When we were almost finished with the first prototype, I asked people from the flight anxiety coaching, would you like to try something new? I want to see if it's possible to experience your stress in the simulator as well. And then pilots came to me and I cried in the simulator. And I said, yes, we're there.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
In this episode with Bas van Duijn and Lucian Haas at the mic.
For commercial and military pilots, flight simulators are part of everyday life. They are used to repeatedly practice routine and extreme situations without any danger, so that the pilot is prepared in practice and knows their procedures and options. Paragliding is different. From training to later free flight, the pilot is always exposed to real air and the corresponding risks. Anyone who makes a mistake, even with a harmless outcome, quickly finds themselves on the ground facing the emotional reality of a mental flight block. The Dutchman Bas van Duijn looks for and offers ways out of such situations. For years, he has worked, among other things, as a so-called flight coach to help pilots resolve irrational fear blocks that take away the fun of flying.
Lately, he has also been using a very realistic paraglider simulator that he developed together with a business partner. He expects even more from the simulator. The system could offer flight schools completely new possibilities for initial and advanced training. All of this is covered in this 81st episode of Podz-Glidz. Just a small note: Bas doesn't speak perfect German, but he can express himself well enough that I didn't want to withhold this very interesting and promising topic from you because of any language barriers. It's worth staying tuned. If you also generally feel that it's worth following Podz-Glidz, then please support my work on this podcast as a patron.
You can find out how it's possible to do this easily and without any obligation on my blog Flugleits website, specifically on the "Fördern" page.
Bas, first question up front, because you just said in the preliminary talk that your German is terrible. Where did you even learn German?
I learned German at school. How do you say that? The middle school. That was a... what, mandatory?
A compulsory subject.
Yes, it was a compulsory subject until the fourth grade. After that, you were supposed to choose seven subjects. And there wasn't enough room for that, even if you wanted to stick with German. So I learned German in practice. I've been involved with flying for 27 years. But we'll get to that later. But I flew a lot in Austria. And
then you practiced it over and over again there.
But that's more like practicing how to order beer and food. You know.
Yeah, so it's going to be a bit harder today because we're talking about some other, slightly more intense topics. Yeah. But if you get stuck at any point, Bas, I'll help you. Or you can also say a word in English or something. We'll definitely keep moving forward that way.
Great, let's do it.
Bas, I'm going to jump right in. You call yourself a Flight Coach. Yes. And Coach stands for trainer, not teacher. Yes. So why did you choose this term? Because actually, you are also a flight instructor, if I understand correctly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My company is set up for that. I help pilots with skills other than just flying. So, for ten years, I've been working with people learning to fly, and I've often seen that many people have developed a fear of flying. I think it's maybe in three pilots who have problems with this, they have much more stress and tension than is necessary to be sharp. And that limits people from having fun and flying well. So I thought I have to help pilots with my company have more fun and less stress.
And so my motto is less stress, more skills. So one of the two things I do with my company is coaching pilots on how to deal with flight anxiety.
How do you do these coaching sessions? Do you go out into the field with people and say, "We'll fly together and look at that"? Or is it really more of a theoretical thing, like conversational psychology?
It's in a conversational format, so it's like normal coaching. I've been a coach for 15 years. I coach entrepreneurs and professionals on getting more out of life and work-life balance, on functioning more effectively at work, and also many managers on how to run a business. That's what I do coaching for. And I thought I could also expand that to pilots. To flying, yes.
So, when you say you actually do business coaching, can you use the same tools to also make progress in aviation? Yes,
For 90 percent, it's the same tools. It's almost the same. And it naturally helps people because I'm also a paraglider pilot and have a lot of experience as a hang glider pilot, as a flight instructor. So it's possible to go a bit deeper than a normal coach who doesn't fly could. The
People who come to you, what are their main questions? Or what is the main problem that most people come to you with?
Most people have had an accident or thrown the rescue tube and become afraid of it.
That's just a mental block where you say, I've thrown the rescuer now, I might not have gotten hurt, but still, now I'm always flying with this fear that I have to throw the rescuer again or something?
Yes, exactly, exactly. Whenever people are in the same circumstances where the fall happened, your body reacts to that. And it happens faster than you can think. It's what we call the monkey brain. It happens super fast and you get scared because the circumstances aren't actually dangerous at all. But your mind perceives them as the circumstances that were dangerous one or two years ago. And then the response kicks in.
The answer, the reaction to that.
The reaction comes from that. And that's how I help people change that reaction back into one that fits the circumstances. So not a stress reaction, but a decision.
How can you manage that? Because what you're describing, this initial reaction you have, is basically an unconscious or a subconscious reaction. It
is a subconscious reaction. It goes very deep. The most important thing we do is find out what it is that triggers the pilot. What causes the stress reaction. So for some people, it's altitude, verticality, clouds. And for other people, it's being very close to the ground. And for others, it's a strong wind. Or strong thermals. Or a completely overcast, dark sky. For every person, it's something different. So we talk about it. And we also do meditation together.
And we find out what it is for you. And very, very often in the first conversation we have, it's not clear at all what it is for this pilot. He says, when I go flying, it happens. And I don't know where it comes from and what I should do to make it go away again. So we also do breathing exercises. And we visualize what happened and what could also happen. And that helps people not to get so overwhelmed and to recognize what happened. And that it's not representative of what is going to happen in all cases when they encounter these conditions.
That means you talk to them. You find the trigger. Then you try to bring that trigger into their consciousness so you can work with it. And to say, okay, if I know the trigger, then I also know how I can react to it. But what do you give people as a tool, for example, when someone says—you mentioned there are people who get scared when they have dense cloud cover. It's dark and everything around them is just dark. And then that triggers it because they say, "I was almost pulled into a cloud once." Or whatever it was. Yeah, exactly.
That's happened to me more often with people I've coached. For example, we'll do a scenario together. So I say to this pilot, imagine you're ready to take off. And you see this dark cloud above you. What's going to happen? And the first answer is always, yeah, I'm going to fly, and then the fear comes. No, no, give me more details. How does it go? How does the glider take off? What do you do with your arms? And then I help the people visualize it completely. And then, for example, they say to me, yeah, then I get near the cloud and then everything gets tense.
Okay, sit down in your harness and feel that tension. And how can you deal with this tension? Maybe breathe a bit more from your stomach and practice staying with that. Yes, but people say it doesn't feel good at all. Okay, keep breathing calmly. Okay, can you also do a small, what do you call it, descending technique?
A descending technique.
Yes, can you do a descent technique? Yes, of course. I can put on big ears. Okay, put on big ears. Do you have more distance from the cloud? How does it feel now? Yes, now you feel a bit better. Okay, keep practicing with the breathing exercise. Okay, and let's go back up. And I also teach people that they can do this, not just in visualization, but also in practice. So, find the situation that stresses you out and do the breathing exercises, for example, and step out of that practice again. Make it easier for yourself again and then go back.
Guys, don't think about it. It's almost a binary decision. I go flying, I get stressed, I go after landing. End of the day, and I can tell my friends again, I flew again. But that's not a way to deal with it constructively.
Wouldn't these techniques you have—especially since you're a flight instructor too—be something that should basically be taught in training, at least in some form? That you should already be talking about these things and saying, hey, specifically this topic of flight anxiety, that you say, hey, this happens very often. And it might happen to at least one out of every three of you that you end up going into the air with flight anxiety, or develop flight anxiety while in the air, because then it's another situation that triggers you. Exactly. Wouldn't it be important to learn and talk about whatever—breathing techniques, meditation techniques, visualization techniques, and stuff like that—much, much earlier, already during training?
I think it would be great, but I have much less work in coaching because flight school owners should be doing much more of this during training. You're completely right about that. But I think, because I'm also a flight instructor, the difficult thing is that a week where you fly with people, into the Alps for example, those are completely packed weeks. You have to learn so much that there might not be enough room to do that. And it's also that many flight school owners, many flight instructors, aren't trained on how they should do it, how they should handle it.
Most flight instructors say, yeah, a bit of stress is normal. You should always keep flying and then everything will be fine. That's what 90 percent of flight instructors see and not because they're bad instructors, but they truly believe that's how it works. Many studies say that human psychology doesn't work that way.
During the time you actually worked as a flight instructor—not just as a flight coach, but you also worked in flight schools—did you also address those kinds of things, or did you just experience that there's actually no time for it in the basic structure?
I always made a little space for that. I always found it really important that people can talk about what they're feeling, that it's not just about saying, "Yeah, I'm stoked, it was awesome" every time you learn to fly. That's what most students always tell each other when they're having a beer. The story always gets bigger and cooler. And I've said, it's at least as cool to be able to say, "I felt a lot of fear during this takeoff, but I did well and learned a lot from it." To me, that's much cooler than the "cool story." And I always teach my students that there are multiple sides to flying, not just the positive stuff, but also things that you might
...can't experience. Excitement, fear, and stress are part of it, but you should experience them in the right balance. And if that's not happening, you should talk about it with other students or with a flight instructor. And that's all normal. All pilots experience that somewhere, and usually several times in their flying career.
From your experience, how many people completely quit flying because they had experiences like that? Quite
a lot. Even though one
they might be able to find their way out again with relatively simple techniques.
Yes, a lot. I believe this topic isn't being addressed correctly by many flight students, because we lose many pilots because stress comes around the corner somewhere in your flight career. And then you're supposed to learn how to deal with it. That is just as normal as having to learn how to handle a stall. We can teach everyone how to recover from a stall, but dealing with stress is very complex for many people. And I believe if there is more attention given to it, we should keep many more pilots flying.
That means it might also make sense to say that you don't just promote SIV training and tell people, "You have to do collapses and other stuff," but also to say, "Look, you should also do some relaxation or mental training, whatever it is, so that you learn how to handle those kinds of situations."
Exactly. I think one in three pilots has a lot more fear of flying than is good for them. And of those one in three, more than 50% stop flying within one, two, or three years. And they give reasons that aren't really true, like it costs too much time, it costs too much money, mountain biking is much cooler than flying. They're looking for excuses. Yes, they're all looking for excuses not to fly anymore, because it really isn't those reasons, but the fear.
You have, I mean, one thing is that you experience a bad situation yourself and develop a fear because of it. Do you also sometimes have people come to you and say, I witnessed an accident and I've had this fear ever since?
I
I've had YouTube
-watched videos with ten crashes or whatever, and just by watching those videos, I didn't learn anything from them; they actually just triggered my fear. Have you ever experienced something like that?
Yes, also. That depends, of course, on the type of person the pilot actually is. People who look at flying in a completely rational way, they often have that more. So they see a video or an accident happen and they think about it. It goes around in their head and then they get scared. Those are, of course, also people who are more feeling-oriented. They have it less. They don't get it as quickly from watching an accident or watching a video, only from experiencing it themselves. There are different categories of pilots and different categories of pilots are
not all equally susceptible to this situation.
Would you tell people to watch fewer YouTube videos?
Watch the right YouTube videos. Of course, sensational videos with huge collapses and entire crashes always look terrible, or if we're being honest, also a bit cool. Look at what's happening. So much adrenaline. That almost went well. He was almost dead. For some people, that's naturally much more exciting to watch than a video of someone explaining why a collapse happened and what you can do to correct it. YouTube gives every man and woman a platform to share their own videos. I think that's a good thing.
There are plenty of good videos online too. But there are also people who share videos that take situations completely out of context and can impress inexperienced pilots by claiming that the pilot in this video could have done nothing other than pull out his savior. Wow, maybe. There were two, three, ten other resolutions for this situation.
And they aren't discussed. People don't think about it; it's just shown as, oh, that's always dangerous, and then it had to happen the way it happened.
Exactly, exactly. And then on social media, there are many Facebook groups for that, where it's always people who believe they have the right answer, the only good analysis of what happened, and they write pages and pages of explanations and there's no more conversation. It's often a lot of polarization.
Yes, it polarizes very strongly. Yes, it
It polarizes strongly, and the downside of polarization is that people stop talking to each other. I believe in paragliding, and especially in accidents, there are always multiple causes. We need to look more at the causes that happen before the decision to take off. What was the pilot's mindset? What was their experience? What glider is this man or woman flying? What is the location? What are the meteorological conditions? Because very often we only see someone flying, doing something with their arms, and a crash, and people say it was this, this, this, and that's just it.
Have you actually experienced a situation like that yourself, like a fear-of-flying situation, where you realized for yourself, "I'm blocked now"?
Yes, that was one of the main reasons I started with Flight Coach. I developed really severe flight anxiety for almost four years because of a situation where we almost flew through a large convergence cloud.
That one almost sucked you in?
Yeah, exactly. It almost sucked me in. That was, I think, ten years ago. I also made a video about it on my YouTube channel, but those were, of course, completely, yeah, my mistakes. I got so much stress from it. I found many excuses for myself to fly less, fly lower, fly shorter, to avoid all the nice thermals, because I also have a strong aerodynamic, scientific background, I could always tell my flying friends, yeah, that cloud doesn't look good.
In 20 minutes, it's going to get a CBE. And there, yeah, the wind is already shifting, so I'm going to quickly go land and start the barbecue, because you can eat in an hour. I'm heading down now.
And the others flew for another three hours and then there was the barbecue, but the coals were already burnt out and everything was gone. Yeah, exactly.
The beer was already finished, but it wasn't a good feeling and it took a long time before I realized I should do something about it.
Where did you get help for that, or how did you get out of that?
I told my flying friends that I've noticed over the last two years that I'm always the first one on the ground, because I know I'm not the worst thermals pilot in our group. And I asked all these people—there were three or four of them—whenever I make decisions that you think I'm making out of fear, they should call me on the radio and say, "Bas, what you're doing now isn't a normal decision, you're just scared." And they did that, and it gave me the input to realize that I often make the decision to head to the landing field quite unconsciously, even though the conditions might have been a bit difficult but not dangerous at all.
But then you also need good friends who know you well and can judge accordingly, who can say, "Actually, Bas can fly better," or "Normally he'd do something else than what he's doing right now."
And I think most of your listeners have friends like that too. The important thing is that you put yourself out there and tell your friends, I have a problem. Just like alcoholics are supposed to do, I have an alcohol problem. If I go for the alcohol, give me a punch in the face.
That means we need anonymous flight anxiety people. Yes, but not anonymous.
What helped me the most was that I was flying with one of my good thermals friends, wingtip to wingtip, with a maximum distance of five meters, and we were flying from one thermal to the next, and I said over the radio, I don't feel good at all. It's not going in the right direction, the air is turbulent, we keep rocking back and forth. What do you think of that? And he said, yeah, that's called thermals. It's going great. Shall we turn together against each other in this next thermal? And I said again, well, it doesn't feel good at all, I'm going down. He says, well, we'll only do five minutes.
Five minutes we'll circle together, and if you still feel bad, we'll land together in that field over there by the church. Let's go grab a beer. But five minutes. And we flew for another two hours after that. And that was the biggest realization for me. It's almost all in your head, not outside.
Let's take that as a possible transition to another topic. From that experience, where you said, "Ah, I was scared myself and that actually cost me four years of beautiful flying" and so on—was that also one of the reasons why you said, "How can we find a different way out of this?" and how did you come up with the idea to develop a flight simulator?
Exactly. That's part of it too. But it goes back further. When I was, I think, a flight instructor for a year or two, I realized that, how should I put it? All flight instructors worldwide have this problem. Your student does something. They give feedback after the landing. But the next time the student can apply those tips is at the earliest an hour and a half later. In an ideal case, if everything goes quickly and the conditions stay the same. But in reality, the circumstances never stay the same. So that was the real reason I thought we should have it exactly like in training and currency training for commercial—and military pilots—we should also have it for
paragliders. That, along with what I also saw regarding aviation anxiety. But aviation anxiety as a reason for the simulator came later. When we were almost finished with the first prototype, I asked people from aviation anxiety coaching, "Would you like to try something new? I want to see if it's possible to experience your stress in the simulator too." And pilots came to me and said, "I cried in the simulator." And I said, "Yes, we're there."
Why did they cry? Because they got so into their fear? Yes.
That's not a great experience for a pilot, of course, but it's very clear to me that we can copy the triggers. The triggers you experience in practical flying, the ones that cause stress and fear, we can also replicate and repeat in the simulator. So for a year now, I've also been using the simulator for flight anxiety coaching. We do the one-on-one conversation, just as I've been doing for 15 years. But for a year now, simulator coaching has also been added to that.
First of all, on a basic level, what does your paraglider simulator actually look like? What are the technical components?
If we look at the hardware, there are three different parts. An input unit, as we call it. It's a semi-shaped aluminum frame with sensors on it. And there are also the risers on it. You can put a harness on there. And the pilot has the weight shift input and the brake. Also for steering. And this unit is connected to a custom-built supercomputer with a very powerful graphics card inside. And this sends images to a VR goggles, VR headset.
Where you can truly experience the flight world in three dimensions.
That means you sit in the harness, put on these goggles, and then fly with this VR headset. And in every direction you look, you see—if you look up, you see the paraglider. If you look down, you see the ground. And in front, you see the horizon. You
you can practice looking around 360 degrees. And it feels very similar to flying in practice. So you see small houses, cars driving across the street. You see the trees, you see the clouds. You can experience the wind speed and direction. You have a Vario where you can see the horizontal speed, but also things like glide ratio and vertical speed. So you can practice everything there, almost everything that is possible in practice as well.
For a simulator like this, how accurately does the landscape actually have to be simulated so that you really get that more realistic feeling of flying, so that your brain isn't thinking all the time, "Hey, you're in a—this is just a game, this isn't anything real." That
That's a very good question, because for normal simulators, for commercial aviation and military aviation, that's not very important because you also learn to fly by the cockpit, by the instruments. In contrast, with paragliding and hang gliding and so on, it's very important that you can see the landscape, the surroundings well, in order to make an assessment of your altitude. Is it okay if I fly over these mountains, or do I have to make a few more turns in this thermal bath?
Speed and distance are much more important, so the landscape has to be very realistic for that. So a car should be 1.20 meters high and not 2 meters, a normal passenger car. And it's very important that a tree isn't 15 meters high, because in reality these trees are only 8 meters tall. So the proportions are also very important. As a basis for the simulator, we need aerial photography and satellite images from Google Maps on a three-dimensional height map that we can get from the internet, someone can get from the internet.
So we layer the photos over it, which creates the basic landscape. And then, using 3D software, we add the houses and the trees, and we create an exact replica of the landing area. For example, if a pilot in our simulator in Greifenburg—which is, of course, a fantastic place to fly—does landing practice in Greifenburg, the shack where you do the U-turn is a real shack, with the same colors, and there's a campsite at the end of the landing field, and the windsock is in the same spot.
So we practice in a virtual replica of the real-life situation, and that's very important for this type of flying, because it's crucial to manage your speed, your distance, your glide ratio—is that a good word? Because it's very important to estimate your glide ratio well, to make good turns, and to make a precise landing on the landing field.
Are you a good programmer too, that you manage to get all of this done?
I'm not, but my business partner, he's a professional
Simulator designer, and he studied aerodynamics, so he built the entire aerodynamic model of the paraglider so that it flies almost like a real paraglider.
And did he then program all the software behind it, as well as all the graphical software that lies underneath?
We use X-Plane, which is a simulator that anyone can buy, and up there we have a layer, how do you say that?
We have
we made a layer over it; the interface is between our aerodynamic design and X-Plane, so that we can fly in a realistic way with the base functionality of X-Plane in this simulator. And we need other plugins and input to properly reconstruct the landing field and areas. X-Plane makes it possible to build many layers on top and underneath.
So it's a piece of software that you can simply expand. And you've written this extension so that it works well for paragliding.
Exactly. And the hardware is built so that you can provide input to the aerodynamic models in a realistic way.
Could I also say with your software that I want to fly somewhere else in the world and that would be just as easy? Or do you always have to invest a lot of work to say, I'll still reconstruct the landscape more accurately so that the paragliding actually makes sense?
Yes and no. If someone comes to me and says on the field, I'd like to fly in Brazil, there and there, then I say yes, unfortunately that's not possible. We can do it, but it looks so bad that it's not realistic enough. We can fly there, but it doesn't look right. The landmarks in the landscape look completely different in the base X-Plane. Completely different from what we can do. But people also come to me who book a training session and say, I'd like to practice my landings there. A landing field that we don't have in the simulator yet. Then I sit down at the computer for a day or two and we've virtually copied and rebuilt the whole thing.
And then it's accessible to everyone, all the flight students who use one of our simulators. That's included in the update.
How many different flight areas have you successfully integrated into your simulator by now?
We've got the Greifenburg area in Austria now. We have Bassano in Italy. We have Dünne Pila in France. And I'm currently busy with Lokken in Denmark. That's also a great soaring spot. And Annecy. Annecy in France as well.
That's already very varied, from coastal soaring all the way to real high mountains. Yes,
because we can practice thermals, landings, point landings in different wind conditions, and dune soaring with the simulator. And we're still expanding that today with hang gliding opportunities,
hanging landing options, top landing options, and we're also doing an aero expansion with an aero. So we're constantly developing further.
Based on your experience, where did the biggest difficulty actually lie in this development? Was it the software implementation or what was the sticking point? Yes, good...
Question. It was the combination of making the input as realistic as possible and making the response of the virtual glider realistic. Because if you make a simulator that is, for example, only 70% realistic and you use it to teach students something, then the students get the wrong reflexes. Because the glider in the simulator doesn't react the same way as a glider does in practice. So that last part was super complex. We worked on that for many years because if you take a paraglider, for example, and compare it with a rigid
Wing, a Cessna for example.
When you fly a Cessna, I've flown many Cessnas too, when you steer a Cessna, the response is almost instantaneous. As you know, a paraglider still keeps rolling. Even if you do nothing, it's supposed to dampen out slowly.
Yes, all movements are slowly damped. You still have the pendulum, it's still swinging, but then it damps out so slowly. Exactly.
I believe an important skill for pilots is being able to control well with weight extension, but also with the brake. And not always doing the same actions, but adjusting to the circumstances. So, the simulator reacts completely differently to weight extension than to control input. That was also completely
difficult to do well.
How do you coordinate that properly? On one hand, you have the experience you gain while flying. And on the other, you have the calculations, where you say, I have the model and so on. But is it that you sit in your simulator, fly around a bit, and say, based on feeling, that's not quite right yet? Or how does it actually work? Did you basically train it with your intuition, something like that?
Yes, that was the first step. And after that, we always tested with a group of test pilots. So, we tested our prototype with test pilots for almost two years and asked the people, now you're flying into a mid or high B glider. Fly with it and tell us what's still not good. And we did that with pilots who have very little experience. 10, 20 hours. But also people who are responsible for training flight instructors. So with thousands of hours and all that knowledge. So it's a completely different group.
And we used that to fine-tune it. We also asked people to do a full stall—how does that work? Do a landing approach.
Yes, a landing approach.
Yeah, do a landing approach. How is that? Is it realistic? And one of the best examples for us is that we
were almost finished with it, was that a pilot told us, I'd like to do a landing exercise at Greifenburg, but with very strong and gusty crosswinds. We said, okay, we can do that. And the pilot landed in the cornfield. In the simulator. And he was laughing. And he said, yeah, if I fly in this situation in practice, I always land here in the cornfield too. And now it happened in the simulator as well. So you have something good here.
So, by reproducing the same mistake, it must be quite good. Where do you see the strengths of such a simulator, and where are its weaknesses in its current form, as you operate it now?
The simulator is intended as a training aid to keep pilots current in practice and also to teach new skills. Learning works best when they can see the result of their actions and decisions. Normally, this is very difficult in paragliding, as so many variables contribute to the result, such as wind direction, speed, other pilots, time of day, and their location. When flying, they have no control over those, but in the simulator, they do. So that is one of the strongest positive aspects. What might not be so well developed yet is the transmission of force, for example, on the brake. Now, we call it an input unit,
because of course you get feedback, you see what you're doing, but you don't feel it yet. Those are just elastic bands providing the counter-force when you steer. In our prototype, we now have something we call Force Feedback. So then there are no elastic bands, but instead there are servos, electric motors, that also transmit the force acting on the virtual wing through the brake. That's something I believe can be even more realistic.
What is it like if I fly thermals with your simulator, for example? When I fly with a normal glider and my harness, it sometimes kicks out, and then I notice, oh, there's a force. Do I get something like that transmitted from the simulator, or not at the moment?
Not at the moment. In the new version of the simulator, we have that, but it's not in this... So right now, when you go out to fly thermals, you can practice with how much brake pressure I need to use? How far should I shift my weight? And you can see directly on the instructor station, but also on your own variometer, how fast I'm going in altitude? Can I maybe do that more efficiently? Many people, when they learn to core in thermals, when we turn the wind on, the wind pushes them out of the... the people out of the core. And what do people say in practical lessons? Yeah, the core, it was gone. I also do practical thermals training.
And that's always what the pilots say. Yeah, the lift was gone. No, you got pushed out of the core. And we can replicate and practice that perfectly in the simulator. If the wind gets stronger, then of course you have to fly against the wind for a long time to stay in the core. But also decisions like, what altitude should I be at before I switch from flying figure 8s near the birch tree to doing full 360 turns? How much brake do I have in the core? Or if I'm flying from one core to the next against the wind, should I maybe do my glide system 20%, 40%, 60%, or something in between?
All these things, yeah, if you've practiced in the simulator and then apply it in practice, you get a lot more out of the practice.
From your perspective, could a simulator like this already be a real asset in paraglider training?
Yes, exactly. Exactly. I've been operational with this simulator for nine months now. And for two months, a large school here in Holland, Airtime Paragliding Sport, has also received one of our simulators. And they use it for instruction for all levels of pilots, from complete beginners to people who want to fly XC.
But are those extra courses that you have to book with them additionally? Or is it basically part of the training, where they say, "Look, you're booking a training package with us and you have to do at least 40 flights, but we'll definitely also do 40 simulated landings or something with you."
Yes, that, we're currently busy with integrating that completely. It's maybe over the course of several months that it will become standard for safe training packages for people to fly for one or two hours in the simulator before they come to the Alps to get practical instruction. What you can learn in one hour in the simulator takes one or two weeks to learn in practice. It's a great accelerator.
Yes, a speed bar.
Yes, it's a speed bar for your flight career.
Why is the simulator such a speed bar? I mean, why do you learn so much faster on or in the simulator?
We zoom in exactly on the skills that this specific pilot needs to develop further. And then we repeat that under increasingly difficult conditions. So every pilot has different skills they need to learn, which, if we do it well, can move to the next step. And that's because it's not clear, I think, this answer.
Well, so everyone, as far as I've understood it—you can tell me right away if that's what you meant—but it's about the fact that every pilot, of course, has different points where they still need to learn something. And these points, which are individual for everyone, can also be trained individually for each person and you can say, okay, you're still struggling with thermals, you're struggling with... there are problems with the landing, you always come in too high, or whatever. We can now specifically work on that again in the simulator.
Yes, yes. We were really looking for a tool to ensure that flight instructors can teach better and faster and help pilots more. That's the idea. It's a seamless connection to practice and it's intended to be used as a supplement, not a replacement.
Since you're saying there's already this one flight school in Holland using it, is there actually experience with them saying, "Okay, before we take our flight students from Holland, where everything is flat, we go to the mountains and they take off for the first time in Greifenburg or wherever that is, and then they fly there and do their first landing approaches in Greifenburg—if we've trained them in the simulator beforehand, you can actually see in practice that it works right away, and then on-site, you can already shift your attention directly to completely different things." We
we've experimented with that—people who had never even seen a paraglider before. That was with another school, Paragliding Holland; they also sent students to us for simulator training. Part of the group were beginners who had never seen a paraglider before; they only had two hours of training in our simulator, and then, a few weeks later, they started their practical lessons. And the people all said, "When I was up there in the air, I recognized it, recognized it."
Yes, recognized.
Yes, I recognized it. I saw where I was, even though I'd never been here before, and that gave me confidence and orientation. So I strongly believe that it helps people experience less stress and know what it's like to do a 360 over the landing field, roughly how big it needs to be, how far you have to steer, all of that is already familiar.
Would you say that, okay, maybe in a few years, a simulator like this could really become a standard in flight schools, at least in the larger flight schools that might be able to afford it and want to?
Yes, that's right, that's the idea, that's our business model. Today we are in talks with many students worldwide who also want to get one of our simulators to support their program.
So you sell these simulators? So I could also say, I want to have one for home, how much would that cost me? Still
no, maybe in a few years, but today it's a license, a
Rental.
Do you rent it from you guys? Yes, you
you rent it. A few months ago, and with preferences more than a few months, and before that you get all the hardware, all the software, but also the syllabus, because training with a simulator is quite different for flight instructors than training in practice. To use it efficiently and effectively, you have to observe different things, and of course there's the support, the expansion of the simulator, everything together, and also, how should I put it, coaching or help, advising, because integrating the simulator into practice—that is, into your students' curriculum—since every student naturally does it in their own way, I also help with that to reach an optimal combination.
and that also has other benefits, other advantages that positively influence the way people work, fewer accidents, many thinking and handling errors can be seen in the sim, and because they shouldn't happen in practice, more intake of new skills. Another advantage is, of course, the barrier to entry for paragliding, which is naturally relatively high; if you're at a party and your girlfriend says, "I go paragliding," 80% of the people who say, "Yeah, I'd like to do that once in my life," almost no one actually does it because the barrier to entry is too high—you have to book a tandem flight.
That's of course great, but the conditions have to be good. You have to be able to get to a landing field. I already have many customers here at my simulator center who want to find out what paragliding is like and whether this sport, this passion, could be something for them. And this is the first step, not the tandem flight. And I've also sent many of these people off after the school, like, okay, you think flying is cool, go and start with the practical lessons. But there are also people who book a complete beginner's package and then go to a school for the practical stuff. So the barrier to entry is significantly lower than with a tandem flight.
So I think it's supposed to help school owners develop a completely different business model to get more customers. I expect it to also be profitable, like selling more gear, selling more overseas trips, more advanced students. Of course, there are also many beginners who think, okay, that was a great week, but I'm a bit scared or I've only seen the basics. It takes so long before I get my license. I'll go do something else. I think, yeah, I think more people will stick with it and you can really turn customers into fans.
If I imagine your simulator, a very, very important phase of flying is actually very difficult to simulate, namely the takeoff.
Yeah, the takeoff isn't something that can be simulated.
We start the flight at a distance from the glider. In the mountains, we say you started here, look for a thermal, or if we're practicing a landing, then of course we aren't allowed to start with a takeoff, which is normal in practice, but we won't do the takeoff at all, and we won't do the intermediate flight with the maneuvers either. We start ten seconds before the point where you're supposed to start the turn in the landing approach. Yes, we just zoom in on this part of the training and we can pause it. We can reset it. We can see, okay, you did a landing approach, but you landed in the campsite.
That wasn't so ideal. What if we rewind the time, go back to the start, what else should you do? Yes, then maybe I should fly downwind a bit longer. Okay, let's go back to the beginning. The downwind leg, and from there you fly downwind longer now. Okay, the student or the pilot flies downwind longer. Ah, too bad, now I didn't get the landing at all. Okay, what's between this point? Yes, maybe I shouldn't make it long, but a bit wider, a bit further.
Extend the crosswind approach.
Yes, maybe you should extend the crosswind approach a bit. Ah, now a landing. Okay, that went well. Let's do it again. Went well again. Okay, let's make it harder. We'll make the wind stronger or weaker, or we'll add a bit of thermals influence, and we'll keep making it harder until the point where the pilot gets into an error, in their head. The decisions no longer work, and then we can also pause it. Okay, you're paused, you're just hanging here still in the air, not moving anymore. Tell me. What, what are your scenarios? What can you do? In reality, of course, that's not possible, but what can you do? Yes, I can fly a bit more in this direction and do a 180-degree turn, and then another 180-degree turn, and then to the right.
Okay, and what's option two? And then we have several scenarios. We talk about them and then we select one, and the student practices that, sees the impact, we go back again and practice with another scenario, and that creates a very direct, yes, a very direct link between the decision and the result.
So you see what you've done and what the exact result of it was? I'm too high, too low, too early, too late, too hard, whatever. Exactly, exactly, yeah. There's probably also an advantage there, if you say, okay, you do an hour of training. How many landings can you manage in an hour on your simulator?
You can do 20, 30 landings in an hour.
Which also means, okay, you can really try out a lot in that spot. You can
try out a lot. That's more landings than most people do in a week or two. We'll do them in an hour. And a complete landing approach naturally takes about a minute and a half in practice. So much more than 30, it would get completely packed in the hour. But what we do more often is not just doing that one and a half minute landing approach, but a subset of it. So just the turn into position, if that's the problem. Or a good weight shift and brake input.
When people always... wobble in the curve. So we can maybe do 60 of these landing subsets. We see all the skills in paragliding as Lego bricks. And we look for which Lego brick is the weakest for you. And we can improve that. And then we can recover that a lot. And on... And if the recovery... makes you do it well, then we make it harder and harder and harder and harder. And then there comes a point because it goes to shit again. And then we have, okay, that's the new point where we go to learn.
And maybe we find another bottleneck, another Lego brick that isn't going so well. Then we look into that again. We are the only institution, the only training center in the world, with a... results guarantee. So we tell our customers, okay, you want the thermals - turns package, then we guarantee you that after this training you can do turns well and fast in thermals and can do so many altitude gains in so many seconds. That you know when you have to switch from flying at eighty to flying at thirty degrees. That you know how to use the vario. That you know how...
that you know how... how you have to act when there's strong wind. Yes, on average, that takes people three hours. On average. So we tell people that takes three hours on average, and you pay a fixed price for it. And if it doesn't work in three hours, you get four, five, six hours without paying extra. So people aren't really paying per hour, they're paying for a... package of skills. Skills that you bring one-on-one into practice.
How can you verify that? Because if someone says they did three hours with you and now says, "I went out into the old ones and wanted to apply that, but it's still not working for me. Barst, you have to give me another three hours." How, how... but then, that's really hard to verify if you're not watching him fly for real. Or you could have someone say, "I did three hours of landing training with you, but now I was out in the wild and I messed up every landing again. Barst, you definitely have to give me another three hours."
That hasn't happened to me with many customers in nine months. But if it were to happen, I'd have a serious talk with that pilot. And if I truly believe he's being honest, then it shouldn't be a problem for me. We have that much trust in this simulator. But the great thing is that we can already see in the simulator whether someone can do it or not. In the first hour, people without thermals experience can't crank it in a thermal with strong wind. They always get blown out.
And somewhere at the beginning of the second hour, it goes great. But if we then change the wind or do a bit of windshear, they lose the thermal again. So by the end of the average third hour, we can see, everything is going great. And when the people then go out to fly, of course there are things that are different in practice. In practice, you feel the feedback in the harness, on the brake. In the system we have today, you can't feel that yet. So you obviously have to integrate that again. But our experience says that if people can fly thermals well in the simulator, for example,
it's so much easier in practice. And think about it, if you're completely inexperienced, a total beginner with thermals and you do a thermal course, say for six days. You start from the ridge. If you can't catch the first or second thermal, you're back on the landing field. It takes at least an hour and a half before you can try again, and maybe the thermals are too strong or it's raining. One of the strengths of the simulator is that if you can fly into a thermal and stay in it in the simulator, you can do it in practice.
So you get a lot more out of a practical flight week.
Could you take a simulator like the one you have with you? Like, could a flight school say, "Look, we always have a simulator in our luggage with us, because maybe we'll have two days of really shitty weather during the flight week. But we can say, look, we have our simulator tent. Every one of our flight students—we have eight people with us—everyone gets one hour of simulator training per day. That way, you still get to fly, and you might learn a lot more on that rainy day than you could by actually flying." That
The whole idea is also that you can set it up at the locations, at the site where you go flying. Of course, you need power and an internet connection, but the input unit, the VR goggles, and the computers all go into the flight cases we have for that. And you need a rigid frame. Is that the right word, a frame? Yes. You naturally also need a rigid frame to hang the input unit on. It has to be able to support the pilot's weight and not move much. It has to be strong.
So you should build it or have it built. Or maybe, if it's a location where the students come more often, it's possible to attach something to the
attach to the ceiling.
To attach it to the ceiling. Yes, there are only four thick screws and you can fasten it with those.
Well, as far as I know, you said there's a flight school in Holland that has one of these things now. You have something like that, you're based in Amsterdam. If I were to say now that I still want to try it out, could I book something like that with you? For example, let's say I want to improve my landing and I want to book a three-hour training session with you. How much would that cost me?
Not for you.
No, not for me. I'm just a regular pilot now and I don't want to write about it or look into it for that; I want a regular pilot to say, "Hey Bas, I heard this podcast by Lucian, I'm interested. How do we get in touch?"
Yes, there are two options. You can book a complete package with the results guarantee we talked about, which costs 649 euros. You can also...
...introductory lesson. We do that at our cost price, and it costs 99 euros for one hour. And then you can try everything out—landings, turns, aerobatics, gliding—just to get a feel for what we can add to your flying career with the simulator.
Especially when you mention June Soaring just now, I mean June Soaring. It is
...also quite popular among your listeners, I think. I see them quite often here on the coast.
There are some people who go to the coast often and can already do it, or think they can, or whatever. But there are probably also people who say, "I'm from the Alps, I want to try dune soaring too," and then they go to Holland, but mountain flying and dune soaring are different things—dealing with all the current situations and so on, properly assessing the wind for it, and all that. You could also say, "Look, before I go dune soaring, I'll go to Bars and do an hour of dune soaring with him on the simulator. He'll explain the most important things I need to watch out for, different dune shapes, and how the lift conditions work there, or if there are any flat spots between dunes, what's the best way to fly through them, and so on."
You can probably train that really well with you. Exactly,
that's right. I also teach dune soaring in the Netherlands and we naturally see incidents with it, crashes. And one of the most common causes is that when there's a crosswind and people make a turn,
go from flying with the wind in their back to turning with their head into the wind and then stalling because they're over-spinning. They tear away. They go negative. The turn
it expands like that, they think they won't make it around and then they keep pulling the brake more and more.
He doesn't go through the curve, doesn't go through the curve, steers deeper, steers deeper, crashes. And that happens quite often. You can practice that really well in the simulator. Then we do a dune with some houses, and then we say, okay, turn left now. Yeah, the houses, they're very close. Okay, how are you supposed to make this turn? Yeah, maybe a bit earlier next time. Or maybe a bit more
Shift your weight and use your hands a bit less. Or, how far back can I fly? Because getting pushed by the wind over the dune happens quite often too. Or if you're almost right behind the dune, you can't fly. Is the dune the escape route again?
To escape. To escape the danger or to get out of the vortex of life, and so on.
Exactly. To escape again, that's also a technique and it's often with
Using the speed bar. But how much? Not maximum, but not zero either. But how much should you actually do? And how can you tell if it's enough, or too much, or too little? All these things that contribute to a lot of fun in practical flying can be transferred to the simulator. So yes, I'd like for everyone to come by here first and then go to the dune. But that also applies to the Dutch pilots.
Okay, maybe there are even some Dutch pilots listening to this podcast who end up landing with you in the end. Bas, I'd like to slowly head towards the end now. One, this is a closing question for you: what have you personally learned about flying with your simulator?
That's a great question, I wasn't expecting it. I'm currently practicing difficult autorotations. Because that's always something in difficult circumstances that gives me stress. And I thought I have to practice that in the simulator for two reasons. To learn it better myself and also to discover if the simulator can be used for that. The answer is yes. And now I'm simultaneously developing the training scenarios for it and also practicing myself. I've also seen that
In practice and in the simulator, doing slope landings is almost the same. How do I get into the flight? Where is the wind coming from? Should I lose my altitude here or there? And that really helps me with the training.
You see it often, especially with X-Alps pilots; they frequently use approach techniques where they basically use momentum and sometimes speed, or simply gain momentum out of a turn, to fly towards the slope with real speed, then convert that speed into altitude to land very gently. That would be something that would be excellent to train in a simulator theoretically, because if you crash, it doesn't hurt.
Exactly. I've had many pilots who crashed in the simulator and said, I'm really glad that didn't happen here in the simulator and not in practice. But your countryman Michael Nessler, who is well-known from Schwing, has naturally developed a technique,
Full speed bar and also a lot of brake and then going down to the ground like a comet and then at the last second doing it again
pull out and then lean. I've never done that in practice, but it's also something I'm practicing in the simulator.
That means the simulator can actually simulate the aerodynamic conditions on the wing so well that if you say I press the speed bar and pull the brakes at the same time, I have a very curved profile. Because of that, it's very stable but sinks cleanly downwards, and that way I can really fly very good landings.
I have to be honest, I don't know yet because I've never tried it, but Eike, the owner of the Airtime school, does that quite often. So that's one of the follow-up questions I'd like to ask her. Do you try it? Yes, I also try this technique and ask him how realistic the simulator is on this point. And if he says, very realistic, then I think I can go practice with it.
Yeah, great. Well, Bas, I wish you lots of success with your simulator. I believe that this idea, if it takes off or if more flight schools do something like this, could perhaps really be a step forward in the way people learn paragliding, or how people can deal with their fears, their difficulties, and the mistakes they make to move forward. And what I also see very often are already quite experienced pilots or people who have been flying for a long time, but who still have ingrained mistakes or can never land properly, but instead always sort of drift in by chance during the landing approach—it's just that the landing field is large enough, so they still all come down cleanly.
But they haven't really flown in a controlled manner to say, I can fly my landing so that, even after many years, I always land within a radius of at least 10 meters of the point where I actually want to go, which would ultimately be important, especially if you want to land in smaller fields and so on.
I've seen that quite often in the simulator too. But thanks, thanks for your interest. I hope so too. The whole idea is to help school owners make teaching more effective and efficient. And I would really like to—I have to say, we would really like to help the whole world with this. And what you're saying about the pilots with more experience, who...
have ingrained errors, we've also seen that quite often. Pilots who fly for several hours a year, who, for example, grab the reins all the time when it gets strenuous. We're also developing something for that today, so that you get a small prompt,
when they grab the controls. And what I've done over the last two months is, every time a pilot does that, I see it and it gets louder. And that works well too. Pilots are afraid of it. But a little extra current should also help with that. So yeah, the possibilities are endless. So
you turn the pilots into Pavlovian dogs who then react in certain ways. Exactly,
don't do anymore.
Yeah, alright, that's that. Thanks a lot for telling me all about it. I'm curious to see how quickly your simulator actually gains traction in the market and with people, if it really works as well as you describe. And I think I'll probably like to come over to Amsterdam sometime to take a closer look and then maybe write a bit more about it on my blog.
That would be great. Come on by.
And so, first of all, thank you very much for your story. I think that some people can still take away some input regarding how to deal with anxiety and things like that. So, I think it was a very interesting podcast with you. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I'm very happy to get in touch with your listeners who might still have questions or comments. I'd love to help. So, thank you for this opportunity.
Podz-Glidz is a podcast that belongs to my Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz. There, you can also find the show notes for this episode number 81, the Flight Coach with Bas van Duijn, along with several further links. Among other things, Bas also runs a YouTube channel with many helpful videos regarding the psychological and technical aspects of paragliding. It's worth checking out. You can find Lu-Glidz completely ad-free online at www.Lu-Glidz.blogspot.com. Lu-Glidz is spelled l u minus g l i d z. If you like Podz-Glidz, then please recommend the podcast. For example, with a good rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a post on Facebook or Instagram, or directly in conversation with your flying friends. You are also very welcome to financially support Podz-Glidz and Lu-Glidz as a supporter.
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