ownership of of where they are and how capable they are
yeah but not because 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 worldwide 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, no. Well, that's why it wasn't, yeah. It was that, that
Was why? And yeah, maybe I should have turned a little earlier, or maybe I should have done this. But the um, the info there's, there's not enough ownership, and that's that 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, 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, 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, yeah, the thermal, it 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 like 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, I'm in the simulator. I'm coming in for land, and you can just dial up the crosswind. Boom, yeah, yeah. I, how do I sense that? How do I, I just, I can, I can tell by the motion of the glider. I've got a cockpit with some instruments, or because I don't feel it, you know, like you would normally kind of
Feel it? No, you're right. We the simulator that we are currently operational with, it's it's 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. Um, so when when you lean to the right, the glider starts uh going to the right, and when you brake, uh, it also has effect on the um, on the wing, and the the feedback that we have on the brake lines, normally when 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, it's 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, motors, um, 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 seven G's, and you really feel these engines like pulling your hands up, but you want to keep them down. You really feel this, it's, it's awesome, and it's, it, it adds another level of, um, immersion. Yeah, but it is not strictly necessary for most, most exercises. So you ask me, "How does it go?" Um, you have an, um, a simulated instrument, you have a simulated, uh, or use a Syrite instrument for that.
And we have a simulated Syrite Cisnaf. We have a little cooperation with, with these guys, we have a Syrite Cisnaf, which you can see your ground speed, you can see your magnetic heading, you can see your vertical speed, and your altitude, um, and of course you see the landscape moving, so you have the perspective change. Um, there's a fan blowing air against you to have the, uh, the sensation of, uh, flight and orientation. In our next version, that's what we call an active fan, so the fan is also controlled by the airspeed, um, with your, which you're flying with, so if you're like making dolphin moves, you feel so
if you know you take you take an X ops pilot, you know, and put them in your system that somebody who's been flying 20 years and done a ton of comps versus a P two, you know, 25 hour, is it just, is, is the X ops pilot going to get into your system and just crush it? I mean, in other words, do they, can you given someone's history? Okay. That they, they're just going to be totally way more natural. You can just tell. Okay. So it's, so it's very relative to the real world.
Absolutely, yeah. Oh, wow! We've, we've had hundreds of pilots in it now, um, and, uh, the general consensus is that it is extremely realistic, both in how it looks and especially in, in how it feels and how it responds. And I've had pilots of that, that, that first group you spoke about, really extremely experienced people flying it, and, and just yelling, I'm flying, I'm flying! What's happening? It's, it's, 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 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, uh, technique, tactics, and strategy, it's at the tactics and technique level. I've had a very experienced cross country pilot flying in it, um, and he said, "Well, I'm, I'm really missing the feedback of my glider, you know?" He started steering by moving his brake inward, braking 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, it 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 the beginning of August last year. So, no, 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 dune soar, I can't fly longer than maximum 30 seconds or a minute because I keep bumming out.
When I'm 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 then 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, and I asked him, "Jos, is that you?" And he said, "Yes, yes. Oh, sorry, I was, I was so into the, 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, um, 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.
You, your brain recognizes the situation, thinks, "Oh, I've learned how to deal with this." So it's, it's really a huge booster, a huge accelerator for flying. That, 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, the feedback is huge, the feedback is real. Pilots are very happy, uh, with it. You
Talk about future editions. Is this something, boss, that you could, uh, are we going to see these in other parts of the world? Is this something kind of exportable? You know, it's the VR glasses, it's the, it's the simulator, you know, that you're sitting in with the, yeah, it is. Okay, it is. And then it's just a software update, I mean, uh, you know, like if I'm a school, which I'm not, but if I'm a school, this just sounds to me, this sounds amazing. I mean, what an incredible way to teach. So, or to add to the teaching that you need, you need the real experience too, but you can have this as a, like you said, to get more than six minutes a day of, of landing. Yeah. Um, if I, if I buy this, can I just get the update for the, you know, the, eventually the thermals actually come off real, real triggers, whatever. I'm just making that up.
Absolutely. Oh, wow. Yeah,
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, 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, and we 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 a—what is an average price that someone here from—well, 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—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—a case, and um, I have a lot—I have a lot of data. I know now what people are willing to pay. These, uh, these fixed-price, um, 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 220 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, like, 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, um, is that within a few years, um, 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, uh, they're a bit baffled. You know, Stephan Bernard, a really high level, he was just with me down at the, at the World Cup, and you know, he flew fighter jets, you know, in for Germany, and now he's flying for Net Net Jet, you know, the private thing. Yeah, and you know, he, he was baffled when he got into this sport as you were, that they don't have more of this kind of check box type learning, you know, that you do this, and it's, it's a, it's a step, it's a process. You can't just skip this stuff in general aviation. You're, you got passengers you that you can't kill, and uh, you know, so he, it sounds like this is a really good way to bridge the, 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 at 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 airtime, our—not just a low airtime pilots, but the pilots that really need to work on building their skills to get up to the level of flight. 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 a 80 percent of the 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 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 eight, and at the beginning of the season, that degraded back to a four. And then during the season, you're learning a lot of things, and at the end of the season, you're at an eight, and at the beginning of next year, at a four 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 a, this is a 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? Yeah, pretty easy equation. Yeah, um, you know, the people around you are getting more hours. I mean, there, there is such thing as talent, of course, in this sport and background, ground and what you've done. But you know, for them, if they're—this is a big one—there's, and I say this all the time, I'm sorry listener to have to hear me say this again, but there's not really any shortcuts, you know? And there's not really anything that replaces currency except this kind of sounds like it might. It certainly helps, well
I, I dare to say that this, this is as close to a shortcut as we can get. You still have to put in the time, uh, you still have to, you still have to 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. more, but but I think it's huge that you, that we can put the um, we can put the bottleneck in the teaching process, uh, in the brain of the pilot instead of the the conditions.
You asked me earlier, Gavin, you asked me earlier, "How does it work? Can I, can I buy one?" We're actually not, we're not selling them because it is something um 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 like add something on top of that, like the the influx of new pilots when we, when When we were 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. Well, then you have to show up at a certain point in time, pay a lot of money. Hopefully the conditions are okay. 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 and people here in Sun Valley. People who live here live here because of nature and the outdoors and what's possible, the ski touring and the mountain biking and all the things to go do. do. And 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. You know, 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, and the barrier of entry is too high, you know, whether that be cost or, you know, just the, the, the weather, The weather, the place, the gear, all these things.
So that's the fear. Yeah, exactly. Wow. That's really cool. I hadn't thought about that.
And 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, the model that we have chosen 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 just a—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 that respond as close to real paragliders as it gets.
You get the landscapes, the training areas. You get a 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 prospective 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. Um, you must be a very busy person and it's, but this is, this is terrific. I mean, what an, what an amazing adjunct to, uh, 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. out uh thanks for sharing this journey with us and best of luck to you buddy this was great
Thanks a lot, was really great talking to you. Thanks for your, uh, for your interest and your enthusiasm, if
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