I have a flight school. Before the volcanic eruption, the flight school was a 15-minute drive from my house. The last time I went down there, it took me five hours. At the moment, the entire area is evacuated, including where the flight school is. And we've had to vacuum everything out by the end of the year.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Roger Frey and Lucian Haas on the mic.
Imagine you live on a beautiful vacation island. You run a flight school and offer a flight guide service. You're looking forward to the upcoming season, when many winter refugees from cold Europe come to you again. And then a volcano erupts not far from your house. That's what happened to Roger Frey. The 60-year-old Swiss man has lived on La Palma for 16 years. He is an expert on the island's special weather conditions. Locally, he is the most important contact for paraglider pilots who want to fly there safely. But this winter, his customers will likely stay away. For weeks, masses of lava have been flowing from new craters on the Cumbre Vieja ridge on La Palma, burying entire villages. And there is no end in sight.
In this episode 69 of Podz-Glidz, Roger tells us what it's like to live with a constantly hissing volcano in the neighborhood. The moments of fascination, detaching from the nerve-wracking helplessness when this destructive natural phenomenon buries entire landscapes and takes away everything many people possessed. Of course, we also talk about paragliding on La Palma and its particularities. Although the flight regions are currently closed, Roger firmly expects that the pilots will return as soon as the volcano has calmed down. If you enjoy this podcast, you can support my work on it in various ways. You can help make Podz-Glidz better known, for example, by recommending the podcast in conversations with flying friends or via social media.
Of course, you can also support Podz-Glidz and the associated blog Lu-Glidz financially. You can find out how you can easily become a supporter without any obligation on the Lu-Glidz website, specifically on the Support page. Before we get started, one last note. You can hear a deep rumbling in the background throughout the podcast. That's the volcano, which also provided the soundtrack for the recording of this conversation.
Roger, what's the volcano doing?
Yes, it changes its face every day. It's been keeping us on our toes for over six weeks now. And today it's very loud. Loud. How can you imagine that? It's rumbling the whole time.
or what do you hear?
You can imagine it like a jet plane going full throttle near your house, and then every now and then you get these waves of sound. So it gets a bit louder and then a bit quieter again, and sometimes there's a bang. It really keeps us on our toes. And how loud is it?
something like that? I mean, really, because you're saying jet, is it as loud as a jet, or is it more like you'd say, okay, there's an airport about ten kilometers away and I can just hear it now?
No, it's really as loud as a jet. The house is in the first line that wasn't evacuated. I'm north of the volcano and the thing erupted three kilometers from my house. So that's damn close. And when you're drinking on the balcony, do you look directly at the volcano? Luckily, no. So now at my office, I have a window that does face the direction of the volcano, but fortunately, there's a garage in front of it. So I don't have to see it every day. You don't want to see it at all, either. Like, constantly see it. No, I take photos every day and put them online. I see it every day, but I have enough volcanoes.
It wouldn't bother me if it stopped tomorrow.
Okay, so he's been at it for over 40 days now. Is it really to the point where everyone is actually annoyed by it now?
Yeah, well, you can tell people are getting fed up, their patience is wearing thin, people are a bit annoyed. A lot is happening. We've had to evacuate over 7,000 people, some of them are staying with friends, they're still looking for apartments and housing, and those are just psychological burdens that are there. Then we have earthquakes constantly. So, I don't think it's very bad right now, but it always depends on how things are built. If the house shakes, nobody finds that funny, and many people actually get scared. And this mix of uncertainty, that's what's stressful.
already. When there are earthquakes like that, what does it mean for you? Do you always jump out of the house quickly so the ceiling doesn't fall on your head? It's not that bad.
it's not that bad and the earthquakes are also relatively short. You're not supposed to jump out of the house—that's the first thing, so that a brick doesn't fall on your head—but you wouldn't have any time anyway. So it thumps, it shakes you for a brief moment, and usually, in a second, it's over. But with
with all the noise and everything, where you're saying the volcano basically shapes your whole day and probably the night too.
Can you even sleep? I can sleep well. Last night was the first night where I woke up twice because of earthquakes. So otherwise, I actually sleep through. But I notice I'm sleeping more lightly than before. So you're somehow a bit tired all day. Do you wear earplugs to basically block out that hissing from the volcano? Luckily, I renovated the house a few years ago and put in very, very good windows. So I can close them and then I just hear its background hum, and you can get used to that. If you now...
when you step out in front of the house every day and see that it's still hissing. What do you feel when that happens? Is it also the case that you sometimes say,
Just pure humility? Or what kind of feelings are they?
I can probably describe the whole range best. When you look at the volcano at night, when we have a westerly wind and the clouds are blown away, you can just see the volcano. It's somehow fascinating; it has a certain aesthetic. But when I turn my head a bit toward the sea, where I used to see villages and houses and all sorts of things, there's only black left. It's a massive lava field that has opened up there. There's the whole spectrum of fascination and that certain aesthetic, and the suffering that people here have experienced with the volcano. Everything is just in there. It's almost a bit of a strange feeling.
You said earlier that 7,000 people are not in their homes right now. I mean, many houses were also destroyed. How many of those 7,000 are actually in a position where they're saying they've truly lost their home and land because the lava is now over it?
Well, there are different figures. The Copernicus satellite counts buildings. There, it's two and a half thousand. But "buildings" means structures. So a house with a pool and a garage counts as three buildings. The number of truly destroyed ones, from the figures yesterday—I have to check quickly—is a bit over 1,000. So, 1,100 actual residential houses. That is extremely high for an island with 82,000 inhabitants.
But the land has basically been lost too, because there's just lava on top of it now. You couldn't just say, "Once it stops, I'll rebuild my house in that spot." Instead, you have to say that there's now a piece of eventually cooled stone there that you can't really do much with at first. So the land is also lost as land, as such. Or am I seeing that wrong?
You're seeing that completely correctly.
An acquaintance of mine who also lost his house said quite clearly, look, if my house had burned down, I'd still have the land. Then I could start over. But with ten meters of lava on the property, you can't really do anything at the moment. Or you can do something, but it'll take significantly longer, of course.
And have you seen that with many people? You're also three kilometers away from this volcano. Do you also have to fear that lava could reach you? Or are you located on a slope such that you'd say the volcano will always, everything it erupts will always flow towards the sea somehow, but won't reach me at all?
So if the situation doesn't fundamentally change—meaning if the volcano stays there and there isn't a second volcano—then my house isn't in danger regarding flowing lava at the moment. The lava flows to the west. I'm to the north of the volcano. The volcano's cone is about 1,000 meters above me. My house stands at 600 meters. So, based on the slope and the location and everything, that's simply not enough. The lava will flow to the west. But of course, it's possible that something could fundamentally change. That can't be ruled out.
The volcano could erupt with lava in another location, and then, for example, that would be much closer to your house.
That is theoretically possible. It's a second volcano, that a second volcano forms. If the pressure in the system becomes too great—we currently have two magma cells below the island. One between 10 and 15 kilometers and the second at about 35 kilometers deep. If too much flows in there and can't flow out at the front, it is theoretically or even practically possible that this magma, which is then being pushed up, seeks out a new path. Do you have...
but de facto, are you actually afraid right now, like saying I could really lose my own house here, or do you just push something like that aside? I see it's over there, I'm actually still safe.
So, I'm not really the extreme emotional type. I look at it a bit more scientifically, and the probability of it heading further north is significantly smaller because the path is longer. So the magma cells are located south of the volcano, and if they're looking for a new path, physics is the path of least resistance; if it goes another three, four, five kilometers further north, then it's almost ruled out. So I'm actually quite calm. But
if I see that correctly, you've at least lost something by then, because in the end, you've lost your job in a way. You work as a paraglider guide on La Palma, and if I see that correctly, this whole season, the classic winter season on La Palma, is probably completely ruined by the volcano. There you have
you're absolutely right. So I'm whispering,
I am
I'm a flight instructor, I have a flight school. Before the volcanic eruption, the flight school was 15 minutes away from my house by car. The last time I went down there, it took me five hours. But that was with police checkpoints, escorts, and all sorts of things. At the moment, the entire area is evacuated, including where the flight school is. And we've had to cancel everything until the end of the year. So, November and December are cancelled. We'll see if anything is possible in January. So, I just have to wait and see.
For everyone who doesn't know you yet. You say you have a flight school on La Palma. What exactly do you offer there? Can people really say, "I want to come to you as a student with no flight experience and learn on La Palma"? Or what is it that you offer there?
No, we don't actually do that. We do have a flight school. We do train people, but the training with us takes an extremely long time. So, if a student is here, because we have complex weather conditions, training takes about a year. So we can't offer that to people who are just coming here on vacation. We want to be serious and stay, and for that, you actually have to have your residence here. The second thing is, if we do training, we don't have the authorization to train according to DHV guidelines because we simply can't meet the requirements. So if we train, we would train according to Swiss guidelines. I am also a Swiss flight instructor, or according to Spanish guidelines. That means you would have to take an exam here in Spain or then in Switzerland.
But we don't actually do that because it's too complicated. We actually offer advanced training. This guide service we've developed is aimed at pilots who already have experience. So, not those who are ready for their exams, but those who are already certified and also already...
and we train them further with meteorology. La Palma is wonderful for explaining really, really a lot because it's a microcosm. And we also accompany the people because we fly here in the lee. That's a special story. You can do that very safely here. The thermals here in the lee are super gentle and beautiful to fly in. But the weather can change very quickly, and then we are in contact with all our pilots and would also tell them to go down and land.
We have a huge package here.
I'd like to talk to you a bit later about the special island weather. Let's stick with the flight school for now. How did you, as a Swiss person, end up opening a flight school on La Palma in the first place?
So, as a Swiss person, I first ended up going to La Palma. I had a job in the pharmaceutical industry and then at some point I said, I'm taking a sabbatical now, I'm stepping out, I'm going to do something else.
Then I dragged myself along and the thought eventually occurred to me that I could turn my hobby into a profession, and that's how I became a flight instructor. So I did the flight instructor training because I said I could offer something like this here, a guide service, because I thought—or realized relatively quickly—that the need is there because the island is very complex. But I didn't want to do that as a pilot; I said,
I want to do this as a flight instructor; I finished my Swiss flight instructor certification and then did the German one as well, just to have the technical competence to ensure the product is good.
And why La Palma right now? I mean, you said you already had a house there, that's one thing, but what appeals to you about going to fly on La Palma and then also offering a guide service? I'm before
came to La Palma for the first time in almost 30 years to go paragliding.
A friend of
...did I have... Was there even any infrastructure on the island back then? No. To do something like that, or was it completely wild and you could just go there and say, I'm going to start here and try it out?
That was absolutely wild. There wasn't a launch site at the nursery yet. We had to find launch sites ourselves and then test them out.
You also had to adapt a bit to the material back then. I mean, the glide ratios weren't that good. You couldn't just take off anywhere.
We tried everything ourselves. For a Swiss person, La Palma is like having everything on one small island. You have the mountains.
That's actually something that fascinates me a lot here on the island. The landscape is beautiful. If I'm currently spitting out a volcano. La Palma has actually fascinated me from the very first moment because it has many mountains in a very, very small space, and it's very steep. The nature here is very impressive and massive. Now with the volcano, it's even more massive. The first time I came to this island, I actually already left my heart here. How high are the mountains on La Palma? What
is that the highest?
The highest mountain is 2,426 meters high, Muchacho. The island is small. It's only 48 kilometers long. At its widest point, it's about 25 kilometers wide. So it's a relatively small island. In relation to this relatively strong elevation, it is one of the steepest islands in the world. It is
something like Madeira? In the sense that there are always very steep coastal areas and so on?
Yeah, exactly.
Something like Madeira. Now, that's not exactly easy for flying, because you're always saying, okay, you always have steep coastal areas, probably also few areas where you can land properly and stuff like that. Why do you choose something like that specifically to say, okay, I'll also start a flight school there and offer a guide service?
My idea was, I wanted to come to La Palma. I wanted to spend a year here. Then I stayed. That was the basic structure. I had my house, my plot of land.
Turning my hobby into a profession wasn't clear from the start. I knew I wanted to do something, something else. I looked into different things, from opening a restaurant to a brewery, all sorts of things. But then I somehow realized, yeah, maybe turning the hobby into a profession is the way to go, because I saw that you can certainly present it here as well. Then I teamed up with a Spanish flight instructor who had already been doing tandem flights here, and we built this up together and have been doing it together for 16 years now.
The classic season in the Canaries and also on La Palma, which is also on your page, is usually something like October to March, I read. Is it not possible to fly well on La Palma during the classic summer months, or is that just because people say...
We can fly in the Canaries, but no one flies to La Palma—do we mainly offer that in the winter?
So there are about 2 to 3 months in the summer where it's really difficult. Why? What's very important here on La Palma is that there's a stratus cloud in the lee during the day, which dampens the whole thing a bit, because if the sun just beats down on those black lava fields all day, then the thermals are small, difficult to center, and also a bit choppy. In the summer, there are maybe 2 months where we also have extremely many wind shifts, and that's just very demanding. So if you have a west wind, it flies great, but then it turns from north to south, and sometimes there are 7 wind shifts in one day, and you can't really offer anything decent anymore where you can say the people are having fun. So I go flying sometimes, but sometimes after 15 minutes I'm already fed up because it's just too demanding.
Because
even as a local, it can even be hard for you to always judge the conditions correctly.
I can assess it well, but it's just too stupid for me. You know, when you constantly have to fight against a wind and then you also have hack thermals, it's no fun; I'm not in the competition.
And in the winter months, is it all a bit calmer, would you say, and that's why the island becomes flyable?
During the winter months, well, even August is actually good, it
are just
no people. We really only offer this in the winter because we can't maintain a guide service for two or three people. So we need a certain volume to run all this infrastructure, the bus and everything. Yes, we normally open in October or November until March.
If people are looking for winter months right now and say, "Ah, I'd like to escape the European winter," the Canaries are an option—now there are all these different Canary Islands. What's the most interesting thing, why should I come to La Palma and not choose Tenerife or Lanzarote or El Hierro or something like that?
La Palma is
so it's actually a really good choice, because we have a very, very good infrastructure for the pilots here, you don't even find that on Tenerife, the ultimate paragliding island. We have a small flight school, we're the only flight school, but we also offer transport options, for example, for pilots who aren't in our guide service. So they can also go up with us. We offer different packages, so you can book a weekly package with us or just fly with us on a daily basis. And then, although flying here is in a small space, if you manage to pull off a cross-country flight here, it's a really great experience.
It's difficult to fly long distances here, mentally as well, because you have to plan so that you don't end up landing somewhere in a lava field. But if you manage to do it, it's wonderful and it works quite well too.
If you can already see what the volcano actually did or left behind on La Palma, in quotation marks, would you assume that flying on La Palma would now be significantly different because so much of the environment has been restructured in certain ways?
I don't think so. The area where the volcano erupted was already a difficult area to fly in anyway. Not many pilots flew in that area. The main flight area is Los Campanarios Jerez, which is significantly south of the volcanic eruption, and the normal cross-country flights are done to the south. It's easier there. Towards the north, the thermals are more difficult and, as I said, not many pilots flew there. It could even be that the volcano is positively influencing the wind, that we have fewer Foehn events in Bordeaux, but that remains to be seen. That's just the theory I've put together.
Whether that's actually the case, we'll have to see.
You just said Föhn. Usually, when people think of Föhn, they think of the Alps, where there's south Föhn or north Föhn and stuff like that. Now you're suddenly talking about Föhn on La Palma. Explain a bit what makes the weather conditions on this island so special?
So, what's really special is that we have completely different weather in a very small area. We could or can fly in Portonaus, where the airport might be closed. On the other side of the island. A straight line of 12–15 kilometers.
So, to put it into perspective, the official airport is on the east side of the island. Portoaús is on the west side of the island, and in between there is a higher mountain range that basically separates the two sides quite clearly.
Exactly, there's a mountain range in between called Cumbre Vieja. It runs pretty much north-south and separates both sides of the island. You can imagine it like in Switzerland, or the Alpine region in general, not just Switzerland—the Northern and Southern Alps. Only here, it's in a very small space. Then there's the fact that we have an inversion at about 1,000 meters here in winter, due to the Azores High. So, at 1,000 meters or more, there's an inversion. In Switzerland, in the Alps, it's significantly higher. Always. And this inversion then also separates the weather into weather below and weather above the inversion. So we already have, we have top and bottom, we have east-west and north-south, so it's possible that we have eight different weather conditions on this small island.
Depending on where you are on the island and at what altitude you are at that moment. Exactly. What do you mean by weather conditions, both in terms of wind, wind direction, and wind speed, or what else all plays into that?
Everything. It can rain, so in the northeast you can be surprised by heavy rain, and we in the southwest, we're flying. 25 kilometers as the crow flies. So anything is possible. Fog, rain, cold, sometimes snow in the winter, then Föhn events, then normal flyable weather conditions where it's stormy in other places. It's just a bit crazy.
What is a typical Föhn event on La Palma like? What does that look like?
So we're flying here in the lee. That means de facto we have a northeast trade wind. The northeast trade wind is usually strongest at sea level. That's something you have to wrap your head around a bit, because normally in standard flight areas, the wind increases with altitude. But here, the wind usually decreases as you go higher. That means we're sheltered behind that high mountain range we mentioned earlier, which is almost 2,000 meters high. And then we have this inversion at 1,000 meters. This inversion holds the wind back up to a certain extent. You can explain that thermodynamically. It simply isn't allowed to blow too hard. And the inversion has to be strong enough.
So we can go under this inversion, in the lee of the mountains, into an area that
is maybe 15, 10, 15 kilometers long and about 10 kilometers wide. In this area, you can then go paragliding.
That's like the safe zone, where you say the weather is
usable. Exactly. Normally. Of course, it can also be that the whole island is flyable. So if the trade wind becomes very weak with increasing altitude, it can be that we still have 20, 30 km/h northeast wind at sea level, but then we can fly past the island. Those situations exist too. That's a transitional situation where there's no inversion. Then suddenly you can fly over the island and see the sea below with white whitecaps because the wind is so strong.
How long did it take you to understand this special island weather system yourself and be able to explain which factors actually cause what, and when it's safe to fly in those conditions?
Well, it took me years. I sat down and worked at it over and over again. I used to come to La Palma on vacation and just watch the clouds. Until I finally had a real explanation—I put a model together—but to explain it physically, I needed the flight instructor training. That means, in the
Did you learn the meteorological basics in your flight instructor training that you needed to explain this island weather? Exactly. Then you probably had good meteorology teachers.
Yes, we had good meteorology teachers, and what was also very important with the Swiss flight instructor is that if you can't explain a sounding, you'll never pass the exam. So that's a very important point, and meteorological soundings are actually very, very fundamental here for La Palma in order to be able to explain what the wind and the clouds are doing.
Are soundings also launched on La Palma itself? So, are there actually real measured soundings, or do you base everything only on model soundings, like the GFS model or something else?
Well, you're always basing it on a model because the soundings happen twice a day. But of course, I compare the models with the actual measurements. There's a measurement taken twice a day on Tenerife. We're only 100 kilometers away, usually in the northeast trade winds. That means the air mass measured there also comes to us.
And the models I use, they're actually quite
usable. So, if you say the island is relatively small, are islands like that even depicted properly in these weather models—which often don't have such a fine grid, especially these global models that cover the Canary Islands?
So I use models where the islands aren't mapped. Because as soon as something gets calculated into it using algorithms, sometimes the results are just complete rubbish. So I take the GFS model, which doesn't have an altitude profile for La Palma. And then I make my own assessments based on what I see in that profile. That way I know what the wind is doing at the island itself. But when the models start calculating something, I'm not so comfortable with that.
So, you really look at how the wind would basically blow over the open sea at various altitudes, and then based on your experience, you say, okay, this wind up to a certain height is definitely blocked by this island and won't reach the other side with that same strength. And only if I see that the inversion is higher than, I don't know, whatever you take as the average value for your island—if it's higher than that, then I might have the risk that the northeast trade wind could break through to the other side as a Föhn.
Absolutely not. So I take the raw data—the measured and calculated raw data for wind, humidity, and temperature—and then I mentally project the island into it and say, okay, at this altitude, if the wind is that strong at 1,500 meters, then it just blows over that pass we have at this height. And I can tell from experience, and I'd rather do it that way than however some model calculates something that I don't exactly know what it's doing. Well, now that's...
something, if you say you've been on this island for 30 years and you're flying there now—I think you started flying there in 2005, am I seeing that right? So, I started flying on La Palma in 1994. Yes, okay, then you've really been on the island for a very long time and naturally bring an enormous amount of experience with you. How quickly would you—or would you even—trust pilots who just arrive on the island in any way to be able to assess the weather conditions of what's going on there?
There's the whole spectrum of pilots, of course. So, if a pilot has really educated themselves well in meteorology and is interested, you can explain to them relatively quickly how it all works. That's also the case—we have flight schools that come to us for the guide service, and we do weather training there, and the people benefit a lot. So, a pilot can certainly assess that themselves, but they have to be careful not to overestimate it. It's better if you really say it and grasp the things exactly, because the line between "fun and games" and being critical is suddenly very thin.
How often does it still happen that visiting pilots get caught in a weather trap on La Palma? Fortunately, it's very rare.
...become. So I also believe our flight school and our guide service help positively there, because if the pilots have questions that aren't in our guide service and we have the time, then we of course help them too. So it has become significantly less common for accidents to happen due to meteorological conditions.
If you were to say, out of x pilots coming to the island, what percentage or how many of them have contact with you in some way, so that you could say—even if you might not be doing the guiding for them directly—that ultimately, surely 80% of the people coming here, or something like that, get something offered by me to help them assess the weather?
So I'd say 100%. During the winter season, I publish a daily weather briefing on my website. Anyone can read it. And I do that because pilots often come to me and ask, "What's the weather going to be like today?" I simply don't have the time for that. I can't do an individual consultation for every single person. So, I put it online early in the morning and then people can check it out. If questions arise from that—for example, someone asks me, "You wrote it would be this and that, how is that explained?"—then I'd be happy to help out anytime, as long as we have the time. Sometimes we have 15 people in the guide service, and in those cases, I just can't go into detail with every single person who hasn't booked with us.
Islands have, well, two meteorologists—actually, they have many more, but let's say there are two typical aerodynamic effects. One is that they don't naturally block the high-altitude wind in a certain way, so it either goes over the island or it doesn't. The other, however, is that the wind is naturally deflected sideways around the island, and then corresponding lee vortices are created in the lee of the island, which then drop the wind back onto the coast in a different way. Because a sort of back-vortex forms there. Is there something like that which is very typical and prevails on La Palma accordingly? Absolutely.
That's actually the engine for our good weather. When we have the northeast trade winds at sea level, this wind is deflected in the north and south of the island. And at this zone from wind to no wind, where you can see whitecaps—no whitecaps, there—an intake effect happens. So in the south, air is sucked in from the north, and in the north, air is sucked in from the south. Toward this wind line. That means we have at least three currents: a west wind, a north wind, and a south wind on the lee side, resulting from what you explained earlier.
And then there are also the corresponding convergence zones where these currents meet, where you could also say it lifts particularly well, because I constantly have large-scale rising air masses, even if it might be slow?
Those large-scale rising air masses do exist, but you should avoid these convergences because if we fly south, for example, the north wind will increase the closer we get to this convergence zone. That means it will be harder to get back. If you fly into this convergence area, it might rise for a bit, but you won't know where the turbulence is coming from. You shouldn't fly into that. Sometimes there are convergences with very little wind that you can fly; those are really great, but the wind must never exceed 15 km, otherwise it becomes very, very messy.
That means, for the less experienced pilots, you usually tell them it's best to stay within this radius of the Campanarios launch site—for example, 10 km forward, not backward, because the mountains are there, but looking forward, so looking west, it's best to stay in that area and you can fly there relatively safely.
Exactly, so the inexperienced pilots, who want to be a bit within the glide path of the landing field anyway, they fly from the Campanarios launch site in the area where they are actually safe. We brief the cross-country flight pilots accordingly so that they already know what's happening. So as I said, one indicator now, if you're flying south, is an increasing north wind; you have to watch that closely, and if it suddenly pushes you south at over 50 km/h, then you have to turn around.
A lot of talk is always made about climate change and all that. Have you experienced anything like that over these 30 years in La Palma that makes you say,
have some of the basic weather conditions changed significantly over the years? Or is the trade wind system overall such a stable system that you don't really notice much of it there?
So what we've noticed is that significantly less rain has fallen in recent years. Whether that's climate change or just a local phenomenon that will eventually balance out, I can't say for sure at the moment. Climate is a long-term story, and you can't make a climate out of five or ten years. From my perspective, that's still just weather. I'm not sure. So the
Climate change exists worldwide; practically everyone agrees on that now. But whether I'm seeing something small-scale and local here that I could call climate change, I can't say.
From the experience you've gained over time flying on La Palma, especially regarding the weather, how much of that experience was, let's say, gained the hard way—in the sense that you actually had some stupid experiences and realized, "Oh, I really shouldn't be flying in these conditions," and then later asked yourself why, what was the mistake I actually made?
Yes, of course you always learn through experience, but I'm not the type to be reckless. I'm more of a reserved pilot. Luckily, I haven't had any major incidents that were very negative. I just dared to try it slowly and experimented. But always a little bit more, like how Judith Zweifel did the tumbling—flying for girls, slowly, then a little bit more, then back again, and so on, just building up a lot of experience over a long period without ever having flown into critical situations.
So that means you've never had an accident of any kind on La Palma yourself?
Right. So, when paragliding, you get hurt every now and then. I've sprained my hand once and my foot once. But that's not because of a completely wrong assessment of the situation, it's just—I sprained my foot because I wanted to land on the spot in a really reckless way.
I just ripped the glider off. It was a bit higher than I thought. That's just how stupid things can be, what can happen. If you've already had so many...
When you fly for years on La Palma, do you ever get to the point where you find it kind of boring? Like, you say, I've seen all of this before. The Northeast Trade Wind is always there from the northeast as usual, and the conditions that develop—at some point, you know the ten typical weather patterns and you already know what to expect and where you have to fly and all that, and you say, nothing new is happening for me anymore.
No, on the contrary. I mean, when you do a cross-country flight here, you can't plan it like in certain other areas where you can say, "The wind is coming from there, so you have to do this and that and that," and you can basically fly it. If you take off here, you always have to expect that the situation will change again and that you'll have to completely readjust your strategy. So it's always a lot of mental work too. It hasn't become boring for me yet, no. You lead
A logbook? Like a logbook where you always write down the specifics of flights to remember them over time? Or is it all experiential knowledge that you just feel in your gut? Yes,
I haven't kept a logbook for a long time now. I do write down the hours, just to have a bit of an overview of what the glider has to endure. But I don't write it all out anymore. No, it's a bit of a gut feeling.
Yeah. Well, you've written a book yourself, or rather several books. One is Meteorology for paragliders, which means "Thunder Weather." What led you to write this book?
So, that's the second book I've written. The first book is a funny story. The first book is "Streckenfliegen." That's the textbook for the B-license. I actually wrote that because when I was in the flight instructor training for the German flight instructor license, I honestly just couldn't find any good training material. And then I thought, well, if I want to offer B-license training on La Palma—and that was the original plan—then I need material. And the material I collected just kept getting bigger. It started as a normal PowerPoint presentation. And at some point, I said, I'm going to put this into a book.
And then you wrote this book, Cross-Country Flying.
Exactly. And then, after that, I wrote Donnerwetter.
written. Regarding cross-country flying specifically, did Burkhard Martens' books not exist back then? So, neither the cross-country flight logbook nor the thermals book by Burkhard?
Martens? Yes, yes, yes. That's not the same. I mean, Burkhard Martens' cross-country flight book is really about cross-country flights. And my book is actually about conveying the theoretical basics a pilot needs if they want to get their B license.
Okay. It's basically like a companion textbook so that you can actually master the topics that are also tested in the B-license exam. Or you can look things up if it says, okay, how is something converted or how do I find certain headings when cross-country flying, and stuff like that. That's all described accordingly there. Exactly.
And the basics that the pilot needs, the theoretical ones, that he has to have if he's taking the B-license exam. So it's not, it's complementary. It's not a competing product to Burkhard's cross-country flight book.
And the "Donnerwetter" was basically you saying, okay, for the PPL I also need meteorological knowledge, which I want to convey accordingly. Then I put that into a book format, and then it becomes "Donnerwetter."
Yes, with the meteorology book, I simply saw that there's a gap in the market. I mean, you have
Meteorology training is relatively modest. And you can look at Germany or Switzerland or Austria—it's relatively modest in all three countries, I think. And when you look into the literature, it gets complex pretty quickly. And that middle ground, where you say, the pilot who's interested in meteorology and wants to learn a bit more without it becoming too scientific—I found that there's actually nothing really suitable. And the book is supposed to fill that gap a bit.
Which, how should I put it, aspect of paragliding weather do most pilots basically understand the least from your perspective? Among the people who come to you—where you always say you're also providing further training for them—where is there basically the greatest need for catch-up or further education?
So I always make the joke and ask,
which weather maps the pilots were looking at. And we all always say, yeah, the surface weather map. And then I ask, yeah, and when are you on the ground?
And that actually hits the nail on the head. So you just look at the surface weather map and then try to imagine the weather from that. But the most important thing I actually have to give the pilots is the weather that's happening where they're actually flying. And if you're looking at the surface weather map, you don't have an overview of what's going on up there if you're doing a flight in the Alps at 2,000 meters. So I also generate the altitude weather maps, and I think that's actually a very good approach.
Which meteorological sources do you use for yourself?
So when I'm preparing the weather briefing here on La Palma, I look at about 20 different pages. Every day? Every day. So I start with the surface weather map, then comes the upper-air weather map, then I do a sounding, then I check Windi to see what it says, check the ECMWF and the GFS—so two different models. Then I look at the rain forecasts, and sometimes check if the different soundings match up in real-time, so the forecast and the sounding. They're checked against each other, so it's a lot of pages, but it's routine, you know, I go through it relatively quickly.
That's checked and the plausibility is verified, and then that's that.
Why is it, from your perspective, that so many paragliders—you just said it yourself—know surprisingly little about the weather, and why is paraglider training still, in some ways, so poor at this point? I know...
It's not. So, the training on a theoretical basis depends entirely on the flight instructor, that's crystal clear. And there are many flight schools that don't pay much attention to the subject. Many flight instructors also say, "Theory, theory, we want to fly," and I understand that too. I think that could be one reason.
Then the training books are also, in part, very
relatively superficial. And I think it's an important topic because it affects us every day—meaning the pilots. In
The main reason is that weather is the most important variable for a pilot. Both in terms of wanting to experience beautiful flights—where I want to know that the conditions are sufficiently good—and, at the same time, wanting to fly safely, of course, and wanting to know that the conditions are sufficiently safe. And I can only assess that in each case by knowing what the weather is actually doing. That's why I always find it interesting to see how few pilots, or how little many pilots, actually care about this topic in the end, but instead head out into the terrain quite unconcerned. Yes,
Maybe it's also because we flight instructors sometimes miss the chance to take this topic out of the dusty theory corner. And I have a huge playground here, of course. If I tell the pilots, "Listen guys, you can't fly," and then they fly a few anyway, I can put them on the bus and say, "Come on, let's drive ten minutes somewhere," and then I'll show you why. And if the Föhn is blowing there so hard they can barely stand up, and they can still see pilots flying within throwing distance, then the lesson is just better than on a chalkboard with some diagrams.
That's also the beauty of a small island like La Palma, where you can really say, I can drive ten kilometers further and show them the corresponding effect live, right there on site and in color. Exactly.
Let's put La Palma aside for a bit and jump back into your own story. If I saw it correctly, you started paragliding back in the mid-80s. And back then, paragliding was still very much in its infancy. You were certainly among—not the pioneers, but probably one of the first paragliders there was in Switzerland. How did you get into paragliding back then? That's also...
a strange story. I actually got into paragliding because the diving school was closed. The diving school? The diving school. So, I wanted to do something with my brother, we said we'd do something together. And then we wanted to learn to dive. And we went there and the diving school was closed. So we put that topic aside again and somehow later my brother says to me, "Oh, I just saw some ad for a paragliding theory course, not much can go wrong there."
But the diving course would have been in Switzerland too, at some Swiss lake, right? That would have been in
in Switzerland, exactly. And then we both actually signed up for the paragliding theory course. I had only seen a paraglider once before. And then we did this theory training without having made a single flight. So we passed the theory exam without having flown at all at that point, we hadn't flown at all yet.
And did you teach yourself how to fly then? In the end? Based on the theory you already had, or did you have a real instructor as well?
No, that was at a flight school. I joined right at the start of the hype period, when suddenly an extremely large number of
a lot of pilots were also getting trained. Because of that, I had to learn it a bit the hard way, because for example, I was forgotten during my first high-altitude flight.
Forgotten? The instructor had already flown away and you were still at the launch site, or what?
No, no, I was in the air and was forgotten. He had his
The radio was already switched off and you're still in the air, not knowing what to do.
They sent me up there. It was a real workout, 600 meters of elevation, and then I landed down there. I had a radio to my ear, a big one, and they told me, "Yeah, if you don't hear anything, then you have to do this and that." Then I thought, "Yeah, that's the radio, it's failed." And when I landed, the meadow was just empty, there wasn't a soul there. They packed everything up, forgot about me, and went off to the restaurant to eat.
And then you eventually chased after them and arrived at the restaurant half an hour later and said, "Hey, where were you?" Or something like that. Exactly.
At first, I wasn't sure if I'd landed in the right place because no one was there anymore. And from that point on, I knew, okay, you have to do a lot of the work yourself.
Back then, there weren't even mobile phones or anything like that. You couldn't just give a quick call and say, "Hey, where are you?" Instead, you probably were quite surprised at that point.
Exactly. So that's how it started, yeah.
Have any other wondrous things happened to you while flying?
Yeah, well, otherwise just the usual stuff that can happen.
For example? Yes, for example
flying into a trap in the Alps on a flight as an inexperienced pilot and then
your glider flies all around your head and stuff. But everything went well. So from that perspective, it's not that dramatic. I never had any emergency parachute deployments.
So I've done several, but because we have to do that in Switzerland, in order to...
To have a glider or rescue parachute certificate, we also have to go down to the rescue ourselves at times. But never, I mean, out of an emergency situation.
So you came to La Palma. You mentioned earlier that back then, flying on La Palma was still pretty wild. Were you basically the first pilot on La Palma then?
No, no. No, no. No, that was... people were already flying here. So I came to La Palma in 1994. My current business partner, Javier Lopez, who actually founded the flight school, had come here a year before me and did tandem flights. Then there were other pilots who were already here before me. Thermals, for example. Mike Liebhardt flew kites here. And later, paragliding. So they were well before me. The scene was small, but I wasn't the first at all. Absolutely not.
And if you look at this scene now, paragliding on La Palma, how many Palmeros are there who actually do paragliding themselves? Or are most of them really visiting tourists who then go there to fly during the winter half of the year? The
Most are visiting tourists. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer Palmeros who go paragliding.
Why fewer and fewer? Well, they just keep getting older, and so does the equipment. And then they have to buy new gear, and that's all just expensive. So paragliding on La Palma for the Palmeros is an expensive sport. With an income like a waiter, who might earn 800 to 1,000 euros, and then has to support a family, you just can't go out and buy thousands of euros worth of equipment. That's one reason. And the second reason is also the training offer. Because there are so few people, it's not interesting for us as a flight school either. And we have to gather people together, and then they sometimes wait two or three years for us to be able to start a course, or we even have to send them to Tenerife.
Because of that, there isn't much of a steady stream of people from the Palmeros. Those are the two hurdles, I think. So most are foreign pilots who come to La Palma to fly here, to enjoy the vacation, the sea, and the warmth of the winter.
And what do the island residents think about the paragliders? Are they basically welcomed because people say they're actually interesting and relevant for us as a source of tourist income? Or are there ultimately so few pilots coming in total that you'd have to say it's not a major branch for the island?
So, as paraglider pilots, we are very welcome on La Palma. The island government has even set up a network of launch sites for us with eight official launch sites. We are a small scene, even with the winter holidays it's still a small scene, but we are perceived as larger than we actually are. Because you
are visible.
We are visible, and a pilot can sometimes fly for a long time during the day or fly two or three times, and so, when the sky is suddenly full of paragliders in the winter, we are perceived as being significantly more than we actually are. That's a good thing.
If you take a typical season, how many paragliders come to La Palma in a winter? It's several hundred. In a normal winter, 500. And they usually live somewhere in the rain area of Portonaus, because that's also one of the main flight areas, and then you drive up to Campanario accordingly. Portonaus is on the coast and Campanario is further up in the mountains.
So most of them live in or around Porto Santo.
If you imagine a typical paraglider, for whom or from what skill level would you recommend planning La Palma as a possible winter destination?
So if the pilot comes to us and is being supervised by us, I would say an A-license, 100 flights. That's okay.
Do you have to be able to launch backwards? It's an advantage. But we don't always—well, at the cliff, we sometimes have wind conditions where you have to launch backwards. Campanario is usually, if it's flyable, you can launch forwards.
That means it's not actually like in other areas, Lanzarote for example; it's not a high-wind flying area on La Palma, but a really calm, "calm" soaring area.
You say it's a calm lee coast, and that's something you have to understand. You can hardly imagine it, because the lee isn't calm. But here, this lee zone is so large that if you fly in it, it is calm. Thermals are 3-4 meters maximum, so it's nothing like in the Alps, where it suddenly kicks you up by 10 meters.
We talked about the volcanic eruption at the beginning, which is still ongoing and, as I said, will probably ruin your season in some way, whether you call it "spoiling" or "spitting" it out, whatever you want to call it.
What does that mean for you, for your life plans there? Are you going to stay on the island, or are you also saying, "Well, the winter is over anyway, I can go somewhere else too"?
I live here, I have here
my house, I'm staying here, I have no plans to throw in the towel now and leave. Sure, the winter will be like this, so the season can definitely last until the end of the year, there's nothing we can do about that. January is also up in the air, all road connections to Porto Naos are currently interrupted, the water supply is being maintained with an emergency supply for now, but at the moment La Palma is a bit like an organism with only one kidney left; almost everything works, but the slightest thing that could happen throws it all off quite a bit. But I'm not leaving, no.
I'm staying here. You also said you live a bit north of the volcano, and the flight areas—if I understood correctly, the main ones, Porto Naos and Campanario, are to the south. That means you can't get there quickly or directly from where you are?
No, at the moment I can't get there directly anymore; I have to drive from Caliente instead, so I have to go from here, from the west side to the east side, then all the way south, and then back again on the west side of the southern part. It's 135 kilometers round trip. And normally it would be... 20.
Oh wow. So, huge detours that this volcano has forced on you. And to undo those, you'd probably have to cut some sort of paths through these lava masses so that you could lay a road through there again, until these lava masses have cooled down.
Either cut a path through it or just build some kind of road over it. True, that would work too.
In the end, it's a new rock face that will have formed there accordingly. Exactly. But all of that will still take its time.
That will certainly be one of the first priorities that need to be addressed, but I don't know how long you have to wait, how long it has to cool down.
In some cases, these lava flows are 30 meters high, you have to think about that. 30 meters.
That means it can still be hundreds of degrees inside, and it's really like a thermos; it stays that way for a very long time. It stays...
for a very long time, yeah. I mean, it's like that too—inside, the lava is still liquid, and you can't see anything on top of it. But if you cut into it to make a road, the soup just flows out again.
No beautiful views, or at least no predictable views where you can say, "Folks, in two months you can comfortably drive to La Palma again, everything will be back to normal." Instead, everything still looks into a rather very uncertain future.
Yes, that is definitely the case.
Roger, I still wish for this hissing volcano and the jet fighter in the background to calm down for you as soon as possible, and for all the Palmeiros residents as well, so that no more major damage is caused, and that life at least normalizes somewhat quickly so that people can live there in peace again and you can also go about your job as a paraglider guide and flight school and so on there in peace. Thank you for your story. Thank you very much.
Sorry for the coughing, I have a lava grain or something.
That was episode number 69 of Podz-Glidz free conversation with Lucian Haas. As always, there are a number of further links in the show notes for this episode on Lu-Glidz, especially for those interested in flying on La Palma. You can find the Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz online at www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com. Lu-Glidz writes Lu-Glidz. If you feel well-informed or well-entertained by me as a listener of Podz-Glidz and a reader of Lu-Glidz, then I would be happy if you supported my work as a supporter. Your one-time or recurring contribution is entirely up to you. In other words, you can give as much as you want.
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