I only fly when I enjoy it. And that's almost every day. I'm not joking. A lot of people don't understand that. They just ask, "But he flies in the same spot, and it's the same thing every day, and so on." I don't feel like I'm flying in a routine loop. It's always something new. The smells, the scents, the views—and as I said, with the passengers, the feedback. So for me, even after 21 years, it's still very, very, very fun.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast. Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Hartmann
Peters from the island of Madeira.
And Lucian Haas on the mic.
Madeira, that's the island of eternal spring, about an hour's flight from Portugal. It's an impressive massif of rock that rises up to about 1,800 meters from the Atlantic and stands in the way of the prevailing northeast trade winds. On the north side, in the Louvre, the moist air masses build up. It rains frequently. The south side, on the other hand, is in the lee, is drier, but also drops very steeply into the sea and only has occasional narrow pebble beaches. Anyone who wants to go paragliding there should already know where and how best to do it, and also when they should leave it alone. One person who knows this particularly well is Hartmut Peters. Over 20 years ago, he walked away from his well-paid job in the Rhineland to move to Madeira and devote himself primarily to flying from then on.
He bought a piece of land, installed a launch and landing field on it, built a house with guest rooms, and has been flying—or rather, flies—every day that the weather permits since then. He says you can easily reach at least 300 flying days per year in Madeira. However, that assumes you understand the complex weather and wind systems of such an island. Much of it contradicts classical teaching. Flying usually takes place in the lee and during foehn conditions. Whitecaps and clouds roll by as visible boundaries. Even cross-country flights are sometimes possible there, albeit with a completely different character and demand than in the Alps. In the podcast, Hartmut Peters talks about, among other things, the beginnings of his flying career, what drew him to Madeira, how he learned over the years to understand and utilize the special island weather for flying, and why he still doesn't get bored after 21 years of launching himself into the air from the same spot every time.
Of course, there are also a few tips and important notes for pilots who want to fly a paraglider on Madeira themselves. Before we get started, just a quick note. While Blueglides and Podz-Glidz are available for free online, the blog and the podcast are not free. As a professional freelance journalist, I put a lot of heart and a lot of working hours into this. My independence is very important to me. That's why I don't finance the blog and podcast through advertising, hidden sponsorship, or fixed subscription fees, but solely through voluntary contributions from my listeners and readers. So, if you enjoy the podcast and want to continue to receive more in-depth stories from the world of paragliding in the future, please support my work as a patron.
You can find all the necessary information on my blog Blueglides, specifically on the Support page.
Hartmut, is it correct to call you a notorious "Lehflieger"? Yes. That
it's actually necessary, because flying by air, well, it has its own special quality here. I'll explain that again later, of course.
Do you ever fly in the "Luft" in Madeira as well?
Yes, we fly in the air every now and then. Either in the winter, when we have southwesterly winds with low-pressure systems, or in the summer, sometimes on the north side as well. But for that, I'd usually have to drive for half or three-quarters of an hour, which is 30 seconds, a minute to my own launch site. Of course, that's a significant, significant difference.
That means you usually fly—or actually almost always fly, as you put it—from your own launch site.
Exactly. I'm only 100 meters from my house here, and from there, I can practically fly across almost the entire island. Well, except for the north side. I've only managed to fly from south to north once.
Your own launch site, if you imagine it like that. Madeira is an island in the middle of the Atlantic. So, what does "middle" mean? But in any case, there's nothing around it except water to start with. Pretty far. And it's like a rectangular block. About 1,000 meters high. Long north edge, long south edge, narrower west and east edge. Very simplified, of course. And your launch site is located here on the south side in the lee, right on the coast. Yes. A bit of cliffside, so you still have some elevation down to the water there. Why can you fly so well there, when the northeast trade wind is actually constantly blowing from the other side?
Yes, the island is even a bit higher. On average, it's at least 1,000 meters high, or only 1,000 meters at the lowest points. At the higher spots, it goes up to 1,800 or 1,600 meters. It's similar to the main Alpine ridge. That means the main wind direction, the northeast trade wind, is usually diverted around the sides. And then I'm on my southwest side, just under 180 degrees away. Very, very, very well protected. And because the island is very, very steep, unlike Lanzarote, for example,
the mountains block the tailwind from my face or my neck, in that case.
Now, there are various launch sites on this south side. I was on Madeira myself once, and I got the impression that yours is actually almost ideal for flying, even considering the wind conditions that develop there. Why is that?
It's turned out in recent years that we can also launch very well from my place even with south-southeast wind directions. Of course, we have different levels of sunlight in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Accordingly, the southeast-facing areas warm up in the morning, and that's when the thermals first appear here. And my launch site has direct access to these lift currents. And as the afternoon progresses toward evening, the sun naturally moves over to the west. And then we have the sun over to the west. Right in front of the launch site are the best lift currents. And this launch site itself lies on the edge of a half-failed volcanic crater. And a unique micro- or microclimate is created in this crater.
And we really love flying around here. And as I said, the mountains behind us, which block the tailwind from us, are over 1,000 meters above us. That's a relatively good protection zone.
Do you actually fly in what's always called a classic, typical sea breeze wind system, where the wind really always comes towards you from the sea? Or, based on your experience, are there actually other wind phenomena that occur there?
It's the permanent fresh air flow that feeds the thermals in the hinterland—that's about seven, eight, nine kilometers to the high plateau. The winches coming from the sea feed the thermals. That means the thermals rising in the hinterland logically need fresh air again, and that comes from the sea. So, the cliff is warm, it feels like a thermal, but it's also a dynamic—a dynamic wind that refills the hinterland thermals. And that's a permanent thermal that usually kicks in from 11 a.m. and then maybe falls asleep again at sunset.
If you were to look at it now—you probably keep pretty accurate records—how many days a year can you get into the air at your launch site?
At my launch site, it's guaranteed to be 300 days or more, and in the first years, from 2000 to 2010, I drove around the island a lot and we even counted up to 342 days of flying weather in a year where we actually flew for at least one hour, at least per day.
Is it still mostly coastal soaring in Madeira in most cases, or is there really something like an interior where you can say you can actually do inland flights there?
We have, I'd say, two spots in Porto da Cruz and in Funchal at Praia Formosa, which are coastal soaring, and all the other launch sites are already cliffs, thermals, and almost, as I said, high-mountain flying. There's also the situation that in the high mountains at 1,400, 1,500 meters at Pico da Cana or Fanal, up in Rabassal, Paul da Serra, we can also fly dynamics, also 1,400, 1,500 meters. That's then similar to Castelluccio or various other areas, maybe also Monte Baldo, if the corresponding wind sets in.
But overall, would you say that you used to travel around a lot, but now you hardly travel anymore and mostly fly at your home spot?
Exactly, we've also straightened out the launch site a bit towards the southeast, adjusted it a bit, and built out some parts, and because of that, we can now, yeah, take off comfortably in at least 180 degrees of wind direction at my place and also do top-landings very comfortably at times. Which wasn't the case before.
How long have you been living on Madeira now?
On June 21st of this year, it would be 21 years.
If you've been on an island like that for 21 years now, you're probably the absolute expert. How did that happen? I mean, how did you end up saying, "I'm choosing Madeira as my flying home"?
As a student, I always thought about moving to Southern Europe. But I didn't know exactly where yet. And with paragliding, which I eventually started in the early 90s, I also... well, right at the very beginning, even...
I've visited Portugal, the Azores, and eventually Madeira as well. And a key experience was a particularly long flight in November '99 on Madeira, lasting almost 5.5 hours. And it was very, very easy to stay up in the air for that long. And the locals told me they do that often. And I eventually checked that out.
And here, no one had ever... well, there was already flight instruction in Tenerife, on the Greek islands there was already, but on Madeira or Portugal, the Azores, and so on, there wasn't anything like that at all, where someone takes care of the holiday flyers who arrive with a paraglider, doing the guiding. And yeah, I made that my mission.
So you're saying you really said, okay, I'm going to build a new life for myself on Madeira and become a flight guide. Am I seeing that right?
That was exactly the idea. However, from the very beginning, the idea was also not just to be a flight guide, but even to have my own site to build up a proper infrastructure.
Let's jump back a bit. You were already a paraglider by then. But how did you get into paragliding in the first place?
If I go way, way back, if you want to point to the key experience in my childhood, it always started with me dreaming of flying as a little boy. At night, in my dreams, I would...
...flying over and over again. So, flying in some kind of plane or something? Or that classic thing you often have as a kid, where you just hover through the air and basically swim in it, looking at everything from above?
Exactly, exactly. These childhood dreams of flying without any equipment, without any wing, no feathers, nothing. So you fly, you fly, you fly, you fly. And that never let me go. And then at some point we drove to the Nürburgring and a kite flyer was pulled into the air behind a car. That was 1973, if I remember correctly. And that was the very first time I saw it. And it never let me go again.
If I remember correctly, back at the 1973 Nürburgring, a kite was pulled up and then basically released right back into the lockout at the same time. And the whole thing even turned out to be fatal.
Yeah, the poor guy, he didn't think it through for long. He's alive. He was probably shut down after two days, I assume. That was a fall of at least over 100 meters. There's actually a video of it.
And I wasn't aware of that in that case. I was way too small. I wasn't even eight years old yet. That was just a week before my birthday. And I didn't actually catch it. I just saw it, a person is flying. A pretty small piece of fabric with some aluminum poles, I assume. And yeah, that fascinated me. That
was at eight years old. How long did it take until you actually got into the air yourself?
Oh, that was in 1992. My very, very first paraglider flight. And that wasn't just a trial course either. That was directly at the flight school in Göppingen in Swabia, in the...
beginner course.
So 92. How much older were you then than eight? Were you 25 or something at that point?
I must have been 27 then. Actually, normally you're not particularly young anymore. Your fine motor skills aren't like those of a 15-year-old who can, of course, jump over slacklines or do flips and all that these days. And as a 27-year-old, you're not exactly a master of fine motor skills either. You have very human reflexes. And as is well known in paragliding, those aren't exactly ideal. But I was fanatical. I absolutely wanted to learn. And just a few days before this training date, I even got something from the second-hand market; it was called Spermel back then, that was still in the newspaper.
There was no internet back then. I bought a used glider without knowing what I actually had. But it was suitable for training and gave me the advantage that I didn't have to share my paragliding gear with a training partner; I had my own, so I could just run up and down the mountain twice as fast. With that, you were finished relatively quickly.
If I remember correctly, you lived in the Rhineland back then, which certainly didn't offer that many flight opportunities in terms of performance for the gliders of that time. Nowadays, it's sometimes a bit better. Did you actually manage to get into the air properly back then, or did you drive down south every spare minute to go flying there? Or how did you do it?
Yeah, it was a bit different. I went to some gravel pit every spare minute and just jumped in.
The first paraglider was from a company called Skydive Günther, from somewhere in Saarland. And it was actually a converted parachute. It was also... Yeah, it was from a...
parachuting school in the end. And that never let me go. I always wanted to get into the air again and again, without really knowing where the limits are or where the dangers lie. And well, it already hurts on the ground. And also, how do you say, being towed behind a car and so on, we tried that too. That was a very clear-cut success. There were always only bruises. And since I had many other hobbies, I didn't have much time to devote to it. Unfortunately, at that point, it was still a bit too short. And I don't think it's particularly healthy either, if you practice a sport like that, I think you should take it very seriously, because you can only get really good at something if you do it regularly.
How did the switch happen, where it actually got to the point where you say, oh no, I want to make paragliding my profession in some way, or at least my livelihood? That had to do with...
...to do, that although I don't think I had a very bad job, I had my job in research at Deutsche Telekom, but I was also allowed or had to travel for this job to Europe, European capitals. I always had my paraglider with me for international conferences, which I think many people do nowadays too, because if they are traveling for work, they at least always have paragliding equipment with them during the summer months. I did that too and then met very, very nice people in Lisbon and spent weekends or later, holidays with them. And from this experience and from the experience that you can fly all year round, for example, on Madeira, the conclusion naturally came, hm, if you can do that all year round, then that is actually the ideal situation.
Then we don't need to have two jobs, like winter sports instructors—so ski instructors or paragliding instructors—which is what you should have in the Alps. There you need two jobs to make a living all year round. And I then found out that you can do that on Madeira all year round and thought, okay, if not now, then when? So we try
That. Probably, I don't know, but you probably didn't earn that badly as a Telekom employee in research and so on. Now you're switching to paraglider guide, guide provider on a different, small island and so on, where maybe people don't even know that you can fly well there yet and so on. It's also a certain risk, but you were happy to take that on.
I took that risk, but I had a massive advantage. I knew the journalists from the two German-language trade magazines from the French-language magazine, whom I had also met repeatedly in the Azores and on Madeira. So I had a direct contact there, and I reached out to them directly to let them know that when the new piece about Madeira eventually comes out, I'm the person to see for people coming to Madeira by paraglider. And fortunately, I was also able to buy a house right near the landing site. And that already had three or four quarters.
To house pilots. And there were few houses around. There were practically no cafes or restaurants nearby. Not really. That means, with the accommodation, the guiding, and the passenger flights, you could actually survive.
Now you always say, your launch site. How does a German who just showed up, just flew in, end up getting a launch site on Madeira where you can eventually say, "That's my launch site," and it's your own land?
Yes, I called my friend on the island and asked, let's say, if I wanted to open a flight camp or a flight school now, it would obviously be very convenient not to start something on some potential building land that gets built on later. Instead... I asked if there was a site, for example, that one in Arco del Caleta—I didn't even know the name back then, the place where I eventually bought the plot. I flew there for five and a half hours to see if there was anything like that for sale anywhere. And with that information, my friend went off and got back to me after a week; he found the owners and said, yes, it would be for sale on the condition that I don't build anything on it.
So don't make any speculations. Build buildings, sell them, build buildings, sell them. The plot is an attractive size at just under 3,000 square meters to put huge, huge, huge real estate on it.
Looking at it that way, it was actually quite a coincidence that the very site you're talking about—the one where you had your longest flight and said you'd like to fly there more often or something—was ultimately offered to you for purchase.
That was pure luck. The wealthiest construction developer from this town, the wealthiest construction developer in all of Portugal, couldn't buy this plot. But I appealed to the ancestors of this community of owners—the heirs—saying that this was their farmland, their livelihood, and I gave them the promise that I would keep it green, or even make it greener than before. Only with that promise was I able to buy the plot. The family was also already quite old, over 70, 80 years old.
And I got lucky there. Fate was just on my side for once. They probably don't
...more, the ones who sold them back then, right?
But they still live there. And every now and then they walk past them, take a look, and everything is fine. And they're happy. You fly on a tandem. Have you ever taken them with you?
That's unfortunately not possible. The locals—many, many locals—you'd actually have to buy them just to get them to fly along with you. They're all so content.
A tandem flight, and that's a crazy thing for them. And flying and all that, they're not really adventurous, actually.
That means they're very down-to-earth. And the element of air is, for them, practically a major source of danger.
At the beginning, at least, I was portrayed as crazy for what I was doing. Yeah, like that I should make a living from it or whatever, or wanted to. No one could imagine that it was possible and so on.
Now with your launch site there. Are the people who fly there also a lot of pilots from Madeira? Or is the pilot community on the island actually relatively small? And is it mainly some tourists who then just come there?
No, during the summer months, there are a lot of local pilots. On weekends, they like to come from the capital. It's only half an hour away, so they come to me.
And even in the winter months, when top pilots from across Europe come here, our cross-country flight racks also come to my launch site and hang onto the heels of the pilots. With the lying harnesses and the high-held gliders. Yes, we learn together, we fly together. The launch site itself is actually the melting pot for all pilots. Whether they are agro-pilots, cross-country flyers, local pilots, pilots from Europe, from North America, from, how should I put it, from Asia, so from the Canaries, actually from South America as well. Pilots come from everywhere, from everywhere. The launch site somehow became known through various film shots we made there, for example with the Just-Agro team, with Paul Takats and Gabor Ketzi.
I'm glad that the knowledge, the flying knowledge on the island, can grow because all the pilots meet up at this launch site.
Could you say that you were the one who, maybe not the spark, but with a saw... really fanned the flames of this local flying scene?
For sure. In the beginning, in 2000, there were barely a dozen paragliders who rarely flew and, yeah, who mostly flew with each other, did tandem flights only in family circles, and so on. Suddenly, I got the urge to fly every day, not just on weekends. Then came the vacationers. They, of course, also wanted to fly every day. They came out with their paraglider, the first ones coming from Austria. Right in the week after I... he still had the paintbrush in his hand, no joke. And then they also wanted to fly as much as possible every day. And then, yeah, paragliding took place all year round, every day, every weekday.
And accordingly, the acceptance was naturally much, much, much greater. And accordingly, the local youth eventually had the desire to do paragliding themselves. From the company's founding on, I also had a flight school on the program; I had a local flight instructor, and I was his assistant. And we actually trained local paragliders here. At your launch site? Partially, actually, first flights at my launch site. However, they had naturally already learned a bit of ground handling beforehand, and actually a bit more than usual. So my skills would unfortunately be unemployed here. All of our flight students can pull back, they can take off the glider backwards, they can do a whole lot that other paragliders from the old scene would eventually learn in an additional course after years.
Our students can do that from the very beginning. We have small take-off and landing sites. And glider control near the ground should already be very, very, very good. And the concentration during landing should still be switched on at a high level, not just going to land on some random meadow. Unfortunately, we don't have that here. I
A few years ago, I was also on Madeira, at your launch site, and I looked at a few other launch sites on Madeira as well. I wouldn't tell anyone, based on the classic idea, that any of them are suitable for training. Isn't it a certain risk to say, okay, they can do ground handling, but now I'm saying, go do your first flight. That's a high-altitude flight from the Arco launch site. And you basically have to do a cliff launch immediately—I mean, you do have a meadow to run up, but then the cliff comes right away, so you're already over a lot of air under your butt and then at the end you have to fly down to the sea and land there on a relatively narrow stretch of beach, which is also mostly a rocky beach. That's not exactly the easiest thing.
Well, what we have, thank God, when we do training here, is the permanent, relatively laminar lift; we have it at the launch site and, of course, we have it at the landing field too. That simplifies things, meaning we don't need large areas at the launch site and we don't need large landing areas. And logically, just like in German training, there's always a flight instructor down at the landing field giving instructions down to the centimeter.
I spent my first two or three years of flying in the Odenwald; there's the Erlau launch site there, where there was a nice big oak tree—it wasn't particularly easy to circle around there either. Now there's also Schriesheim, which is also very, very special. I think we have easier launch sites in Madeira now. I did a nice launch in Oberammergau at the Laber in the 90s, so to speak. That's also a very, very, very, very steep launch site. I'd say the launch site isn't particularly forgiving of mistakes. You can see how, if you're in the right place at the right time under the right conditions, it's not difficult at all. As I said, at my launch site, it's only open when it makes sense, and I'm usually only there when it's safe and no one can get hurt.
That can happen, of course; it can happen at any launch site in the world, and unfortunately, it happened to me too. But generally, if the conditions are right, it's all child's play, and nowadays with the light equipment, with the glider that launches way too easily, I think you don't even have to be as good a pilot as we were in the early 90s, when we had to fight with the heavy gear on top of the short launch sites.
Why do you say gliders that are way too easy to launch? Are you a bit jealous of today's pilots, for whom it's made so easy? Or do you find, for some reason, that it really is too easy to launch?
That's how it is nowadays. I've already made a short demonstration video. Paragliders today start without touching any A-lines, B-lines, or brake lines. So, the brake lines usually stay up when they are launched. So, a light glider in category A. What happened to me once was that I landed on a gravel beach in strong wind and my nice tandem, which was also a bit more modern and didn't have any more sliders in the leading edge, went back up after landing, and we took off from the gravel beach again and landed another 30 meters further. I didn't count on that happening at the time it happened to me, four, five, or six years ago.
I hadn't thought it was possible until then that a glider lying flat on a flat beach could suddenly take off again, lift me off the ground, and so on. Okay, nothing happened, but it was a new situation. And with the new gliders, it's just become so easy that you don't have to do much at all to get started. So the important takeaway here is the realization that the flight is only over when the glider is packed up, not just because you've landed. The flight is over—that's a bit of a special point nowadays. You shouldn't forget that. Even the pilots who started flying early—today's gear has huge advantages, but it also has side effects,
Side effects. Let's talk a bit about meteorology on islands, with Madeira being a classic example of all the kinds of effects that can occur there, just for you as a Madeira expert. One of the difficulties, for example, is that the island sits out there in the Atlantic and has such steep coasts, rising so quickly to a thousand, sometimes well over a thousand meters, that the weather models and all those corresponding landscape models underlying them don't really capture everything properly—in terms of height, extent, and so on. How do you come to a reasonable weather assessment, or especially an assessment of the wind situation, when the weather models themselves can't actually map the whole thing accurately?
One very important realization first is that the standard atmospheric pressure of 1013 hectopascals, which you still learn about in school, means that it's still low pressure here. So the air is very, very light and very, very mobile—very explosive. What's important here is that the air pressure should be above 1020 so that you can have relatively carefree flights here. It's also the case that because the island rises very, very, very steeply out of the Atlantic, there's an air dam; that means the air molecules don't flow onto the island at 15 knots, as is often found in previous forecasts—so at nearly 25 or 30 kilometers per hour—or don't reach the island at that high speed at all, but rather that in the lower triangle on the north side, on the leeward side, there is sometimes no wind at all.
And on the north side, it's also clear that there can hardly be any wind on an obstacle, well, protruding vertically out of the sea. There's also little sunshine to lift the air. Ultimately, way up in the mountains in the Louvre, where the entire air mass of nearly 60 kilometers wide and one and a half kilometers high naturally has to pass over, there is, of course, extremely strong wind, just like on the ridges in the Alps. There's a compression zone there where it gets really accelerated. Exactly, that's where this Venturi effect is distinct, and way down in the Louvre, there's sometimes nothing at all. So, what's being pushed in from the sea, what's being measured in the weather models—that's not correctly represented in the models, in these animations from Windy, for example, because of this nano-climate and micro-climate we have.
And there are pilots who actually use Windy to prepare and find launch sites. They're always very surprised that we flew where Windy said it was impossible. And vice versa, they've been to places on the island where it was unflyable because the wind was coming from behind or down from the mountains, even though it was actually supposed to come from the front.
Is there some kind of weather model you can access online that says, "here are the wind conditions," like it's calculated in high resolution or something, that accurately reflects the wind conditions? Or is it really just experience that you have to have as an island pilot, meteorologist, and so on?
I believe that an attentive pilot who pays attention to meteorology, and who also knows there are webcams, who can look at the sky and correctly interpret the cloud movement speed, the rotating wind wheels, the whitecaps, the birds—and can read the cloud formation, doesn't need models. And the models are just confirmation of his knowledge, or in some cases, they don't work at all. So, I believe there are no models that blindly illustrate what will actually work over the next few days. The daily look out the window, the daily look at the airport weather, which I then project onto the topography of the steep island—specifically the airport weather from the neighboring island of Porto Santo, where the actual wind, the actual wind blowing over the sea, is measured on the runway, and the actual cloud formations being pushed over to Madeira,
I transfer this weather. I have the webcams around the island to confirm where the clouds are, where the whitecaps are—basically where the problems are, where visibility is insufficient and the wind speed is too high. For me, flying is mainly about seeing where the limits are, and I get that from the webcams; what happens throughout the day, I get that from the airport weather. Plus, clear weather diagrams from the meteorological center. But a model doesn't depict that. A single wind model with all sorts of datasets, like from Meteo Blue and so on—you can choose all sorts of models. Unfortunately, that doesn't work.
We've tried that enough times already. It leads to searching for a needle in a haystack. So, for example, you look for the needle in the case of the wind, and then you end up at the wrong haystack.
That means if you're a traveling pilot going to the island, you often run the risk of actually being at the wrong launch site if you don't have a local somehow helping you out.
Exactly, it's always worth having your phone with you, and these days it doesn't cost a cent anymore, roaming is included, and the data volume is included too. You're welcome to call me—not at seven in the morning at sunrise, I unfortunately can't assist with those kinds of flights, I'm still dreaming of nice afternoon flights then—but basically, I'm available at any time to check if the pilot is in the right spot, and I can inform him about all the possible microclimate effects if he's at this and that launch site at this and that time, and what he needs to see to ensure his safety, and what the flight planning would look like from this and that launch site to this and that landing field. I mean, I know the island like the back of my hand.
How often have you experienced it yourself, and perhaps had negative experiences with it, where some weird weather phenomena occur around an island like that, which then sort of surprise you in the air? For example, how often does it happen that you're flying, and then the trade wind somehow breaks through, comes over from behind, and suddenly hits you as a cold downdraft?
Just the day before yesterday.
My colleague took off with a passenger. It took me a bit longer, longer, longer, and then came hot air, cold air, hot air, cold air. The forecast also clearly showed that the air cools down significantly at altitude. There were inversion layers, the wind accelerated below the inversion layer, and so on, and so on. I didn't feel comfortable, and after fifteen minutes of paragliding with the passenger, I hooked up and said, well, let's just leave that. It'll get better over the next few days. And my flying colleague landed, called me, and just said that if he had known what was coming his way, he wouldn't have taken off. Okay, he finished the flight cleanly. It was just before landing that cold air masses came over the mountains,
Warm air from the beach going up and so on. The glider never collapsed. But comfortable and stress-free flying looks different. So, almost nothing happens to us, the locals, while flying that would be attributable to any kind of weather phenomenon. The ones who fly here, they've learned this; they can read all the signs, they know what's coming, or rather they feel or see the danger that's brewing, so to speak. So if they—we actually fly like this, you'd never go flying in the Alps. You see five kilometers ahead, okay, there's the rotor crown, 200, 300 meters above you, the trees are bending.
We fly, but we don't fly that high. If you see that in the Alps, you don't go flying. Or maybe your last name is Mauer and it's currently X
-Alps. That means you're flying, you see boundaries where you say, I definitely shouldn't fly over there. But I'm still in the safe zone here. But how do you know that your area stays safe? Like, how can you just say, okay, as long as I stay in this altitude band, everything will be fine? How can you be so sure about that?
First, constant monitoring during the flight. You have to keep thinking and maybe check the flight instrument—so, the heading—to see what altitude you're at right now. Is it already coming out of the sea or not? The transition is often very smooth; it's not digital. Second, of course, reading the weather forecast to see what happens during the day. What's happening with wind direction, temperature, and humidity at altitude. So, a certain amount of flight planning, a rough flight plan based on what happens during the day. Do I have to be careful in the afternoon or will everything be fine? So, will it just be easy? That's the basic requirement. And as I said, always during the flight, also with the other pilots flying there, compare what's going on right now. All flying objects are sources of information.
And if they start rocking too much, even though it's not usually common for their glider to rock like that, then you don't have to fly over there. For example. So we actually fly into an area bordered by no-go zones. Above us, to the right, to the left, and outside. Actually, yeah. You wouldn't do that. I can remember a situation. Andelsbuch, I think it was. You look north towards the launch site, out to the north, and then you look over towards the west and see the big clouds coming over Lake Constance and so on. Then you normally wouldn't fly there or you fly down relatively fast. With us, it's different.
As long as it's all still back there, like 1, 2, 3 kilometers away and so on, we take off and fly. Because we know it can't get any closer. Those are completely normal island-typical effects. But that just means you have to be able to read and assess it accordingly.
But that requires the corresponding years of experience to know that when the clouds are being pushed out of the valley back there, that's the cold air flowing down. But it doesn't necessarily reach me. Or it might even be directed back toward you as a vortex, because it first goes out over the water and then basically turns left or right again, and might even create an updraft for you.
Exactly, that's also due to the island's topography. The mountain range to the west—it gets lower and lower. And behind our landing site, we have mountains that are 400 meters higher, plus a plateau that's several kilometers wide, I think 5 kilometers, which is also a source of warm air, a thermal source, that lifts the tailwind over us once again. And if you know the topography, if you know, sure, the sun is setting there, and accordingly, the first shadows and the first outflowing air masses appear in this and that valley, which you can read off the sea surface. Yes, if you can add all of this together,
then you can immediately picture it, is it still good here or when should I go for a landing? It's disadvantageous if you have to land on the landing field from the sea. That's, of course, every dry landing. And if you can also walk away from the landing field or from the top landing field, it's still a good landing, but that doesn't have to be the case.
How often has it actually happened to you that you've been pushed out onto the sea and had to make a water landing? I can
I can remember a situation where I even chose the water landing on purpose. I was flying with Thorsten Siegel during an event. It might have been 2000 or 2001. I think it was 2001. Yeah, we were all surprised by how the air masses suddenly started dropping towards the sea at 5 meters on the windward side. And if you're flying vertically down at 5 meters onto a small meadow surrounded by large rocks, there are two possibilities. Either you bounce it off, or I chose the harbor basin next door because I could swim and you can't break your legs there. The glider just gets wet, that's all.
And as I said, equipment and gear can be replaced very quickly, bones cannot. And Thorsten Siegel was surprised too. He landed about 200, 300 meters further down on the beach. And yeah, we had never experienced anything like that before. But those are the kinds of effects where you might choose the sea voluntarily. Sometimes it's even life-saving if you land in the water, because you can be rescued. On different coastal areas, hardly anyone can help you. Let alone anyone seeing that you landed there. Or fell down. But I've never been washed out into the sea by the weather. I always recognized it in time.
And there are descent aids. Of course, you shouldn't have just tested and checked them off in A- or B-theory. You should be able to use them, whether it's a B-stall, a steep spiral, or, or, or. That's part of the training.
Has it happened more often, like with your 21-year-old Madeira story, where tourists who aren't familiar with many of these effects and can't read the weather signs as well, find themselves inevitably landing in the water or something like that?
With holiday flyers, guest flyers who fly far too rarely, who mainly fly on vacation and then push the limits especially much, I've noticed several times that at sunset, when the cold air masses come down from the mountains, the thermals at the cliffs up front naturally get even better, better temperature difference. There are some who then turn up and were able to look over the island and were standing up there in the north wind. So if in the evening these thermals work better than at noon when the sun is shining or in the afternoon, I have to say, that has something to do with overmotivation or ignorance and so on. You never have to wonder why you then end up landing in the sea. So you should actually pay attention to what you're doing, what element you're in, and which side of the island you're on.
I don't explain that at all, because when things go wrong, I usually still get calls and have to provide an explanation, and then I become the point of contact for all sorts of people. And that is, of course, very unpleasant at times. And as I said, I didn't choose that when I set up my base there, that I would also have to deal with stuff like that. I want everyone to be happy, that we can all celebrate something together after every flight day and then happily take to the air again the next day.
What was your own most intense experience with strange weather or other phenomena while flying on Madeira?
Right at the beginning, on the day I signed the life insurance to secure the house mortgage, I went flying on the north side. It was summer, though, and the north side works relatively well then. And then I flew out towards the East Cape, which is also the airport's approach path. I still remember the great videos at the East Cape with Raul and Richard and Felix, the acro pilot, with Jimmy Pacher and so on. They all flew out the back. Of course, they had much better gliders, obviously. And they can also fly much better than I can. I saw the footage and thought, wow, today is the day, today you're going to fly out there too.
And of course, I wasn't out there with the same gear, and from a certain point on at the back of the Cape, behind Maschiko, behind Kanissal—where the approach path starts and the CTR has already begun—I couldn't get back anymore. I was just moving backwards and constantly upwards towards the airport. And that's when I realized, oops, every now and then you should try to fly back to see if it's still possible. It wasn't. There was very little land beneath me, and a large cliff and a massive empty space were to be expected below.
And a high-voltage line from a power plant, from an industrial park. And for me, it was clear: I have to get down here now, and very quickly. And what I knew well, what I mastered very well, was the steel spiral. And that went over 20 meters, up to 24 meters. That's due to the glider, of course. It probably isn't even possible anymore today; if the gliders go, I can't get down that easily anymore. And with this steel spiral, suddenly the glider was gone from above. And with such high acceleration and such high centrifugal forces, I didn't expect the glider to be able to collapse. In the red, in turbulent air, it actually happened and there wasn't much left of the glider. The altitude was still sufficient. I was still maybe 200, 300 meters above the ground.
But the rescue glider I had in front of me, the front rescue, that was just the tandem rescue. It was obviously way too big for the altitude. Even assessing that rationally, it really surprised me how, yeah, how should I put it, how cool I was that I hadn't done it yet—throwing the 60-square-meter tandem rescue. I would have guaranteed landed somewhere in the sea. So I just waited. Waited, waited, waited, waited, until I was maybe only 100 meters high. And suddenly the glider opened up again and at some point even that giant ball alone opened up again, as if by some ghostly hand. And the landing was then extremely gentle in the industrial park, which had just been leveled out beneath me, where solar panels are now mounted. You wouldn't be able to make an emergency landing like that anymore these days.
But the worst part, as I said, was the adrenaline level. It was so high, I was shaking for 12 hours. It was unbelievable. And this experience, where unprocessed life events from the sandbox to the present flash through your head—this experience is pretty terrible and stays in your bones for a long time. And I also swore to myself that I don't want to do that again. So foresight is extremely, extremely important. Stress while flying, it knocks you back so much, it takes away your safety, your experience, and everything is almost reset to zero. So, did you not fly for a while after that? Well, I flew again immediately the next day.
But with every little shake and jolt of the glider, I was almost paralyzed, like an ice pillar. It stayed in my bones for weeks, months.
So, that means you somehow, by flying again and again and so on, basically erased it from your system bit by bit. Or did you also get some other kind of mental help somewhere or something?
So I flew that terror out of my bones through daily flying and, of course, probably eventually through provoked collapses, full stalls, and base falls. And yeah, you have to deal with the subject matter intensively because... the mistake had been flying there. The mistake had also been believing that a steep spiral is a very, very stable maneuver where the glider can't collapse and so on. Well, at that time, I wasn't that aware of it. But you learn. I learn every day—after 21 years of flying every day, I'm still learning every day. That's how free I am now.
Hartmut, let's start wrapping things up now. I have a few more touristy questions. Especially for listeners who might be considering traveling to Madeira and such. When is the best time of year to fly there? Even if you say, yeah, you can fly all year round. Is there still something like a time when you could say, at least for flying, it's perhaps still the better one?
So anyone who likes flying in shorts and a T-shirt should come in the summer. You can take off from cloud-free mountains in over 20, 25 degrees. The thermals are unfortunately not that good. When the air is naturally pushed over from Africa, cross-country flying is of course more demanding or almost impossible at all. But you can fly much longer every day. If you come in the autumn, so from October, November to March, April, when the air masses coming from the sea are cooler, the fun with the thermals is much greater. For aerobatic pilots, a lot of fun is guaranteed there too; the thermals are tight and strong, 5, 6, 7 meters per second. So aerobatic pilots don't have to land down there either; they can do their whole program all day
live out above the launch site. But that's for active flying, active pilots. And the less experienced ones and family flyers, holiday flyers, they are very, very well looked after here on the island between May and October.
When traveling to Madeira, you mentioned that you offer rooms yourself, but those are probably booked up pretty quickly and so on. What would you consider the best location on the island to stay if someone travels there, maybe even with a partner in the middle, where they say, "Oh, I want to go flying sometime, but we also want to go hiking or something else." In which corner of the island would it be best to stay to have, overall, the shortest travel times to the interesting spots?
So paragliding happens extremely often, almost every day in the Caleta, Madalena do Mar, Arco da Caleta region, so on the southwest side. And as I said, there are also beaches, there are diving schools, and there are hikes directly up into the mountains. Tourism there is still very rural, with little hotel tourism, mainly apartment and vacation rental tourism. And I can only recommend that, because that's the sunny side of the island.
How do you see things with the classic stuff, where people book all-inclusive packages and say they have a hotel somewhere near Funchal or something where they'll be staying? Would that be a reasonable overall solution, or would you rather say to make it more of an individual experience?
So my suggestion would be, there are package hotels and package tours, especially in the Canizal area, which was the island's first tourist destination. Funchal came after that, but that's already a half to three-quarter hour's drive from the southwest. And you have to drive back again in the evening.
If I want nature, the sea, mountains, flying, and so on, then the southwest is actually by far the best area to relax in. There are hotels here too—smaller hotels, large hotels—that also offer package deals.
Funchal—I think Funchal is a very, very beautiful city. But for me, it's also sufficient that you can get there in half an hour. You can spend the whole evening there, the whole day, and then head back out of the city in the evening. It is already significantly more hectic, with much more vehicle traffic, many more people, much more noise, and of course, much more exhaust fumes than out here in the countryside, which has now been significantly expanded.
If someone comes to you as a pilot, since it's on the island, are there any special regulations to follow? Like, do you need any specific registrations, special insurance? Should you bring any particular equipment?
When you come to Madeira, sure, normal insurance and a pilot license are sufficient; the EpiCard doesn't hurt, but no one asks for it here. But of course, in the event of an accident, it's naturally advantageous to have the documents with you. What you don't necessarily need—you don't need three jackets, thermal gloves, you don't need three flight instruments and so on. You can bring all that. You can bring a liege harness. You don't necessarily have to bring a boomerang; that's more of a disadvantage. A good 1-2 glider or something like that, ENB, high-end, and a C-glider is completely sufficient.
And yeah, you shouldn't just show up in sandals. Like I said, on a pebble beach with round stones, you can easily twist an ankle. Even if you go down to the beach, there aren't that many sandy beaches here. Otherwise, I'd say you can just come here normally, no special preparation needed. This isn't the high Alps; you don't need an oxygen mask or anything like that. Very rarely do we have snow up in the mountains for 3 or 4 days, or 5 days a year. That means everything is very smooth. It's the island of eternal spring or spring-summer. And there are no nasty insects, no snakes, and no... Oh, I don't know. Some other vermin that might bite you here.
So, it's very relaxed here on the island.
Is cross-country flying possible on Madeira too? And within what scope?
Cross-country flying, yes. The routes flown from my launch site are about 20, 25 kilometers away. You can't go much further. Either the island ends or the controlled airspace of Funchal Airport, the Cristiano Ronaldo Airport, limits the flying. It's similar on the north side. I've documented all my flights between 2007 and 2018 in the global flight database Leonardo. So that's linked directly here by the DAV. XC is the same platform, just the international one. You can look up all the flights there. There's a specific league called the XC Madeira Open. All the flights on Madeira,
between Madeira and Porto Santo, which took place in the plan square. They are all documented there. And anyone can click in and orient themselves by the respective seasons and years to see when and where which flights were made. I was usually able to submit around 500 flights per year.
200 to 300, 350 flight hours per year, no problem.
You can do plenty of research. There's Thermel 7kk, I believe—it's an internet platform where thermals and flight routes are visualized. You can zoom in on Madeira there and clearly see the hotspots where people fly, where most of the flights are, and the biggest, best routes and thermals. There's plenty of information material. If anyone wants it, I can send the links. That might be quite helpful as background information. There's also a world flight database with the flight areas. Paragliding 365, Paragliding Earth—you can find launch sites there too. So you can prepare at home as well. But as I said, I'm always available on-site.
You can WhatsApp me or chat via Signal and so on. We'll get together and everyone will get the information they need to have the best possible flying experience.
Cross-country flying, you said about 20 kilometers are possible from your side. When I imagine the terrain, or rather from what I still remember, cross-country flying up there is really the thing. If you don't land down at the beach, there are pretty much no landing options. They're also always towards the sea, there are always these small, pretty rugged valleys with little streams flowing down into them and stuff like that. So, if you want to do cross-country flying there, it's pretty much like you should know what you're doing, or rather you have to be quite brave.
Do you see it that way too?
That's how it is. But what I've learned, as I said, coming from my classic DRV flight training and flying that way, is that I initially saw too few landing fields for my taste. In reality, it's like this: you're flying, you have thermals, and as long as you're going up, you don't need to look down. I learned from many Swiss paragliders who flew into the interior where there are no landing fields at all, but there were thermals there. And as long as you're going up, you don't have to worry about landing fields. That's not necessarily my strategy. I'd always like to have direct access to plan B, and I'd like to have that ready at all times. In a steep landscape like Madeira, it's often not even possible to see the landing field. But if you fly out towards the coast and see, oh, okay, I'm 500 meters up, I can actually glide for another five kilometers, there's always something.
It's just visually very, very unusual that you don't see that there are landing sites. You practically always find something, so of course you have to take care of that well in advance. If you're just drifting somewhere and hoping you'll find something, that's obviously not the best option.
That means the sides of the island are basically so steep that you can normally fly at least until you reach the sea and maybe still hit that small bay, the small pebble beach, or something like that.
Exactly, and usually there are roads and paths along the coast down there. So, the connection to civilization is guaranteed and you can get away once you've landed somewhere. Or you can hitchhike your way out. And yeah, the worst experiences are when you even get hitched all the way back to the launch site, even though the person driving you had no plan to drop you off there. And they even come to look and carry your glider down for you. We've had experiences, it was so extremely funny. Just different from what I experienced in the northern Alpine region.
Where is the
cross-country flight record from Madeira?
I mean, I know that I still flew it within my limits of 73 or 74 kilometers, but I think—I'll have to check—I flew it on the north side. But that's also an accumulated distance with three turnpoints and so on. So, how is that, are those four legs? Exactly, three turnpoints. That means there
you ride down one side of this island several times from west to east and then eventually land down on the beach.
Or you land because your GPS runs out of battery along the way. Yeah, that happened to me. After over 66 kilometers or something. That was a bit frustrating too. Yeah, it's actually true that when good weather conditions occur, you don't have to work for it at all. As I said, Alfredo Studer, who won the XC World Cup once, described it like this: the 15 kilometers on Madeira are about as strenuous as 100 kilometers in the Alps. Because when you gain altitude there, you're at the base in no time. That means you only have 300, 400 meters of working altitude. Then you only have 2, 3 kilometers of range until you have to find the next thermals, and so on. And in the Alps, that's naturally a completely different dimension. That's how you have to imagine it.
That's the 1,200, 1,300 kilometers of the Alps shrunk down to 60 kilometers. And you could say that's flying in a test tube. In other words, in a very confined space, or a storm in a glass of water.
And did you just say you uploaded all your flights? Up until 2018? Not after that? And why not?
Quite simply, I switched laptops. I didn't manage to install any drivers for the old serial interface. I still had an Ercodec XC Trainer with a serial interface, and I actually didn't succeed with that. And then I just let it slide for a bit. And then I just left it completely. That was 10 or 11 years, which was enough to see that you can be number one in the world in flights or flight hours almost every year. So, always in the top 10 in this statistical evaluation. And that was enough for me.
Nowadays, you can fly with your phone and upload a pressure of the IGC file right after the flight and so on. I don't do that anymore either.
Have you become calmer as a pilot over the years?
I've become extremely calm. Tomorrow is one day, the day after is another. I have two tandem pilots who are also top-notch and can handle passengers very, very well. I help them out. They have families, they have kids. Due to Corona, they've had a bit more downtime than I have. I'm happy to help them and I always let them go first, supporting everyone so that everyone has a lot of fun flying—every vacationer and so on. So, I don't fly ahead to show that it's possible anymore; those times are pretty much over. I only do that very rarely now, or for TV shoots. Next week, for example, we have something for a big music video and all that. Sure, I'll take part in that, of course. But the crazy times, the wild times, I've left those behind.
Now you mainly only fly from your launch site with a small radius around it, which is what you can mainly do in terms of cross-country flight. When you've been doing that for 21 years now, do you ever get tired of it, or do you get bored of always flying at the same spot, where you'd say, "Actually, I know it like the back of my hand"? Are there still any positive experiences and real surprises where you say, "Hey, I'm still getting energy out of that"?
That is actually the case every single day. And I only fly when I enjoy it. And that's almost every day. I'm not joking, a lot of people don't understand that. They just ask, "He flies in the same place and does the same thing every day," and so on. Every flight is different, every minute is different. For me, I don't feel like I'm flying in a routine loop. It's always something new. The smells, the scents, the views, and as I said, with the passengers, the feedback. And for me, after 21 years, there is still very, very, very much fun in it. No routine, not at all. Every flight is new. And every perfect landing is new. It's always a new challenge.
Is there a flight you'd like to do on Madeira? Like, something on your to-do list, bucket list, or something like that?
What have I never successfully completed? A flight from the mountain peaks. Someone else has managed that a bit differently. For example, Mario Eder did it. And even with a high-performance glider, they could only make one more turn at landing to still manage to glide in at the landing field. That is a very, very interesting cross-country flight with hardly any altitude gain. I've skipped that one so far. But the day will come, I'll go up the mountains, maybe with light equipment. Then I'll do the flight sometime. And I'll take in the landscape gliding by underneath me.
That hasn't happened yet because there are still very, very many passengers coming. And because I also have a lot of fun being out with the passengers and the other pilots at my launch site. But at some point, it'll pull me back up into the mountains, into the solitude. And then I'll do those flights again. That
would be a flight from the highest, from the highest mountain of Madeira. That's somehow a bit more than 1800 meters, I think. And then north or south?
It can go north or south. Towards the south, there are very, very deep, steep gorges on the way. Especially appealing. But very, very few or no landing sites. It will probably go more towards the north. So it goes from Pico Ruivo, 1861 meters. There is a takeoff area there that's just enough for the paraglider. There shouldn't be much wind. But there should be a bit of wind. That's not often the case either. It will probably be quite early tomorrow, before the clouds move in. And that, I think, could be a flight on the north side. There are also landing possibilities there, not such deep gorges and wind systems that would then be unpredictable.
That's still on my to-do list. So far, I've only ever hiked up, hiked up, hiked up. And well, you sit up there and think, yeah, it would be cool to fly from up there too. When you were hiking up, did you always have your gear with you?
Not so much in recent years. When I go hiking, for example, I'm actually just going hiking. Until five or ten years ago, I always had my glider with me. But nowadays I can switch off and say, okay, today let's leave the glider at home. I don't always need to have it with me.
Okay, Hartmut. Thank you for your story about the island of Madeira with all its real ups and downs, or rather all its meteorological difficulties and everything you have to watch out for. Certainly a very, very exciting story. I hope that you will manage to make that great flight from the summit of Madeira again sometime. And if not, probably, since you say you've become calmer, you'll likely also enjoy just sitting at your launch site and watching the others try to land perfectly again at your cliff, up on the beautifully seeded mountain. Then you can also peck at some chickens on the green grass and around there, and so on.
I've also got a goat now, a launch site goat, who's currently taking care of the blackberries growing in the neighborhood. And the rabbit mowers—or lawn mowers, I mean rabbit mowers—the ones that take care of the lawn at night, they're being prepared again right now. They're being trained. So we actually have relatively biological conditions there. We don't work on the lawnmower anymore. We actually work with the little animals, our pets, which can also be a small children's zoo for the passengers who bring their kids along. So that's also great. Chicks are running around. But it's all free, nothing is fenced in. And I think that's pretty unique in the world, to find something like that at a launch site. And a pool and accommodations partly underground. That's also quite new.
Thanks to the big C, we had plenty of time to let loose here and tinker with things, building and constructing to expand the infrastructure. So we didn't let our heads hang. We did other things here. Great,
Hartmut. So, thanks for your story and all the best.
That was Hartmut Peters in conversation with Lucian Haas. If you want to learn more about paragliding on Madeira, Hartmut's flights, and his offers for guest pilots on the island, you can find a series of further links in the show notes for this podcast episode on Looglides. If you enjoyed the episode, please listen to and recommend Podz-Glidz. You can find all podcast episodes on Looglides and Soundcloud. They are also available in well-known audio catalogs like Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, etc. Of course, you can also subscribe to Podz-Glidz in your podcatcher of choice.
And finally, one more request. If you aren't already, please become a supporter of Looglides and Podz-Glidz. By doing so, you help me continue to present you with more in-depth stories from the world of paragliding in the future. As a freelance journalist, I also live off the work on or the income from these projects. You can choose the amount of your contribution completely freely. Quite simply, you can give whatever you feel the offer is worth and seems fair. If you're unsure now and think, oh boy, how much should I give? Then for simplicity's sake, you can use the following suggestion as a non-binding guide. One euro per podcast episode and 2 euros per reading month on Looglides. Of course, you can listen to a few episodes first and read Looglides over several months and then make a lump-sum contribution.
Payments can be made easily via PayPal or bank transfer. You can find all the necessary details on my blog Looglides, specifically on the Support page. Until next time. Ciao.