Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cloud-Based Mayhem. We haven't done one of these in a while, but an Ask Me Anything show was due. Got some great questions. We dive into three of them here. One on the new, new-ish anyway, two-liner C-Class gliders. And to answer that one, I reached out to Malin Lobb. He's been on the show. We'll have another full show with him up here shortly. But he has been doing a lot of training for the Race Academy for the Brits and also half a fly-o and handles a ton of the SIV there in Annecy and in other parts of the world. So we get into C-Class two-line gliders with Malin. And then a couple questions from the field about first bivy attempts and what should you be thinking about, where should you go in the Alps, and when are you ready for bigger, bigger expedition-type stuff?
So I try to answer those and don't have much housekeeping other than to say, again, apologize that we're a little behind here, but this one, depending on when we drop this, should catch us back up and then we'll get back on our regular scheduled programming. Hope you're having a good summer, getting some good flights, having fun in the sky. Enjoy.
Malin, good to have you back on the show. We're going to do a proper full-length show here. I know it's been a little bit, but you're traveling with your family and I just got back and we're going to attack this question that came in for this Ask Me Anything show about two-liner sea wings. This is kind of a new breed of sea wings. Several manufacturers are making them and putting them out and I didn't really have the expertise to answer this question. So glad you're here to be in my stead and answer it professionally because you know a lot more about this stuff. Than I do, seeing how all these wings behave in SIV. Let me read the question first so you all can hear it and then Malin, I'll hand it over to you.
I'd like your take on the new crop of two-liner sea wings and things to consider when moving up from an EN C3 liner. They're becoming popular where I fly, but I know two accidents happening within the last two weeks. One happened immediately after launch where one side of the wing collapsed and the pilot ended up in the trees with no serious injury. The other happened when the pilot experienced a flight of two-liner sea wings. The wing disappeared only to come forward with a vengeance that he didn't adequately control and almost ended up in the wing. He landed and was able to walk out but with a fractured vertebrae. In both cases, these are experienced pilots, but maybe not prepared for the extra control required by a two-liner. In the second case, the pilot mentioned the energy in the wing was so much greater than he expected. With only two rows of lines, it seems to me that any collapse is much more impactful as there is no extra line support to help limit the extent of the collapse.
How can the difference between the two-liner and three-liner be explained scientifically to help someone understand how collapses are different between the two? So, yeah, take it from there. You know, what's different from a manufacturing standpoint between a two-liner and a three-liner? How do they behave differently? What do we need to get out to the, you know, the flying audience who's considering moving up to one? What are the pros? What are the cons, if any?
Yeah, well, thanks for having me back. I'm glad that those guys weren't seriously or too badly injured. There's quite a lot that could maybe be described a little bit better by designers, but from what I see, because we get a lot of these wings now in SIV, is if you are already on a three-liner C and you move to a two-liner C, you're not going to notice any difference. I've noticed that. I've never got on a wing and felt that they had more or less attachment points. There's so much more involved in the span-wise cohesion of a wing, of how solid and how much feedback a wing gives or how little it gives. And then there's a lot to play with aspect ratio, the shark nose, how far back the A's are.
And then the pilot itself, the harness that you have with it, there's more than just one thing at play. But essentially, if you didn't look up and you're already used to flying an ENC, then you probably wouldn't feel any difference. In terms of collapses and how it's affected, so unless you have collapse lines on the SIV, you can't pull collapses. So there's a variety of other things that we get into. But I think one thing that people don't do enough of is try and fly defensively. And use a bigger input when they're getting a collapse. So maybe a downside of having less lines is it's going to be a bit more cravat-prone.
But if you're flying something with more aspect ratio, then that's going to become a bit more cravat-prone as well and potentially give you more feedback. But if you're going from the same aspect ratio, then you shouldn't notice much difference. Now, they are more stable, so you should suffer less collapses, but potentially collapse. collapses you do have are then going to be from more aggressive air so it could be that pilots with softer wings or wings that collapse easier are used to doing smaller inputs to stop those collapses and those are the sort of collapses that aren't even going to happen on two-liner so they're you know they might be bigger or more violent than ones they used to when they do happen but they would still happen on their you know their three-liner ones but it depends on the wing you fly as to whether you're gonna you know feel it or not some wings are they breathe a little bit more they move a little bit more what you don't want is a wing that's too solid and not giving much feedback but these three-liner seas i think they're all really good in terms of their manageability and amount of feedback there's there's definitely a spread from the highest end to the the more entry-level ones so there are ones that uh if you're a bit tentative uh that might be better than others to get into but i think people have been hurting themselves on three-liner seas for as long as they've been around and uh the two-liners are no different it all comes back to the pilot action at the time of a collapse that's the most important thing
and more are these wings more compared to you know a d two-liner or a CCC wing in terms of you know holding on to them when they go you know when they come back up it it pretty similar different how would you compare them because you've flown them all
yeah no i think i think they're exactly where they should be in the category they haven't been shoehorned into the c category they are the way that they fly the energy they have uh the feedback they're giving um they should be directly in the in the sports um category uh like i said if you you know if you didn't look up and you're already used to the the power of and feedback of the seas then you probably wouldn't notice any difference um it's the The question might be, should most pilots that are on seas be on seas? That's probably the better question. And then, you know, if that person then hurts themselves on an ENC three-liner, someone might not think much of it. But if they've just moved to one with two lines, then there's something to blame it on.
You know, I think accidents that happen on these, maybe because there's this fear of the unknown, they might put it down to the wing choice rather than the pilot. But when someone crashes their three-liner sea at the moment, people just see it as an accident rather than something from the wing.
Interesting. Would you still kind of classify this in the same category as what we have talked about over and over again on the show, when to move up? Do all the basic rules apply? It's, you know, when you're pushing the wing you're on as hard as you possibly can, you're using its full scope of the speed system all the time. You're basically, in jockey's words, you're getting bored of the wing that you're on. You know, you've maxed it out. You've maxed out the hours. You've maxed out your, you're observing 100%. You know, you're not thinking about keeping the wing open. You're not looking at the wing all the time. You're, you're, you're, you're in quote-unquote ready.
Is that any different with these? Is there, is there any more kind of hesitancy? Is there any more, well, do you have X?
Well, I would, I'd bring it again back to wing control rather than, well, it's both things. One, when you're at that stage where you're flying a wing like that, you have freed up all the bandwidth that you can free up. You're flying automatically and that frees up as much bandwidth as possible to make good decisions. But wing control then, it comes down to, because you need to have done enough that you've covered all of the asymmetric collapses, the frontals, the autorotations, unless you're going to buy collapse lines. But really, by the time you're on a two-liner C, you should have done enough collapses and collapse to rotations and autorotations and stuff that you understand that enough that you're not going to let it happen again. And then really, you don't need to bring collapse lines on the SIV because we teach much more about how to use the B2C.
Then we do about needing to focus on the collapses of the wing itself. So like the spin point on the Bs, the full range of the Bs, doing rapid exits and catching on the Bs, using the full, like locking your legs at full speed and then coming back to trim speed just with your hands and then finding the spin point. So there's a lot of exercises we can do that the pilot starts to learn to use the B handles just as if they were brakes. The same rules apply. If you pull the full range and you leave it there, you're going to spin the wing. If you do a punch, you're not. And it's just like that on the brakes. And it's getting pilots confident enough that they can use the Bs to their full advantage because most people flying two-liners don't use the Bs enough.
And then really, they become safer. You know, the three-liners have only got a certain amount of travel on the Cs. Even the ones with the pulley systems, it's not as effective as having the full travel of Bs. So it's a lot of work. When you start to use speed bar more and you're happy to, you know, sit at kind of half bar, two-thirds, being efficient and using the wing like that, then really that's where two-liners not only come out in terms of efficiency and like into wind penetration and their glide efficiency, but also the safety of being able to keep the wing open at speed. I really think that they're safer in that respect than a three-liner because you have so much more control of, you know, the speed. Your angle of attack.
I'm not hearing a lot of downsides, really. I mean, it sounds like if you've, you know, you've spent some time with wing control, you've done your SIVs, you've got the hours, then it should be a handy tool.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there is different levels of them. Like the softest one we see is probably the Nova Codex. That's really quite a gentle, you know, beginner one if you are apprehensive. Like I don't really see a point. I don't see a point in three-liner Cs anymore. So if you're, you know, at the high B level, you've got some good pilot actions because for me, it's not the amount of SIV you've done. It's the pilot actions that you've gained from it. You know, it should always be pilot focused with SIV. So if you're a nice dynamic pilot, you've got, you know, good brake range, you can stop rotations, you're flying your EMB well, you're happy to use speed bar and actively pilot, then I wouldn't even move to a three-liner C. Okay. Go straight for a two-liner.
Just get one that, you know, the higher level ones, the Arctic R and the Photon, they've got the best performance, but they're, you know, the kind of at the top of the category. And then you've got the kind of the Volt being like mid-range, Codex being quite a nice soft one. So they all have slightly different characteristics. Some are a little bit more punchy than others, but they have the performance. The ones that are slightly more, slightly of the higher level of the category, they have the best performance. So it's always a trade-off.
What are you seeing, Malin, in SIV on these wings that are catching people by surprise? Anything? Is it the same as EMDs and CCC wings on two-liners?
Yeah, exactly the same. Yeah, they're not the right wing to learn stools on. So if you haven't, you know, well, you can, but they don't take kindly to being stooled badly.
And it's like even like a high-level C wing, you know, three-liner isn't going to be very forgiving to a bad stool technique. Most wings these days need the two-stage entry, which you're not going to be doing on your first stools. They don't like being overstooled. So that's really nice. No different to most modern wings, even, you know, high Bs these days, you need to have the two-stage stool, you know, dialed to make your life easy. It's just these wings have a little bit more power again. And they're just on the aspect ratio where you can start to use a three-stage stool and choke the tips a bit, but really that doesn't come into play too much.
It's where I introduced the idea of controlling the speed of the tips. Once you've broken the foil, you don't really need it until you start getting into the D category.
Malin, I wanted to ask you, that just reminded me of something that's related, little unrelated. We just had US Nationals out in Chelan and the last day we were all screaming towards goal, towards end of speed and hit a pretty violent dusty that was about a thousand feet over the ground. It still wound up pretty tight where most of the gaggle hit it. And it was a rain of gliders. The edge of this thing was incredibly sharp. So if you didn't dive into it really hard, kind of got thrown out of the side. And so I was one of them that just glider blew up pretty fast and I'm pretty familiar with the two-stage and I've done a lot of practice with that.
But in this case, being in such a hardcore kind of combat situation, I just immediately went tail slide and hope nobody hit me because it was basically, I got to get this thing under control immediately. And there were gliders all around me and everything worked out really well. But I've still been in, I'm always imagining the perfect scenario over the water, you're doing two stage and it's so lovely. It's such a nice way to do it. But then switching that to a full combat situation, is that still your go-to in a full combat? Would you still do a two-stage style or would you just go immediately tail slide and deal with it?
Well, it depends what configuration the wing is in. I can't remember the last time I did a stool in anger because I'd rather the wing was flying and then recognize the situation that it was in, whether it's going into a rotation or a parachute tool, or if there's a cravat or anything. So there is that. There is no, even though I talk about two-stage and three-stage stool, it's more about just bringing more awareness to what the wing is doing at the time. So if you've had a, I don't know why you wanted or needed to take it to the tail slide, whether you'd had a frontal or it had stopped flying anyway, or you were in parachute tool, which we call the shit zone. But it's just about having the situational awareness of recognizing those situations and then deciding what you need to do with your hands. If it's already in parachute tool or front tooled and not flying,
just go to tail slide because the whole point of the two-stage stool is to manage the span as it drops into a stool, where if you're already there or you're in a configuration where the wing is hardly flying, then you don't need to do those certain inputs. So whether it's two-stage, three-stage or whatever, it's, that's kind of a very simplistic way of looking at the different phases of a stool. And actually it's just about recognizing what phase you're in and what you need to do with your hands. So if what you did is not working, or it that's what you did worked, then that's what needed to be done.
Yeah. It was, it was a big asymmetric and it was, you know, looking like cravat. I was, you know, we were in a very, very thick gaggle and it was just for me it was, okay, I get to, I gotta see what's going on, get control of this thing. And yeah, it was pretty wild. There was a reserve toss in it and it was, it was a pretty dynamic situation, situation but i was happy with how it all worked out yeah
i want some i want some footage of this carnage it sounds uh entertaining oh
it was awesome it was very exciting we were right over big high tension power lines and that i think matt beecher was was was leading and he was the one that hit it and his bank up was full yasin style you know just hey everybody come to me it was it was basically a massive wing over like oh that's a heater let's go there and but then it was just carn i mean there was at least three maybe four wings that just exploded and one of them was was right after uh alex almost hit me and i was so glad he didn't he was one of the ones that was really tight on me and kind of swerved out and then he got hit and had to throw yeah it was a it was a proper chaland day it was great it was it was exciting uh well cool that that's pretty i think we hit what we needed to hit there anything in closing you wanted to hit on these sea wings any other words of advice or caution i
think the the thing with choosing any wing is that the the problem with us humans is that we we don't know what we don't know we don't know the level of our income incompetence and you know really that is the the true the
thing is that if you're going on a course or speaking to the right people uh you know it's impossible to to understand your level you know it's it's never the wing it's always the pilot or it's very rarely the wing there are there have been some terrible wings made in the past which you can blame certain things on but but generally the the accidents that happen the things that go wrong are pilot induced it's just a it's just a lack of knowledge it's and it's it's nothing it's not pointing blame it's just a very difficult thing to actually understand yeah to try and understand where where we're at so you know if you get onto a two-liner and you think oh my god it's a two-liner something's going to be different then it will be your you know your mental attitude towards it will be different which isn't going to help things so any wing you fly i think i said in the last podcast like i i don't look at what certification a wing is anymore because to me it's irrelevant i you know i trust on my um my my piloting inputs and my situation awareness so if you're thinking of moving up to one really be uh the other thing is just to be really honest with your own skill set because they're really easy to fly any wing when it's open is it's pretty easy to fly it's when it's closed that the higher up through the categories you go the more fruity um a situation you can get yourself into so be be brutally honest with your your own wing control and level um and then do something about it if there's any gaps in your knowledge find the pilots that can give you
some feedback or or you know pay and go on a course that where you can get that sort of uh that feedback because for me i don't care what wing you turn up on i i um i care what inputs you are doing in what time well
said my friend malin thanks man i'll let you get back to your family i appreciate we all appreciate your knowledge and excited to hear you might be coming over to the states for a future SIV and uh we'll catch up here very shortly for a full show yeah
great good speak cheers gavin okay
next question for our ask me anything show i haven't done one of these in a while this is fun is from steve hallsworth he says two of my close buddies just came back from the care quorum with special stories and spectacular photos matt wilkes who you've heard on the show a couple times and ollie carr i would love to have gone with them but new job so no time to prepare and then he says my question is how to know if we are ready even if both physical and in the air how did you know you were ready for alaska for example so i take the position on readiness like i did with sailing all those years ago 99 and this is not a real statistic this is just what i've seen of people who are preparing to go offshore just prepare for ever and never go you can never really get the boat to where you need you can never really get the experience you need you can never get the equipment that you need depending on budget and all that kind of thing so you just got to go and learn and get out there and mess about and make mistakes and get better uh that's certainly how i did it and it worked pretty well and i'm going around the world a couple times and that's been my approach with flying as well you know my first bivy with was with john sylvester over in beer and it was a very modest 50k over the back from beer and we spent the night high over manali kind of got encased in ice it was so cold that night and then in the morning took off from right where we landed the night before and flew back over beer and we were a couple thousand feet over launch when people were just setting up to go so uh very special and kind of set the stage for many adventures in the future but so i guess the answer is go for it why not life is short i don't think you're ever going to feel fully prepared but i would definitely suggest you know certainly from a bivy standpoint you know the sexiest way to do that is to be doing quite a bit of top landing and not have to hike up from the valley bottom and top landing is certainly one of the more dangerous things we do flying so you know having really good wing control skills being able to touch down and do top landings uh in the meat of the day is certainly high risk so you want to be have really good ground handling skills and just solid experience in that department rather than just trying to do that on the first time you go out and try to bivy so starting small is always a good idea and you know bivy and multi-day xc adventures can be done in most people's backyard uh some easier than others but you know you can do a lot of things in the backyard and you can do a lot of things in the backyard you can do little adventures that require very little prep uh just a little bit of food you don't even need a stove or a mat or anything you just sleep in your wing if you like to go that style but i like having a pad and a bag and a tent and all that stuff so if you can carry a little bit more weight you can add more gear and be more comfortable and just go do it a little bit and then you'll gain confidence and you can start edging up into bigger and bigger missions what i would say when it comes to really big missions like alaska or the rockies traverse or uh what they're doing over in pakistan is you know you are going to be hit no doubt with the unexpected and conditions that are probably not recreational so you want to make sure your pilot skills are up to snuff and you want to be mindful for sure of things like high altitude and exhaustion and dehydration all these things that require more margin as you heard on the show with bill beninati who's a real high altitude expert even people who are incredibly physically well trained and have thousands and thousands of hours in the sky are going to be operating at something less than 100 percent what that is depends on the day but something less uh when you're operating at high altitude and combine that with much thinner air so you're moving through the air faster so places like the karakoram in pakistan and beer where you're really tall just require a lot more margin uh both mentally and uh physically in terms of your spatial margin with objects so you just got to go in with the knowledge that you're going to turn things down you know you're not going to be operating at 100 volume so turn it down have fun try to keep it fun and try to fly within the rails within the margins that uh you you've set try to avoid as much as you can peer pressure and uh yeah go for it you know uh ships are safe in harbor but that's not what they're built for i like that quote last
question for this ask me anything
about the show i'm probably butchering your name buddy i'm sorry uh he actually says no need to make this onto the show but i wanted to include it because it's a good one and i'm wondering if you had a suggestion for a 10-day intro to vol biv trip in the alps for someone like himself then he gives some background i don't think background really matters too much uh as i just said in the last one i think we should just be going for it doing these things but maybe we'll see how it goes i don't know i don't know if any people haven't been to the alps find it quite daunting it is a huge vast region for flying and i get this question a ton where should i go and the answer is it doesn't really matter uh the alps are vast you know if you stretch it over into slovenia and then come west all the way over to mont blanc and then start heading south down through anisee and down through the maritimes all the way down to monaco basically the X-Alps course when it used to go to monaco there are just so many flying zones it would be exhaustive and quite tiring for me to even start listing them here so there's you know there are regions you know the pinzgau and the zugspitz area and the dolamites and the maritimes and
fiche you know the the valis and the roan and the rhine uh the are all you know amazing areas but basically if you're just following the spine of the alps weather can often be quite different on the south side or the north side fern is your biggest enemy there and if you're willing to move around then you can really follow the weather you know everything always comes from the west so you know you can get behind it or get in front of it and move accordingly you know there's great public transportation all over most of the alps and so it's easy to get on a plane and and jump ship but that gets pretty exhaustive and you often you know weather moves pretty fast so sometimes it's better to just sit tight in a certain area that you want to play in and try to session it as best you can so in general you'd like to be over there there we get some great days in april some huge big banger days but they're fewer and far between than may and then june and then typically july august are your best summer months september can still be incredible even though things are cooling off and the days aren't going to be nearly as long july and august tend to get more stable in the alps so to really cover distance you've got to be up in the much higher terrain which means the
either you know in switzerland up in the in the valis on either side of the firka pass you know the eiger side or more towards cour and davos but to get above the inversions you typically got to be pretty tall to start the day but you don't have to be and you can still have really good flights even when it starts getting really hot and more stable valley winds become more of an issue in july and august pretty much across the alps so on the big high pressure days you're going to be really looking for some sometimes you can get more valley winds as things start to heat up
my personal favorite has always been kind of late may in june because you still have a lot of snow there's tons of water there's water everywhere in the alps you don't have to worry about that with bivy which is one of the great things about doing bivys in the alps but i like june even though you know when you're up tall it's uh it can be quite a bit colder so you need bigger gloves more clothes and that kind of thing but it's not nearly as busy And the kids are still in school, so the public transport is pretty open and the roads are less busy. Places are just less busy. As you get into July and August, things obviously get a lot more busy, especially in the Dolomites. The common thinking in the past was always that the Dolomites, really the sweet season there is in September because they're quite a bit spicer and quite a bit stronger.
I guess that's still true, although I like the Dolomites anytime it's good. It's always really good down there. So yeah, really, you can't go wrong. If you've never been, Annecy is a must. You've got to get there. They have the Bourns to fly and the Chablis and a bunch of hike and fly races in that zone for a reason. Tons of that stuff is top landable. It's all very easily bivyable, but it is pretty much everywhere. I don't know any places that don't suit for multi-day hiking. You can hike and fly camping adventures. It all works pretty well. There are areas like the Sud Terule that are a lot more treed, but still the valleys are great. The tops of stuff are usually clear.
There's grass everywhere. So not very specific, but hopefully encouraging. If you've got the time and you can make it happen, go for it. You'll learn a lot. You'll have a lot of fun. You don't have to hike on any given day. There's gondolas and chairlifts everywhere. So you can take a day off, get on a chairlift, take it easy, or you can go hardcore. Hansa just finished another one with his son. I think this is the 8th or 9th year in a row. This year they made it from Annecy all the way to Monaco. Just the two of them doing their tandem gig. And at the end, I think they walked 40k down to Monaco in a straight line. So much more than that by real time. But it all worked and they're stoked.
Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked.
Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. Stoked. If you
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