Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cloudbase Mayhem. No housekeeping today. We can get right into this show with Alex Schweig. He is Peruvian born and got into flying down there in Miraflores. And then shortly afterwards, got a little bored with that and decided to pick it up a bit. Got into acro, still into acro, learned German so he could move to the Austrian Alps and get a job and work in flying. and picked Gerlitsen, a very famous acro spot, a really good place to train, a really good place to send it. And he's doing all of those things. So he reached out to me with a terrific email about how he approaches safety and risk and progression and the value of proximity flying and ground handling and all the things that we hear about on the show.
But I really enjoyed his perspective from the email and what he was talking about. So I reached out and did a show with him. He's been flying for 12 years, has big ambitions, just recently did his first comps down in Columbia, the Columbia Open and the British Open, and he's been doing a lot of flying with Yassin Savoy, a legend comp pilot, and I just really enjoyed this. We spent an hour together talking what we all love, so please enjoy this great talk with a fascinating individual, Alex Schweig.
Alex, welcome to the Mayhem. I'm glad you reached out to me and kind of funny timing. I was just looking at, there's a few people I like to follow on Instagram and just saw one of your nice photos, I think of flying with Yasin this winter down in Columbia. I understand you just spent quite a bit of time down there, but I thought where we might start, cause you know, maybe a lot of our listeners aren't familiar with you. I wasn't, and I had to kind of, since you sent me that email, I had to, I've been following on you a bit on the social media stuff, but why don't you share with everybody your brief history and why we're going to chat today?
Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, as an avid listener of the podcast, it's quite a pleasure to be here. I'm not yet a household name in paragliding, hope to be someday.
Basically, I was born in Peru, means I grew up soaring on the coast in Lima. It's a popular coastal soaring site, but boating around gets boring pretty quickly. So that took me into the pursuit of acro flying and ground handling and proximity flying and this WAGA kind of flying style. And that ended up bringing me to Europe in 2018 for a big Euro tour. Long story short, I found an opportunity in Austria, learned German within a year. And the next year I was basically living in Austria and working as a tandem pilot. something I had already been doing in Lima as well on the side, but here, it took upon a more professional note and kind of expanded my network of contact and my interest in paragliding to the point that this year I went on a cross-country exploration trip with an ex-colleague of mine.
Yasin Savov. He's a well-known PWC pilot, and that opens the door to this next chapter in my my adventure of flying, which is the world of cross country, which I find very, very intensely interesting.
And you've got a German accent. Is that just from picking it up and being over in Austria, or have you spent a lot of time in Europe previously? And also, you don't look Peruvian, so what's your background? What's your heritage?
That's funny you say that. I tend to pick up accents pretty quickly. Since I started living in Austria, I've picked up a pretty backcountry, mountainous Austrian dialect as well in German, which is, yeah, a bit of a fun note. My family is mostly European in background, but I was born in Peru. My mother was born in Peru as well, but I'm here on a Belgian passport thanks to the fact that my dad was born in Belgium, so it made things quite a bit easier. Did
You learn in Peru? Did you learn in Lima? And the sites we've all seen in front of the building is kind of the ridge soaring site, yeah?
Exactly. So, basically, that this site that everybody knows, the one in front of the big buildings on the coast, is called Miraflores. I didn't learn exactly there; I learned further down the coast at the site where the people who got kicked out of the main site went to fly. Because I was 15 years old, I... I never actually took a course to learn how to paraglide. It was basically borrowing equipment and playing with it, and about six months of ground handling before I ever got my feet off the ground. And... and to this, I credit this... this love for ground handling has made me a much better and much more intuitive pilot, I would say. Do
You think all that playing around on the deck led you to acro too? Because that's, you know, we see all the acro pilots are just so, you know, that's something we hammer on the show all the time is how important ground handling is and just how fun it can be too. You know, we want to encourage XC pilots to spend a lot of time doing it, but do you think that's what led you to acro, or is it more of the flying and just kind of getting bored with the ridge soaring? I'm
Gonna get on the side of the XC pilots who don't like ground handling and say, "Okay, it can be really frustrating at the beginning, but once you get into a certain flow, it can be extremely rewarding." And of course, at some point, this playful either proximity—very close to the ground—or handing the glider from one side to another, spinning it, jumping around, this of this kind of playfulness, of course, can turn into the same kind of emotions in the air. And as soon as reach soaring from one side to the other becomes boring, you start looking to get upside down. How
Did you, how did you kind of start breaking into to acro? Where did that, how did you? Is that, is there are there good places for that in Peru or
So, not, not really on the coast. It's a coastal soaring site. The one good thing is, if the wind comes in early during the day, it mostly holds during the whole day, and it means you can do many, so to say, runs. But the truth is, you're flying at most, at best, 200 meters over the ocean with waves, with power lines underneath you, a highway on the on the coast, and buildings behind you. So there's, there's no possibility of actually throwing a rescue. It's not a good acro spot, but it did allow me to get an insane amount of airtime in the few years that I was flying there.
And I imagine, you know, when you're, when you're ridge soaring like that, and like you said, it does get a little dry after not too much time. So you start spending a lot more time getting close to things, you know, proximity flying and, you know, scraping your feet and, you know, just making it more fun, which is also So obviously, you know, anytime we're playing with the ground, it's a little bit more dangerous, but it's also really good training. Did you find that that also kind of helped you prepare for acro?
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. One of the sites we started flying at once I got bored at Miraflores is Paracas. It's a coastal soaring site about three hours away from Lima. This I can recommend to everybody. It's a beautiful, beautiful place in the desert inside a natural reserve. And the whole fun there is, you can, you can fly barefoot, you can touch down on, on objects, you can fly very close to the ground. And this sensitivity and this playfulness, for sure, will reflect in many other aspects of flying because you're making corrections all the time. You're, you're always in constant movement, you don't stop adjusting the angle of attack, the turn, the, the pitch of the glider, including weight shift as well.
And I, and I believe, I really do believe that this intensity of play has a positive effect on all aspects of flying. Did you compete in acro? No, my, my level in acro is, is pretty intermediate. I took part in the last acro world cup in Albania last year. Um, but my interest right now is, is not really competing at a high level in acro. The, the, the level that pilots have reached right now is pretty crazy.
Yeah, it's insane. I'm content
being an intermediate pilot.
Yeah. How did you switch, or have you switched, I guess? When did the XC start?
Yeah, for me in Peru, XC was never really a thing. I kind of observed it from the side, because there are cross country pilots and there are cross country possibilities, but Peru is a complicated place to fly. the Andes are very aggressive in geography as well as in climate. And that never really piqued my interest. Once I came to Europe, I realized that there was so much potential to learn cross country. But anyways, I was way too concentrated with the whole history of my acro-flying here in Europe. And I worked together with Jessen as a tandem pilot at Gerlitsen. It's It's a popular acro site. And at some point during one of the summers that we worked together,
he told me, get a cross country glider, get a competition glider. You have the skills to control it. At which point I said, no, I don't. But he told me to get a cross country glider, prepare mentally, and go down with him to Colombia to do some exploration flying. And this was the beginning of what I hope will be a pretty long and savory career in cross country flying. I
like the last sentence in your email when you were kind of introducing yourself to me. It was, laugh a bit at our shameless pursuit of living from piloting flying bags around the sky with grace intact. It was a great sentence. Flying bags, I love that, around the sky with grace intact. What does grace intact mean to you? you for
Me, it's... it's pretty important to have a distinctive style, and I think one of the things that we can radiate around in our... in our pursuit of flying is not only our emotions, but our style in the air as well as on the ground. And it's important for me to show who I am in the air, not only... not only so people can recognize who I am, but for me to always look for a certain harmony and a certain grace in my flying. In the same way that the mark of a top chef can be recognized instantly by the way they play with flavors. I would really love for the mark of my flying to be seen instantly in the air.
I've never heard an analogy with food with flying. We hear about the chessboard in the sky and flying chess all the time, but I'm also a foodie. I'm not a chef at your level by any means, but the the cuisine in Peru is, you know, world famous these days, especially in Lima. And that's—that's an interesting analogy to tie food to, you know, style, the style of food and the the complexities of flavor to flying. I like that; it's interesting, yeah.
I think, I think there's a certain analogy to be made between the activities that one pursues in life, um, be it rock climbing or skiing or cooking or music or flying. I think everybody can put their own spin on things, and I think it's pretty important to refine this, this distinctiveness, not, not in the sense that you have to be a show-off about it or people have to recognize it instantly, but it gives you a very beautiful goal to work for in, in ever refining your own style and your own image also of yourself. Because for me, motivation is a big thing. I've been flying for almost 12 years by now. And it is a complicated thing to take care of my motivation, to make sure that I don't lose the motivation for flying, to make sure that flying is always a pleasurable thing and a thing that I can always learn from.
And not that flying becomes a routine, Because that's the point where, I guess, it can become pretty dangerous when it's just a routine and it becomes careless, and you, you don't care anymore about showing your style or refining your style or working on your technique or learning when it becomes a careless pursuit on the side, I guess that's when it can also become pretty
dangerous. That's one of the chapters in my book, killing complacency. And it's because complacency kills it's a, yeah, that's, that's good that you bring that up. Will Gadd talks, you know, I've done, I did that expedition with him a bunch of years ago across the Rockies and for For him, style was really important. How is style, you've mentioned style now a couple of times, how do you think of style?
Yeah, for me, it's the distinctive mark that a pilot leaves in his flying that can be recognized in acrobatics. It's pretty easy to notice. You've got pilots that have a very aggressive style. You have pilots that have a very technical, clean style. In cross country, that's more, well, not always more of a subtlety. There are some pilots who have a very Sandy style, so to say. They will go out in front of the pack and not really care about anybody else's line choice and just do their own thing. Yeah, like Yassin. You're learning from a king.
It's been fun to learn with him. He's a character. He's a very good friend. But he does have a very distinctive style in the sense that he will push forward with his own line choice without much regard to whatever the pack wants to do. In a sense, that's a very distinctive style. Other people will be mathematical and calculating and very much the contemplative chess player about it. It really depends. For me, it's working towards an aesthetic that I can be completely happy with and that identifies me as a person in the air and on the ground.
You've said that you, you know, you learned German so you could really bring your passion to a place where you can get the hours, you know, Gerlitzin's one of the best in the world because you've got the Acro site and amazing cross country and typically pretty good weather for cross country. It's an area I know very well. It's very special in the Alps as are most of the Alps for flying. When you say work, is that tandem work? Are you working in paragliding or is that with chef? chef is that being a chef no
A cooking was something I left on the side in at about, basically about 2015, I took the decision to leave cooking on the side for a while and dedicate on a career in paragliding. So to say, the easiest way to start with this was was tandem flying and working at a flying school. Doesn't really pay that well, a tandem flying is a good opportunity to have a very intense season and then take most of the year off to to dedicate to my own flying. And the opportunities I found in Austria for tandem flying were very good. And not only that, the opportunities that I found to relate to a community. Gerlitzin is maybe not the best ever aqua place. I would say it's Organia in any case. But the community that gathers at Gerlitzin is very unique.
I think it's a completely unique community. There's only one like it in the world, and it's right there. It centers around this camping site called Camp Candy by those who know it, and it's just such a colorful and flavorful mix of people from all over the world who come either to fly acro, or or do safety trainings, or just dedicate the time to being happy and colorful. You're
12 years now, and pretty diverse. Sounds like, you know, you did the—you learned in Miraflores and did the the ridge soaring and then acro, and now you're in, you know, one of the mega places for, you know, it's kind of an Annecy of the Alps kind of place to train and fly. Uh, you—you mentioned motivation; have you had times where it's—it's been harder to motivate, harder to get out the door, and you know, get the hours for
Sure, um, there's been a few moments in my flying career where I've almost dropped out of the sport entirely because I pushed myself too hard. Um, I have a low tolerance for frustration; that's something that one should recognize and and handle carefully. So, for sure, there's been moments where I where I where I was angry at flying, where I was angry at the fact that We spent so much time just waiting for the correct conditions. I was angry at the fact that acrobatic flying is very much a pursuit of repetition and repetition and repetition and sometimes making the same mistakes over and over and over again. And mixing that with risk makes it even more complicated to manage. But one of the important things for me is just to keep things fresh, to mix with other outdoor sports.
Right now, one of my biggest pursuits at the moment is skiing and ski touring, and that's something I can very easily mix with high mountain flying. For example, doing a doing a long ski tour and flying down, or actually flying up to then ride down, yeah.
That makes it fun, isn't it? When you, when you're, when you're mixing activities, it's, uh, just a little bit of spark and
I, I see many. Of course, I see many young people around me who are pursuing the sport very intensely and they attain an incredible level of skill in a very short time. Sometimes that makes me a bit envious because I look back at how long I've been flying and sometimes I can't do all the tricks that some of the younger guys are doing. But then I realized that for me, the pursuit of free flight is much more of a long-lasting thing. I want to do this for the next, I don't want to say a number of years. And in that sense, I have all the time in the world to diversify and pursue different directions in flying as long as it keeps me safe, happy, and motivated.
How old are you, Alex?
I'm 27 at the moment.
Okay. Still pretty young, 12 years. Just trying to do the math here. So you learned early, 15, 16 years old.
I had my first flights alone when I was 15. It's a bit of a funny story since I, I guess this story has been repeated over and over again in the history of paragliding, but I was ground handling on somebody's used equipment. I, I was already keen to get off the ground. Somebody gave me a radio, switched it on, took off. As soon as I took off, the battery died, boated around for about half an hour, top landed on my own, and then I decided I was a pilot, and a couple years later actually got a license of my own. You had any accidents?
That's a, that's a good question. I've, I've kept myself very, very much out of risk. I mean, not to say out of risk, I've kept myself out of unexpected encounters with the planet. Let's put it that way.
That's a good way to put it, you
haven't hit the ground.
hard, you just hit it normally, oh.
No, I've—I've hit the ground hard enough to bounce, but not enough to cause any long-lasting damage. Image, um, it is very much in my interest to keep it that way.
Chalk that up for me, how you know? I, I have often said I didn't get into this sport till I was 30, in the mid-30s, and I've often thought, you know, given my background and my love of speed and ski racing and just all the stuff I did when I was young, I just don't know that I would have survived this sport if I had done it like you did at that age. Anyway, I've always thought it's pretty good. I think I'm happy that I, in some ways I'm bummed. I mean, we learn better when we're younger and, you know, I would have loved been doing the X-Alps 20 years ago instead of when I started at 42, you know, pretty much definitely past your physical peak kind of thing.
So, but on the flip side, I've just thought, God, if I would have done this when I was 15, 16, I would have killed myself. You know, I just didn't have the respect for, I don't know, death that I do now and risk. And, you know, I was pretty loose for a long time and went back to my ski racing years. So I'm wondering how, you know, we want young people to get into this sport. You got into it young. What do you think the difference is or what are some of the things, what can you tell people that are listening to this who are maybe younger as a bit of a heads up? up, I'm not looking for anything, you know? Be careful, you know, or go slow. Or, but I, you know, it's, it's, you're, you're very different when you're 15 than when you are when you're 35.
100 um, one thing that probably made a big difference for me was that I, I wasn't involved in, in any sports at all. I was not a, I was not interested in sports until, well, after I started paragliding. Ah, okay. So paragliding was, was an activity for me; otherwise, I was, I was quite a, a stay-at-home kid. And this made me much more reflective, I would say. It made me punish myself a bit harder for my mistakes and really try to punish myself every time I would put myself in danger. I would very much reflect upon it because I hadn't been exposed to this kind of danger before in my life. And with paragliding came also the pursuit of other sports and also some injuries on the side. For example, I got really into mountain biking, Got really into downhill hill mountain biking, and then the injuries started coming, and I eventually left the sport because I thought this was unsustainable for me.
And so, one thing I would, I would recommend probably younger pilots, is to really think about how long they want to pursue a sport and not burn out in the first few years. I've seen way too many amazing talents get to a very high level and then just disappear. I guess it's a—it's a good idea to have in your head how long you want to do a sport for, what—what your goals might be in the sport, what are you willing to risk, how much you're willing to put on the table to attain a certain level of proficiency in the sport. If anything, just to reflect more upon the things that we do, to reflect more upon the times that we put ourselves in in moments of unnecessary risk, and to have an open mind for other people's comments.
Um, we all know that there's—there's a breed of pilots that only sit on the takeoff and tell everybody how dangerous, dangerous conditions are, and then actually never fly, even when the conditions are perfect blue birthday.
But it's fine to listen to them, but it's also fine to develop a criteria to
digest what kind of information is actually useful to you. So I guess having an open mind, listening to people who are more experienced, but not necessarily eating up everything that
everybody tells you as well. Yeah, that's another chapter in the book. It's a hard thing sometimes, times I think for, you know, for veteran pilots, it's pretty easy to decipher which is which, but I imagine that's hard. I don't really remember that. We, you know, I flew more in places when I was coming into the sport where there weren't many people around. So I didn't have to deal with that too much, but it's, I imagine that it's hard to figure that out when you're a hundred hour pilot, you know, who are the, who are the guys that are, you know, constantly constantly ground-sucking and for not much reason versus the people that you really should be listening to you know might be Chrigel on launch talking about challenging conditions probably want to listen to that yeah
Exactly. If somebody is throwing feedback at you, I think it's pretty important to have an open eye and see who is actually on the other side of the mic. In my early days, I was—my motivation was thrown down quite a bit. My pursuit of acro, and my pursuit of acro at a high level, was thrown down quite a bit by the fact that nobody was flying acro at the coast. Everybody saw it as something intensely dangerous. And I was shunned away from actually pursuing this so intensely because it was perceived as something that would cause a public accident, get our flying site closed down. And in the end, moving to Europe and finding such a mass of like-minded people and such a mass of young people who would embrace this kind of activity and say, that's perfectly fine what you do.
were actually way more sendy than you are. You're actually a conservative one compared to all the variety of crazy birds out there. That was a big eye-opener for me.
Yeah, I think this is one of the most important things. If you want to get good, you got to live in a good place to fly in it. I think that's just so critical, often overlooked. You need to be in a place that you can get the hours and you need to be in a place where there's a lot better pilots than you are.
100%. I think one of the most important things is just to surround yourself with pilots who are way, way better than you are. For once you learn through osmosis, you get to see a reference point and locate yourself somewhere on the proficiency scale and figure out what your path is to getting to a level similar to theirs. At the moment, I don't have a fixed home. At the moment, I just move around wherever I get the most flying hours. and in this way it's it's a nice challenge as well to organize one's life around flying conditions
the you recently started flying comps, I think in 2020. Did your first down in Columbia, if I have that right? I'd love to hear what you're learning from guys like Yasin and and how that progression is is going and and kind of what your goals are with that in the future. Yeah,
actually my My first two high-level comps were this year, so 2021. I did the Colombian Open and then got accepted as a wildcard at the British Open down in Roldanillo.
This was an eye-opener. So that was just this year? So
You've just done your
first comp? That was just this year. Oh, wow,
okay. Yeah,
and I have the Niviuk Open coming up in May, and from there on I still have to figure out the rest of my calendar. It was pretty much an eye-opener to see the level of pilots, pilots, uh, flying competitions in the speed at which they calculate their proficiency in handling their gliders. How good they are at climbing is a real eye-opener. I would say that's the biggest difference between being proficient at acroflying and keeping a glider open. Will not teach you how to climb fast. That's a, that's a skill completely of its own. The
British Open. I didn't compete in the British this year, but I have in past years. It's, it's pretty World Cup speed this year. I watched it from afar. It's fast. How did you find—was it, was it encouraging, or was it really, really humbling for both? Oh, I loved it.
I loved it. Um, many were saying the the speed of this year's British Open was similar to PWC, which makes sense because most of the PWC pilots this year were using it as the as the warm-up.
yeah um
It was, it was a bit of an eye-opener for me to to realize how much I still have to go before I get anywhere near being a top-level pilot, but it also gave me a good sense of the fact that I am already in a good position to start with. I can push confidently on a two-liner, actually. This, this time that I spent down in Colombia, so about 60-something hours flying two-liners and 1500 kilometers flying in down in Colombia, was the first time I'd ever spent any time at all on two-liners. So I arrived in Colombia and two days later, with three hours of sleep, I was flying 70k behind Yasin on a zero light.
Fun, that's a good time. Yeah,
It's, uh, quite the experience, I would say. And then, following Yassen's pace through the backcountry of Colombia, doing some exploration flying, that was interesting to say the least. And as for the competitions, I would say that the one thing that makes a huge difference is the climbing. Because gliding, finding good lines when you're a gaggle flying is possible, it's not that difficult, but being the one who arrives, even if you arrive low at a thermal, and being the one who reaches cloud base first or reaches the altitude at which you want to drop that thermal and go full bar again first is is an art in and of itself what
What little things were you picking up following Jason around? He's a good climber; he tends to just... his downfall is impatience, but it's, it's, uh, it's something we all just love about him. He's, he's always out leading. It's, it's fantastic to watch. Um, you know, that Russ, Russ who won the world championships this year, always talks about discipline, so Yasin probably wouldn't—I don't think he would say he has a lot of discipline, but he, he loves pushing. But I'm curious, you know, being able to fly with him outside of the comp environment, what you've learned from following him around in the sky. I
wouldn't call it impatience. I would call it pickiness. If a thermal is not right, if it doesn't have the right punch to it, he's just going to completely ignore it.
While somebody who's just learning and somebody more conservative like me is probably going to scratch around in a plus 0.2 and think, okay, I'm getting height. This is perfect. And not actually actually go and transition again to find that boomer waiting for you two kilometers away
Yeah, yeah, just learning when to smoke through something, maybe sometimes a little bit slower, but you know, just backing off a little bit if you get a bubble versus turning is, uh, is one of the critical aspects of doing well in comps because when it starts getting really fast at, you know, at the World Cup level, you know, one turn that's that's not, uh, well used is, is, you know, you don't want to go backwards, you'll just never catch the lead gaggle again. So it's that becomes a really critical skill, is knowing when to what's good and what should just be, when should you move on?
yeah, the craziest thing about comp flying has been basically every time I've made a wrong decision, I've had this horror moment where I've just been down somewhere low, scratching around trying to get back up to speed and then watching the whole field just fly over me 65 kilometers per hour. It's... It's a horror story unfolding in front of you.
But it's such a roller coaster of emotions. I mean, acroflying is something I love and I'm going to love forever. It's very intense. It's very rewarding. It's very much instant pleasure. But the roller coaster of emotions throughout the whole day that unfolds within a cross country comp, and participating in an event like this, is unbelievable because you can have your heart sink to the bottom of the ocean while you're 50 meters off the deck, just scratching in some windy place, and then again you're on top of the gaggle on a big thermal with all these world-class pilots speeding away, and being the one who's breaking away, which, which did happen to me once in the comp, and it's such a feeling of acceleration. It's amazing what
are your goals alex you know you've you've had this kind of a pretty nice mix of various different aspects of flying, proximity flying, acro, now more recently cross country, sounds like a little bit of exploration flying with Yassin in the last 12 years. What do the next couple and five look like to you?
I'm going to say the next couple of years look quite a bit like pursuing cross country competition, as well as keeping my current acro level and always expanding upon it. is probably going to get into some exploration flying as well, something I'm extremely keen on. And in the next five years, I'd like to start participating in some hike and fly races. This is probably going to be one of the toughest challenges for me because it's the first time in my life that I'm a physically active person, and I really want to get up to speed and up to shape in order to participate in these kind of competitions. But I have to do it in such a way that I don't injure myself from overuse, because it's a type of injury I've already had from so much flying. Flying is terrible for your shoulders, just to give an example.
Acro flying is terrible for your shoulders. Yes, indeed, that's, uh...
Acro flying and landing 300 tandems a season is also not very good shoulders.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, tell me about tandems. This is something I've always very consciously avoided my whole flying career. Is that because I hear from it depends on who you talk to? You talk to to some tandem pilots like Seb Espina, who just loves it, you know, and he thinks it really helps his flying, and he just, you know, it's good money, but it's also just, uh, he really likes that aspect sharing flying. But you talk to a lot of tandem pilots and they'll say, you know, the one thing you want to do if you want to become a good pilot is not do tandems. How
Do you feel about that? I've been doing tandems for the past six years. Um, I'm gonna say one thing about tandem flying—flying, it's... it's wonderful to share the joy of flying with somebody who has no responsibility whatsoever with the sport, in the sense that they're just out there to have those 15 minutes of amazing fun, and you're showing them this brand new perspective on life. And when we learn to fly, our first few flights are like being a tandem passenger; it's all new, it's all beautiful. This new sensation of flight is something undescribable, and it's being presented to you, and this... this awe, awe, and this admiration slowly fades, and it gets peaked up again every time you discover a new acro maneuver, every time you fly a new place.
But with time it kind of wears off and with tandem flying I feel you kind of absorb this from the person in front of you. Every time you do a tandem and you make somebody intensely happy, you kind of absorb this newfound awareness for flying again. So I greatly enjoy it. It's just a reason to be in the air many many hours of the year it does allow me to be very flexible with my with my time
It's a good motivation to be an extremely safe pilot. There is no making mistakes in tandem flying. Nobody cares if you land on your ass; nobody cares if you what kind of tricks you fly in the sky. For tandem flying, you have to start perfectly every single time, no matter what conditions, and make sure that the person in front of you feels the confidence, confidence to entrust their safety to you. There's, there's no making mistakes and there's no taking dumb decisions.
Yeah. I imagine that's really an aspect of our sport where this, you know, being mindful of complacency is a big one. I'm sure when you're just doing laps, you know, I'm just doing sliders and kind of quote unquote, the same thing over and over again, even though even flying tandems is never, you know, no flights ever the same as another flight. But the, I imagine that's something you have to remind yourself of pretty consistently. Is it, or is it just natural?
No, it is 100 % true. We tend to become complacent pretty quickly with repetition, is something I notice. And every time I notice a mistake in my routine when tandem flying, I have a very, very structured routine that goes from the moment I lay down my backpack on the ground to the moment that I push some passenger off a mountain, and every time I notice a mistake that I've made in this routine, and I try to be pretty hard on myself because this could interfere with somebody's safety and mine as well. It is, I'm not interested in injuring anybody, and I'm least interested in injuring myself. How
Many people would, you guess, 100. Okay, you take 100 people for a tandem; how many of those 100 decide, "I want to do this, I want to become a pilot"? It, I
would say it's not, it's not very many, um, just the pursuit of fly of one percent. I honestly don't know, I could say, I could say a number, but it would be, it would be pretending that I, that I know, but it's not the pursuit of flying is a, it's not big. No, I, I would say the pursuit of flying is, is such a technical thing, and it's such a commitment in time, money, and, and dedication, and mental bandwidth. Most people that I fly with, at least in the place that I do fly with, because it is a touristic place, it is a family holiday site, they're just there for a joyride.
Yeah, I'm fascinated by this.
You're quite interesting. I don't know that there's that many people that get into this sport that come from not a very sportive background. And And I'm always fascinated with this with my own group of friends, you know, my, most of my friends, I mean, nearly all of them who I do, you know, pretty, pretty wild things with, whether that's, you know, snowmobiling back country or ski touring, or I'm kind of like you with mountain biking, I've kind of given it up. I've got hurt and hurt too many times, but, you know, these are people who are very competent in the outdoors and have, you know, played in the outdoors their entire lives. They have no interest in flying. They love my stories and they like watching the films and, you know, they're fascinated by it, but they're not even interested enough to go have a tandem.
That's interesting that it's, you know, it's one of these things that I think most of us have in us when we're a kid. We look at birds and want to fly. And I certainly wanted to fly, but I didn't get into flying until I was in my mid-30s. I didn't really know what it was before then. But we don't see it like you do in the Alps here in the States. It's just not everywhere like it is in the Alps. It's pretty hidden. But, but yeah, the question is, you know, why do you think it's, it, it only reaches out to a very small percentage of people? Because when you take your passengers tandem, they don't know any of those things about gear and time, and you know, they, they're just, "Oh, I'm flying this, this is pretty neat, I want to get into this," but it doesn't seem like that's the case.
I
Would say, I would say flying is something that you're born with. This desire to look up into the sky and want to be there, I think you're either born with it or you're not. You can certainly grow into it, but I, I feel like this is a dream that is like a gene. It's, it's within you. You can either choose to exploit it or not. I was a pretty nerdy kid. Most of my childhood, I was spent reading and doing some kind of pursuit that was not really very related to sports. At some point, that became an obsession session with airplanes. I was very much into building and flying radio-controlled airplanes. And that led into paragliding. Because at some point, I realized that these airplanes I was building and the joy I had in flying them were
not enough. And as soon as I saw people actually flying on their own, this spark and this dream was born within me to actually take part in that. And at the beginning, there was no ambition. There was absolutely no desire to do anything, but just sit up in this chair in the sky and watch the world from above, from this very contemplative, meditative position. But that slowly became the pursuit that it's become now, that that has been mixed with being a multi-sport mountain athlete participating at a high level in competition, which is something that I never desired before until this year. It's been an interesting journey, and then, and to observe myself from the outside is, is very rewarding as well.
And flying has brought me everything I have in life: a personal transformation, a very, very rewarding and varied lifestyle, friends, a job, traveling to—I think I've flown in about 13 different countries by now, so Yeah, the pursuit of flying, I would say, is it's either something that's deeply ingrained in you, or it's something that you can appreciate and participate in as a passenger, but you're not going to be pulled into it because you think it's too extreme or too complicated or you're just not drawn in that way to experiencing it constantly.
With your acro background, what would you say about the importance of SIV and XC?
I would say cross country pilots have a bit of a way to go. I observed a few incidents in the air in Colombia. I saw some very interesting, to say the least, situations, including like a full one rotation tumble over an ENSO after an asymmetric collapse. Very, very enlightening to see from a distance. But it just shows me the level of SIV that many top-level cross country pilots have is insufficient. And I would say any amount of acro training and any amount of just control training, including ground handling and close-to-the-ground flying and playing,
is not just rewarding, but it's going to exponentially increase anybody's level of safety during this pursuit of cross country flying. Because, to be honest, these cross country gliders, They're not; they can be extremely aggressive in very punctual situations, but an acroglider is, is more demanding when it gets out of control. I would say things happen quicker, and the fact that you become proactive in, in controlling an acroglider throughout maneuvers and throughout the learning process of acro gives you a lot of mental bandwidth to be able to play with when you are in a, in an emergency situation, because there's a lot of things that your hands are doing without you ever having any idea what they're up to.
What
would you like to see more of in our sport alex when you're you know you're in you're in a major hub but what do you think is missing or whether Whether that be training, safety, instruction, wings, gear?
I would like to see training follow a more natural path because a student fresh out of flying school has a very confusing career ahead of him. I would like to see training follow a path that leads them, depending on their interest, through a safe way of progression to attaining the goals. Because right now you leave school as a beginner pilot and you're basically out on your own. You can decide to take a cross country course. You can decide to enroll in a safety training. But these are all very, very specific things and there's not too much string actually binding them together.
I'm amazed that this is something that comes up all the time And it doesn't matter who I'm talking to or from where they are. I mean, I know there are places that training is better than other places, and I won't get specific on that. But, you know, and there are, of course, instructors who are better than other instructors. But that's just the case in any sport and anything we undertake. But this bird out of the nest thing and kicked out of the nest is incredible in our sport. something that comes up over and over and over again. You know, we don't... depending, you can go through the APPI system or one of the others, but at some point you're, you're, you know, quote-unquote, done with your initial training and then, see you later, good luck.
It's, it's a bit mind-boggling. It's, a, it's no wonder that I think we see we have the attrition rate that we do and also, or the accident rate that we do?
Yeah, the issue is that our sport is so unfathomably complex and far-reaching that it's hard to actually create a system of education that will encompass everybody's interests, I would say. Yeah, you get kicked out of the nest with a very, very basic set of skills that is very certainly insufficient for most situations in flying, except taking off in perfect conditions, flying down in perfect conditions, doing that and doing a little bit of thermaling in perfect conditions and landing in perfect conditions, but the issue has to do with the fact that this is, this is also not any conventional sport. This is, after all, aviation. This is, after all, extremely technical and extremely reaction driven.
And it's just a sport that requires such a massive investment of time and mental power, and I would, would say, self-reflection as well, if someone wants to do it sustainably. That many people just find themselves incapable of dedicating that much energy into the sport and are stuck in this intermediate syndrome, yeah.
For sure, Alex. Curious, uh, what's your—what's your biggest aha moment, let's say, in the last year with paragliding, uh?
moving from an 18 aqua glider to a two-liner that I've never flown before in real air, and actually figuring out that paragliders can fly pretty far, that's
A fun one. Hey, wait a minute, I can go a long ways. This is cool. Hey, wait a
minute, I don't, I don't actually have to look down. I can look straight, and I can actually go there. Yeah,
That is pretty neat. I remember my... the first time I watched the X-Alps was in 2007, 2007, and I was sailing. We were... we were doing the kite surfing expedition thing, and I was sailing up in... I don't have that right. No, that was 2011 when I was sailing in Scotland. But anyway, I saw the first one in... in 2007, and it blew my mind. All I had ever seen was exactly what you described: was people would launch off a hill and fly around for a little bit, and then land right there where you were standing. And that's what I thought paragliding was. It just seemed the most boring thing in the world to me. And then I saw somebody put me onto the X-Alps, and I watched it and just got totally addicted. And I thought, "Wait a minute, hold on a second here, these people are traveling..."
they're using this like you said what did you call it you know a bag flying bags to trap Yeah, for
me, it's still completely unfathomable to put my head around the fact that we can ski tour or trail run or hike up a mountain with basically a school backpack and then proceed to go 300 kilometers in the Alps. to me is just a crazy pursuit is the fact that we are the first humanity has has dreamed has always had their eyes turned up to the sky, always thought, "Wow, would be so majestic to soar among the birds." The fact that we live within the first few generations that are able to do this with such ease and convenience, it seems to me a waste of my time not to dedicate myself to that, yeah.
It seems quite unfair, doesn't it, that we didn't have plastic and nylon when Da Vinci was alive? You know, that poor guy, he dreamt all this, he drew it all out, but he couldn't do it. No, we're very fortunate. What's the funniest thing you've ever seen flying? Oh,
That's a bit of a difficult one. I'm gonna have to think about that one for a bit. I've seen, I've seen many interesting, interesting situations. Uh, I think we should... I was, I was living at a flying site called Bischling. Um, yeah, I know. So, okay, cool, nice. I was living there last winter, and one thing we would do is... just, Austria is a very alcoholic country, let's put it that way. And one, one thing we would just do is... there's, there's like a mountain hut right next to the takeoff. We will sit on the terrace and have some beers and just eat some imaginary popcorn and watch things going on at the takeoff, you know, with all kinds of pilots and all level of pilots taking off and flying around. It's, it's a circus, yeah.
It is that... is that... is that can be quite circusy, isn't it? A busy... it's a busy launch. It is very entertaining. Uh, yeah, Bishling would be a good spot for that. We constantly go through there day one of the XL. So, what... what piece of kit would you love to see that doesn't exist yet?
I was going to wish for it, but somebody just brought it out on the market. And it's this new flare glider that allows you to have deep power like a kite and fly closer to the ground. And I'm so stoked to try one of them soon. That's a big dream of mine to have this ability to swoop down and stick to the ground. And something I'd really like to see is a bit of an innovation in the rescue technology and cross country harnesses. I'm thinking a base system in a cross country harness would not be a bad thing. I'm really surprised nobody's brought it out on the on the market, because cross country pilots need weight anyways. Weight is not an issue; I myself fly with six liters of water in my cross country harness. I'm thinking those six liters of water could be a life-saving base system instead of just useless water do
You know about vessels harness, he's
made Of course.
Has he? A cross country one already? No. Oh, sorry. I didn't hear you say cross country. Yeah, no, it's acro. But no, his harness is terrific with that whole base system and cutaway system. But yeah, if we could bring that in. I think it's coming. But if we could bring that into XC, that would be really terrific.
Probably another piece of kit I would be very, Very much interested in would be a more beginner-friendly school harness, just to avoid all the kinds of mistakes that still happen somehow with people not even experienced pilots. This is, this is something that's completely confusing to me: how pilots can still forget to do the leg straps and the current T-bar systems and the current stay-up or not-forget systems out there on the market. They're nice solutions, but they're fiddly and, and I wish there would be some kind of a system that would make this completely impossible. The fact that you could get into a pod harness, or into a, or into a school harness with your legs undone and thereby producing a deadly incident, yeah.
That's a good one. It still happens way too much; that always blows me away too. But yeah, we've got to be nice if we can get, you know, this is something that doesn't happen in commercial aviation because they've made checklists, you know, they've made you just can't. They've eliminated the dumb stuff because you have to go through this every single time, and we teach that to an extent, you know, and it becomes a thing, you know, you're, you're the for the checks you do. That's, that's the something we've, you know, ingrained in people, but it still gets forgotten. We, you know, we're still human; we make mistakes.
The one thing that flying so many tandems, so many thousands of tandems by now, has really ingrained into me is the importance of a of a standardized procedure. Yeah, so I follow basically the same procedure from the moment I set down my backpack on the ground to the moment that I leave the ground, and this applies across the harnesses that I use. So for me, it's it's very simple. It's one leg strap, T-bar on one side, T-bar on the other side, the other leg strap, chest strap, or whatever combination of of buckles that I have, but I try to do it consistently in exactly the same order. For once, it's just easier on the mind, and there's no way of making a mistake if you're always following exactly the same procedure.
Yeah,
That's really smart. I think that's something that
Easily missed, you know, we talk about all the time, you know, when you're, when you're clipping in, don't talk to anybody, and all these things. But I mean, if you just make it exactly the same every time, that's a good way to solve that. This is how you do it. I
mean, you never forget how to tie your shoes because you've done, you've tied your shoes in exactly the same way your whole life. If you put on your harness exactly the same way your whole life, it's pretty hard that you're going to do something wrong.
Alex, you probably are aware of this, but I've been asking you questions from this survey I put out about a year and a half ago. I've got a couple more and then we'll wrap it up and be mindful of your time here. But I've really enjoyed this. I've got a couple more here. This is a tricky one, but does free flight make other aspects of your life better or worse? So work, relationships, that kind of thing.
I would say free flight has been the single most determining factor in most of my life, in most aspects of my life. So to say it's for sure determined where I live, it's for sure determined my friendships, my relationships, how I spend my time, how I plan my year. I would say it's been positive, as I said, free flight has brought me friendships, connections, work, an extremely rewarding lifestyle—a bit of an uncertain one at that, but extremely rewarding. I would say it's brought me to actually love sports and love taking care of myself and being healthy, and it's just brought me to meet some of the most amazing people on the planet.
You know, the diversity of people that are attracted to free flying There's everything. There's absolutely everything. There's the IT guys, there's the engineers, there's the... there's the hippies, there's the... the crazy skiers, there's every type of colorful character you can imagine out there in paragliding, and for some reason, a big number of them tend to... to concentrate around this place called Camp Candy. If anybody wants a dose of color in their lives, I would really suggest spending a couple of weeks down there. That's a
terrific spot.
You've mentioned a few times that your approach has been pretty conservative and you haven't had an accident. You've been at this for a while now, 12 years. I'd like to just hear more about how you manage the kind of risk to reward spectrum and how you view luck versus probability.
I would say I can discount the first years of my flying as being not very risky. For sure, the flying that I'm doing, starting from the moment that I moved to Europe, is of much higher risk because it's much more real. One thing is coastal soaring and playing around on the coast. And it's completely another thing to be living in Stubaital, where you can choose to take off on a day with fern probability and then see yourself flying 30 kilometers per hour backwards if the wind actually blows in through the valley. So I would say my risk level has increased, but it has increased very much proportional to my expertise and my knowledge. I would say it's very, very important for people wanting to do this for a long time to
take a look at themselves from the outside, consider what kind of risks they're taking, consider how to minimize these risks, consider the value of always staying up to date in training. and the importance of having proficient glider control. You know, I never want to be in a situation where I very much feel that I'm a passenger of destiny. And as an acro pilot, I say I'm a conservative acro pilot because I'm not very often out of control. There's many people flying acro who get into situations with multiple twists and they get out of these situations successfully and very often. And one thing you see in agri-flying is actually how many,
how dire a situation can be and still solve itself completely on its own. But I don't want to take this approach because I don't think it's a sustainable one. I'd rather take an approach where either I don't put myself in a situation where I'm out of control, or if I put myself in a situation that I'm out of control, I have the tools at my disposal to work myself out of it and not just wait for fate to do its thing.
It's important for us to not confuse luck with skill, isn't it? Completely. Alex, it was a very articulate hour with you. I love how you described flight and your approach. Thank you very much. That was a true joy. I really appreciated this. I learned a lot, and thanks for your time.
Thanks, Kevin. As I said, the podcast for me is a wonderful medium to learn. It's something I plug into when I'm running or ski touring or just really need to clear my mind and bring some fresh thoughts. Some of the people that you give a platform tour are amazing. And I just hope that my words can inspire some people to follow this, as I said, this dream of flying bags around with Grace Intact all over the world. It's quite a colorful thing we do. I think that's a nice goal to
do this with Grace and style and tact is important. Thanks, Alex. I appreciate it. And good luck. I hope to see you in the sky soon.
See you in the sky soon, Gavin. I don't think it's going to be very long until we meet at some comp.
That sounds like it. Sounds like it for sure. Cheers, bud. Thank you.
If
you find the Cloudbase Mayhem valuable, you can support it in a lot of different ways. You can give us a rating on iTunes or Stitcher, however you get your podcast. That goes a long ways and helps spread the word. You can blog about it on your own website or share it on social media. You can talk about it on the way out to launch with your pilot friends. I know a lot of interesting conversations have happened that way, and of course, you can support us financially. This show does take a lot of time, a lot of editing, a lot of storage and music, and all kinds of behind-the-scenes cost. 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, year.
So way cheaper than a magazine subscription. And it makes all of this possible. I do not want to fund this show with advertising or sponsors. We get asked about that pretty frequently, but for a whole bunch of different reasons, which I've said many times on the show, I don't want to do that. I don't like having that stuff at the front of the show. And I also want you to know that these are authentic conversations with real people. And these are just our opinions, but our opinions are not being skewed by sponsors or advertising dollars. I think that's a pretty toxic business model. So I hope you dig that. Um, you can support us. If you go to cloudbasemayhem.com, you can find the places to support. You can do it through patreon.com forward slash Cloudbase Mayhem. If you want a recurring subscription, you can also do that directly through the website. We've tried to make it really easy and that will give you access to all the bonus material, little video casts that we do and extra little, uh, nuggets that we find in conversations that don't make it into the main show, but we feel like you should hear.
We don't put any of that behind a paywall. If you can't afford to support us, then just let me know and I'll set you up with an account. Of course, that'll be lifetime. And hopefully you're being in a position someday to be able to support us. But you'll find all that on the website. All of you who have supported us or even joined our newsletter or bought Cloudbase Mayhem merchandise, t-shirts or hats or anything, you should be all set up. You should have an account and you should be able to access all all that bonus material now. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate your support and we'll see you on the next show. Thank you.