Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. I want to start by apologizing for being so late with this one. We're a week behind. I will stack them back up, as we always do, and get back on track. We'll do this one this week and then another one next week and get back to our two-week schedule. The reasons are many. We had a very good friend of mine, Evan Bouchier, and his wonderful gal, Emily. We had just gotten married on Saturday, and we had a big fly-in here in Sun Valley, and the weather really cooperated. And a lot of big flights go down. Some of you may have heard Galen Kirkpatrick beat the U.S. FAI record by a substantial margin. That was actually set here a little over 10 years ago by a farmer in here in Sun Valley.
So Sun Valley continues to be the place for really big flights, and it was fun to have a whole bunch of people in town chasing it. Before I get into this show with Michael Vergalla and the Free Flight Lab, I wanted to put out a little PSA from Jessica Love. Some of you may remember she was collecting data quite a while back on fear injuries, and she's just gotten another grant to take an even deeper dive. And I'm going to just read this from her, and if you're interested in participating, you can reach her directly or just ping me, and I'll send you or she will send you the invitation letter that explains how it all works. But here it is from her directly. Are you a paragliding pilot currently experiencing a fear injury? And I'm assuming this works also for hang gliders, of course.
Jessica Love is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Portsmouth, and she's conducting a study to understand how fear injuries change and evolve over time. Jessica's research aims to identify the factors that promote or inhibit recovery to design better interventions and foster resilience. She is looking for active pilots who are currently experiencing fear injuries, and she's looking for people who are willing to volunteer for this study. As a participant, you'll be asked to take part in interviews and maintain a diary of your experiences over the course of six months. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to research in our sport that could help countless others in the future. By sharing your story, you can help uncover valuable insights and make a significant difference in how we understand and treat fear injuries. If you're interested in volunteering or want more information, please contact Jessica Love at the University of Portsmouth.
You can email Jessica Love at the University of Portsmouth. You can also email her directly at jessica.love at port.ac.uk. Again, that's jessica.love at port.ac.uk. Or just ping me, and I'll send you the information. All right, this week's show, Michael Vergalla. I've been hanging out with Mike at comps for a number of years. He and I have some sailing background together. He has done a lot more racing than I have. But I started. I started with sailboat racing and was into science and research back in school and then discovered paragliding in France in 2012 and shifted his life, as many of us do, around to flying, but mostly research.
And he has an organization called the Free Flight Lab. It's a nonprofit. And as he explains in the show, there's kind of three pillars of that, climate science, conservation. There's safety. And he geeks out on all kinds of cool things when it comes to flying and weather and forecasting and measuring energy. And he wants to get a robot flying on Mars and all kinds of cool stuff. His brain is fascinating, how he thinks is fascinating. I've been a big fan for many years, even though I didn't fully understand what he was doing. So I wanted to get him on the show so I could. Better understand what they were doing and what the vision is there and what they can potentially accomplish.
Fascinating stuff. We had a lot of fun. And I think you will, too. Oh, and there's a bit at the end about motion sickness. It's very cool. He suffered with it badly, both at sailing and flying. So if you suffer from motion sickness, make sure you stay until the end. And he's got some advice. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy.
Mike, it's great to have you on the show. I should have been doing this years ago. You've been deep in some very cool projects. And I have watched from afar because everything you do is way beyond my brain power. So I can't wait for you to wow me and the audience. And I'll try not to act too stupid in the questions I ask you. But I know you're dealing with energy in a way that's very cool that maybe we inherently understand. But. I don't think we really do. So but before we get into the free flight lab and what you're doing, what you're trying to accomplish and the powers that be, what's your history in this sport? How did you get into this? How did you get into flying? How did it lead to the free flight lab?
Yeah. Gavin, I really appreciate you having me on the on the show. I know we've we've talked a few times and actually there's no better time than today to kind of discuss the different projects I've been working on. I got into paragliding mainly because I was talking about how racing sailboats changed my life. I was, you know, I always had a dream to be like an astronaut and fly around and explore strange planets. And a mentor had given me advice that I needed to become an operator. So be able to effectively be trained in anything and be able to accomplish high stress, convergent situations and deal with it. I went to university in Florida and I started repairing boats that were destroyed from a hurricane and started taking them out and racing them.
I found a group and started doing offshore races off the coast of Florida in the Gulf Stream. And that had a fundamental impact on my life because, you know, you'd be a few days into a race and and in a squall and in the middle of the night, see the moonlight and rainbows by the moon. And and it was these unbelievable experiences. On Earth that were powered by wind and weather that changed my life. And so I was talking about that at this this university in France and a guy said, hey, I think if you like sailing, you might like paragliding. And so, you know, really what I didn't realize is he just needed me to drive his car down. But it's OK because I, you know, I put on the bag and I hiked to launch and I watched him take off.
And I. And I thought, this is this is just this is the thing I've been looking for, right? I I had hoped to, I don't know, fly fighter jets or something, but I didn't want to bomb villages. And and all of a sudden there's this fabric aircraft that seems quite capable. Now, I went to school for aerospace engineering, but we never learned about paragliders. We never learned about gliders or soaring or thermals. We learned about very other things. And so out of a bit of frustration.
I've been continually trying to connect the dots between my my science and research background and this sort of beautiful art that we participate in, which is paragliding and both the the design and construction of paragliders, but also how we use them, how we fly and the, you know, the variety of species of birds we are. Right. And I and I like to make the joke. It's like the odd ducks at the odd duck pond. You're going to find. Weird pilots and you know what, you're going to land in a field with them and the person you're yelling at in the thermal, they're going to land in the same field as you. So you kind of can't burn too many bridges, but at the same time, everyone is their own unique type of pilot, right?
They're they're into acro or they're into hike and fly or they're into racing where they're carrying 50 pounds of lead or something. And we're all unique, but we also all are taking advantage of an opportunity that has only existed. Basically, in the last 30 years out of all history, right out of tens of thousands of years of humans being curious about things that are moving around in the air, we get to do it. And and that blows my mind. And I'm trying, you know, free flight lab. And this essence is is how to do more with paragliders beyond just a sport where some crazy people go and fly around and race or go explore. And then where it really roots back to my origins is it's exploring a very strange planet with very strange creatures on it.
And and you get smells and you get you get all of the wonderful things that is on Earth. And that's fascinating to me. So I I first saw it in France. I took like afternoon and ran down a cow field filled with thorns and was bleeding off from my legs. It was the best. It was the best day of my life. And it was fantastic.
And and so I was, you know, a student. I didn't have any money. I had lots of time. And and I, you know, until I was out in California, I didn't start. So I saw it in 2010 and I started in 2012. And if my instructor hadn't let me pay him over the course of a year and a half for my first wing, I wouldn't be flying. Right. And that day in France took a very big deviation of what my course in life was. And where my course in life has now ended up. And I wouldn't I wouldn't change it for anything like their experiences flying that I can't dream. Right. Like the start of a race where everyone is rich, soaring up the side of a cloud before they cross the Columbia River. You can't explain that to anybody else.
Like it just doesn't make sense.
Yesterday we were we were flying from here. It's quite smoky right now. We were flying from here just basically as far as we could. I was with my buddy Revis. He was supporting me, you know, in a couple of X-Alps. And we got out over the Lemhi's over over Saddle Peak and hooked an eight meter climb on the Averager. You know, that's really hard to describe that to somebody going from 6,000 feet to 15 grand in seconds, you know, just in your ears popping and everything's so epic. It's just epic. It's it's mind blowing. You know what you're seeing, what you're feeling, what you're experiencing. From hot to cold to the power of the sky is is mind crunching.
And then a plastic garbage bag or a star shaped balloon flies past you or or or you and some other crazy thing. And I I think the perspective we get is alarming. You know, the modern world as humans, we're basically two dimensional. We're like magnets on a refrigerator. Right. We move along. We can climb up a mountain. But even on a plane, You're going 500 miles an hour in one direction, and the up and down is not so much, so paragliding and gliding or, but, but really, paragliding and hang gliding probably are the most three-dimensional experience you can have on Earth. And and then I ask the question, well, what can you do with that? Right. And that that's really where the lab projects come in and the the idea of, like, what?
Well, what are the three areas that could help our community, help our pilots and and kind of enrich and enhance the sport in one way or another? And I landed on three areas. And so it's climate science. So that's, you know, measuring things in the atmosphere, looking at improving weather forecasts, et cetera, conservation. So as pilots, we end up flying in really beautiful, amazing natural spaces. And we're actually we care a lot about them. We're good stewards. Of our natural spaces. Right. We we hike one way and fly down. We're not we're we use the trail half as much as other people in some cases. But that revolves around, you know, eagle preservation, hawks. Right. All of our experiences that we have around nature and its animals.
And how do we prevent forest fires, for example, like I've been at a number of sites where we're flying and we call in the fire because we're the ones with the perspective. We're out in Kings Canyon. At seven thousand feet and we say, hey, look, there's a hotspot over there. Somebody call it in and we can call it in. So we we have a way to effectively work with our communities and people that and protect the natural spaces we love. And then the final area is safety. Right. And whether that relates to motion sickness, which I've done a lot of work on motion sickness or line trimming, keeping the gear in calibration and tuned. And then the final area is safety. Those are sort of the three pillars of areas where projects exist within free flight lab.
And, you know, it's all it's all a big experiment. And the current sort of main showcase project currently is a high altitude paragliding robot. And so we've talked a bit about that.
And I just was curious how high paragliders could fly. Like, what is the rate of Kindler, the first of which is. the physical limitation of how high we can fly. And it was kind of a wacky dream, but I got the opportunity to test it one day. And I built a robot, like a small little RC robot with little arms. And it had a very dumb control system and a GPS, had some waypoints in it. And I built a small D-bag out of a recycled spinnaker and put it up on a high altitude balloon, like a weather balloon. And it D-bagged from 18 kilometers. And I packed the wing just like an acro pilot would pack the wing. And I followed the Pál Takáts video and just said, okay, well, let me do it the way pal does it because I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here.
And then the robot worked, right? I mean, it had some riser twists, the riser twist came out, and then it worked. And so I said, well, shit, now what, Right? Like, this thing works? What do we do with it? And a lot of the ideas are around, well, how do we return radio songs? How do we return weather balloons and make sure that we're not creating trash all over the planet, right? 2,800 stations globally that launch twice a day is almost a million dollars a day spent on weather balloons. And it's all garbage for the most part. Now, there's an opportunity to use paragliders and to use other systems to fly these things back or to launch balloons in more places, right? I was talking to somebody recently in Sun Valley. They said, yeah, our closest sounding is in Boise.
We would love to be able to launch radio songs here. So the project ideas are around sending things really high up and then flying them back. A three kilogram paraglider can carry a hundred kilogram pilot all day, 11 hours, 12 hours, 500 kilometers. In engineering school, you would learn that that paraglider would just go down at some glide angle and not be as capable as having that flight platform carrying that amount of... of mass that doesn't exist in any other flight platform in the world ever that is that efficient. And so other than people flying around for sport, it hasn't really been applied. And so that's fundamentally the projects now that I'm trying to get funding from NASA and from National Science Foundation is to unlock the use of paragliders for these type of research atmospheric flights.
And so that's a really good idea. We've done a lot of research, climate science research, helping out forest firefighters, providing radio relays, for example. And one of the things is that the rules just don't even exist. If you say, I flew the highest paraglider in the world. If you go in the FAI rules and the NAA rules, there aren't rules to even get the record. So in the last week, I submitted a proposal to the NAA that will end up going to the FAI to add new rules and new type classes to even allow for paragliders to fly. And so that's something that I'm trying to do. robotic paragliders to achieve anything, um, because it's been going on now for five years and we have flights from 25 kilometers, um, have flown over 180 kilometers. Uh, the company that worked with most recently flew in a 90 kilogram robot from 20 kilometers, full scale wing, single surface Denali on wing.
And, and I learned about the wing from Logan. I said, "Look, I really need a single surface. It needs to be strong. It can't just be hiking, you know? It can't be super ultra lightweight." And he's like, "Dude, you got to go and check out this Denali on. It's a freestyle wing, people do acro with it." And, um, so that's already happened. I mean, this, and you put a robot on it.
and flew yeah
It was a 90 kilogram robot, and the whole goal of that is to return things from space. But like, paragliders, hang gliders, that all started with space stuff, right? They were trying to return capsule because those astronauts didn't want to just be thrown into the ocean; they wanted to have some ability to land where they wanted. Um, and they're like, "No, you guys, we're gonna put you in the ocean, we don't care. We're gonna give you round parachutes." But it all started with big inflatable hang glider things, and so we're kind of returning to that original idea. Just NASA gave up on paraglider stuff in the late 80s, early 90s, because they were garbage. I mean, not—not to insult the at the time—but like, they were not that good, right?
Yeah.
Wow, how much trash is happening from weather balloons? Well,
Each weather, how big are
They, what are they made of? Where do they go? Where do they end up about?
a loaf of bread about, you know, it's a foam box that's got electronics and batteries in it, and they're launched from all the radio sound locations, uh, in Germany and some countries. There's a big communities of people that chase them and collect them and send them back, but for the most part, there's a lot of areas of the ocean of the South America, African continent, that that don't really have this incredibly important truth information that anchors all the satellite data and all the forecasts together. Um, you know, one of the most valuable measurements is are these radio songs, um, and so globally we have a problem, and especially we that the pace of weather changing
is outpacing our ability to keep up with it, and so we need to have more measurements, but do it in a way that's responsible and do it in a way that doesn't create more problems, right? And so we, you know, people working with me and and myself are trying to figure out how to unlock reusable radio songs, um, but also once it's reusable, then you can put more expensive sensors on it, right? Whether it's looking for fires or whatever that might be, um, but it's really just the beginning. And and a lot of it is just first, when I went to Cupa Care and showed people I wanted to fly a paraglider at high altitudes, they told me it was impossible. And then the next year I went back with pictures from doing it, and they're like, "Well, this is crazy." I was like, "Okay, well then now what do we do?
Let's like figure out how to work together here." Um, yeah, now the craziest part Is there are dust devils on Mars, yeah?
now if there's
Dust devils on Mars. There's got to be lift on Mars, and so one of the goals is to fly high enough to get NASA excited and say, "Hey, let's go send one of these things to Mars and go thermaling around on Mars and go land on Olympus Mons." Like, the biggest mountain in the solar system is on Mars, and um, NASA's not going to go land there because it's hard and scary, and so just throw one of these things in the side of the mountain on Mars. Yeah, anyway, okay, so it's not impossible.
Take me through, maybe I'm diving too into the specifics, but again, because I'm ignorant on this stuff. So, as I understand, what do you call—what do you call the balloons, uh, the weather balloons, weather—
balloons. Yeah, but you'd call it high altitude balloons. Yeah, but you call it sans or something. Well, I said, "Radio sand is the sensor payload, okay?"
So as I understand, those usually get—they go off in the morning, right? Yeah, they go off at
Zero and 12 Zulu, so globally they're synchronized. How
Do you get yours to go up?
Same thing, uh, have a balloon launch it, same exact thing. Okay, it, it looks the same now. An interesting piece is that early on, when these started, they didn't have GPS, right? They had just a radio that would send temperature and pressure and humidity, mostly temperature in the beginning, but anyway, but now they have GPS, so the models have all been adjusted to be basically treat the balloons as if they only go vertical, but that's not true. They get into the jet stream and they blow in the wind and stuff, so there's a couple pieces of of making, you know, right now we only measure the temperature profile on the way up, right?
And we measure the winds on the way up, but this now allows you to run a mission, not one way, but both ways, right? So, even that same system, same exact radio. payload can fly up and fly back, um, doing collecting data on both directions, um, so there's just a couple things and and that's where, you know, free fight lab is a non-profit and it bootstraps its work by selling nose cones and trim rigs and like giving talks and things like that, but in order to be a non-profit that grows and is sustainable, there's this other element of like needing to actually do have customers and figure out how to, you know, get contracts to do radio song launches and help different organizations and groups.
And that's, that's just a snowball that gets slowly built, you know, day after day, uh, based on rejections.
Fascinating. So the, the, this current songs, the current weather balloons, they've got GPS. Why don't people go get them? I mean, you said they do in Germany. Yeah,
some places do. I mean, it's just, it requires someone in a car driving. It's just, it's people and time and that's it. It's people in time and it's costly. And is there incentive to reuse it? Um, you know, I think we're slowly getting there, but, but this idea that the system can fly after its end of, you know, it's reached its top ascent, uh, and then it flies. I mean, we're the amazing thing about these, high altitude flights is sometimes you can't come back. So if at 15 kilometers, you let go or 20 kilometers, the jet stream might be too hot, too strong. So the system has to determine, I can't make it home. It's too windy. I have to go and land other places.
And we have a little SD card that has backup landings locations and, and it'll go and just pick a new location and go land at. But the The most amazing thing is that if you go to higher, if you go to 25 kilometers or 30 kilometers, the thing is going so fast because the air is so thin. you make it back upstream and you can make it home, right? Instead, you know, the very first wing, it opened at 88 meters per second.
That's how thin the air is. So that means that the forward velocity is also screaming along. So if you want to get in front of 50 mile an hour winds, you just go and fly a hundred mile an hour for like 10 minutes above it. And then you've gotten upstream and you can make it home. So it's, it's, it's like these alarming things that we would never discover until we just started throwing things into that environment and flying them and seeing what happens. Um, you know, in a good flight is actually boring. The video is really boring. It just, it's a black sky. You've got a wing. Yeah. The earth is absolutely stunning, but it's a boring flight when the system was dumber and it would do spirals and wing overs and stuff. Oh, it was awesome. You'd have like these amazing views of the earth and yeah, it was wild.
If someone just came to you today and said, here's a million bucks, go for it. Where would, where would the majority of those funds go? What would you be doing? What would you be working on?
Um, I think there's a few elements of, uh, sensing systems, right. And, and one of them is, uh, if you take the Jeep, the raw GPS data that instead of calculating a navigation solution of like, where am I, if you take the data from the GPS receiver and the transmitter from the satellite, when that receiver and transmitter is rising and setting over the horizon, the signal goes through the atmosphere and you can capture temperature and humidity profiles just with the raw GPS data. And so in 2020, I did a bunch of experiments on Airbus commercial aircraft. Cause I was sponsored by Airbus for a short period of time, basically until COVID.
Um, and And I demonstrated for the first time that all commercial aircraft without a purpose science-built payload can take their GPS data and capture really highly valuable weather data. Now, as of yesterday, there's a paper coming out on it. Right. And so all of this stuff is happening still right now. And I think, you know, you can't just create science for science. It has to have impact and it has to be able to, you know, have some fundamental thing that changes what people do. Um, and I think there's a huge opportunity when it comes to weather forecasting. Um, and you know, it relates to our agriculture. It relates to clean water, relates to sports. It relates to scheduling and planning, aviation, transportation.
Um, and I think that paragliders have a very unique perspective on all of this. You know, some of the least understood areas of our atmosphere are the planetary boundary layer specifically around how do clouds form? What's the transition of convective systems? Like basically everything paragliding, is the thing that people don't understand is how is energy moving from the ground to the top of lift? How are clouds forming? And, and we are so in it. We are in that environment. We are in the environment that people don't understand, right? There, there's nobody modeling dust devils in this, in like the Waterville plateau, right? Like that's not a thing, but then you have tornadoes destroying communities.
You say, well, maybe there's a bit of the, we can take the flavors of the food that we get to eat as paragliders and help the rest of everyone understand how that all works. Um, and like early ideas was I thought, Oh, well, let's, let's give sensors to all the paraglider pilots, have them fly around. Um, that's not really the right thing to do. Um, so one day free flight lab might look a bit like Stanford research institute is the goal where there's a nonprofit that works on high impact, projects, But then there's sort of like a venture fund that takes those when they're productized, takes them when they actually can be a real business, and spins them out into businesses with licensing fees that generate these projects that don't make a lot of sense to anybody.
And so that's, that's the end goal of all of this, um, is to get there somehow. And, and, you know, again, one step at a time up this mountain, just putting like, head down foot in front of the next and see what happens.
Since you started the lab, have you been able to capture a ton of data? You know, are you, are you sending stuff up into the atmosphere on a regular enough basis that you're seeing certain trends, certain differences, you know, how much difference is it between 2012 when you started flying and now in our atmosphere, is there more water vapor? Is there less, is there more heat? Is there, uh, you know, obviously climate change is, is, is a part of this question, but what are you seeing and how specifically, how is that going to impact us as a community in what you're seeing?
Yeah, I think that the right answer to you is that we're not, we're not collecting enough information right now for me to be able to accurately answer that Without it being a much larger conversation, I think.
What I am seeing is that since about 2015, I've been tracking the investment into weather companies. right? Just across the board and how weather companies are growing and, and what kind of conversations around, whether it's AI and weather, et cetera, et cetera, quantum and weather. Um, this is a space that's going to get more and more interesting over the next five or 10 years. Uh, because in some cases where people see weather risk, there's also weather opportunity, right? Um, I think back to sailing, I used a high weather, high, high resolution forecast. That was a 200 meter model made by a guy, Mike Dvorak. He made it for America's cup. He started selling it to sailors in San Francisco Bay.
We were able to pick left or right on a one kilometer course and won the 2017 national championships, right? For the express 37 fleet, we had a better forecast. We were able to make better strategic, you know, business decisions based on that forecast. Um, we all know that forecasting paragliding is quite difficult, right? But we do also expect that, you know, with drone deliveries coming online, uh, flying taxis coming online, these vertical air motions are going to become very critical to everyone else pretty soon. Now, we also know that the difference between taking off in this cycle and the next cycle is going to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very important.
And I think fly in this cycle is getting yarded into the trees or having a clean launch and just flying away, right? And we are sensitive to that. and I think that there's a lot of the things I'd like to work on are trying to create that bridge and create value in taking what we know and our perspective and converting it in a way that keeps people safe. Right? Like if you're flying, if you have your grandmother flying in some flying car taxi thing, you don't want her flying at the inversion, where she's bouncing around and crashing into the ceiling of the inversion and getting sick and upset. Are all of these flying taxis going to smell like vomit? Because people are just flying in turbulence, and it's a robot who doesn't care and hasn't looked at anything.
So I think that's kind of like the future of things that we'll be addressing. I don't know if that didn't answer your question on how much data we're collecting. Right now, from the work I did with Airbus, I have more data than I have money to pay professors to process. Wow. It's a great problem
to have.
Yeah, it's a great problem, except for you need the money to pay the professors. And once COVID happened and Airbus shut down a lot of their innovation projects, that dried up. So I had money, I had a team, and that's what really kind of threw the spark into all of this, is that I had enough critical mass of data and resources to do my first high-altitude test, to build the sensors, to kind of tease out where the value of our perspective and experience connects with the rest of the world. And now I just have a knife in my teeth to try to make it even more real.
Tell me about conservation. That was an interesting thing to hear you say, one of the three pillars. This is something that I'm constantly feeling guilty about. It's our profession, our recreation, what we participate in. We're flying plastic, we travel. It's a pretty self... Trucks to launch. Yes, trucks to launch, if you're not doing the hike and fly thing. But the travel really adds up. If you're doing the World Cup circuit or even just a couple of comps a year, this is something I'm always... I always feel guilty about it. On the flip side, I also see your point. We are very aware of our environment as a community.
I think we're pretty good about paying attention. We're pretty good about wanting to protect the places we go. Some obviously better than others, and some more adept at understanding how to do it. I think often we... Like recycling, should you, should you not? There's always... Nothing's very simple, especially when it comes to protecting. And it's hard to take the step. It's hard to just take the step to make something happen.
Anyway, talk about it.
Yeah. Well, again, it comes to our perspectives, right? At our local park, for example, the Rangers, there's a helicopter. The county has a helicopter. Now, once in a while, the county flies their helicopter around. But, you know, helicopters are... $100 plus an hour, burn a lot of fuel, are not the most elegant flying machine. They just beat the air into suppression. Now, we fly at our home site, but we have all the same perspectives as the helicopter. So how can we... And it started with the question of how can we fly Park Rangers tandem, for example, and allow them to do what they need to do in the park without a helicopter?
Right? I mean, I got my tandem to be able to share this perspective. And one of the kind of the biggest things that Free Flight Lab has done related to conservation is BBC reached out to us because I have a picture of a golden eagle from Mission Peak. And they reached out in 2019... Yeah, 2018. Anyway, we planned in 2019, the BBC team came out with this eagle expert, Lloyd Buck, and the BBC film team from Natural World. And over the course of four days, we flew Lloyd with wild eagles. Now, this guy had dedicated his entire life to birds, to training them.
He's like bonded with this eagle, Tilly. Neither one of them can leave the house at the same time. Like they have... Someone's got to be in the house with all these birds. You know, all the birds with David Atterborough. This guy is that guy. His entire life. He... He'd wanted to fly with eagles. And he'd done the, you know, where they chase the geese with the pair, the powered hang glider and stuff. But I was able to take him flying with wild eagles, wild golden eagles. And I mean, we're both crying. We're like in the tandem. He said, I've waited my entire life for this moment. And I never imagined it would be like this. And we're busy taking climbs and thermaling together. And that's what I wanted to create. I wanted to say, well, look, we... I get to listen to the sound of bird feathers. I get to listen to the sound of bird feathers adjusting because we have no motor.
It's like... There are bird experts that have these bird books that most of the pictures are from underneath the birds. Not up with the birds. Not when they're flying. Not at 8,000 feet over something where it's just you and this bird turning a thermal because you're both so desperate to get into the air. And so, you know, I think maybe you and I were talking about it. Somebody was saying how the birds don't play, right? Yeah, yeah. They were like saying, oh, the birds don't play. And we definitely know they play, whether they're the crows or whatever. So we have a lot of opportunities. And I don't know. I don't know if as a community we're taking advantage of them, right? Like we all want access to launches.
And it's very hard to get parks or police or anybody to say, okay, our insurance says it's okay for you to take this park ranger, right? And I think it does come down to insurance. But we've taken a few park rangers on their off day, right? And said, like, we love the park. We know you love the park. Come fly with us and we'll show you the park from an angle you've never seen it, right? And then the guy's like, I've always wondered what it looked like over here. And he'd worked at the park 10 years, right? And he finally gets to see parts of the park. And whether it's counting cows or animals, I mean, there's so many opportunities. And I think the goal is to inspire. To inspire more people to say, okay, well, there's this park.
We have tandem pilots. We have the ability to share this perspective and see what we can do, right? Explore the solution space of can we help? And, you know, I had built a payload back to the science payloads. I built a multispectral camera that just basically looked at plant health. So it took out the infrared filter, looked at plant health. And I flew it over an area in Kings Canyon that had had a. Had the rough fire. There was a really, really large fire. And you could see where the dead trees met the living trees, just in the data, right? And it's kind of a beautiful image, but, like, you can see where the dead trees meet the living trees. But something else happened is that in that image, you could also see dead trees within the living trees.
And that was pine beetle rot. And so we have the same perspective as a UAV, some flying drone thing, you know, a helicopter. And we enjoy it, but also we can share it and maybe help fund local clubs, right? Like, what—what is—what is the way to tie, tie these things together? You say, okay, well, tum water, I don't know, once a month we're gonna go and take a picture of the river in this one position. Or, or if it's the along the coast in California, we're gonna take a picture of the cliffs and update, you know, um, geology people who are interested in how the cliffs are collapsing. Like, they don't need to run a two hundred thousand dollar program of flying planes low with lidars or half a million dollar thing.
How do they engage the community to say, well, there's a bunch of algae bloom now, right? Like, take pictures of the algae bloom every month. Like, how do we—how do we connect the dots between pilots, the communities, and the natural spaces that they fly? Um, and I'm doing it in my own way, but I think the real goal is to just inspire others to say We have this unique craft. We can do more with it, and who and how can we connect these dots to make things more sustainable, right? Um, for everyone, my
One of my favorite memories from my film projects, I was just out in Telluride for their club was doing a fundraiser for, you know, the insurance issue that we have here in the states. We want to get into that now, but this is a U.S. thing, but it's, uh, that we were showing the Rockies traverse, and the very first day of that trip with Will Gadd, we, we kind of dove off course, went into ropes, and the the highest mountain Canadians Rockies he had climbed it, but he, you know, this is all in the film, but he's going, you know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Nobody's ever flown over this thing, and meanwhile, the filming helicopter wasn't with us that morning for the launch. They were coming in from wherever they were coming in from, and so they had just taken on fuel, but it's, you know, it's a million dollar A-star helicopter, a very, very high end
and to get that shot of us flying over the top of Mount Robson, we had to dial down about five times, spiral hard down, because we were out climbing an A-Star helicopter. I mean, not even a little bit, you know? We were just, we were just dicing. You're just, you know, they just annihilate the air, is what you said. It cracks me up because we were just so much more nimble than an A-Star helicopter. We could exactly where we wanted to go like that, and just dial up, and then wait for, and I can't get up to you guys, can you come back down? Sure, come back. I can't get up to you guys, can you come back? Sure. We did it five times. I mean, the movie, it looks like we just get up to the top and film it. Looks amazing, but I, I think these are the things that people don't understand is that in, in people with no motor, well, how did you do it?
Right, all of all of paragliding is a blind spot, like, unfortunately, the world doesn't care we exist, right? And that, and that, that's wonderful, but also, I, I see opportunity in that, right? I mean, and I don't, you know, I don't want the sky filled with paraglider robots that make us not able to fly, right? I definitely do not want that at all. However, somewhere in between insanity and like just a couple people getting to experience these unbelievable things is something really interesting, right? And, and you know, when you do a spiral and an A-star helicopter, you're not able to do an SIV course or a full nose-down spiral. You're descending faster than planes, many planes can descend, right? Like, you're saying you, the performance of our vehicle outperforms the climb rates, the altitude limits of a lot of expensive aerospace Swiss watches, right?
And, um, I think back to, I think the Sierra Safari one where you're talking about it's just an elegant bed sheet and dental floss, right? I mean, effectively, that's what it is. And, and yeah, you mentioned the idea of it's plastic. Um, you know, there's a lot of initiatives where people have tried different ways of recycling gliders, uh, whether it's the bags or it's different apparel and things like that. Um, I think one way to recycle our gliders is potentially use them for robotic projects, right? Like, once they're no longer safe for a human to fly, who cares if it rips apart when the robot's flying it? No, it doesn't matter, right? And so there might be this second life, right? And so I, you know, I haven't sold some of my old gliders, yeah, I haven't, some sold, so I don't want, I don't want everyone's old glider, but like I have, I have a bunch of my old gliders thinking like, okay, any day now, any day now, this is, this idea I have, this vision is going to be a real thing, and these old gliders will get to do something, right?
Like, I'll go and do something ridiculous with them, and it'll be fun.
You were clearly destined for, you know, research and science. This is what you went to school for; this is the—this was your, your program. You learn about flying in France; it completely diverts your life, probably put you into something that's never going to make as much money as if you just stayed on track. But, uh, you seem really psyched about this. Is it? Are there days where you wish you would have stuck with the, the plan chosen, maybe more straightforward path? Or is this providing your brain and your inquisitiveness with plenty and more? I
would say all of the above, I think. In it is where I'm at, and there's only—it's, it's one of these situations where it does feel like the only thing to do is go deeper, like really thermals back in that stupid canyon, and I gotta go deeper and like, like
Belcourt says, "You gotta double down, yeah."
And I think that there's been times, there's been times where my toes tingle and I'm scared to do it, and I'm scared to do it right. And I, and I like play along the foothills, you know, and then I end up bombing out somewhere along the foothills. But, uh, enough has happened now that diving deeper feels like the right thing, right? And I, um, you know, even if I bail, even if I bail and go get a job again for a year, a couple years, all these other things are going to keep pushing forward, right? Before I got sponsored or funded by Airbus, I had four jobs at once and I was quite happy because I could do what I wanted. Um, and I gave all those up to do the Airbus thing, but I had, I had just gotten Pasa certified as a free flight lab school, right?
Because I'm an instructor, and and I had gotten RRG insurance and I had set up a school because I wanted to teach people and I wanted to share the experience through teaching. Um, and then I got an opportunity I couldn't say no to, which has kind of kicked off some of these other ideas that were for down the road and, um, and I'm sure that that could happen again, right? There's there's many bends and turns in this journey, um, but I recently just won a contract from NASA and the National Science Foundation to continue working on high altitude paragliding robots that took five years of things that didn't make sense to finally make sense, to finally get that small contract. So, you know, I'm going deeper until until otherwise noted.
until you got through your reserve, yeah.
You know, and I can, I but
reserves. Work, you'll be fine. Yeah,
You know, look, I can paint fences and dig holes. No matter what, we're going to make sure that things happen, and I think, well, that's kind of the funny thing too, is that yeah, selling nose cones doesn't pay rent, but you know what? It offsets, it offsets the fact that my little lab shop with my 3D printer is in the back of where I live, and I can paint fences and dig holes, and I live, right? It's like the Silicon Valley, build it in a garage kind of thing, um, and it's being done by selling leather nose cones, you know? And like, that's fine, that's fine. I'm not, I think some people would like me to make millions of dollars, but I think like right now, it's just make it all work and make it make sense, and um, the weather is still going to be hard in 50 years.
There's still, we're not going to, we're never going to perfectly crack that, so it's a, it's a, an exercise of continuous exploration, and you know, every day you fly is a new day. Every single day, whether it's the same site, whether it's the same time of year, there's something new about it, some new flavor. And and all of these experiments are very much like that, like you just don't know until you go, and then you figure out what to do next, and you try to make the next best choice. You
You and I have a sailing background. Uh, you more seeing me more, I guess, expeditionary, I guess, in a sense. But, uh, the—it's—it is interesting to me that we, many of us in our little tribe, have a kayaking background, a sailing background. You know, obviously we're pretty similar. You know that there's flow there, there's flow in air, there's flow in water. Uh, there's, in a sense, similar risk profile, especially with the kayaking, maybe not so much in sailing. But the question I want to ask is, and I've been asking this lately because I just think it's fascinating, we live in places where people do rad things.
I have a lot of friends who do rad things. No interest in flying, zero. Uh, my wife has no interest in flying. I take her tandem and she starts asking me about where we're going to have dinner two minutes into the flight, looking over her shoulder. She has no interest in it. Uh, what is it about you that you're interested in? About us, what is it? Why are there people who the Da Vinci's versus the not I
have no idea, but also, um, the
experience that I have flying, and I don't think that's what everyone experiences—that the thoughts that go through my mind, the very strange, weird thoughts that happen while I'm flying around. Um, everything from mortality, just like hyper-focused on mortality for maybe some unknown reason, to to fiddling with snacks in your pocket, or like there's just—it's such, uh, an experience that I don't think there's ever an end to it. I mean, there is an end. Well, there—there is that end, but but there's more, and I think maybe I was considered that I had, you know, some attention deficit disorder challenges or something.
But that's, that's in in flying it, I think it becomes your superpower, right? When they, the British team, looked at the Max Plank Institute, and they were saying, like, "What? You know, they did eye tracking to see what people were looking at." The absolute best pilots were looking at the most information, absolute most information. Now, there's too much information, and to me, my brain is always just zipping in a lot of different directions, and flying, all those directions are focused on one task, one task, flying. You're flying, and like, maybe your brain drifts, and you think of other things, but, but you're in it, you're absolutely in it, and you don't have a, you're not, you can't just say stop, you can't say stop.
And sometimes, sometimes I don't even think I'm enjoying flights until three hours in, like, somehow after three hours, I'm like, "Wow, this is fantastic, this is so cool." But before that, I am a wreck in my brain, thinking about stuff, and I'm like, trying to do, I don't know, um, that isn't interesting.
I noticed that, you know, we've had a really, really good week here in Sun Valley, and uh, I've been noticing that Sun Valley's never really that tame, you know? It's pretty on, and it's, and it's always that way. And yet, there's this certain point in the flight where that gloves come off. I'm eating no hands on the brakes. It's just, I just, I'm just loving it. It's just, yeah, epic. It hasn't
Been a long time since I've been on a plane, and I've been
Gotten any better than it was two minutes ago, but suddenly I'm just so in the zone and so in the flow, and I'm not any better than I was two minutes ago either, but I'm better, I'm way better, I'm way more relaxed, I'm way more, you know, it's just that, you know, there's the early season that we go through where we're just jittery and everything feels high pressure and sharp, and and that's all good, just gone. I go through that early almost every flight, there's that whole kind of I'm just not really in sync, not really feeling good, and then there's this moment where it's just, ah, I got, yes.
Yeah, and I, and I think unlocking that is really powerful. I mean, from sailing the moments in my, I was, I did four deck a lot before I did the role I'm in now. I did four deck, which is a, you know, trying to prevent the next problem, you know, and and managing lines and managing where spinner are in sales. And there are these moments where you feel like you're in the Matrix, for better analogy or not, you slow down time. You just stop the world, and all you see is the thing that you have to reach to and connect to, and everything stops. And all of that happens in a fraction of a second, and to everyone else it might look fast, but to you, everything has stopped. And even in the middle of it, you're being blasted with waves and all sorts of things, and it all goes quiet.
And you just go and do the thing you need to do, and I don't know how to unlock that, like no drugs, no meditation. I haven't experienced it any other way than these things, like racing sailboats and then taking 2D racing sailboats to 3D with paragliding, and and it's not every flight, but in those critical moments—and I mean, in in January this year, I had my B riser snap in Columbia in the middle of a task, and it became one of those moments, right, where you have your whole pupils as big as dinner plates, all of your training, everything focuses into that moment to make sure that you exist in this world in the next moment. And um, it was terrible, but it was also so powerful and like such an enriching experience that made me grateful for everything.
So I, I like, I'm okay with that duality. I, I'm, I hear you that some people just are not interested in flying and they probably shouldn't fly. Yeah, no, no, I think
They shouldn't either. I just, it's fascinating to me that who's attracted to it and who isn't. Yeah, I
Mean, we're crazy. Look, none of this modern world would exist without really crazy people getting on really shitty boats and most of them dying. None of them knew about hurricanes; they would just get on boats and they'd mostly die and they'd eat their shoes and they eat their belts, and that's why we have this world, and that's really crazy. They were much crazier than we are. Oh,
My god, I just read Wager. Uh, I don't know if you've read that, but you—we are so soft compared to what those people used to do. Oh my god, it's just, it's awful what they went through, and they just kept going through it. It's, yeah, it's amazing, and
They didn't have clean water or things with toilet, like, you know, you put a bunch of people in their head and they're there.
oh my god
brutal, and then they're great success. They're like, "Hey, we did it! Good job." Yeah,
I mean, the people were insane, and so I think in order to make progress as humans, there has to be a batch of people that are a bit crazy. Now, do they just do sport forever, or do they start to somehow let that sport trickle into other things? Because it's just so powerful and amazing, and and I think most people have been looking the other direction. And and the whole concept behind what I was doing and trying to do with Free Flight Lab is: say there's something that I'm not good at, but I'm really magical about this paraglider system that we fly, but just as a a system to explore and learn about the earth and and just make things better. Let's like unpack this and understand, like, what what can we do with this?
And and try to push it in as far directions as we possibly can take it, just to see what happens, and and and see if we can, you know, create some good in the world. and blow up less villages
You know, if, if sometime you want to just talk about motion sickness, I think that could help a lot of people too. I mean, I, for the first, first four years flying in the mountains, I threw up every single flight.
Let's talk about it.
Yeah, let's give it, let's
dedicate a couple minutes to that
Yeah, well, I used to throw up every flight, and I think it was just that it was a—it was similar to your computer crashing when you open up too many windows, just like too much going on, and I'd pop, um, and it's okay because I had done the ocean racing and stuff, and I would just throw up and get back to changing the sail, and it was not a big deal. But when you're flying a paraglider, at some point you're exhausted of throwing up, you know, you're dry heaving, your ribs hurt, uh, you got to fly this thing, and—and that becomes just not workable. So I started doing research as—as I do, uh, and I found a woman who NASA at NASA Ames, uh, which is in Moffett, Moffett Field over in—in the north
of the state near
San Francisco, uh, who had developed a strategy to help fighter pilots and astronauts that would get derated, so they—the government spent a ton of money training them, and then they started to get sick, and so they couldn't fly their high-performance aircraft anymore. Uh, and so this woman took them and did a number of, uh, different research programs with them to discover how to train them to basically build up tolerance and get the tools to reverse motion sickness. And I'll summarize it: so what she found is that there's five stages that lead to motion sickness, and most people don't catch motion sickness until stage four or five, but if you can catch it in stage one, two, or three, you can do breathing exercises to basically reverse the symptoms.
So, a lot like your—your recent episode with Jeremy, I mean, you were holding on to your breath like a life raft, like an absolute life raft, and—and you're doing this active meditation and you basically reverse the symptoms and
you're
And so, the more that you do it, the more it works, and the more it reinforces that it works. I don't get motion sick anymore at all because of breathing, because of just
conscious breathing through
breathing, and also it's identifying the symptoms early and breathing early. So, for example, the very first stage of motion sickness is salivation, sweating, drowsiness, and increased warmth. At that point, most people wouldn't start breathing exercises, right? They'd take a packet or I'll take some water, but they probably don't do breathing exercises. The next step is sort of dizziness, a headache, maybe stomach rumbling, and then epigastric awareness, which is—it's not nausea and it's not like discomfort, but you're aware of your stomach, right? You start to like think about your innards, right? And, and again, that's only the second step. Again, most people don't feel like they're motion sick at the second step. Now, if you're aware of this and you've been training in the first or second step, you're not going to be able to—you're already doing breathing exercises and you've wound that back, and you don't ever get into the third or fourth step.
But now, in third, in the third step is epigastric discomfort, which isn't nausea, but it's like increasing uncomfortable where you have a knot in your stomach or in your throat, right? Like that really, that sensation, like, okay, you know you're swallowing and stuff. but now, now we're into kind of stage three, and this is it's a bit of the tipping point. Like, if, if you catch it here, you can wind it back, but it's tricky. And if you don't catch it here, you're most likely going to lead into the fourth step, which is nausea, where you're, you're like not aware or discomfort, but you're like very feel very nauseous. And then the final step is just frank vomiting, and that actually counts. Not actually throwing up, you can be frank vomiting without throwing up, um, and you know, and, and tandem pilots experience this all the time.
But since I learned this, I trick people, so I, I get them to do breathing exercises and
i'm like
If you're gonna do this, I'm
Gonna do this, so I got this place to go. It'll do it, you can do it, I mean...
the one thing when
people come
up to me, and they look at me and they're like, "Oh, ya y'all should do this." And they say, "Oh, we know when you do this, it doesn't really matter, but when I do it, it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't manifest in your mind, but it starts in your mind." So that actually gives you the power to manage it and control it. And so these, if these five steps are going to... If you start doing these breathing exercises, you wear a heart rate monitor on your watch, all of your symptoms, all your physiological states are going to increase before these symptoms start progressing. And if you can catch it and rewind it, you'll never get sick again.
It takes a while. Just briefly, what does a breathing exercise for this look like?
It would be a long breath in through your nose. And then pursing your lips in such a way like you're blowing up a balloon. And a real back-pressured breathing out. And just focusing on that really hard, strong in and breathing out. Almost imagining like you're belaying. You're bringing in the line and you're tensioning it. And you're just... You focus... You just focus on that as if it's the only thing in the universe. And you can just wind it back. And, you know, a few times I got sick in the four years of practicing it or so.
But, yeah, I can fly two weeks of Chelan and never get sick. And it did pop up a couple times this last trip. But, you know, I noticed it super early and I just breathe. And it's, you know, it's like being Batman. It's on my utility belt. And I'm just like, okay, great. I'll just start breathing now. And it also helps when you're shitting your pants, right? You're in some place, stressful. You just do the same breathing exercise. When your heart rate drops, your flying gets a lot better. Like you're calm. You're aware. You're attentive to things. And you've had a number of episodes where people have talked about this. And this is just one other element of it. But people are afraid to talk about it. Like after many trips, I'll mention it.
And someone will come to me. Like in the shadows, as we're all headed back to the tents and go, well, I also get sick. So why don't we just talk about this? It doesn't matter. Like you don't have to be embarrassed. You get sick. Like there's things to do about it. And you don't, you know, you don't have to take drugs or ginger or pressure points. You just use this thing and you can retrain your brain. And that's ridiculous. God,
I wish we'd known this for Jodi. She spent eight years sailing around the world. And she was sick every day. Poor thing. Oh,
well, if you remember when Logan, Logan's partner, Sophie, did the row to Hawaii. I worked with them early on because they had some of their teammates who were really getting sick. So they were going to like children's playgrounds and spinning in on the on the games there and practicing to not get sick. And on the boat, they ended up using it. And I think they were good. I mean, that was an incredible, incredible journey they did.
Yeah, that was very cool. Mike, thanks for thanks for your time. I'm glad we finally got around to doing this. It's it's needed to happen, but it sounds like the timing was right. It was fortuitous and good luck, man. I we all really appreciate you and what you're doing. And I love that there are people with brains like yours and not everybody has brains like mine. Good luck.
Yeah, well, as long as people have brains, we're going to be doing OK. So, yeah, thanks so much, Gavin.
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. You're a treasure and good work. Keep up the good work and and keep going, man. Keep pressing double down. If
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