Then we went up to the Choralpe, and the wind wasn't right at all. The flight instructor says that doesn't matter with a paraglider, you don't need a headwind. Then, because there was a tailwind, the flight instructor put stones on the canopy so it wouldn't get blown away from behind right away.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Manfred Laudan. And Lucian Haas on the mic.
Anyone looking for information about the paragliding scene today will find more than enough on the internet. Facebook, Instagram, paragliding forums, thousands of YouTube videos, manufacturer websites, numerous blogs. Two decades ago, it was completely different. Scene info and flight reports back then were mainly available through monthly magazines. One of the first, if not perhaps even the first in the German-speaking world, to bet on the new online possibilities to write a kind of pilot blog was Manfred Laudan. For 20 years, he has been running his website abschweb.de as a personal flight diary. He has documented all his flights and even more experiences in over 4,000 entries and over 40,000 images since then, and he continues to do so today.
You can easily call Manfred a pioneer blogger of the German-speaking flying scene. But Manfred's flying career goes back even further. The 68-year-old today learned hang gliding as far back as 1985 in Berlin. Shortly after, he took a one-day fast course to also take to the skies with paragliders. From 1995 to 2004, he was the head of training at the Tegelberg flight school. Even today, unless the Corona crisis prevents him, he regularly takes off from this iconic mountain. In the podcast, Manfred Laudan talks about the beginnings of abschweb.de, as well as his flying career. He gives insights into how the blog influenced his life and how he even reached readers in the USA with his flight reports.
His stories also show that you can still have that deep inner desire to fly even after 35 years as a pilot. Even if you're starting from mountains you've already flown from a thousand times.
Manfred, over the past few days, there's been magnificent flying weather everywhere. But we're still in the Corona lockdown. How hard is it for you to stay on the ground?
It's not entirely easy, but it's not that hard for me because, of course, I have other hobbies too. For example, my piano. That's very important and it naturally helps me over a period like this, because playing the piano is coming into play quite intensely now, so to speak. And that does me good, of course. In that sense, it's bearable for now, as long as it doesn't last too long. Yeah, obviously. But of course, I see the weather and when I look out the window, I see beautiful cumulus clouds. Clearly, I would have flown, no question at all. The conditions were great and I watch the birds right here in front of the window, where a kite often circles very low and such.
And it already flew past the window at about five meters. And without a single wing beat, it found thermals here. At Firsthöhe. I find that quite impressive. That's what I'm always watching now, obviously. It probably never happens
different, right? Yeah, exactly. Your last flight in your diary is from March 16th.
Right. Did you
did you already think back then that this could be your last one for a while?
Yes, I thought so, but I wasn't entirely sure yet. But it was clear to me because there were unusually many people at the launch site. And I didn't feel quite comfortable there. I thought about how one is supposed to keep their distance and all that. And then I voluntarily gave it up. Even before the general flight ban, I said, no, I don't want to do that now. I saw it at Buchenberg-Wimmeln and said, no, I don't want to get into this mass influx. And then I gave it up for the time being, and then the shutdown came anyway, and then it was clear. That's just how it is, yeah. You
You run an online aviation diary, abschweb.de, and you've been doing it for 20 years now. You could actually say the site is something like the progenitor of at least the German-speaking aviation blogs. How did you come up with the idea back then, 20 or over 20 years ago?
I actually started putting pictures and reports online back in 1997. That was shortly before my wedding. And my bride—or rather, my wife by then—encouraged me to do it. At that time, of course, I was still shooting on film, so on chemicals. And that makes the whole thing very impractical for such a purpose, because you just can't be up to date. Or at least, it's very difficult to be. It was quite an adventure back then because I wanted to be up to date every now and then. I really felt like it. Like doing a flight report on the same day and having it on the web that same day. And it would go like this: I'd basically rush from the mountain straight to the photo shop.
I'd have the pictures developed immediately. Then they'd come back right away as prints, as test prints. I'd sort through them straight away—almost all of them, I sorted out all of them. I don't want these, I don't want these, I don't want these. Because I only had to pay for the ones I wanted. And of course, they always looked a bit silly when I only took five out of 36 pictures. But what could they do? Those were the conditions back then. But that's how I'd, so to speak, still get the stuff on the web on the same day using a scanner and all that. There were reports back then too. But they're no longer available because I didn't link the reports, so to speak, in the timeline. Instead, I just kept overwriting them. They didn't come that often anyway. Because of that, they'd already been up for a month before the next report came along.
And then another new report would come in. But at some point, doing something like that became so much fun that I said, no, I can't keep going like this. I can't keep going like this. Now I've just put in a nice report. Now I want to write another one. Now overwrite and delete again. No, I'm not doing that. And then I introduced the thing the way I have it now. With the continuous daily paging. And at the beginning, I didn't write every day. But then my reports started to pile up more and more, so to speak. In any case, since January 6, 2000, I've had a continuous navigation in the thing. And since then, you can sort of scroll back. That's how it is.
Could you have imagined back then that you'd keep this up in this form for 20 years?
No, to be honest, I didn't think about it. I just did it back then. And it just developed that way. And it was fun. And I also did other things. And included things. For example, my trip to Berlin and so on also came up. I flew there, to the old camp and all that. I connected that. But I also always included a bit of culture and a bit of sightseeing and so on in my reports. And it just kept developing like that. So that other aspects of life were constantly being incorporated. Because they are important things to me. And because I also have the corresponding photos and just wanted to report on them. And because I didn't want to come across as a one-sided plane nerd, but also as someone who simply finds other sides of life important.
And I wanted to convey that in my blog, too, yeah.
Well, looking at your site, it hasn't really gone through many internet trends. It's not based on modern blogging software like WordPress or anything like that; it's actually still programmed in classic HTML. Right. Why did you basically stick with this old technology? Why didn't you just say, "I can actually make this much easier for myself and really rebuild it"?
Yeah, because at the time I started, blogs didn't really exist yet. And all these other things didn't exist either. I developed it over that time. And I developed my style, too. I always placed value on design and things like that. And back then, I also... because I wrote a lot of software, like D-Base-style stuff. So on FoxPro, Visual FoxPro. That's what was available on the computer back then. I had Windows XP and I had everything on that. And I wrote so much software that the work wasn't that bad at all.
So I was able to automate a lot of things. I just had to, so to speak, insert the current content and do a bit of layout design. But otherwise, the essentials were already handled by my software. And that worked well until 2018. Then there was the big computer crash. I think it was in March. And then suddenly, from one day to the next, I had to solve the whole thing with a new computer. On that one... Windows XP was no longer there, but Windows 10 was. And I lost all my software because of that. And since then, I've been doing everything manually, HTML-style, in the text editor.
But I have a lot of practice with it. So it goes relatively well and quickly. The main work isn't writing the HTML stuff. I copy a lot of things. It's all done with copy and paste. Easy peasy. The main work is the design itself. Finding the images, scaling the images, and so on. And the work remains the same with other products. I just don't have the options I have now. And I liked my layout. That's part of my style. And I saw no reason to change it as long as it works. And it does work.
Okay. If you look at your page a bit, you keep some pretty good statistics there. For example, it says your diary actually covers more than 10,000 pages today. In your image archive, you can find more than 42,000 photos. Right. You have a flight log that shows over 4,600 flights since the year 2000, and so on. From that perspective, you could actually say you're perhaps the best-documented Gleitschirm-Blog on the planet. At least if you take the online documentation into account. Do you actually still fly for the sake of flying? Or do you actually only fly for your diary anymore?
Yes, always both. So, let's put it this way, I have an incredible amount of fun flying. I'm just as much of a flight enthusiast as you probably are. For me, the two just go together now. So, the diary, sure, I fly. There are no flights that aren't documented. I can definitely say that. There are no secret flights that I've kept under wraps. There aren't any. So, with me, everything is in there. Even if something went wrong, that's documented too.
And for me, they just go together. I can't separate them like that. I just do both. But I'm really into flying. That's for sure. I have to say that first.
Probably not documented, but your first flights, I assume, that you ever did in your career. Because that was way before you started with Abschweb. How did you even get into flying?
How did you get into flying? Well, a friend of mine, who I made music with back then, played in a band with me—he played bass. Electric bass. And I played keyboard. And he told me, "Come along to Teufelsberg. Come along. It's a lot of fun and all that." Teufelsberg,
that's Berlin now, where you are. You lived in Berlin back then. I
lived in Berlin. Yes, yes. Okay. In West Berlin. In East Berlin, it was still the GDR at that time. And of course, no flight permission. No, in West Berlin, there was flight permission from the Allies. But the
planes were there.
It was limited to 80 meters above ground, though no one managed to do that at the time.
And as for the flight area, only the Teufelsberg was permitted, so to speak. That's a rubble hill on the edge of the Grunewald. A large forested area within West Berlin.
And it really had a height difference of 50 meters, nothing more. And someone gave kite flying lessons. He wasn't actually a teacher at all. But he had contact with a flight school in West Germany. And he taught me, as well as my friend and a few others, how to kite fly. With equipment that didn't have any quality seals or anything like that. But it doesn't matter. I mean, we learned it. And then I got an L-license through this other flight school back then. And I did my kite flying training in Ruhpolding. The original thing about me was that I learned to kite fly without having a driver's license.
And no car either. I didn't need something like that in Berlin, either. Did you take the S-Bahn to go flying or what? I took the S-Bahn to go flying. However, how do you do that with such a long kite? I had a short-pack kite. And with that short-pack kite,
on the bus, it fit in the stroller compartment. Just slightly diagonally.
And in the subway, it also worked a bit diagonally and so on. That somehow worked, yeah. And then I built a bicycle trailer. And I transported the thing with the bicycle trailer. So that worked. It worked. If you want to, anything is possible.
And I learned it there. But later on, when I got my license and really wanted to fly. A lot of kite surfers from Berlin would constantly drive to the Frankenwald to fly. And of course, I always went along with them. But I didn't want to be dependent on them all the time and all that. And I naturally wanted to head out on my own to a proper flying area. So I had to get a license. I did it. And it worked. Then I suddenly needed it.
Yeah, that's how it was. You also moved to the Alps, right? Did you move to the Alps because of the flying? Because of the flying? Yeah,
Yeah, yeah. I moved to the Alps for the flying. And that went along with the fact that—yeah, I have to tell a story in between. It was like, I went away with friends in Berlin, so flying friends, and I had the feeling that because I'd been flying so much, I could actually convey something to people who didn't have much flying experience yet. And that gave me the idea to become a flight instructor.
So I did my flight instructor training and then had a somewhat original way of getting in touch with the flight school Tegelberg at the time, with Matthias Krug, who ran it back then. He had actually lost his flight instructor. He made a botched takeoff and was dead at Tegelberg. And suddenly, he didn't have a flight instructor anymore. And then I, I talked to him quite often. You'd just run into each other casually at the airfield. And then I told him that I wanted to do the training. Then he said, you can start with me. And then I came back to it.
That's how it was. You keep asking what time period we're talking about. Is it '86, '87 now? Wait.
'86, '85. We're talking about '85.
Although the thing with the flight instructor was already '88. And in between, in '86, I started paragliding. In early '86, the rumor suddenly came out that something like that existed. There was this hang gliding magazine back then. Do you maybe remember? But I think that was before your time. I don't know. At that
At that time, I hadn't even flown yet.
Yeah. Okay, it doesn't matter. It was called Flying Glide later. But that doesn't matter. Back then, it was this paragliding magazine, or also abbreviated as Drama.
And there was suddenly a report in there about paragliding. And I found that interesting. Especially because I always enjoyed hiking in the mountains too. And then I thought, that's something—climbing a mountain with such a light piece of equipment. And then in the spring of '86, there was a crash course for hang gliding. In Kössen, with Himberger.
And I did it. But it really was a crash course. What did "crash course" mean? Well, the training time was like... five times launching the glider. Then three times down from the hill. Pretty steep hills. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made it with the gliders of that time. At noon, then a drive to Choralpe. So with CH written. Not the other one. So near Westendorf there. Choralpe. And then we went up there to Choralpe. The wind wasn't right at all. The flight instructor says that doesn't matter with a paraglider. You don't need wind from the front. Then, because there was a tailwind, the flight instructor put stones on the canopy so it wouldn't get blown away from behind right away.
And you guys, you're hang gliders. You can run. And I said, I ran like a...
brutal. I ran, ran, ran, ran. But I made it. And I landed at the bottom and got my license. So that was my training. That means five
Flights from the little hill, a soaring flight, and then it was, okay, you can do paragliding now. You can fly now.
Yeah. I got my O-license for that. What kind of glider did you have back then? Well, that was a Maxi. A Randonneus Maxi from Kalbermatten. That was the one from the school, right? I didn't have my own yet at that point. The first glider I bought for myself, I bought it right after, because I had a blast with it. Then I bought a small Randonneus—not the Maxi, but the Speed—back in the spring of '86. And then I started hiking up mountains with it. I didn't have any further training, honestly, no. I never had any further training. That was my only training I ever had in terms of paragliding. I just hiked up mountains and experimented.
And I went to the Pyrenees with it, explored some mountains there and just flew down somewhere. The mountains had to be relatively steep, of course. But with this weird rectangular glider, where you could almost crawl into the entry edge because the openings were so large, I at least flew from the Zugspitze. And not from the Schneefahnerkopf, like many people say that's the Zugspitze. That's not the Zugspitze. I really flew from the Zugspitz summit. And I didn't get to Ehrwald. I didn't manage to get to Ehrwald. It wasn't possible. I landed on the ski slope halfway down. There was no other way.
That was back in the late 80s.
The one with the Zugspitze
was 87, yeah. 87, okay. You then told me you became a flight instructor. When you were working at the flight school in Tegelberg, did you only teach kite flyers then? Or did you also teach kite - and paraglider flyers?
So, at first, I only taught hang gliders. I didn't really take paragliding seriously as a form of aviation. For me, it was actually just a descent aid, so to speak. With those old gliders, you couldn't stay up high. You couldn't fly thermals. You had a minimal sink rate of three meters per second with that thing. And what do you want to fly thermals with? You can forget about that. You can just absolutely forget about it.
And with the kite, of course, I didn't just fly thermals, but also cross-country, obviously. At first, I was just a kite instructor. I didn't see paragliding as more than a gag or something, but not really serious flying. That only developed later. Yeah, and then I had, interestingly enough, towards the end, I think it was 1989, I had an Alnayer. I don't know if that means anything to you. That was a glider, it had an elliptical shape, so at least it was advanced, and it could be controlled completely with body movements. So it was designed entirely for body control, so to speak.
And there was some eerie resistance from people who were paragliding instructors back then. You're not allowed to fly something like that, it's life-threatening. If you do, then you suddenly tilt to the side and the glider goes, or if it collapses, then the pilot suddenly hangs crooked and so on. Then he can't just sit there in peace anymore—that's the kind of nonsense they told back then. That
that was also the time when all the harnesses still had proper cross-bracing. Yes,
Cross-bracing. And the thing was, what I was flying there, the Alnayer was completely designed for body steering. And from kite flying, I was of course used to body steering. That was actually the natural way of steering for me, using your body and not over there on these brakes.
But later on, those same people also said it's reasonable to steer with your body. But at the time, they massively defended their cross-bracing.
You said that at the beginning, good flying and thermal flying with a paraglider were out of the question. Can you still remember the first flight where you thought, oh, now you can actually fly properly with a paraglider? Like, where you could really say, that was a thermal flight, or where you basically did your first little cross-country flight with the paraglider?
So, I had already done some thermals with this Alna as well. Yes, that was possible with it. Although it only had a glide ratio of about 4.6 at first.
In comparison, the Ranone Speed had a glide ratio of 3.2.
And so, I was already a bit [into it] with it, and it had a minimum sink rate of about 1.5 meters per second. You could already fly thermals with it. That was possible. But of course, no comparison to that. The comparison to the glider is clear. But then it naturally developed further. And then, I lived in Heidelberg for quite a while because I met a woman there and just thought, you just stay in Heidelberg.
And I even opened my own flight school there. For
Kites or for paragliders?
For kiting, only for kiting. Back then, as I said, paragliding was somehow still just an extra gag for me, but I didn't take it seriously yet. But then I suddenly had the chance. And that was also when my time in Heidelberg came to an end. I suddenly had the chance to take over the Tegelberg flight school as the head of training. The head of training was suddenly vacant because Matthias Krug quit, or rather sold it. And they were desperately looking for a head of training. And I said, I can do that. But the condition was, paragliding instructor. Okay, I said, then I'll also do a paragliding instructor. But that was already in 1995. In 1995, I became a paragliding instructor. Since then, I've been both. Yes, of course. You
So, when you became a flight instructor in the middle of, let's say, 1995, you also took over the Tegelberg flight school and ran it for nine years. Was that actually a happy time for you?
Partly, partly, partly. So, let's just say what wasn't happy at all was the competitive situation with the other flight schools on the mountain. There were some really nasty stories, which I don't want to go into detail about now, because the flight schools—one of them still exists, right, both still exist. Two of them still exist. And yeah, it was pretty harsh, so to speak, what was going on with the competition there. No one gave anyone any slack, so to speak. It was some pretty nasty stuff. But anyway, I don't want to dwell on that now. It was definitely a good time. I really enjoyed giving flight training. I had a great time with it. What was completely bad and unsuccessful for me, however, were all the business matters.
Those were all pretty off for me. So I'd describe myself as a miserable businessman. I'm not really built for that kind of thing. But I taught with joy, yes.
Teaching often means that as a flight instructor, you're standing on the ground and don't actually do much of the flying
...get to fly. Right, but when I'm down on the ground, I have to give the people proper instructions over the radio and all that, and think through everything. But I still managed to get enough flying in. So I made sure of that; even as the head of training, I had certain...
organizational power in this school, so that I could set things up in a way that allowed me to get into the air as well. In
That period also marks the actual start of abschweb.de, your online diary. Right. How did you even come up with that domain name? Abschweb sounds more like gliding, not really like proper, long-distance flying. Was that your intention? I mean, did you want it that way?
For me, it's all of it. For me, it wasn't just cross-country flight; I also enjoyed gliding and so on. For me, it was getting into the air, taking off from the ground, and so on. That was actually what gave me joy in flying. Cross-country flight is nice when you can do it, but I was never so obsessed that I'd feel frustrated if I couldn't do it, to be honest. I always enjoyed it. Whenever something was possible, I did it. And I think the name is totally fitting. I still think the name is good. Quite clearly.
Well, Abschweb.de is also a very personal diary of yours. Who actually reads your reports? Or who was reading them in the early days, when there wasn't much else—who was reading them then? What kind of feedback did you get?
I've always received feedback, and for a while, I just checked who was visiting my site. But honestly, I found that unproductive. I'd say to myself, I'd rather write a new report than deal with any of that—like, which tables to fix and so on. I thought, that's nonsense. I did notice that I got feedback from all over the world. Even from America. Quite funny, by the way. A New Yorker was actually visiting Schwangau to meet me. He ran into me in the supermarket, recognized me because he knew me from the photo, and said, "Hello, Manfred." And then he started talking to me. Then he told me that he lived somewhere in the 15th...
...sits in an office on the 15th floor somewhere in New York and reads my reports every day.
And he
wanted to meet up with me now. He flew from New York to Germany because of you?
Well, because of me. Of course, he combined that with all sorts of other touristy stuff. But for me, that was an important chapter in terms of tourism—German tourism, yeah, sure.
Did he fly himself back then? Or did he just, like, for your sake, come across your side of things? Did he...
didn't fly, no. But he wanted to do a tandem flight and all that. He then got interested in doing a tandem flight at Tegelberg. He didn't fly himself, no.
Did you guys do the tandem flight too?
He didn't do it with me, no.
Or do you maybe know of any people who started flying themselves through your page? Like, people who took it as inspiration to say, I'm really going to take a flight course now. I assume so, but I don't know for sure. Now, you've been doing this for a really long time, and flying as well for a really long time. How important is flying to you actually today? After so many years. Very important.
Right now, in these Corona times, I'm realizing just how important it is to me. And actually, I'd love to fly every flyable day, but that's just how the world is. It doesn't always work out, you know. You are
I'm 68 now. How long do you think? I'm 68 now, that's right. Do you think you can keep doing the flying for much longer?
So my prognosis, let's just say, I might manage for another ten years. I feel relatively fit and healthy, but I don't think I'll still be flying at 80. I think there comes a point where you just have to call it a day because the body simply doesn't keep up anymore. So I've set a rule for myself: I'm not going to let myself be pushed into the air with great difficulty by some helpers if I can no longer walk. That has no value. I won't do that. So if I can no longer make a confident takeoff, then flying as an active pilot is over for me. Then I'll just watch from the sidelines. Then it's over for me. And I think one could manage for about ten years. But who knows? Who knows what will happen in ten years? I have no idea.
I just take it as it comes and I'm just happy that I'm still healthy enough today to feel like I can do it for a few more years. Eventually, it's over. Everyone knows that. Or everyone should actually know.
You mentioned flying in the Pyrenees and stuff earlier. But now you mainly just fly locally around your area. Like at Tegelberg, Buchenberg, and so on. Wouldn't it get boring, always being in areas where you basically know them like the back of your hand? Have you already flown every single rib? I know them like my own.
your own back pocket, but it does improve my flying there. I know my way around well and no, there are so many possibilities. And on a day when it's about distance, there are always surprises, and I've already done some really crazy cross-country flights, and those are incredible experiences. I don't have to rack up the kilometers like some others. I'm not the type who flies for four hours or something, or even eight hours like some people. I don't do that. So for me, if I stay on the mountain, the air is usually gone after an hour, and if I fly out, after two hours it's sort of like, now you could go land again. That's just how it is, it doesn't matter. My demands just aren't as big as those of some of the big cross-country pilots.
That's enough for me, and when it comes to cross-country flying, I mainly need a good destination—something that looks great in photos and so on. That's much more important to me than the number of kilometers. You
You've also witnessed the aviation and the development of aviation at Tegelberg over the last 20, 30 years. How has that changed?
Yes, it has changed a lot. There was a time at Tegelberg when it was really packed. When there was a real mass influx, like you still see today, I don't know, in Handelsbuch and so on. Something like that happens very, very rarely at Tegelberg nowadays. So, there's actually not that much going on at Tegelberg. It's been a very laid-back mountain for a few years now. I've even experienced a time at Tegelberg on a really popular day with great weather, on a Sunday—you have to imagine—where I was the only pilot present. I went out, had a great flight, it was fantastic. And I stayed there alone. No one else joined.
On that same day, at other well-known flying sites like Neunerköpfe, Handelsbuch, and so on, the infrastructure collapsed everywhere due to the massive influx of people. Because they all thought, for God's sake, Tegelberg is so packed, we're not going there. But that's what everyone thought.
Crazy. Can you explain why a mountain like that was once so "in" and is now, in some ways, somewhat out?
Yeah, I mean, it has to do with certain expectations. There are some pilots who expect from a launch site that you can, I don't know, lay out side by side in masses on a huge meadow and head out just because you feel like it and so on. That's obviously not possible at Tegelberg. At Tegelberg, it only happens bit by bit, bit by bit, and very disciplined. Those are things that some people just don't like. And that's why they automatically don't go to Tegelberg, but instead to Neunerköpfe or Handelsbuch. It's just like that. That certainly plays a role. Then there are also people who prefer to launch backwards. Of course, there are also people who launch backwards so well that they also launch backwards at Tegelberg.
But honestly, those are the few. Backward starters who aren't that experienced aren't good at Tegelberg; they don't look very good there. That's definitely the case. So, you can actually always take off forward at Tegelberg in most flight conditions. Otherwise, the conditions are borderline anyway. But of course, you can also take off backward if you know how. But very few can do it in a way that looks good at Tegelberg.
If you fly in a region for such a long time, you notice a lot of other changes and so on. What about the weather, for example? Do you see any recognizable changes there, for instance due to climate change? And how does that affect the flying there? For sure.
I see changes, but I don't see any changes in the statistics and so on. There have always been good days and always bad days. I can't say that flying has become better or worse. It definitely hasn't become worse. I can say that for sure. But I can't say it's become better either. So it's just a bit different. Sure, we have more heatwaves and so on, but it's hard to say. Of course, I notice climate change, but purely statistically regarding flying, I can't—I can't establish anything right now.
Honestly, no. Or maybe the wind situations have become more severe, like there are stronger wind conditions more often or something like that?
Well, not at Tegelberg. Not at Tegelberg. I can't say. I mean, I would notice, but it's not like that. There are very, very many good flying days at Tegelberg, so it's like that.
If you look at your flight statistics with 4,600 flights since the year 2000, you're really getting over 200 flights per year, so it must be flyable very often in your area as well.
It is, it is, yes. Because the Tegelberg is also just favorably positioned. That means with westerly winds, the Alpine edge protrudes to the north, and because of that, the wind just hits the flank with a west wind. That's of course very favorable, but because the Tegelberg is also very good for launching towards the northeast, you can also fly there quite well in many easterly conditions, as long as the wind isn't too strong. It's generally a bit more turbulent then, but you can still fly it well. And yes, with a south wind it's of course nothing, that's clear, but you often have flyable conditions at the Tegelberg even with a weaker south wind because the higher mountains come from the south, so the local wind system...
the south flow dominates. That's very, very interesting. So, I often have conditions where other mountains have south, but the Tegelberg has something in the north and it's flyable. So, we really have many flyable days, definitely.
What would interest me now from a meteorological standpoint, or specifically regarding the development of thermals. Last year, the Forgensee was drained for a long time, so regionally in your area, a large body of water was basically gone and you had more dry ground there somewhere. Did that have a noticeable effect on the thermal situation there? But hello.
Sure. No, it was interesting. So, when the Forgensee was empty in the summer—it's always empty in the winter, that's normal—but when it was empty in the summer, you could actually fly to the Forgensee, turn up over the Forgensee, so over the desert, and it was like, there were these massive thermals right over the lakebed where there was no lake anymore, and yeah, of course you noticed that, obviously. There were interesting flights, it was just different than when there's water in it.
Makes sense. If the lifts don't run for longer this year—we don't know when they'll reopen—how good are you on foot? I mean, can you still hike up to the Tegelberg yourself for a hike and fly, or are your strength levels only enough to say, okay, Buchenberg is still doable?
So, I'd say in an absolute emergency I could still make it up the Tegelberg, but that's brutal. I can only do that very rarely; I'd be completely exhausted for a week. So, Buchenberg is doable, yeah. I'll go to Buchenberg often, but maybe hike up it once in a while, but
it's insane. I mean, it's enough, no, my strength isn't what it used to be. I would have done it back then, but nowadays I'd say Buchenberg is plenty for me, and if it's higher than Buchenberg, then my pain threshold is roughly at the Spiesser or something. That's about 600 meters, but 900 meters for the Tegelberg, that would just be too much for me, to be honest.
If you extrapolate that, maybe for the next few months, if it's even possible to fly again, maybe only the Buchenberg is up for you. Don't you think that a mountain like that would eventually get on your nerves? Can
be good.
We'll see, we'll see, yeah, sure. What do you do then? Do you still browse through a lot yourself? I don't know yet, I don't know yet. I'm sure something will come to mind. Do you actually still browse through your online archive a lot and read old stories and say, oh yeah, those were the days?
Yeah, of course, logically, I do, yeah, for sure. Yeah, those were the days, I mean, they were different times. No, I like reading in my diary, yeah, again and again, clearly. What
what's your favorite story on abschwebt.de? Oh, there
Are you asking me something now?
My favorite story, oh, yeah, the favorite story is of course the intense one. I have a very intense story, and that's my ski start at the Hahnenkamm—it's brutal, that story. Do you know it? No. Oh, you have to see it sometime. But that was quite a few years ago. Ski start at the Hahnenkamm, that's intense, yeah, yeah. I did that because on the Hahnenkamm, you're only transported by skis. Nowadays, the local pilots do it with Bigfoots, but I'm not good on the slopes with Bigfoots, so I don't really feel like dealing with that kind of thing. Back then, I actually started with my skis, with my two-meter-long skis, and that is
it somehow worked out, but it wasn't in the green zone, honestly, not at all.
Through the treetops and all that, it wasn't funny. No, it wasn't funny, but I made it. But of course, that story exists, clearly.
And if you wanted to share one piece of wisdom from your vast experience with young pilots today, what would it be—something you'd say is important that they should definitely pay attention to in their flying careers?
That stubbornness and all that... I have to get into the air now, you have to put that aside, that's really very clear. So, never take off if I have the feeling it could be a shitty flight. Never. That is always very, very important, yes. So not even if it was so cumbersome to make the flight possible. No matter what you sacrificed for it, a climb or something else. If it doesn't feel right and if I have the feeling I might regret the flight afterwards, then just don't do it. Don't do it. No matter how cumbersome it is to give it up.
How often have you broken this rule yourself?
Rarely. Rarely. Rarely.
And if it did, did it always turn out well?
In the early days, of course, more often than in the
more recently, yeah. I didn't do that at all anymore. I just kept going, but if I had some shitty flight, I really fooled myself. Like, knowing beforehand that the flight was going to be shit and then doing it anyway—no, I only did that in the early days, yeah. In the early days, you were still so fired up, you'd just say, it'll work out. It'll be fine. That's long over.
for me. Okay Manfred, thanks for your story about abschweb.de and your aviation career and the exciting times you experienced there. Yes. I hope that you'll also get plenty of flying in, not just this year, but also over the next 10 years, and that you'll be able to keep filling your diary with great flight stories. I hope so too. And yeah, first of all, all the best, that you'll make it through this Corona time okay. You too.
That was Manfred Laudan in conversation with Lucian Haas. You can find Manfred's blog at www.abschweb.de. The story of the ski state adventure at Hahnenkamm mentioned in the conversation can be found in the archive under the date 02/28/2004. If you enjoy Podz-Glidz, I would be happy if you supported my work. As a patron. Because while Podz-Glidz and the content of my blog Looglides are freely available, that doesn't mean I'm giving them away for free, so to speak. How much you want to give as a contribution is entirely up to you. If you're unsure, I recommend a non-binding guideline of one euro per podcast episode and two euros per reading month on Looglides. Payments are very easy via PayPal or bank transfer.
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