Hi
there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. I am a week behind again. I apologize. I've been buried in these comps down in Utah, and I always have big plans of recording during those, but these were very, very busy events, and I wasn't able to make that happen except the last one with Matthew Fittis on one of the weather days. But I do have some shows now finally in the can, and I'm going to release this one right away with Hugh Miller. Hugh has, of course, been on the show before. He's part owner of Cross Country Magazine. He's been flying for 32 years, and I recently noticed I follow him on the socials, and I noticed he's been flying sailplanes. So I thought it'd be interesting to talk to him about what that journey's been like, why he did it, what he's getting out of it, and what he sees in his future doing it.
Because I've been quite. I've
been quite fascinated,
especially since talking to Gordon about his crazy wave escapades out in the Sierras. He has, I'm sure, hopefully, heard that show. It's amazing. If you haven't, go back and check it out. It's pretty wild. But yeah, I've been pretty fascinated about getting into this myself, so I thought I'd reach out to a newbie who's just exploring it on his own. Just did his first comp, and the comparisons, what we're missing, what we might learn from sailplanes. I'm a glider. Community, what it costs, what is involved getting into it, and all those kinds of things. And we finish up by talking a little bit about Cooper Car. We just got back from Cooper Car. Always a big festival and event, and fun to see all the new stuff coming out.
So we talk a little bit about that, some of the new innovations that are happening. Please enjoy this show with Hugh Hunt.
Hugh, welcome to the CloudBase, ma 'am. Thank you for saving me. I'm a week late, and I just reached. I reached out to you three minutes ago to say, let's do a podcast, and you said yes. I appreciate that. And I know it's later there, but I think I pulled you off the hill, it sounds like. And the reason I got… Always a pleasure. Yeah, thank you, sir. Thank you. We're going to start with some… We're going to go back in history a little bit before we get to your sailplane adventures. But I've been watching your posts lately, and you're getting into sailplanes. And this is something I'm really fascinated about, and I need to get more sailplane pilots on the show, especially after talking to Gordon. Yeah. Yeah. Stuff, that wave stuff he's doing out in the Sierras, that really looks up my alley. Can't wait to go fly with him. But for the four people who are listening to the show who don't know your history, can you rewind the clock a little bit, get us caught up speed?
How'd you get here?
Yeah. I'm obsessed with paragliding. I have been for 32 years. My name's Hugh. I'm an addict, something like that. And I'm a co-owner in Cross Country Magazine, and I love paragliding. And now, gliding as well. And I've also done a teeny-weeny bit of hang gliding in the past as well, until I realized how heavy they are and how weak I am. So, yeah, that didn't last very long. Yeah. Is that all right? Is that enough? I think that's good. 32 years
paragliding, a bunch of comps. You were your co-owner of the magazine. You helped publish our book. That was awesome. Yes. Of course. Yes. Fantastic. It seems like ages ago, doesn't it? It does. It does. I think we're ready for the second edition here at some point, I guess. Have you done any more shows
since then?
Oh, a couple. Sorry.
Yeah, that one was based on the first 100, and what are we, 240 or something now? 235 or something. Yeah. We're getting up there. But, yeah, so what's this sailplane thing? Why did you get into it? How is it going? Well, yeah. What do you know that we don't know?
Oh, yeah. I don't know about that. They're very, very different sports. But I got into it because, yeah, I've done a lot of paragliding. And a lot of paragliding in the UK. The UK is, it's an island. And with today's performance of our paragliders, we're increasingly realizing it's an island. And we're reaching the coast more and more often. And I was kind of curious about what gliders can do. And so I signed up with a friend to do a course last April, did that. Then just, you know, they give you like a tick sheet when you're learning. So you have to cover, you know, handling, landings. Takeoffs, spins, stalls. It goes on and on. You know, I ended up filling out about 70 or 80 tick boxes. And I was just obsessed with getting the ticks.
It's a very simple psychology. Just get another tick. Go fly and get another tick, you know. And so, yeah, I just really enjoyed the process of learning. And then, obviously, as soon as I, you know, got signed off to fly on my own, I just thought, right, off we go, cross country. And started getting into cross country flying. And I learned in a club. It's called Lasham. And it's one of the. It's one of the biggest clubs in the world. And they're really pro cross country flying. And there's a load of, you know, really good ex-hang glider and paraglider pilots there who are into gliding too. So, yeah, there's already people I could talk to and hassle and, you know, go up dual with and get into XC flying with. So, yeah.
Okay, before we go any farther, a couple of questions just right there, right in the beginning. How much does it cost? What does it cost to do this? A
lot more than I thought. I signed up for the course. The course was £800 for four or five days, which is, what, $1,000. And I thought, that's it. That'll teach me to be a glider pilot. Wah, wah. No, it took. You have to keep going back. I went solo about three or four weeks after that. I guess it cost probably £3,000 to train and qualify from start to finish. All in. Maybe a bit less. I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't counting because it was quite a lot. But, yeah, it's quite involved. It's more involved than learning to fly planes or paragliders or anything else. And that's mainly because most airfields, they winch launch you. So, you get towed up and you are going up like a rocket.
Within two or three seconds of the all-out signal, you're doing 50 knots and then you're doing 90 knots. And you have to really control that ascent. And then they want to see that you're really good. If the line breaks or there's a launch failure at 200 feet, you react really quickly. You dive the glide of the ground. You pick up airspeed and you land going ahead. Or, you know, you can be safe basically on the winch. So, a lot of the training is around safely launching and landing. Yeah. But it takes a long time.
And what does it cost now when you just go? Once you get the qualifications and go out, what does that cost? Yeah. You're going to go.
It's pretty cheap. It's £10, $12, $13 for a week. And on a good day, that's enough. You'll get launched to, you know, 2,000 feet. An aerotow's £35, maybe $40. And, you know, every time you get dropped off under a cloud and you're off, you never need to relaunch again. So, it takes out all the hassle that, you know, that is inherent. And the adventure as well. But, you know, flying flatlands, choosing the hill, deciding which one to drive to, it's always a last-minute decision. It's hard work, logistically. And I live in Brighton, you know, the wrong side of London. So, it's a lot of effort. You know, I'm used to driving for three, four hours to get to a hill, flying for six, seven hours. And then, you know, three, four hour retrieve.
And I've done that for years and years and years, and I've loved it. But it's actually quite nice to just drive an hour and a half, fly, do a 300, 400K flight, land, and be home by seven. So, I'm getting old.
Now, you say, you say, okay, it's a non-event. You get towed up. You're going to go under a cloud. And you're going
to fly. You're going
to go. Yeah. But that's, you've got 32 years of experience of doing that. Is that for, if it was just somebody off the street that's learning how to fly a sailplane the first time, is that also going to work like that?
Yeah. I mean, they'll always drop you off on an aero tow under, well, they'll get you to a good place and you can release and be pretty confident of getting a climb. Yeah.
Winching less so, because you're lower and you're dropped off straight over the runway. But aero towing, it's pretty much. What is
better or worse about the learning process, and I'm talking about the exams, the stalls, the spins, you know, what they take you through, I've been told, is really what we should be doing with paragliding as well. It's much more involved. You get more. There's more checkboxes.
How are your school days, Gavin? Yeah.
How did you find the experience? I mean,
I don't know, I spent all my time in the principal's office, as you can imagine. Well, no, you've got a good comparison then to gliding. You spend a lot of time outside the principal's office. It is, yeah, they're pretty, there's a lot of discipline. There's a lot of, you know, a bit of shouting. Don't do it like that. Da da da da da. Well, we walked away from that one. You know, it's quite, you have to have fairly thick skin, because I think in most countries, the gliding clubs are still run by a fairly old guard, a fairly established kind of ex-airline, ex-military kind of background people.
And to be fair, to run safely, you do need that discipline, because gliders are really heavy and fast, and so is the equipment that gets them in the air. So, you know, you do. I'm not saying you don't need the discipline. But coming from a paragliding background, where you literally, you know, you're probably doing low hops on your first day, and you get that real taste of freedom and exhilaration, it's a different experience for sure.
You said right at the top that it's a really different sport. It's a really different activity. That surprised me a little bit. Why?
Good question. It's a bit, I guess the difference is, if you think of paragliding. It's being like wing foiling or surfing or windsurfing. So you just turn up with your gear and, you know, you assess the conditions yourself. You have a chat with your friends and off you go. And you really enjoy the sensations of being in the elements and using the wind and the waves. So gliding is a bit more like, not that I've done much of it, but going out on an ocean yacht and crossing, you know, a long stretch of sea weather conditions. Change a lot more. You don't feel the sea in quite the same way. You're reliant on other people to get you in the water and to help you out when you're in the air, possibly to.
But you get to experience, you know, probably much bigger seas in more safety.
So they're different. I'm not saying one's better or worse. I'd still probably prefer a good day's paragliding because you get that exposure to the elements and, you know, you're flying right next to birds. And, you know. You can just, you know, seeing the wispies go past on a paraglider is a very different experience. And you're taking off. Sailplane pilots are fascinated by the way we use, I've forgotten the technical term for it, but, you know, the very bottom thousand feet of the world's air and how we're right in the mixing zone when the thermals start. If you're flying in the flatlands and small hills, you know, if you're flying in the mountains and getting low, that's exactly where you're at. Sailplanes never, never really deal with, with that part of the air.
They're always higher up and they're always, um, using the, using the clouds much more and less the terrain. So, you know, thermaling out of a small hill is, you know, with the birds is, is a very different experience from, um, being in wave or blotting down cloud streets and not stopping. But yeah.
When you first started doing your, you know, you first started going XC, was it really nerve wracking? I mean, you're not getting 16,000 feet like we do over here and you've got, you know, a multiple number of places to glide to. Yeah, we, we
had a, we had a crap year last year. So my first XC is we were, we had cloud base of three and a half, 4,000 feet and I was clinging to the cloud base. Like, you know, leave one and get to the next one, a hundred feet below base, next one, 200 feet below base. I was ridiculous. I
was really
nervous because, um, yeah, the thought of landing out is really scary. You know, you, you need a lot of space. I remember the first few days I learned, I'd be driving home, looking at the places I'd land a parallel going, no, it wouldn't land in that park. No, it couldn't land in that kid's play area. No, it couldn't land on that cricket pitch. No, that feels too small. You know, there aren't that many places you can land. So that does, it's quite intimidating. But then I did some extra training, um, with a really good, uh, cross country pilot who took me out in his motor glider. And he cuts, he cuts the power at 1,500 feet and he says, right, where are you going? Why? And you have to get into the right area and, you know, set up a, set up an approach around a field. And, and then, you know, you're down to 200 feet and then he points out that it's a vineyard you're about to go into and you're going to die on the line.
So, you know, you just, you just have to keep, keep practicing your field selection till you feel more confident with it. Um, and then, and then you feel better about getting low. Still not great. It's very nerve wracking. Um, but yeah, it's, it's still, that's why we, you know, we like, we like that stuff as pilots. I think we like having to sort shit out when it, when it gets, gets a bit, um, sketchy. So, yeah. Uh, obviously the motor, the, the, the gliders with turbos don't do that. They just, you know, get low, pop out the turbo and away they go. But in a pure glider, and there's a bit of kind of like, there's a bit of, uh, snobbery from the pure gliders about the motor gliders. Cause it's like the e-bike thing. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, yeah, possibly.
But you never, you'd only use it when you really need to. So it takes away quite a lot of the adventure and it changes the way you decide. Sure. What you decide, you know, I've been, been flying. Um, I'm going to really bore you, Gavin. Sorry. I was at Cooper car and like everyone was asking things and I always got the subject back to gliding. Cause I've only just got into it. I'm really excited about it. So sorry, but, but I went tandem with a couple of people and they had a motor and they were flying into really, I thought, silly spread out areas and surprise. I had to start the motor. So yeah, I think pure gliding is the way for me, um, for the moment.
How much, how much do you think your experience of gliding, this is kind of a ridiculous question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, is being colored by your 32 years of experience of paragliding. I'm, I'm wondering, you know, what, what, what non-pilots must be thinking? Are they, do you think they're less nervous about finding a place to land? Do you think? I think because you, you understand the sky, you understand how, how everything works. You're, you're, you're attacking in a totally different aircraft, but I would imagine you're.
Yeah, I think that definitely helps. Although glider pilots, it's weird. Like when you're gliding, you are going straight to the darkest bit of the cloud, diving straight in there. Doesn't work. You push onto the next one. Paragliding. Sometimes we just don't have that option. We don't. We don't get to the dark bit because it's too shady beyond it. We stop and circle before. And glider pilots ask me, why do paraglider pilots always thermal in really weird places, like on the edge of clouds and stuff? And I'm like, well, because we can't get to the good bits. And some, some days I've flown, I've talked to paraglider pilots and I've met up with them on the radio, like, you know, Kirstie and Guy and other friends in the UK. And I, I've said, how have you found it? And they've been, it's really crap. It's really weak. It's like half to one meter.
And we've been in really straight, you know, like three meter climbs consistently. Cause we can get to them. So, um, it is, it's, but you do get to sample a lot more clouds and you get more confident about what, what, what works, you know, but, but equally on a paraglider, you don't, a, you don't have that luxuries. You don't have the range and B, you are cycling to each cloud rather than in a supercar. So by the time you get to it is substantially different from the cloud you thought it would be when you set off. And that's, that's, what's really struck me, um, about the difference. In gliding and, and paragliding. So classic gliding theory and the classic gliding clouds. Yes, they're great. And they totally apply to classic gliding flying, but in paragliding less. So we have to be much more observant and attuned to the way a cloud is changing rather than the way it looks when we set off.
Is there much? I don't know. I don't know about you, but generally quite often, maybe half the time I set off for a cloud, I've changed on route on a paraglider because it changes.
Yeah, for sure. Is there, is there much, as you're getting into gliding, spending more time in a glider, is there, are there any, oh my God, I didn't know that. Is that happening?
Uh, or I wish I'd known that. I mean, oh my God, I wish I'd known that for the last 30 years. Yeah. Are you, are you picking up things about the sky and how things work that you didn't know existed?
I think it's might've helped me in terms of the forecasting and you know, when the trigger temperature is going to be. You know, reached and then what, and time to leave the hill, I'm definitely more attuned to that to pay more attention to that. And I check out the day versus the forecast a lot more because the, the gliding, the glider pilots only really, they, they pay full attention to forecast on the morning. We don't have the luxury of doing that. We have to decide on the day or two days before forecast, whereas they decide on the day cause they're at the airfield, they load it up, they go debt and it's pretty, pretty accurate. So it's made me do that a bit more on the morning of the, of the forecast. And I think it's, you know, it's just made me more confident that it is as per the textbooks, to be honest, you know, the, the, the, it does all make sense speed to fly sort of, it's sort of relevant to us.
I wrote, wrote about this in that article a couple of issues ago. But for us, we have to move horizontally a lot more on glide than, than, than, than, than we think we do. I think to make the best of. Best of the air as you know, you, you know, this good gliding pilots, you're talking about your shark, do that anyway. Well, not mine. No, it's a guy called G G Dale, a coach, really good coach. Uh, he's coached like the Australian team, the British team and Kiwi team. And he's been the national coach for all three countries. I think he, um, I went on a coaching week with him and he just said, yeah, forget about dolphin, you know, that, that doesn't happen. All right. Really? Okay. And, uh, he said it's, it's about block speeds and sharking.
So instead of, instead of dolphin where you are accelerating and diving, diving the nose, dropping the nose through the sink, and then pulling back and lifting the nose like a dolphin through, through the lift and sort of extenuating your glide path up and down, according to conditions, he says, that's a complete waste of time because you're just making your total glide path longer. What you need to be doing is moving like a shark. So move left, move right. As you sense or notice lift increasing, um, off your glide path. So people talk about sniffy lines. So sometimes you can kind of feel the lift, can't you? Other times you might have to just sort of explore over a, a drier area of land or, or under some wispies. So that is definitely applicable to gliding and paragliding.
And it's way, I mean, I thought because of the glider gliders, they would be straight lining a lot more. If you look at the good, a good track of a glider. A glider pilot on a triangle, they'll deviate from course just as much as a paragraph. There'll be 20, 30 % off course a lot of the time following the lines because they, they don't want to be turning either. They want to be, they want to be, you know, gliding in neutral air or lifting air as much as they can as well. Um, so just because the performance is, you know, triple or quadruple, it doesn't mean that the game of flying efficiently, the rules of flying efficiently changed that much.
And is that, is that much more of an instrument thing? In a glider than it is by feel like we do in paragliding or is it just horizon or you're just looking out forward and you can kind of just feel it?
That's an interesting question. I don't know enough about it, but having flown in a competition, one comp now and seeing how good pilots do it and ask them if what I'm doing is about right or not. I think it's quite visual. So you're, you're literally, you know, you are flying towards the dark bit. The cloud you're hanging a right as you hit it, you're going to the next bit and carrying on. If you look up the spec, you look at the hyperlapse footage of, um, Stefan Langer on YouTube, you'll see how he connects the clouds. Um, and, and it's more about that. And then obviously a bit of feel, you can't feel a lot through the stick. You can feel a little bit, you know, I, I get shouted at if I'm in a duel and I turn the wrong way. They go, it's left, it's left because they noticed that the left wing rise.
It's nothing like a paraglider where it's, it's a bit more obvious. So I'd say it's visual, a little bit of feel and a little bit of instruments, but it's far more by feel and, and visual than I'd thought. I thought glider pilots just looked at their instruments and did maths all day long.
Are you spending a lot of time on a simulator?
Um, no, probably should, but no, I haven't done any. Did I, what have you, what have you heard? I don't know. I did, I
did one. I think it's. It's the Condor thing. And I remember, uh, Eduardo Garza, who was in the couple of the X-Alps with me, um, 2017, 2019, maybe he, he, because he didn't have any time to go over and scout, he did it all on Condor, which is built for sailplanes. Okay. I think it's Condor. I might be wrong, but I, and so he basically flew the whole course so he could see it, you know, see it from a bird's eye perspective. And, but, uh, but you're flying it as a, as a, you can pick the sailplane and the performance and all that kind of thing. But I recently got to fly one and I flew a task around where we had the PWC in Switzerland in May. So we just pulled up a task and I flew it and I flew it from a glider, you know, I crashed and I didn't know how to take off.
And I, but it was, I guess it's pretty accurate. I'm just wondering how much it, you know, you see the little telltales out the window and. Yeah. You know, you try. To figure out how to use your feet and, uh, yeah, yeah, I think,
yeah. So, uh, one thing we have to learn as paraglider pilots is, um, attitude controlling the pitch, uh, and also the coordination of the stick and the rudder control. So those three things are new and quite baffling. It's like really foreign, totally foreign language. So I guess for that would be very helpful. And also, uh, just in terms of safety. So, um, if you, so, uh, you know, I've just joined a club. I'm a person who's actually really good at paragliding. So I'd like to know a little bit about
the bridge, uh, and, and how it works and how they work. That will
help me.
I think the first thing I've learned so far is, I guess I've learned a lot from the, uh, the past. The last thing I've learned so far is, I've learned a lot from the past. I think the first thing I've learned is I've learned a lot from the past and it's true. I've learned a lot from different people, uh,
things like, because, you know, this was my first time flying paragliding. got in the sailplane that they're never they never say oh my god dude it's so amazing it's just the it's it's all i want to do they they sound more like you are that it's it's interesting it's cool it's uh you know you're you're you're loving it but it i mean do you see this just taking over your life dudes do you see you stopping gliding to pursue gliding it's quite
cool doing it it's quite cool doing a loop i enjoy that it's very cool going into wave and being at like 14 000 feet and seeing a cold front coming towards you um uh yeah it just opens up new ways of flying and seeing the world i guess so uh yeah and also the competitions are amazing i mean they're like they're way more interesting and varied than i thought and i would hesitate to say far more interesting than paragliding comps at the moment shoot me down but you get a far variety you know bigger variety of tasks it's much more about a pilot making the the most of the day and thinking for themselves and then than paragliding comps you know because i'm assuming it's all what
it's start gates how do they do it they do it like the old school you choose
you choose your start time elapsed time so there's some tactics there about when you start to get the best of the day and also when your competitors start some some uh some tasks are assigned area where you you have to go into three set massive cylinders and fly as fast a task as you can
and then you're able to do as you
can so that means going as far as you can within those three cylinders each one might be 50 k's big and make it home you know after four hours so that that's really interesting because you have to you know find find the right streets or work out what the wind's doing so there's a lot more thinking for yourself i mean the fact the fact that russ russ ogden talks about the you know if you make a decision for yourself in a paragliding comp something's wrong i think that in itself speaks to a problem in paragliding comps where you know an xc flying it's just a matter of should be about a pilot's ability to make decisions off their own bat and gliding i've found that there's still you know there's still i've been told there's still quite a lot of um following the good guys but um given the the variety of tasks that we have and the variety of conditions you could the greater variety of conditions you can fly in i think it is more down down to the pilot to make individual decisions where
do you see you've gotten this taste just did your first comp where do you see it going i mean the the the big triangles they're doing in the alps out over the med and up italy and i mean my god
bonkers and and you know what gordon's doing out in the sierras and the perlan project and you know the just some of the stuff that they're doing i mean gordon flying with night vision goggles all night flying yeah three thousand plus k that's just gotta be awesome uh do you is that your future where do you where do you see this going
oh i
don't know i mean you know that so the flights you're talking about they took off from faience near san andre and they flew um i believe they flew down to corsica and maybe sardinia even and then across to italy you know they went there were 20 25 000 feet over the med and then this is in march and they went over italy and then sort of did did some flatland flying on the way back i don't know it's crazy isn't it i mean i so i flew in faience uh in august duel and it was the day that honor and did 360 and tear and bruce loads of 300s were done and we actually flew past some of them as we made our way north to barcelonette i've got to say my experience in a sailplane was was probably disappointing compared with the paragliders because they're really in amongst the mountains and you know breathing the air and enjoying it and we were a bit removed so for me i'm not sure if if i if i'm that interested in the really
super disconnected from what's around you i like the idea of of like wave flying where you're really close to the wave bar and going up and down it and sort of surfing it like a pillow or or you know getting a low save and you know that sort of stuff and probably just doing it locally in the uk because it's quite convenient and can carrying on paragliding as well and yeah maybe one or two more comps because they were fun i was surprised how fun they were and how safe they were as well no accidents you know taking off at three after the cold fronts part passed and up to five thousand feet and flying in 40 mile an hour winds down cloud street so the head bouncing off the canopy because it's you know the the the climbs are so strong it's yeah it's good fun yeah
there's a couple of my friends have gotten into it and they they talk about you know out here in in utah well i'm in idaho but we just had these comps down in utah last couple weeks and the weather was really dynamic and for them that's those are the best days i mean like you said they're going right under the anvil and and yeah boasting in the hail and then escaping and then you know you need a little bit more lift you just point it for the darkest nastiest looking stuff and i mean those are the good days for them because they've got the range and the speed and uh when
i when i went back paragliding after because i hadn't touched a sailplane since till april 2023 and i've done loads of paragliding the year before loads of cross country and then i went back into paragliding in about may june and i was absolutely bricking it just you know it was just it was just it was just it was just it was just it was just just wobbling about underneath the cloud and it was psychological i got it back thankfully but it did take a bit of adjustment but there is something to be said about pushing on speed and being able to to get through but i guess you know you just have to pick your days in paragliding don't you and there's a lot to be said for flying on on the lighter wind days when you know as much of of the world and the nature around you is within your skill set as possible you can never make it completely so but you can definitely load the dice in your favor
it's like there's a lot of i've been trying to get him on the show for years you know gary osoba out and you know was one of the kind of one of the people who found the whole texas distance thing back in the day were hang gliders down by corpus christi gary did gary play you
out did gary play you out today no
no no he's he's uh he just wants to do it in person
was that the last minute request
no no no he didn't but he he wants to do it i'm taking gavin
fallback to you uh yeah so he but he does you know his whole thing is trying to fly certain distances you know 600k triangle as fast as you possibly can to me so totally is that in texas that what you call nose down well he's he flies out of uh what is the really famous one out of new mexico it's out by albuquerque i forget what that airfield's called uh it's got a great name moriarty moriarty
i think it is he was helping um uh johnny and dustin and all those guys with the record encampments and doing all the forecasting wasn't exactly and he
he helped us out when cody and i went down there i was actually just gonna tell a story about cody and sailplanes but he yeah he flies i think mostly out of moriarty but he's yeah his whole jam is you know not necessarily the biggest triangle but he likes to he likes to pick these days and then fly it really fast yeah you know just jam yeah um yeah
yeah that's that's the attitude of of uh a lot of people
yeah yeah that's that's the attitude of of uh a lot of people
cross country but it's about speed it's about optimization and and that that's great you know what was your speed 90k an hour in all the rest of it and how fast you can get around it but also it takes out some of the adventure because we like flying till the end of the day don't we on a good xc day when the sun's going down there's something really magical about that whereas on a sailplane you're probably wanting to be home by five because that's when the day slows down so you know it's more of a blast around for four or five hours okay but i'm so slow it i think almost eight hours to do my first 500ks and i quite appreciated that though i sort of squeeze every drop out of the day i could and that was part of the fun so there's no i don't think going faster makes you any happier as a pilot it's just a sort of it's a it's a number and a mark of the checkbox how efficient you can fly i guess yeah yeah uh
when when does this turn into yeah i'm kind of tired of these club planes i i want i want the gordon plane uh
there
is one factor here that sort of makes that decision for me what the magazine's not paying
that much
it's doing brilliantly well and we're very grateful to our subscribers but if they could just have a few more then you know maybe it'll happen maybe it'll happen um yeah you know my sailplane so i've just been to the koopa car and um there's a brilliant new innovation there we can talk about this a bit by super or super is it super or super good question i always get this wrong let's call it let's call it super um it's this amazing uh harness with a built-in reserve and sensors uh on the harness and via i think wire or bluetooth to the glider and it detects when the pilot goes into auto rotation and um and continues to go into auto rotation and it sends uh out messages to um your uh if you've got one your um in your spot provider um emergency services and as you hit a certain safety altitude it'll deploy your your emergency parachute for you um the reason i'm telling you this story is because hopefully it's interesting to talk about a bit more uh but also because the price of that was the same as my second-hand glider from 1978 so it it you know you can do gliding you can glide in fairly fairly accessible equipment or you can spend if you're
a glider you can do gliding in fairly fairly
you've got the money a lot of a lot of uh a lot of money and you know get an arcus but you know gordon's arcus does 49 to month one mine does 40 to one whatever it's yeah they're all they're all good that's what i'm saying right
right right i mean you can have a lot of fun with the club planes yeah exactly and you don't
need to
buy the jet plane
just like if you are flying an enb the focus should be improving your flying using what you've got rather than trying to jump up to get better this
innovation that bear has uh yeah i hadn't heard about that but you know i just ran these comps and with the fly master trackers you know if you're admin you're on the back end you know one of the things that somebody's looking at you know in this case the PWC is yvonne you know you're you actually get i got maybe 10 of these every day you know possible reserve deployment pilot number latin long and none of them were ever a reserve deployment they were always yeah people just spiraling or you know doing it was something irregular i'm assuming this separate thing's way more accurate it's not going to just deploy your reserve when you're just doing a heli or something
so um yeah i i don't know enough about it but it's been they said you know that we talked to the designer um roman bartellini ed has just texted me the the name um so i'm very forgetful so roman um is a came he's an engineer drone with drone kind of experience and he joined super pair and they've been working on this for six years i'm not entirely sure of the details but you know they're uh yeah it's it sounds pretty interesting yeah and uh and i you know they they said look we were looking looking at a way to make paragliding safer two-thirds of accidents happen from you know reserves not being deployed in auto rotation we we know several friends between us and i'm sure listeners have know many too where that's been the cause of serious injury or death so
whilst a company i visited before we're sort of like oh yeah i see what you think about that and we're quite skeptical i i don't know i think it's interesting and yeah yeah we'll see they're doing a lot of testing over the next few months and i think they're hoping to release it next year um is
that a is that a kind of a cutaway system too or does it get rid of the main because we're not a rotation so that's what happens right you're yeah i i had it
i was interested in that as well yeah i don't know is he i'm not being a very good journalist here i don't know i don't know there's a separate reserve that there's that you cannot deploy yourself and it's there's uh uh there's this i don't think it's an explosive because you can take it on a plane but there's some sort of um ejection system that that gets the reserve out quickly um when when activated um and um yeah there's all sort of um all kinds of um electronic circuitry involved in that and connected to the sensors and all the rest of it wow
cool i like these kind of innovations yeah and who knows
you know i drove an electric car for the first time and it was it was like tightening my seat belt and telling me off when i was going too too near the middle of the road and then at one point there's no one else on this road and i was playing around i sort of went well let's pretend that i'm sort of lost consciousness and see what happens and and it was like taking over and red alarms are going and it was slowing down and you know there are pros and cons i'm not saying that's but you know yeah if i was to have a stroke i'd probably appreciate it
yeah huh cool uh what about the the people involved in doing it have you made a whole new group of friends and new community is it has that been quite interesting we should have we should have this video
maybe i find it hard to make friends gavin i really like i really like the diversity of people in paragliding i mean i've made some really good friends who i would never have met were it not for paragliding and generally people are pretty enthusiastic and encouraging and upbeat in paragliding um and in gliding they are too but i think it's just a slightly different mentality and it's a it's a bit more sort of cool calm and collected you know if you're going gliding and you're on the radio they'll be calling you out by you know three two to papa nine you know transitioning nine thousand you know five thousand feet good air you know it's all that sort of talk there isn't a lot of banter they're they're they come from they sort of have this aviation discipline kind of stuff ingrained in them so i ended up like just i end up with that official radio but with a little two meter radio having a laugh with my paragliding friend who's also converted to gliding so yeah they're they it's a different culture and ethos and they're that you know like with gordon or you know the guys up um the guy called chris gill and north and south and stuff like that so it's a different culture and ethos and they're there are some there are some really cool characters within it but i'd say as a whole
it's probably more conservative perhaps with the small c perhaps with the big c okay
yeah more more commercial airline type
i would think xf air force is definitely some sort of military crossover okay yeah i don't know if there is in the states yeah in the in the uk yeah yeah yeah but really encouraging really friendly really good i guess the nice thing is you rely on each other a lot more because you know
you're going to be able to do a lot more and you need
people to be volunteering running the winch running you know most are not commercial so there is that sense of everyone helps each other out if anyone lands out they will be picked up wherever they are so you know you you grab the trailer you go out you you know you might get into an argument with the farmer you drag a glider across the cloud fields and you know yeah it's all part that there's a bit of adventure in that but yeah everyone everyone will help each other out it's just everyone's it's like it's slightly less diverse crowd i like
okay is that what what's
happening with the uh what's what's happening with
it yeah i had a look at this last week so i think there's probably something like three or four times as many paraglider pilots as glider pilots in the world at the moment in gliding there's a there's there's uh there's a sort of a weird uh age demographic where there seem to be a lot of um teens and people in
the world who are
in their early 20s involved in the sport then a lot of people are sort of 60 plus and uh that's partly because gliding was incredibly popular in the 70s and 80s and those guys are still flying and also partly because it is quite expensive so if you start as a teen and you've got all the junior rates and stuff you just can't afford it when you get to 25 and you've got a full-time job so yeah um in terms of the industry i mean unfortunately there are you know four or five big manufacturers who sell you know gliders for 250 000 euros new and that's their market you know there's there's it's um it's quite exclusive in terms of buying new gliders you have to be pretty rich to afford one so that's where the industry sort of targets and there's loads of very cool exciting innovations like we have fez which is front electrical system you know um electrical motors powered by batteries but ordinary pilots are nowhere near being able to afford those sorts of that sort of stuff whereas in paragliding it's kind of more for the average pilot and the normal pilot isn't it so that's where the market is
you just returned from cooper car what'd you learn what other than the uh the sup air thing what was that what are you seeing in the market uh it's
yeah lots of conversation i'm not very good at conversation after after the third i was like i've got another two days of this and i was only there for two days marcus for there for the four so i felt a bit bad about sneaking off early um there's a lot of talk in the trade tents and um yeah uh yeah no most most of the brands seemed pretty happy um lots of refinements going on in terms of harness development um and um yeah the the we we spent a couple of hours watching the masquerade and that's lovely you know seeing the parade i think for visiting pilots it's got a bit less appealing because there's a lot of there was a paramotor flying around telling people that they had to land because they you know they were in the air after nine o 'clock in the morning and that was banned and you couldn't take off after such and such a time and you had to pre-register to even do the hike and fly from the don't the crawl so i i guess that's all necessary measures that being brought in but you know i remember the days when you you know you'd be at a party on the on the tent and you just see these lights above you and it'd be raul rodriguez and felix like spiraling down you know in the middle of the night and it's like wow and we can't even let off lanterns now because yeah it's just different it's lost some of its magic i think but it's still a very exciting um weekend and it's still the you know the fundamental atmosphere is still there for
sure and this time it wasn't a mud fest i've been there a couple times where it was we can be pretty wet but i think yeah no we had good weather yeah it's
nice weather yeah yeah really nice yeah uh
anything you want to say more about sailplanes uh
yeah it makes you a pretty good person i think it makes you a pretty good person i appreciate good aerodynamics like it's quite hard to go back from a submarine genie race five style harness to a normal one uh when you see the difference in performance between a 1950s glider and a 1980s glider and you just look at the shape on the runway and you go that goes well that goes well that goes well that doesn't it's just that obvious you know so um it's it's uh you definitely it definitely attunes you to the importance of um is it fluid dynamics aerodynamics i don't know all that stuff both and just how and just you know uh how lucky we are as well i think in having the access we have to the places we fly and the experiences we have because most most people don't have them it's pretty nuts what we do now
and that that brings me to my close that many people have heard this story because it was on the man but and i know you did because we worked on the book together and cody was one of the chapters but in one of cody i think i've had him on the show twice one of them i can't remember which was the first or second one but he talked he had this incredible flight from somewhere in the wasatch out deep out over the desert and you know he was fighting to stay below 18 000 and there's hail and it was you know freezing cold and rowdy and uh you know just a big you know u.s day in the west and there was at one point there's a sailplane that was kind of circling around him and then headed off into the distance never saw him again and he was imagining you know his his visors you know getting all iced up and he's you know shaking like a leaf and he's sucking on his oxygen and he's imagining this sailplane pilot you know cruising by listening to rock mononoff you know just cruising oh look at that little guy look at that leaf in the wind over there see ya just imagining the difference between the two of it yeah
yeah but then you know we on a glider you don't have those experiences of being down at 300 feet and spotting some swifts or swallows and connecting with that climb and you know you just don't you don't you don't have that so yeah it's yeah i think that's a it's a good story because it sort of speaks of the difference and the exposure to the elements we get as paraglider pilots yeah and also the feel the feel of a thermal is so mark watts has this um description like thermally on a paraglider is like getting your hands into the into the earth and just working through the soil with your hands uh hang gliding is like having a spade and like lifting the soil up with a spade and then gliding is like having a mini mini digger and just scraping away with a mini digger's bucket you know
using hydraulics out on that yeah exactly
yeah yeah you always a treasure man thank you very much uh thank you for saving me with this show i appreciate it i can look forward to keep watching your pleasure yeah you're uh we
have we also it's a it's good timing because we've got a masterclass
that you know talks about dolphin flying and and shark flying stuff that's coming up in about two or three weeks time so it'll be available online for subscribers as well so we'll get him to explain it much better than me
awesome yeah i think people talked a lot about that one that was really interesting it was a good read i appreciate you guys as always putting out such great content thank you well
thank you gavin for for keeping the show going and you know it's um yeah it's it's a great contribution to to for all of us um and um yeah i mean i listen to it most in the winter i think it's it's just such a nice thing to do you know in in the downtimes i think the magazine gets most read in the winter as well so um yeah it's uh we need our spirits up exactly exactly thanks
buddy appreciate it
no worries if
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