Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast,
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding, today
with Sebastian Barthmes and Lucian Haas on the mic.
Anyone who goes on cross-country flight with a paraglider and uploads their flights to online competitions will quickly realize that to get a lot of points, you basically have to fly a so-called FAI triangle. The requirement to maintain three turn points in a specific distance ratio obviously means that other route options are basically discriminated against. The competitions cap the imagination when it comes to route selection. Sebastian Barthmes didn't want to accept that, even though he was very successful flying large triangles and even won the German cross-country flight championship of the online XContest in 2017. Together with other pilots, he thought about how to free cross-country flight competitions from the yoke of triangles. The result is a platform called XCR, which stands for XCRevolution.
At the address xc-paragliding.com, you can upload your flights and have them evaluated by an algorithm that allows for and rewards much freer route navigation over many turning points. In the following brief hour, the 33-year-old talks about the background of XCR. We'll discuss long-distance flights and how to envision them. It's about how Sebastian managed to rise to the top of German cross-country pilots in just four years since his paraglider training, and why you have to learn to fly into the lee with common sense for truly long distances.
Sebastian, in cross-country flying, there's a king of disciplines. And that is to fly a triangle, preferably a so-called FAI triangle, and to close it as well. That's where most of the points are. Is that kind of requirement simple for the pilots?
Yes, well, it's always a sporting goal when you have a set of rules to follow. And that's sort of a guideline that every sport pilot can follow. So it's obviously great to have such an established system to fly by, which also gives you sporting goals.
Some cross-country pilots also say that flying FAI triangles is a curse. Why is that?
Well, if you always have, so to speak, a rigid set of rules, which originally comes from the history of a completely different sport—gliding—and from a completely different time when you didn't have GPS tracking, where you couldn't record a second-accurate track log, but instead had to take a photo at a specific, limited number of turning points, then that might simply not be the right set of rules for today. And this set of rules, meaning the FAI rules with the triangles and the limited number of turning points—you have three turning points, for example,
it just, well, it doesn't really take full advantage of all the possibilities. Yes. That you have with paragliding. And that includes the flexibility of being able to just take a detour into a remote valley or fly along remote mountain ridges. And in the history of paragliding, standard routes have simply crystallized that place these three turn points optimally and make them flyable. And well. So if you always fly the same routes, you know them well of course, then you're in a certain comfort zone and that also somewhat brakes sporting innovation, trying out new routes and flying off the beaten path and so on.
You
You've now declared what I'd call the XC Revolution for cross-country pilots in the Alps over the past year and even launched your own website for it. What is it all about?
Yes. So it's already a long-term project, and there's been a long discussion going on in the cross-country community, especially among ambitious cross-country pilots, for years about questioning the FAI rules—thinking about what could be improved. And then we just threw various ideas out there, and some of them were even discussed in the DHV forum. There were also prototypes that demonstrated different new points or rule systems in a small web application. For example, there was a very promising approach where, instead of turning points, you would evaluate the area flown of a polygon, but there were other approaches as well.
And so, at some point last or the year before last in the autumn, we sat down. It was Uli Strasser, Armin Harig, and I. We had really thought through many different approaches, and ultimately, it led to a very interesting system where we managed to develop an algorithm that approximates the actual route of a track log via a polygon. It's a polygon. It's not specifically limited to a certain number of fixed waypoints. And because of that, you get a route that is very close to the route a pilot would, let's say, sketch out manually if they just took a track log and were given the task on a map to, hey, roughly sketch the route you flew onto the map.
And based on this route, on this polygon that is created, we simply calculate the points the pilot gets for it. And he will be awarded fewer points if he flies a certain route twice. So, the algorithm recognizes if a specific section of the route was flown twice, and fewer points are awarded there. This means you don't need a triangle calculator or sectors that you have to display and hit exactly; you can just go flying, fly a nice route, and if you don't fly a section twice, if you don't fly along the same valley twice, then you know, you've most likely reached the maximum score.
Let's take a step back just to understand this for the average pilot. What you've done now is basically programmed a website. The site is called xc-paragliding.com, by the way. You programmed this site, and it's something like the DHV's XC database. You can upload your flights there as IGC files, only they aren't evaluated according to the classic rules, but according to new rules, and after that, points are distributed again. Am I seeing that right? Yes, exactly, that's correct. But these points, if it's been like this so far, okay, it's checked whether it's a free flight or possibly a triangle; your algorithm doesn't even look at whether it's a triangle, it only looks at which corner points it set, and if you connect these corner points as a polygon—as a line—then I define the distance.
After that, there are points, and then it's more or less about whether I've actually flown certain things twice, as you say. A valley there and back, back and forth, gives fewer points than if I fly a new route somewhere else. That's the basic idea.
Yes, so that's exactly the basic idea. We proceeded in several steps. The first step was to implement this basic idea into an interactive map, so that you could upload a flight and then see what points you'd earned. Based on that, we optimized this algorithm, simply uploaded different things, saw how it reacted, and so on. But then the question came up pretty quickly: okay, how is the community reacting to the system and what can be done with it now, how do we handle it? What were the reactions from the scene? Well, they were actually very, very positive from the start. As soon as people somehow grasped what we were doing. Of course, there are always voices saying, yeah, why do we need another system now?
There's already XContest and DHV-XC, and there are some people who say, "Yeah, there's a super complicated mathematical algorithm in the background." And they criticize that first. But once they understand that it's not necessary to understand this algorithm in detail for optimization or athletic performance, and if they understand that the system works completely differently than XContest or DHV-XC, then very many are very enthusiastic. So we already have over 200 pilots, many of whom have actually submitted flights and participated in the beta season over the course of the season.
So we haven't announced an official competition yet; we just wanted to test the reactions first.
Now, your project is also in a bit of competition with the other XC competitions. If you consider the DHV XC as a real competition. People who fly long distances would have to say for the DHV, I'm aligning everything so that I fly the largest triangles possible to potentially get the highest score. But if I'm flying for XC Revolution, then it would be good. Or I could say I don't have to fly a triangle at all; I might fly in a star shape into five different valleys and back out on different routes, which also makes a great route, but it might get very few points with the DHV. So you're always thinking, yeah, what am I actually flying for if I want to do well with the DHV and maybe score points in the championship? That's contradictory. How do you deal with that?
Yes, well, that's naturally a difficult thing. How do you get a top pilot to break away from the classic system? And I've noticed that in myself too. I've realized that during this season, I still ended up flying triangles and didn't specifically optimize everything according to the new system. But it's not necessary. So, in this phase where you say you don't want to commit one hundred percent to some totally crazy new system, you don't have to. Because you can still achieve very, very good results. If you look at it based on classic experience.
Yeah,
Exactly. I mean, you can also fly an FAI triangle that has fewer double track sections. A very extreme example, of course, is the Grende triangle. If you fly it in the large version, it has a lot of double tracks in it. And that naturally gives you fewer points in XCR. But it's still competitive in XCR. It's not like you don't get any points or anything, but the athletic performance of flying it is certainly rewarded. But if you were to fly this triangle in the same size, for example, in a more rugged way so that you minimize those double tracks, then you would get correspondingly more points and would have, well, ultimately performed more.
The question is always, if someone is subjectively judging an athlete's performance, it's clear that someone flying the Grende triangle with the double sections didn't have to perform as much as someone who would fly the Grende triangle with the same turning points but would cross through the wilderness somewhere in the pampa to avoid using those prominent valleys.
At the same time, he could obviously take a bit of a shortcut and save some time by crossing the pampa instead of using those prominent valleys. But of course, he would be taking on a certain amount of risk that way.
Is there something like a mathematically optimal route in the XCR rule, where you'd say if I want to get the most points in the XCR, I'd have to fly a seven-pointed star or an octagon or whatever, which in the DRV would classically be the FAI triangle? Is there a counterpart to that where you'd say, mathematically, that's the optimum?
No, and that's exactly the beauty of it. I mean, every route is optimal if it doesn't contain any duplicate segments and leads back to the starting point. That ultimately optimizes the points. Whether you fly some weird figure-eight, a zigzag course, a triangle, or a square, that doesn't matter. And that's also the beauty of the system.
Do you have any hope that this new scoring method, after XCR, could eventually be adopted by the DRV? Or that people will eventually say, "FAI triangle, I'm sick of it, I've been flying the same routes forever. We need something new," and just forget about the old way? Or is it so ingrained and everyone still wants the points and wants to become German Champion or whatever, that it just won't be able to take hold?
It is still difficult to estimate at this point how the whole thing will establish itself fundamentally. A top athlete will, of course, always try or be motivated to achieve something in a specific competition or under a specific set of rules, if they can get the corresponding attention there. This means, conversely, if the public relations for such a competition are good, if there are great sponsors who do a lot of publicity for it, and of course, if there are attractive prizes, but also if there are corresponding numbers of participants, where people then see again, hey, wow, he flew so and so far and he flew this and that crazy route.
That is, of course, a motivation for why professional athletes would fly under this competition system and might eventually turn away from the old one. But that's also a motivation that's hard to estimate, because it takes a lot of energy for the organizers to get a system to that point in the first place. That's why, from our side, it's more of a proposal for the community to change their mindset, to simply think about other things and maybe let go of the old ways. We've already spoken with the DHV, and they are quite interested as well.
...of the competition system. Of these new concepts. And especially the idea of breaking away from these classic structures and having a bit more freedom—that actually aligns quite well with the core philosophy of the DHV.
Well, you're one of the organizers and co-programmers from that side, I believe. What motivated you to put so much of your free time into getting this whole thing off the ground? What's your motivation for investing so much into it?
On one hand, I'm just technically interested in these new ideas, and on the other hand, I'm also technically interested in the development of such web projects or programming projects. And at the time, I also had a bit of free time, like in the winter. And well, I thought to myself, hey, let's just try it out and see how we can get this system off the ground a bit. And yeah, that was actually how the project unfolded. So from the first prototype that we just cobbled together out of necessity to see how one could even evaluate this system, whether it would be a meaningful system,
...all the way to us saying, "Hey, let's go ahead and make a proper platform as a beta version," and then you do a bit more and a bit more further. And eventually, the whole system is just there.
Is the project continuing this year? And if so, are there any changes where you'd say, we had an experience last year that we definitely need to change in the evaluation or something? Or has it really already proven itself?
So we already made some minor changes during the beta season in places where we saw, oh okay, for some small, localized routes where you're just flying back and forth a bit and doing a sort of pleasure flight, sometimes too many things were being cut from the track. And we optimized the algorithm a bit so that the actual route the person flew there was followed a bit more nicely, without compromising the scoring. But otherwise, it's been limited to relatively small changes and some fine-tuning, so the system has actually proven itself after the first beta season.
Well, it's up to everyone to just click through the flights on the platform. I don't know, about 200,000 flight kilometers have been submitted in total or something like that. That's a huge database for us to evaluate the system. And so far, we haven't seen a single flight where we'd say this flight is somehow completely undervalued or completely overvalued according to the rules system. Unlike FAI triangles, where you can very easily have a large leg cut off or fly a very difficult flight that then isn't rewarded.
Now, you've probably also been observing very closely over the year what kind of flights are being uploaded there, just to monitor the system yourself. Are there still things where you said you were really surprised and went, "Wow, someone actually tackled a route like that"? Is that really something new, and is that perhaps also partly due to this system as an initial catalyst? Like in
maybe not directly in that context, but I wouldn't say that someone flew a certain way specifically because of the system. But there are surprisingly many pilots who don't stand out in the DHV-XC at all, who really fly these free routes that aren't oriented towards the FAI system and who fly, let's say in quotation marks, smaller routes of 80 to 100 or 120 kilometers, but very nicely through the landscape, exploring the area, and don't follow those kinds of triangles. And that's very nice because you can recognize these routes much better in the new XCR system, because there the route is actually evaluated as a distance and also listed as such.
What would be a 60-kilometer FAI triangle under the classic system—which shows up as a triangle in the list for a few kilometers—is actually a polygon in reality that led into remote valleys and covered a total distance of maybe 100 kilometers. And it's great to see when those kinds of flights suddenly stand out and can be rewarded accordingly.
That means flights that would have just appeared as "long distance" under the old system are suddenly highlighted more, because you just see, wow, the day wasn't that great, but then one pops up with 100 kilometers and you see, wow, that's a distance, I wouldn't have thought at all that they'd fly in back there and look out from the front and so on.
Yeah, exactly, that's the beauty of the system.
You've also noticed, at least I have, that over the last few years, you've always been looking for new routes again. Sometimes you even asked in the paraglider forum if anyone wanted to try something new over here or there. What motivates you to keep looking for that new stuff, specifically? I mean, I...
My conscience always gives me a little nudge when I see a good day that isn't quite optimal for the classic routes. Like, if you have some kind of difficult weather situation that's actually quite good. Let's say, for example, a high base but a lot of wind in a specific corner, or some overdevelopment in the Dolomites or something in that direction—those standard cases that do exist. Those are actually good weather conditions, but the classic triangles might just not work or aren't optimal. And then I think to myself, okay, why should I try to fly this classic triangle at all costs?
That might be because of my comfort zone, since I know it. But then I look for ways to vary or reshape the route, or start from somewhere else, so that a nicer or longer route comes out of it, of course.
It's also striking that you dare to take on such huge distances in between, when the weather is likely right. In 2017, for example, you once flew a very large triangle from Speikboden that was planned for 300 kilometers. In the end, I think it clocked in at about 271 kilometers. However, with the main Alpine ridge crossed twice. How do you come up with an idea like that? That's pretty daring as well.
Yeah, that's actually the perfect example of the situation I just described. It was exactly like that. So, the weather forecast predicted overdevelopment in the Dolomites. But basically, there was weaker wind on the south side. And what was brilliant that day, of course, was the base altitude. A 4,000-meter base was forecast, and you really had to take advantage of that. On the north side, the problem was that while it also looked good, very strong westerly winds were predicted. And that means if you have such strong wind, flying a closed triangle isn't really easy.
And then I came up with the idea: okay, why not crawl westwards on the south side of the ridge, so to speak, in the lee of the main ridge, then cross over, and then crawl on the south side of the ridge. And then, so to speak, fly a bit against the northwest wind as far as possible. And then let the west wind carry you back home to the south side. That's how this plan came about, to fly this triangle. So that's also a bit of what always appeals to me and lures me—to use the weather for me instead of against me. Just looking for a lee situation that I can use to sneak behind the wind and then use the wind on the return flight or something like that.
And that mostly worked out quite well that day. It was only at Landeck that the northwest wind became really too strong. I couldn't head any further north at that point. And because of that, the northern turning point didn't work out, which is why the 300-degree turn didn't happen. Time-wise, it would have still worked perfectly.
How do you actually plan your cross-country adventures, just so I can describe it a bit better? How do you go about it? How do you decide whether you're going to fly at all, where you're going to fly, and when do these decisions happen and on what basis? Do you just look at the weather and then you know exactly where you have to go, or do you have a very specific system you follow?
Yeah, it's changed a bit over the years. Back then, a few years ago, I'd really look weeks in advance at what the weather conditions were like and when and where an opportunity might come up to go cross-country flying again. Nowadays, I actually only look one, two, maybe three days ahead and just check what the thermals forecasts are, what the wind forecasts are, and what the base height is.
The problem is simply that the forecast is too unreliable. You get excited for the cross-country flight day, make plans and all that, and then it turns out to be nothing again, and that gets annoying over time. And with increasing experience, it's also the case now that I can actually estimate quite well,
within a day or two beforehand, whether it's actually going to happen, whether it's worth it. And if it's worth it—well, "worth it" is always subjective, for me I'd say worth it means a potential of over 150, 200 kilometers, something in that ballpark, then I'm also willing to drive three or four hours from Munich, and then I can also... and then I just drive to where it fits.
So the weather is the deciding factor in whether it's worth it or not. Do you have a specific weather service that you mainly trust, where if I look at five others, they might just show five different results and I wouldn't know what to believe? Or do you really mix them together a bit and have your own system?
Yeah, I've tried different things, but actually, I trust the tool from the Deutscher Wetterdienst, from flugwetter.de. That's a tool I always use as a top task; it shows me everything I need to know.
and unfortunately, the accuracy of the forecasts has decreased a bit over the last two or three years, it feels like; I don't know why. They've changed the weather model a bit,
from Cosmo to Econ, I think it's called, and since then, it hasn't really been the same as it used to be, at least. I don't know if it might also be because of the weather—that the weather has just been behaving a bit strangely over the last two years—but before that, it was somehow more reliable. But regardless, I've also tried other models or other forecasting tools, including paid tools, and personally, I get along best with the Deutscher Wetterdienst.
Now you've decided, okay, the weather is like this, I'm flying there and back. I've also read that you sometimes describe how you flew such routes in the DRV-Info. It always comes up that you also work a lot with Google—what do you take away from that and what do you pay particular attention to?
If I don't know exactly what a certain area looks like—I mean, I fly often, but I don't have decades of cross-country flight experience like others do—there are just certain areas in the Alps I'm not familiar with yet. So if I'm flying through areas I've never been to, for example, like with the Speikboden plan, and that's for maybe 50 or 100 kilometers, I want to know what to expect there. And Google Earth is just an incredibly helpful tool to look at the topology and, especially for me, to see what the landing options are. Particularly in the Finchgau, there are fruit orchards everywhere and who knows what else; it's very difficult there. So I check to see if there are sports fields or suitable landing areas.
So you can also recognize those kinds of things quite well there.
Do you set waypoints in your GPS, or do you have a kind of visual memory where you've looked at it once in Google Earth and can then recall it during the flight and say, "I saw that the sports field has to be somewhere up ahead"?
Yeah, so the latter. Basically, I go through the flight mentally so many times and prepare for it for so long that I actually know very precisely where everything is. It's interesting, though—in reality, it always looks different; the mountains are somehow higher or steeper or flatter, it's always a bit different than what you first imagine in Google Earth. But fundamentally, the broad valley courses, the passes, and so on, and places where you might have to be careful with an off-field landing, I can remember those quite well. And that's part of the preparation too, just committing it to memory for so long and playing out different options.
So I don't have to actively memorize it or anything. It actually happens naturally just by spending two or three hours working on the route.
But you do do that. You sit in front of the computer for two or three hours and, at least with such large routes, you really go through it bit by bit with the mouse and look at the different sections.
Yeah, at least I'd say, actually. But it's not like how you might imagine it, some meticulous work where I go through it systematically bit by bit and note down individual things; it's more about curiosity or interest, or weighing different alternatives, where I'm thinking back and forth, maybe I should do it there, and then I go back into DHVXC or into others, into XContest, and look at different routes that were flown there, and then I go back into Google Earth and think about whether that makes sense and whether it couldn't be done differently, and so on, and through all this back-and-forth thinking and planning
the time just flies by. So it's over really quickly then.
If you were to do the math now, if you fly five hours on a long route, how many hours did you invest in preparation for that? Does it roughly balance out? I mean...
Yeah, for a five-hour route, I'd say I probably don't really prepare for it properly anymore. So, if the flight really isn't pushing the limits, if you don't have to push everything to the max, I can manage that quite well just like that now, well, straight out of the cockpit. So I just look at where it looks good right now, then I fly there and it works out fine. But if I have a flight where I'm using the whole day, like really eight to ten hours of flying, then I'd say there's probably just as much preparation involved for that amount of flight time.
Many pilots fly their 100-kilometer flights as a standard thing today, but they don't necessarily always get very far. Is this much better preparation for these long distances perhaps what makes the difference for many pilots? That you can say, if you want to fly really long distances, then you also have to invest accordingly in the planning? I
I think there are certainly some types like that, but for me, it definitely applies. I think the main difference between 100 and 200 kilometers is that with 100 kilometers, you can choose the time of day. And if you lose half an hour somewhere by fiddling around or not getting a connection properly, it doesn't really matter. But if you have to use the whole day to fly your route, then you're also flying in very poor conditions—in the morning, for example, or in the evening, where you really have to fly with a lot of sensitivity and can afford fewer mistakes, otherwise you'll end up stuck on the ground.
And that's exactly what makes the difference. The margin for error for the entire flight plan becomes significantly smaller when you're flying a long distance. At 100 kilometers, it's just not the same as it is at 200.
At what distance would you say it's like a benchmark where you're like, wow, that has to be a really good pilot if they've made it that far? Because you know that in correspondingly weak and difficult conditions, they sometimes have to fight their way through? Yes,
I think it's less about the distance and more about the actual flight time. Because, I'd say any flight that starts early and ends late was very demanding. With distance, it's a matter of, if you're a pilot who has good control of the glider, then you can very easily fly 200 kilometers with a competition glider, with a CCC glider. Because you only need 6 to 7 hours for that. And that means you can comfortably start at 11 a.m. and land at 6 p.m. And that's, well, then you're basically picking out the optimal time of day. If you fly the whole thing with an A-glider,
that's naturally way more demanding. That is, I'd just say that anyone who starts at 9 a.m. and lands at 8 p.m. has definitely achieved a top performance and certainly didn't have it easy. That takes a lot of effort.
What's also noticeable is that long distances today actually always require a very high average speed to really get over those 250 kilometers. Simply because of the time limits. At some point, the lights go out. That basically means flying in race mode all the time. So, as few turns as possible, you have to keep your foot on the gas, and stuff like that, which in turn demands a lot of attention from the pilot. So he really has to be fully present at all times. Does that still make it fun, really holding out like that for 10 hours?
Yeah, well, you have to like it, that's for sure. I can imagine—or rather, I've actually had flights where I thought afterwards, phew, that was exhausting, being on the gas the whole time, and it was really demanding today, and maybe I wasn't quite as mentally strong. And then it's just the case that being in race mode constantly can be, yeah, it can certainly be very exhausting. But
it's not necessarily necessary to fly long distances. I mean, if you have a talent for it, for example, and you can fly very accurately and have the endurance, then you can also fly your 250 kilometers relatively comfortably in 10 to 12 hours. That's also been shown more often with B-gliders.
What does flying without mistakes mean to you?
Flying without mistakes means that you simply don't lose time anywhere. So, if you make a mistake, it usually means losing time. That means you somehow approach an edge incorrectly, then don't get the thermal entry right, and then have to fiddle around. So, the biggest mistake is, of course, simply stalling and ending up standing on the ground. But basically, a mistake can also be simply losing 10, 20, or 30 minutes. Or that you don't get the entry into a good ridge very well, so you can't fly along the top of that ridge at a high average speed, but have to crab along the bottom and just can't fly as fast as you actually could.
Now you just said yourself that long distances are also flown with an ENB. It's already been shown. There are also pilots who have flown 300 kilometers in the Alps with an ENB. You don't fly an ENB, though, but an END, a Ceno, and before that, I think an LM6 from Ozone. Wouldn't it even be a bigger challenge for you to say, hey, I'm going to try the whole thing with a lower-classified glider?
Yeah, it would certainly be a bigger challenge, that's completely right. But it's not one that really appeals to me. Last year, because I was curious about how I'd fly with such a glider, I actually borrowed a B- and a C-glider for cross-country flights. I flew around with them a bit and was
Well, it's not presented that positively. I just love the agility and also, of course, the speed of a D or a Ceno—so, a two-liner in general. I especially love the handling in accelerated flight because if you want to fly long distances, you have to fly in accelerated flight a lot. And I love that two-liner handling where you still have full control over the angle of attack and the brakes in half or full acceleration. That's actually the best part. And that's why, since then, I don't really want to go back to a three-liner either, because I'd just miss that by now.
You also provide photo documentation for many of your routes, including on Facebook. When I look at yours, some individual routes are documented with a lot of photos. Now you say you fly a Ceno, a two-liner—some pilots would say, oh, then I'd better never let go of the control lines. Who knows, it might just flip the canopy over me. How do you do that? How do you still have the time and a free hand to take such, in some cases, really successful photos? It's tricky.
There are always sections of the route where there are no photos. And then you know, in that part of the flight, things got a bit intense. But basically, there are usually crossings that leave you enough peace to quickly snap a photo with one hand. And yeah, somehow there's always an opportunity to quickly take the picture. But it's true. It's really, there's less time and fewer opportunities to take nice photos than there were on the LM6, for example. So I personally find the Ceno is a bit more finicky in some situations. But of course, it's also a matter of getting used to it.
When you go out to fly now, even if it's not always the ultimate route, what defines for you, in the end, saying that it was a successful flight?
Well, I'm kind of a sporty type when it comes to my approach to cross-country flight. I always enjoy it, and that's why it's a successful flight for me if there was a bit of a challenge somewhere. If I said at some point, "that wasn't exactly easy, but I made it" and I managed to handle that tricky situation well somehow. Then, for me, it was a good flight. That means, even if, for example, there are some weak autumn conditions and I try a small cross-country flight and end up with 30 kilometers at the end, if it was somehow a challenge for me and it wasn't easy, then it was still a good flight for me if I pulled it off.
Looking at it by that standard, what was practically your best flight in 2018?
2018 was
the most beautiful flight from the Engadin. That was really, that was really very, very impressive. That was my first time in the Engadin and I tried to fly a triangle from there, which no one had flown yet. It first went down towards St. Moritz and then north towards Walensee, and then the triangle over towards Landeck into Austria over the Albergpass, and then back again. And into the Engadin. That was very impressive because it goes over these high Swiss mountains, which have a completely different topology than the mountains you see in South Tyrol or
in our Northern Alps in Tyrol, for example. That was already the highlight of this season, at least.
If you look at your career a bit, you only started paragliding in 2012, if I saw that correctly, but then by 2016 you were already in the top 5 of the DAV cross-country flight rankings, and in 2017 you were even in first place. How did you make such fast progress? What did you focus on?
Can you take that back? Well, I definitely wanted to do cross-country flying from the start. For me, that was always the main motivation for paragliding—having this freedom with the paraglider, being able to explore the mountains freely with such a small, light craft. Yes, I already had a sailplane license, which certainly helped me, even though I hadn't flown for 10 years before that, at least, it must have been about 10 years. I think the last time I flew a sailplane was in 2002, then came studies and work and so on, and I hadn't done it anymore. But from sailplane flying, in sailplane flying, you get a much deeper meteorological training for the license and
that understanding naturally helped. Plus, I had studied aerospace engineering, which means the aerodynamic understanding was already there, which also helped me, and that's why I think I had a relatively steep learning curve in that regard. The whole understanding of the currents in the Alps, valleys, lee sides, and so on, I just picked that up very quickly.
On one hand, you could call it natural talent, but at the same time, you've probably also gone flying a lot and trained a lot with it. If a normal pilot came to you now and said, "Look, I want to fly longer distances too, how can I further my education? How can you train for something like that? What should I pay attention to?" I think...
It always depends on the person, of course, but for me, the decisive factor has always simply been the mental training. The preparation before and also after, thinking about what you want to do, where you want to go, what exactly you want to achieve right now, and what you did wrong in a flight, what others did, what others did wrong, and so on. For me, at least, it was that I spent a lot of time dealing with paragliding, with cross-country flying in particular, outside of the actual flying itself, and that's why I was able to recognize my own mistakes very well when I made them and also trace them back to the things that were the triggers for those mistakes.
and avoid it next time, and I think that's very important.
That means every flight you do is followed by a systematic analysis of what I did well, where I got stuck, what I could have done differently, why I made that decision, why I didn't turn right into the other valley, and so on.
So I definitely think about that a lot, and it's also often the case that I say beforehand, like, I'm not entirely sure about this one point, maybe it's better to go that way or that way via this and that route, and then during the flight, because I've already thought about these key points in advance, I can also assess the situation
better assess the situation and also recognize if I've actually made the wrong decision. Of course, it's completely normal to say, okay, I'll just try it this way because I lack the basis for the decision, and then you end up being wrong. But then you know—or maybe you realize early enough—ah, I was wrong, I can maybe still turn back and then take my Plan B. And if you don't just have one plan, but always have a Plan B or Plan C as well, then that's also very helpful.
Do you also basically prepare a Plan B and Plan C during the preparation, or is it always situational when you're flying—like, okay, I want to go there, but if that doesn't work out, I'll have to hit the next ridge or maybe switch to the valley side or something? Or is that really already integrated into the preparation?
At the key points, it's definitely integrated into the preparation, yes. So if I say, I don't know this pass or this crossing yet, I'll do it for the first time, or I see with the current weather situation that it might be critical, or it could be difficult with the base altitude and reaching this and that point, then I think, okay, if I don't reach it, what do I do then? How can I move forward? Because I always try as much as possible...
to avoid situations where I say, I'm not sure, and if it doesn't work out, then I'm stuck on the ground. That wouldn't be nice, of course. That's why I always say, if I'm not sure about any situation in the planning, if I already recognize the difficulties there, I always think of a plan B for that situation, and then I naturally hope that plan B works out then, or if plan A doesn't work, that at least that one does. In the past, it's also happened often enough that plan B didn't work out either, because it was also fraught with the risk that it just wouldn't work, and maybe the weather situation was such that it just didn't work out that time, and that can happen.
Is this way of thinking in terms of alternative plans with A, B, and C and all that also something you perhaps picked up from the glider pilots, because they have to plan ahead completely differently than we paragliders when it comes to landing sites or things like that? Have you benefited from that?
Maybe a little, yeah. I mean, obviously, this mindset as a glider pilot, that you don't just, well, that you take the flying seriously. Sometimes I feel like paragliders view it a bit like riding a bike or skiing or something, but I view paragliding more like a pilot—that you're moving through airspace with the appropriate discipline, that the corresponding risk is there, that you don't just fall off a bike or ride into the next snowdrift, but that you actually crash. And this awareness of risk, that
I think that was ingrained in me early on in soaring, and I certainly benefited from and took a lot away from that basic mindset.
Now, I think you gave a talk two years ago at the DAV Sportlertag, where you showed how you flew a specific route, and then there was a comment from the moderator of the day, Ralf Schlöffel, who said, "Well, now I understand how you always do it, always nice and direct into the lee." That means, in many cases, you also take risks. How do you deal with that then? I mean, how do you assess those lee risks, for example? Even when you say, "Oh, I have to get over the main ridge of the Alps," lee flying is always going to be part of it, especially with such long distances.
Exactly, and that's why, especially on long cross-country flights, it's always involved and...
but you don't learn anything about the theory of exactly when a lee is flyable and when it's dangerous and so on anywhere. Certainly also because it's a very complicated topic and I could definitely give a whole lecture on it, just about lee flying and when you can do something based on my experience. But it's also always so subjective—like when which pilot can do it, with what skills and with which glider. That's why, yeah, probably no author or anything would dare to write about it, actually, because you can quickly end up on thin ice. You can't just take over someone else's risk management.
That's basically lee flying, the secret science of the steering champion.
Maybe, maybe, I don't know. Basically, yes, I think there should be more training and more talk about it, in my opinion. But it's always a double-edged sword, of course, because someone who is inexperienced and gets such tips can, of course, put themselves in danger very quickly.
Are there still like three basic tips for lee flying where you'd say, you definitely have to have these and follow them? Like, follow them in the sense of, "Okay, now I know, I'm not allowed to fly into that lee."
Three tips, that's hard to say in such general terms. One thing is definitely the psychological aspect, being aware that you're entering a zone that you can't always assess 100 percent. That means you really have to be active with all your senses and really always have your plan B here as well. That means, where can I turn now and reach a clearing somewhere with a glide ratio of 3 to 1 or something. And have I turned enough, have I got enough distance from the ground and so on, so that you really choose your safety buffer a bit larger and then really say, something isn't right here, I have too much headwind, the lee is too strong, or whatever, I'm turning now before the turbulence hits.
And I've had situations like that where I said, okay, I have to get through this, I don't want to turn back now, and I'll just keep flying. And then I ended up, well, I ended up on the ground even faster than if I had maybe retreated right from the start. Yeah, it's a difficult thing to judge the lee correctly. The second tip would be to simply
...familiarize yourself with the topography, that you really have to be sure which direction the wind is coming from, not just at the altitude where you currently are, but also regarding how the regional wind is structured and how the valley winds are structured. And then it always depends on whether it's a lee created by the regional wind, for example by the flow over a large mountain massif or from the main ridge or something of the sort. Or whether it's a lee created by valley winds, for example by the lateral flow around some
...valley end edge or some kind of overflow from a lower mountain ridge. And depending on that, the lee can manifest differently; for example, these regional lees—lee effects generated by the regional wind—are sometimes easier to fly in, so to speak, if you are located below this regional wind. Then you can sort of feel your way into the lee within the wind shadow and sneak around there. So I would also give the tip to be very careful, feeling your way forward bit by bit, gathering experience, and training that with...
weak wind conditions. If you say, "Today there's weak regional wind," but now I can try out this basic lee idea and do it, and then next time maybe the wind is a bit stronger, then you can try it again, and so on. Then you either get hit on the head or turn away in time, or you just don't overdo it. And that's the important thing. That's probably the third tip. You should never overdo it and always listen to your gut feeling, and better turn away in time.
How often have you overdone it?
Based on your feeling. With Lees specifically, maybe once or twice actually. So once or twice I thought, okay, now it's really going down. But the other times so far—I mean, I actually fly in some kind of Lees situation at some point in almost every cross-country flight—and that was actually always okay because, well, I think my risk management, my personal risk management, is relatively or rather on the safe side. I often fly with more distance from the slope than other colleagues who really scrape along the slope and then often fly better, because in such Lees situations, of course, it's the case that if you fly directly along the slope, sometimes
...ends up in fewer of the main sink areas. But that's still too risky for me in many situations. That's why I'll often fly in a slightly steeper descent. But then I also have
the safety buffer. And I think that's why I'm saying now that, compared to the number of lee situations I've had, I've felt like I've had relatively few critical situations.
That means even if the bag somehow fails, you'd say, I've still got 500 meters under my ass at this point, I can still manage that.
Yes, well, these incidents are extremely rare. So I don't really have any... I don't really have any incidents that would be noteworthy. But yeah, I always account for that, of course. And in terms of risk management, I always have a plan B and C. For example, I also fly with two rescuers and things like that. So I'm already very safety-conscious.
Now you say you're ambitious, also sportingly ambitious. What are your aviation goals for this year?
This year, well, obviously, I love the Eagle with the 300, which no German has managed to do yet. And that's pretty much the only thing I'm really looking at. Otherwise, my aviation goals are mainly, maybe trying out new routes again, repeating experiences like the Engadin flights or the Speikboden flight back in 2017 or something like that. Those have always been the most beautiful flights. But I don't want to be misunderstood, a triangle flight is also something super beautiful and I always love doing it again. I'm looking forward to that too. So now it's slowly getting to the point where you can again a bit
excited and can hardly wait for the cross-country flight season to start again.
Sebastian, I wish you much success on whatever routes you fly, whether on standard triangles or large polygon flights in XC Revolution or xc-paragliding.com is the corresponding site where you can upload your flights for that. And thank you for these insights into your flying life, your flying knowledge, and I wish you lots of fun.
Yes, gladly. Thanks and bye. That
was Sebastian Barthmes in conversation with Lucian Haas. Anyone who wants to learn more about the XC Revolution platform can find it on the internet at www.xc-paragliding.com. I also reported on the project last spring on Lu-Glidz. The link to the corresponding post can be found in the show notes on the blog. By the way, you can find the podcast Podz-Glidz on the Lu-Glidz blog and on Soundcloud. Additionally, Podz-Glidz can be subscribed to via well-known podcast catalogs like iTunes, Spotify, or podcast.de. If you enjoyed this podcast episode or previous entries from Podz-Glidz, please pass them along. A link, a comment, a like on Facebook—all of that helps make Podz-Glidz better known and perhaps turn more paraglider pilots into enthusiastic podcast listeners.
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