What is Masterclass?

1. Level 1 - Solo certification

2. Level 2 - SIV/SIKU (recommended)

3. Level 3 - Masterclass <— My Job is to Confuse You!

4. Level 4 - XC Adventure Coaching <- Ask Someone else.

The Biggest Risk is Not Knowing What you are Doing

By far the best investment you can make is not in your fancy equipment, but in yourself. Why are you even considering upgrading your wing and harness before you have your survival skills sorted? You got only one mind and body, and you need to take good care of your health. My coaching is about self-defense, and surviving bad conditions. I’m not here to coach you what everyone else is doing. Because, I know you only need to crash once before you stop flying, I know you need to work on surviving in an imperfect world.

Have you completing at least 100 full stalls before buying a new wing or harness? It’s so simple. If you do just that, you are probably safer than 95% of the pilots around you. I hope you are the kind of person who will avoid any serious injury that could end your flying career or hinder your progress. Do you want to be able to fly your whole life or talk about how you used to be in competitions before you stopped flying? Why not fly how you want and have more fun flying because you have awesome control? Weatherman is often wrong so know what you are doing before the surprise.

The Dangers of Staying Too Comfortable

Staying too comfortable and passive for too long can be dangerous. Today, manufacturers cater to a different audience than the pioneers of the past. Many modern wings are deceptively easy to handle under normal conditions but collapses violently with little warning when the air gets turbulent.

Passive Safety vs Active Safety

• Passive Safety: Wings designed for comfort, often leaving pilots oblivious to dangers. Gives you lots of confidence before it collapses.

• Active Safety: Requires constant inputs to stay in control, keeping pilots aware of the air around them. A wing that scares you might actually be safer than one that gives confidence.
  
  Many modern wings are deceptively easy to handle under the normal conditions therefore instill a sense of confidence in pilots before they’ve truly developed competence. Comfortable wings have a stronger self-pitch stable profile (reflex) are easier to fly. For example on some highly pitch stable wings, a 10-20% applied brake changes the wing profile to what is outside the certification range, and some wings can violently shoot forward and even go below you, collapse hugely with very little feedback.

  Less self-pitch stable wings require your active inputs constantly, keeping you constantly on the alert, forcing you to be aware of the quality of the air around you. This can be terrifying for many pilots, and energizing to a few pilots. For my temperament, I think a wing that scares me is safer than a wing that gives you over-confidence then collapses without warning.

SIV/SIKU training and beyond..
SIV is highly beneficial for most people to gain confidence to do collapses and stalls. However, it is hard to say if one reserve over water with a boat is safer than 2 reserves over pine trees with someone to help you down. Water is for sure less of a mess than being tangled in a tree. But water is very hard if you fall with the speed of a spiral. Nothing is totally safe, but not training is probably less safe on the longterm, unless you are unlucky.

It is unrealistic to respond in a real situation correctly, unless you practice situations that are as close as possible to the actual emergencies. Perhaps if you are very rich, and can afford to many dozens of SIV courses, but even then it’s hard to reach 100s of stalls with SIV courses. Like martial arts paragliding also takes years of uncomfortable disciplined practice, with minimum of 1000 stalls to learn how to control the wing in a non-flying configuration. But if you reach this level of skill, you are much safer doing XC than most XC competition pilots, with the exception of acro pilots and the Redbull X-Alps stars.

Fortunately one can speed it up significantly by learning basic acro before stepping up to a high performance XC wing. To practice any acro, even wingovers, I would have a minimum a sit-up harness with protector, 2 reserves (1 steerable front, 1 inside the harness) and plenty of altitude over surface. Don’t get over-confident.

In real emergencies, I can tell you from experience that the front reserve is much more effective and faster. However the disturbing trend is that manufacturers sell harnesses that have reserves under the seat and students don’t know that the front is easier to deploy. I also don’t understand why many schools don’t recommend steerable reserves from the beginning. At worst, the steerable will open faster, and go straight down like a normal reserve. You have to grab the handles and the reserve risers to make it steer.

Under the seat reserve results in slower deployment and more difficult deployment under heavy Gs. If you are in a spiral, the reserve become multiple times heavy and even more with friction, and then you need to pull exactly in the direction that the reserve can slide out. Sometimes handles ripped off as pilots panicked and pulled it in an incorrect way. If you are falling into the ground, just 1s can make the difference between life or death, yet most reserves are under the seat and manufacturers continue this trend as well. In paragliding, you must think on your own about your safety and not rely too much on the experts. Always do your own research!

But, to fly safely XC over challenging terrain where the turbulence is unpredictably extreme, you need to know what to do precisely quickly, without being overwhelmed. Otherwise you are just being lucky so far, doing XC in the Swiss Alps. Learning air self-defense is unavoidably risky, but my opinion is that it will be safer on the long run for pilots who will fly a lot.

To survive in the air is not about your IQ, but more about mental stability, and doing what you need to do. First you need to train for mental stability. To stay calm in strong turbulence, it’s essential to practice difficult scenarios through, cold showers, and basic acro training. Cold icy water will help you train your body to stay calm. If you don’t practice encounters with some level of discomfort regularly, your tolerance to discomfort will gradually creep back.

Pushing Boundaries
Even once you’ve mastered a maneuver, while you are healthy and young, you should continue pushing your boundaries in manageable steps to maintain and build confidence to stay calm in more uncomfortable conditions. As you get weaker and older, your reactions will slow and you should slowly downgrade your equipment to compensate, so if you are flying a CCC, you can go D, then C then to a B, then A over many many golden years.

"You must be the teacher and the pupil; you have to learn from yourself, not from an authority that tells you what to do, what to think. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you—your relationship with others and with the world—there is nothing else."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Scoring points or be an Artist
This is what I’ve observed. In Karate and Judo, martial art has become a sport of scoring points and competition rules, rather than effectiveness in actual combat situations. Similarly, majority of the competition pilots from around the world, if they had to fly alone over the sunny rocky Swiss Alps, without the security of the race organizers and herd, can’t do it safely. Pilots who learned flying in the Swiss Alps already with a high standard, because of the unforgiving terrain, imperfect conditions, turbulent air, and plenty of inaccurate weather forecasts up high in the mountains.

There are many really good pilots out there, but the majority of the pilots are oblivious about danger. Some are flying too difficult a wing that they cannot handle as soon as conditions changes, and the glider goes out of the EN certified test range. Certification collapse happen in still air with no brake inputs with a certified collapse angle which is unrealistic. But this is the best we have today.

In physics you are not right even if 1000 people agree with you or even if a certification authority said so. It would be prudent to watch as many horrific paraglider collapse/crash videos as you can, analyze, and simulate what you could do better. Most of these crashes on YouTube are avoidable. Seek out discomfort.

When you are flying, your risks are all yours, your techniques and mental model of the wing’s physics has to be accurate to reality. Your most dangerous years are the first 2-5 years after you get your license, and the bad habits, and beliefs learned in the first 5 years typically stays forever. The reality is most certified pilots stop flying regularly shortly after getting their license. A hidden risk of a crash can be having an unsupportive partner. After years of not flying, it is also good to refresh your skills, and start again with an easier wing in mild weather.

Superior paragliding pilots use their superior judgement to avoid situations where they will need to use their superior skills. If you really want to fly a long time, get serious about your self-preservation skills first! Your big XC adventures can wait ;) Get all your safety steps into a habit. Train until your reactions to turbulence are as instinctive as breathing.

Key Principles to Teach Yourself:

• Common Beginner dangers

  • Work on your mental stability under intense stress (strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system).  Wim Hof suggests ice cold bath/showers with breathing exercises.

  • Upgrade your skills before upgrading your wings. Max out your training on an easy wing and situp harness, before going into a pod harness and/or to a higher performance wing. Even EN-A wings can shoot past the horizon and go underneath you when tested beyond EN certification maneuvers. A Pod harness makes progression unnecessarily risky in turbulence.

  • First find out what you should NOT do. Stop Bad Habits before they become dangerous.

  • Secondly find out what you should DO. One positive habit enhances another positive habit. They will accelerate your learning.

  • When you upgrade to a faster wing, learn everything first on a sit-up harness.

  • Know your own limits. Become competent first, before getting confident. Focus practice on what you are weak in.

  • Don’t party the night before if you plan to fly. Even slower reaction speed of even 0.1s can sometimes make a difference between life or death.

  • Be Grateful, keep a generosity of mind. This is the one virtue that will save you from getting arrogant!

  • Immediately look at the wing with anomaly, ball up, respond quickly precisely, and stop any riser twist with your body and hands.

  • Develop 3D spacial awareness. Always know where other pilots are their direction. Always be aware of your compass heading away from obstacles.

  • Move defensively, always yield to be safe, rather than to assert your right when in potential danger.

  • Not planning for Plan B is planning to crash. Keep an eye on safe emergency landing spots. Try to predict the vortex/rotor by looking at the terrain, sun, and wind.

  Understanding Feedback and Wing characteristics

  • Work on your calmness and sensitivity so you can feel your wing and air

  • Wing Energy Management

  • Stall point

  • Spin point > Spin

  • Wing-overs -> Loop

  • Very Big Ears and recovery from cravat

  • Fullstall > Flyback > Deepstall (Advanced)> Helicopter control (Very Advanced)

  • Pendulum control

  • Pitch, Roll, Yaw

  Equipment selection

  • How to select: Harnesses, Steerable Front Reserves, Quickout Carabiners, hook knife, GPS Vario with airspace for XC, Compass, Smart Watch, etc.

  • Can you go from 0% to 100% brake range in less than 0.2s? For that even the brake handle makes a big difference.

  • Learn to inspect your equipment regularly. If you see tiny holes, tape them quickly before they get bigger. Order new lines if they start to fray.
    

• Avoiding Cascades

  • Preventing Horse-shoe, and Riser-Twists, Nose-down spiral, etc. If you fall into the canopy, start swimming..
    

• Control in Turbulence and Strong wind

  • Aviate, Navigate, Escape or Land
    

• Survival Fundamentals

  • Learn Spin, 2-stage Stall, Stable Flyback, and Deep Stall, Clearing a cravat without using Stabilo most of the time
    

• Efficient use of Speed-bar and Back-risers
  

• Get extremely comfortable to use 100% brake range
  

• Avoiding losing your mind to Group Think

  • The bigger the group the more likely they will be wrong

  • Gain skills and confidence to decide for yourself

• Reading the Mountain Air

  • Interpret Sky, Terrain and Air currents

  • Understanding Weather Forecasts better

  • Use Weather Alerts on mobile

• Master Extreme Rapid Descent

  • Spiral with Big Ear

  • B-Stall

  • FlyBack

  • Big ears with speedbar

  • Wingover

  • Looping

• Reserve deployment and Emergency Landing Techniques

  • Strategically down-plane to pick your landing spot

• How to Land in an Emergency

  • Show gratitude to Farmers

  • How to Land safer

  • Leave No Trace

Learning from Others
Remember that even the expert guru can communicate only their own perception and their own unique experience, which may be strong opinion, but it is still only one perspective out of many. Learn to think from meditation, from a space of respecting perspectives on how what was said can be right, i.e. in what kind of situation, rather than rejecting it outright as crazy. Be open-minded, keep your ego in check, and follow your heart! Always remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

Please contact me if you feel I can help you!