The very first thing we have to get used to, as hard as it sounds, is that anything that flies can theoretically crash. That means I can either push aside this fear—this "I could fall, something could happen"—or I can say, "Yes, that's a fact, how do I prevent it?" Whether it's meteorological, technical, or equipment-related, how much risk am I taking, am I flying prototypes, whatever I do, okay, how do I approach it? And that's how I assess the whole thing a bit.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast. Stories from the cosmos of paragliding. Today with Helmut Schrempf, Heli. And I am Lucian Haas.
In paragliding, it's now considered good practice to do safety training every now and then. Nicken and Rollen, accelerated collapses, steep spirals, and Wing-Over, Full-Stall, and Flyback are just some of the maneuvers you do over water and with the reassuring voice of an instructor. And what you're allowed to try out in your ear. It's a bit like a test of courage and serves many, above all, to build confidence in their own glider, that in most cases it even returns to a flyable shape and position on its own. If that doesn't work out once, it's often due to the pilot themselves. Because whoever sits in the harness tense up, whoever acts against the movements of the glider, whoever pulls the brake but doesn't release it just as controlled, contributes to extreme situations arising.
The Austrian Heli Schrempf has witnessed this many times over his 15+ years as a safety instructor. He has spent a lot of time thinking about and testing why this happens and how it could be done better. His takeaway from this is that SIV training shouldn't be about stubbornly working through a catalog of maneuvers. Instead, he focuses on training the pilots' motor skills. They should learn to follow the glider loosely in all directions as it moves. This is because, on one hand, canopy collapses occur much less frequently, and on the other, they usually unfold much more harmlessly. Heli calls this concept Safety Pilot Coaching, or SPC for short, as an alternative to classic SIV.
In this 127th episode of Podz-Glidz, we'll take a detailed look at various aspects of risk and safety. Heli talks about his understanding of good flight planning, introduces active-passive flying, discusses maneuver training over water with two-liners, why you should keep your legs more extended in a liege harness during collapses, and why freestyle training and ground handling represent the best investment in your own safety. If you enjoy this podcast, please support my work as a patron. You can find out how to do that very easily on my Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz, specifically on the "Fördern" page.
Heli, you posted an interesting video on YouTube two years ago. Paragliding Bingo Cutaway. What is it about?
What is it about? Yes, regarding its origin, I actually sat in a bar with my launch leader, pretty late at night, and we discussed how long a paraglider flies if you cut the lines. It was just a crazy idea at first, and then eventually, a year and a half later, we got two gliders as a loan. They were Bodyguards back then, and we said, okay, just cutting them off isn't fun anymore, let's make a game out of it. At the landing field, the line levels were drawn, the individual lines, and everyone had a radio with them and everyone had different lines to cut, and then the goal was, whoever throws a rescuer first loses. And it was actually amazing, we had 24 main lines there and I was still flying at the end with seven lines.
The deal was? The A lines only come into play from the tenth round, which drags the game out a bit. It's quite interesting, though, because we said seven lines, and the thing actually still flies—of course, it's an A glider, lots of backup, lots of reserves, and how much that stuff actually holds up. And then Johannes had the bad luck that on one side the A lines were gone, so the game was basically over for him.
And what was interesting was that he thought he could loop his hands, with his thumbs through the brake loop, to be able to control everything and still cut lines. And then during the fall, he more or less cut another line and it took him seven seconds to get his thumbs out of the brake loop. So that was like an "aha" moment from this video, where I'm saying, hey, that's actually a no-go, especially with gloves. He was wearing very thin gloves. Especially with thick gloves, looping the brake, really looping it in. He then went into the water without a rescuer. It was a rolling motion, six, seven meters per second, that was okay. And then I was happy, I won, pulled the rescuer out, and lost because of that.
I found in that
The video is very interesting to see; there are also shots where you filmed the canopy from above, or where you filmed each other, and you can really see how a paraglider canopy no longer forms a uniform arc, but basically looks almost like a sine wave at times—going up, down, up, down—and yet the profile somehow still carries it and it still flies straight, until the spinning motion finally sets in when he cut off that one line too many. Are you actually a person who likes seeking out risk?
No, I'm actually a total coward, to be honest. I try to be careful with everything I do. Some things might look very radical, but I think very carefully about what I'm doing and what the percentage chance is that it will actually work. And I basically assume, let's say, a 97 percent chance that it has to work, because we can never have 100 percent certainty anyway. But actually, I'm very cautious. To some viewers, it might look a bit different at times. I'm comparing it now to ground spirals over Lake Garda towards the landing field at huge speeds, where I always build in reserves. Where I say, I know that with the excess energy, I have reserves in the system. And I've simply trained for it and done it. It's not like I'm saying, I'm taking a risk here.
That's just my assessment.
What does the risk of a paraglider pilot depend on? Or, to put it quite differently, if you look at it from a student to a professional athlete. I'm considering you now as a professional athlete who also does X-Bier and X-Auto and has participated in things in the Alps and such. In your opinion, who actually takes on the greater risk?
I think that question is difficult. Who takes the bigger risk? I believe a lot of risk comes from things you're not consciously aware of. Where you say, okay, this is fine, but you're overlooking something essential. And especially as it is with us in paragliding, where so many factors come into play. Weather, meteorology, flight technique, maneuver flying. How am I feeling right now? My psyche, my physical condition. So many things come into play. And I know it from my own experience. When you go up somewhere, especially hike and fly, you go up. You have your equipment with you and you ask yourself, can I still do this, can I not do this anymore? I'm not entirely sure. Do I do it, do I not? I believe that in exposed situations, where you're running late on the time factor.
Where you say, I have to fly down now, that's where you take on the biggest risk factors. That's how I assess it. And otherwise, of course, I might have overlooked something meteorologically. But that should actually work with training to some extent, that I have a certain understanding of it. And at the beginning, I see paragliding like this. You start flying, do your first flights, gather your first flight experience. And it's a bit like a pyramid. At the bottom, you have a wide base. You actually have many things that forgive your mistakes. At the beginning, when you're out there, you say, okay, you're flying in 10, 15 km/h wind, then you go up to 20. That works, it has a certain margin. But now go into the competitions, where I say, now I'm thinking about a special start with the X-wing.
If I've climbed 300, 400 meters and there's a 40 km/h wind gusting at the top. You take a few steps down and say, yeah, I can launch there. As soon as the glider is up, it goes pop and I'm hanging 200 meters above it. The margin for error simply gets smaller. You make one mistake and you're hanging in a tree or you get blown away. And with these things, I believe the higher you go toward the tip of the pyramid, the smaller the margin for error becomes. That's how I'd assess it. And of course, that can vary from someone who just started flying to someone with 10,000 flights of experience. So it's very variable in terms of where the risk lies.
Is there a basic rule where you would say, how do you fly safely? How can I reduce risk in paragliding? Other than saying, I'm not going flying at all, but like, how?
Yes, a basic rule, I have to know myself very well. Actually, as the very first thing. For myself, I have, first of all, I read such a funny sentence, like, what is risk? Risk is a future that shouldn't happen.
Yes, that's basically it. And to that, there's actually the other thing, which is the plan. The plan is what I've done. And the plan is the future that is supposed to happen. And within that scope, I have to deal with risk, I say, is this going to happen? How high is the probability that this works? And we'll all have a certain amount of risk as soon as you clip your foot or yourself into the paraglider. You can stumble, you can make some kind of mistake. There are simply things that cannot be ruled out. I say, for example, I always said in the basic course, the very first thing we have to get used to, as hard as it sounds, is that everything that flies can theoretically crash.
That means I can either push aside this fear—this "I could fall" or "something could happen"—or I can say, "Yes, that's a fact, so how do I prevent it?" Whether it's meteorological, technical, or equipment-related, how much risk am I taking? Am I flying prototypes? No matter what I do. And I tell myself, "Okay, how do I approach this?" And that's how I assess the whole thing a bit.
You just said that to prevent the risk of this uncertain future or something not happening in the future, I actually need a plan for what should happen in the future. Exactly. So, basically, does a good flight plan always belong to risk management?
Yes, in all cases, 100 percent. You have to be careful now; many people have flight planning in their heads like, yeah, I'm planning a route. I'm going to do this and that. For me, flight planning starts somewhere completely different. That's, okay, meteorological preparation and so on. But my own assessment belongs there just as much. What can I actually do technically? Where is my skill level, if you want to put it like that? How am I feeling right now? Am I 2,000 meters high and saying, okay, I'm completely exhausted up here because I overdid it, and now I'm going on a cross-country flight? That doesn't fit somewhere. You could maybe put it like this: how do I assess myself? Where are my strengths? Where I then said, well, maybe I can't spiral because I'm just at the beginning and haven't learned it yet.
I might not be able to handle G-forces, for example. But I know a lot about meteorology and I can prevent myself from getting into a situation where I have to spiral down, saying, okay, I'm definitely safe on the ground. I can compensate for other things with different skills that I have, where I'm better at them. To a certain extent. Now, that doesn't mean you should learn more meteorology because you don't have to be able to do anything technically. But I can compensate a bit with it. And that's the self-assessment. What can I actually do? What is fact? And if you take a quick look at a post with Theo now, why has this ground handling shifted so much? Why can aerobatic pilots sometimes no longer take off?
And are the league pilots and competition pilots better now? Who did more ground handling and so on? How does that correlate in these areas? And a lot has shifted there too. It used to be that those who did a lot of ground handling hardly had any problems with take-offs. That came out of that area, specifically regarding flight technique, where I'd say, hey, there are actually only two tracks that help you with all other types of flying—from hike & fly, cross-country, climb & fly, no matter what you do. And that is maneuver flying and ground handling. The two support all other types of flying. I can definitely take something from maneuver flying to apply to cross-country flying. But I can hardly take anything from cross-country flying to apply to maneuver flying and freestyle flying.
I think it's become a bit of a springboard by now. You can also notice it in the SIV training. There are hardly any spots left. This awareness is slowly entering the scene, saying, hey, it makes sense to train maneuvers. And in the past, people would just say, well, nobody needs a SAT or a STALL or stuff like that. But nowadays I've said, no, for me, the SAT, for example, belongs to flying as a completely normal standard maneuver. We have the situation where I say, hey, I can take a stall, I have a spiral dive, I have centrifugal forces, I have exactly one SAT movement. When can I react to it more easily? If I've experienced it before or if it's completely new. And if I have the opportunity. The gliders make it easier now.
It's not quite as radical as it used to be. The equipment is better now. And why not? And that's how I see it, it's been said that the whole thing ties together a bit.
Ground handling and maneuver training. That was always about training. That means, besides flight planning, maybe we need something like a training plan for every plan for our entire flight career?
Yes, definitely. I like to break the whole thing down by time. I make myself a flight plan and say, even if I'm just flying a glide, I say, okay, whether I want to or not, I make a plan. I say, I'm flying out there, I'm flying into my landing zone, and then I'm coming in. The more time I have to think about how I'm going to do it, the less stress I have in the air. The problem always arises when changes occur. Specifically, in a short period of time. Where I actually... I'd say within a second, a quarter of a second during disturbances, or within a short period, I have to change a flight plan. I'm forced to do it. And the shorter that period becomes, the more critical it actually gets.
And I can only do that if I also train maneuvers. And it's not even about me saying I have to fly stalls on every flight or anything. It's about basic things. The movement directions of the paraglider that we experience from the outside. And something has become established there that I find just doesn't quite fit. Specifically, when cross-country flying, you're naturally tempted to maintain the glider's performance as well as possible. And that means no rolling movements and no pitching movements. And the pilots can do that. They've perfected it. They say fly straight ahead, dampen out every little pitching movement on approach. And if you've been doing that for ten years... I train that.
And then suddenly I have a pitch movement that I'm supposed to fly actively. And I don't want to do that at all anymore. Because the body says, that's not right, that's not good, that's bad. In reality, though, those are exactly the axes that move the paraglider. And when it gets critical, those are exactly the movement directions that are there. And they even protect us partly. If the glider, for example, collapses and turns away into the rotation. Then I have a lateral rotation movement. And it turns away. Similar to a wingover. It kicks out. I never train rolls or wingovers. And the glider is suddenly 45, 90 degrees sideways next to me. Then I'll probably panic.
If I practice the wingover over and over, I fly it. Then that direction of movement is okay. And it says, okay, it's stupid, I don't want the collapse. But I can only go along with it. And the rotation, keep the tension in the system. And after, what do I know, 180 degrees, I can catch the glider again. But I have to follow the direction. And we are now... that's the trend it's gone towards. The glider must not move away from above me. And that's only true in straight flight. With disturbances, if something happens, that's not the case. A friend of mine once compared it to kayaking. There's slalom. There you navigate your poles as precisely and as efficiently as possible.
And it's only if you mess that up that it becomes freestyle.
And that's exactly what we have. Nothing happens for 10, 20, 100 hours. And suddenly, something happens. And now it's not flying straight anymore. Now I have to tilt my head toward freestyle, in truth. And say, okay, how do I get out of that?
Now, the wingover is an example—it's already a relatively complex maneuver that you wouldn't necessarily teach a student as their first thing or anything like that. But let's stick with the student and go one level deeper. If you look at how and what is taught in terms of flight technique in a paraglider school today, is there any important basic knowledge, motor skills, or anything else that is basically being criminally neglected from your perspective?
"Sträflich" is a harsh word, but yeah.
Well, it's difficult, of course. I'm just looking at the training now, how I became a flight instructor back then. I started flying myself, of course, got my licenses step by step, and then went into the flight instructor training. One week of theory, one week of practice. And then another refresher course. And with three weeks of training, I became a flight instructor. Plus the practice hours you obviously need on top of that. Looking back now, having had my license to train students, I actually have to say I wasn't ready for it. Not with what I actually received as a toolkit there. The flight instructor training is actually too short. And at some point, I started thinking: how would I teach myself to fly, 10 or 15 years ago, with
based on what I know now. And I actually came up with something completely different. I did an experiment, which I have to say wasn't entirely legally sound, and I asked myself: how many times does a person have to set up a paraglider before I can let them fly down from the mountain for the first time? And we had, I believe, 25 setup exercises in a practice slope. I broke that down to five times. That was a very tough experiment back then. And it worked. I always watched and thought, okay, let's wait, we'd better do a bit of theory, let's discuss this. The pilot has to understand what he's doing. That is, why am I doing this now? Then comes the how: how do I do it? And specifically, it's not necessarily how do I do this with the glider, but how does my body do it.
What movement motor skills do I need to apply? I put a lot of emphasis on that, and with 14 people—14 participants—there are naturally those who are more motor-skilled, while some find it a bit harder to implement. It certainly also comes down to how much I move, or how much I move outdoors, or if I don't actually do any sports at all. Various things play a role there. The person who launched the glider most often did it seven times, and then we flew down 500 meters in altitude. Of course, with theory briefings, rescue briefings, etc. The effect of that was that the people only went up the practice slope three, four times, or six, seven times, and then afterwards, as I said, after flying, the valley wind sets in, let's go back to the practice slope, they all said, yeah, cool.
And I know from my own experience, I ran up that slope 30 times, or 40 times. And I just didn't want to see it anymore. Because I'd say, it's exhausting in the summer, it's warm, you're dragging this insulation layer up with you, you're sweating like a pig, and then you just don't want to go there anymore. And the effect was, they all said, hey, cool, let's go again. And then, this is about 15 years ago, maybe ten, I said, hey, we have to change this. My flight school director back then said, are you crazy, that's right. That's not legally allowed if something happens. And I said, yeah, I understand, but maybe we have to change the basis for it.
It's quite interesting, I had a Swiss flight instructor recently, also in the podcast, called Schmatz. He basically follows the exact opposite of what you're saying right now. He has his flight students—always a very exclusive group, only 15 to 20 per year—whom he first only lets do ground handling for months at a time. And only when they can do ground handling really well, specifically on a flat field with a nice valley wind, but a flat field, only when they really master that and can complete a proper course, then he says, okay, now they have so much body awareness, now I'll take them to the mountain and they can also take off safely there, then everything is fine. It's just a different approach, especially probably regarding motivation. I mean, you have to have very high intrinsic motivation if you say, I'm sticking to ground handling for three months before I'm even allowed to take off.
And you're saying, yeah, it's best to let them start flying after five times, and then they're motivated to learn all the rest.
That's also an option, and I can definitely vouch for it working. I did it that way with my son. He did a lot of ground handling at the beginning and, of course, gained relatively good motor skills and an understanding of movement because of it. But it's also a factor of time. I think we also have to consider that—we all have a certain amount of vacation, of free time. How much time can I invest? If I say, I'm going to do three months of ground handling, I can only agree that would be perfect, right? But few people actually have the time. And everyone who basically says, I want to start flying, has this dream of taking off, of getting their feet off the ground. I can still remember my first flight.
That was just, wow, awesome.
And that exact motivation told me that if I really want to be able to do this, I have to spend a lot of time on the ground. My flight instructor told me that back then too. If you want to get good at it, you spend a lot of time on the ground. But there has also been a difference in terms of technology. Nowadays, we have gliders that basically launch on their own, more or less. They are very forgiving. The glide performance has improved. The gliders fly better.
Passive safety has increased. You can do a lot. And if someone can also provide the feeling of flight, they learn to fly their curves, I can only learn in the air. I can't do it anywhere else. And that's also your question, the time factor. How much can I actually learn? And I think a combination of both would be perfect. Which is also the current discussion, that ground handling should actually be mandatory as part of the training. I would find that great if that happens. Especially ground handling technically, now that it's going back to Namibia. There are many variants there too, where everyone says Cobra starts and all that stuff. And I always try to explain, guys, it's all one thing.
Whether I do a Cobra start, pull back, or pull forward, in truth, I can get out of any position into any situation. And ground handling already trains that understanding. For me, for example, ground handling was where I'd say, well, this pulling back, I stand there with my crossed leg straps and hold my glider over me for two hours—that actually goes pretty quickly once. But as soon as the glider is up there, it doesn't belong up there anymore. And for me, everyone—so I myself at the launch site—I pull up, and as soon as the glider is over me or in that direction, I turn around. Ground handling actually means: then stand facing forward, lower the glider to the left or right side. Move on.
Try to get a plan. What else can I actually do with this thing? Which directions can I move it? Just holding a glider over me for two hours, especially at the beginning, yeah. But as soon as that works, it has to get out of there. Because that's the situation you have when launching. The glider breaks out, it's off to the side of you. What do I do now? How do I get out of that position and maybe back into a launchable position? And that's what you should actually work towards. Also deepening the ground handling a bit or saying what provides what. And if the glider is standing next to me—I think everyone knows forward pulling, the glider goes off to the side, then it's standing next to me and we all have this sinking or under-running, whatever you want to call it. And if the glider is standing next to me during a forward pull, then I have the same position as if it were in a Cobra launch.
And you can maybe combine that a bit, saying, hey, this is all one movement and I can go from any position to another. And if the Swiss guy says during ground handling, exactly that's what I want my people to be able to do before they go up for their first flight, that's an approach that is absolutely awesome.
This keeping the glider above you might also have to do with people saying, oh, you can learn to keep the glider above you in the form of active flying. Like you were saying earlier, we train a lot towards having the glider above us as much as possible and noticing immediately, oh, it's moving a bit to the right, so I steer a bit against it, it's moving a bit forward, I pull the brake again, and so on. Are we basically putting maybe a bit too much weight or too much attention on this so-called active flying?
That's a very difficult question. Active flying, what does that actually mean? There's also the thing of always flying in contact, always playing the glider, and so on. And I keep getting this question in the trainings, what is active flying? And only two years ago I questioned that myself again, or questioned myself, what am I actually doing when I'm active flying? In the trainings, I then...
for years I've been taught: go with the glider, stay loose in the harness, relax, stay connected with the system, go with it. And then I caught myself in practice and said, I'm not doing that at all. I'm flying under tension, I'm under a slight body tension when I'm flying straight ahead, accelerating on my own,
but as soon as I have a disturbance, I release my tension to go with the system. The slight body tension helps me feel the system. But as soon as a disturbance occurs, I have to go with it. And I can only do that if I let my butt cheeks go loose. And that was like, fuck, I've actually misinterpreted that for myself and passed it on for ten years. Stay loose, yes, but only then when something happens do I have to go with it. In order to feel something, I have to be connected to the system. If I'm sitting in there like a potato, it just tosses me left, right, back and forth, and I don't actually feel anything at all.
And then I said, okay, active flying means for me, I'm under tension, the system wants something else, what you want, first go along with it and then I correct it again. And that's exactly what we do. Especially when you talk about the new generations of gliders where you have the control on the rear risers, in the accelerated state, you try to compensate via the rear B - or C - handles, but the hips have to move externally with it. Tension, go along, give way, build up tension, correct.
So that's how I've defined active flying for myself. That old saying, "half two kilos of control pressure and nothing will happen"—that used to be an opinion, but I've completely moved away from it. Because it just doesn't add up.
So active flying is actually this switch between body tension and relaxation? Exactly, in order to
That's basically how it works. And that's how I've flown very well until now, and in the flights I've done—whether cross-country or at Hike & Fly competitions—I've never had any situations where I would have even remotely said, "Now I'm close to the reserve." I've never had that. Precisely because of what happens intuitively a lot of the time, you eventually have to sit down, analyze it, and say, "What am I actually doing there?" so that you can pass that knowledge on.
You are currently one of the most sought-after safety instructors, also because you offer training specifically for two-liners, for example, the Deutsche Gleitschirmliga or the Deutsche Liga des Gleitschirmfliegen, so the competition people were already there with you in training to try out how to handle a two-liner in emergency situations or stress situations and collapse situations and all that. But before we talk about that, first tell me at all how you came to become a safety instructor. So
That might have to start earlier, I never wanted to learn to fly. You never wanted to, okay. I never wanted to learn to fly.
I originally come from various fields; I used to do more climbing, and I was also a canyoning guide, a rafting guide—I was already active in the outdoor scene. At some point, my ex-girlfriend back then said, "I'm already flying, you should get your license." And I said, "No, you, then stop with the climbing and so on." Then the relationship ended, and I got the license.
And then I somehow got hooked and said, wow, that's really cool. It was just the first flight down, but I said, wow, I want to do that, that's really something ingenious, to lift your feet off the ground and just fly underneath with the simplest means. And then I started out as a bus driver. Then I became a flight instructor, and then the first...
supervised flights, practice slopes, or high-altitude flights. Then at some point, I started doing routes from the launch site to the landing field and eventually started thermal soaring courses. Thermal soaring wasn't really my thing. I'm more of the type who says, I want to do aerobatics, I want a bit of action, I need a bit of adrenaline at the beginning. And I actually spent a lot of time on aerobatics. I flew my first stalls at the Stoderzinken, I still remember exactly what that was like. I was up there with a friend and we looked at each other, I said, have you ever flown into a stall? Yeah, no. You? No. How does that work?
Okay, yeah, brake down slowly, pull through, and if he tips back, hold your hands under your ass, hold them, and if he's anywhere forward, hands up. Okay, then we took off, did some fiddling around, we lost it, and I braked down five times and thought, well, oh well. And at some point I realized, now he's gone. I held on, I was shaking like a dog, and at some point hands up, luckily the thing flew again. And then I thought, are you kidding me, that can't be right, can it? And that's when I started to get interested in what I was actually doing, why was it shaking me around like that? YouTube wasn't that widespread back then, in 2005,
In 2004, streaming was like in the Marktcafé—it took half an hour to load a single video. And then we just moved forward step-by-step and did a lot of training on the ground, and I thought, hey, you can train that on the ground, that's great. Pulling up a glider over the brakes. And so it went forward step-by-step, then eventually I learned spirals, flew the first helis, and just kept going step-by-step. And my uncle at Sky-Club Walter Walter then said, yeah, just come along to the SIV training, and I stood in front of the camera for once. And I was allowed to watch, so to speak, and they said something like, they put me at the launch site, launch site management, and eventually I sat at the radio. And sitting at the radio for the first time, that was hell.
Telling someone to do this now, and suddenly half the glider is missing, or it accelerates, or it goes into a spiral, and I thought, wow, what am I even saying? And then I realized, somehow, I'm good at this. I can pass on the experience of what I did myself—the stuff I messed up—and give someone a shortcut. That's nothing other than what we do as instructors. We try to shorten the path we took, the things we learned ourselves, and tell someone, save yourself these steps, then you'll progress faster. And I've asked myself from time to time if that's okay. That I can get someone that far so quickly. And I regularly question that for myself as well.
Does that fit? Is that the right way? For example, I had someone there with 40 flights, 42 flights, so practically finished, and I grabbed them and said, hey, you up for it? Let's try this, trust me as far as I can, I've assessed you based on what you've learned so far, what your motor skills are like, to get this far in 5 days of SIV training on the maneuvers, as I believe it fits. And he says, okay, let's do it. And by the end, he flew proud and full. Before that, he hadn't flown a spiral yet, he learned spirals during the week, wing overflying, so he learned it, flew it, and repeated it, and I had such a good feeling about it, and in principle, after 5 days of SIV training with 46 flights, he finished the training.
he flew the accelerated collapses, fully accelerated, learned spirals, controlled them, then flew them proficiently and with pride. And then we had a wrap-up talk and it was totally cool; he said, I know what it's about now, but I also know that if I want to be able to do this, I still have to learn more, I have to repeat it, it's really muscle memory, as they say, or just doing it without thinking about it, but it's awesome because I've actually experienced and realized the worst-case scenario that exists once, and flying with pride, yeah, is demanding, you have to understand the directions of movement a bit more for that, but it's nothing dangerous.
Respect, yeah, and I find that a stall, for example, or flyback, as they also say it, there are many words for how you can describe something, some taken from English and so on, you say, I need that to fly, how am I supposed to abort a start if I can't stall, how do I want to land cleanly if I can't actually brake, in little or no wind, we need that and those are characteristics that our aircraft has and I find that everyone has to deal with that from the very beginning. Even a beginner, when he lands, he pulls through and produces a stall. That's completely okay, it's actually good that way. And that's how I eventually drifted there and then at some point I changed flight schools and have been at Lake Garda for 12 years now and did the training there with Ersttätig, with Ralf, and kept going and kept breaking things down and I remember, at the beginning we did the entire theory on the first day in 3 hours.
That was brutal; it wasn't really theory, it was more like, "this is how you fly it." Why? Well, it's just like, "this is how we do it." And then I realized we had frontal instruction, so we were totally on it: "that's the maneuver, flap, take the battery, pull down, release," and that was it. Why it happens or why you react that way actually got lost. And I realized for myself, if someone tells me to do it this way and I don't understand why I should do it, what the background is... I have no reason to do it, because I might have been flying for 10 years, I have many who have been flying longer than me, who have experienced much more,
partially. And if someone tells me to do something just because I said so, that's no reason for me; it resists something internally, a bit psychologically within me, I'd say, well.
And then I started really breaking it down and now I'm at three theory sessions in the SIV training. I'd say the entire theory is eight hours in total if you really add it up, where we actually talk about the maneuvers, about the reasoning—why should I do this, why should I fly wing height, how do I do it, what does my body do, why are the pulling movements? And so, I slowly progressed step by step until three or four years ago when Elli approached me. And said, hey, you fly the maneuvers with the two-liners, do we want to do a two-liner training? And I said, I don't know if I can do that, right? That was, for me, a new, purely two-liner...
SIV training, I was like, wow, what am I supposed to do there? I don't think you can fly it, how do I move the whole thing forward? But okay, let's try it. Let's just do it once, that's where we started back then with these two-liner trainings, and of course, I've also developed it over the last few years, step by step, getting more and more precise, and the effect of this whole learning process of mine was, on average, ten or twelve years ago, we had five to six rescue descents per training. So, add this and that to it, and by now, I think last year there were three or four rescue descents in the whole year. And that's where I say, that makes sense somewhere.
So, it has a commitment to where it went. And back then, I also started doing maneuver flying with the two-liners because I said I like going up, but I also want to do maneuvers, and then I said, well, the glider just has to suffer a bit.
And I actually started doing maneuvers with these gliders, even flying actual dynamic stalls, misty flips, heli-stuff, with the two-liners, which isn't always that easy, but it works. And I noticed, yes, the basis for that is motor skills. I have to start with the pilot. I have to tell the pilot because we all fall into a certain
shock or muscle tension if something goes wrong or something new comes up that I don't actually know yet. And I have to prepare the pilots for that, and I've noticed, like, if someone has been flying straight for ten years,
in competition, just keep the glider above you, stay straight, maintain performance, and yeah, no turns—that's a huge step, and I have huge respect for all the pilots who then say, okay, now I've flown straight for ten years, now I'm going there, and now we're bending the thing. That's like, the deepest respect, and that's where it starts again, and I do that too, I start with the two-liner training at the base. Very basic maneuvers, and that's, for example, nodding, completely normal nodding, or what does it look like in the Schreckengurtzeug training? And that's how I've built up the development until today, where I then say, yeah, okay, if I may put it that way, I belong to the top trainers, some say, and I still sometimes doubt myself, can I even do this, do I have the right to sit there, and before every training I actually always sit there for about an hour and say,
Man, you actually don't know anything. A little humility there. Hey, but then I notice it during the conversation; I say, yeah, okay, those little things that many pilots don't think about at all, or they just don't register because it's not that tragic if there's no disturbance, or if I don't have to be so precise. And then we just start with the basics. And that's worked out so far.
With the two-liners, there are basically two developments. I'd say one comes from the top and the other comes from the bottom. One is the CCC two-liners, the real competition gliders, where most of the pilots who fly them have been flying for a very long time and have a lot of experience. And then, for a year or two now, there have been these new C two-liners, where people say, "Yeah, you can move up from a B-glider, then you can fly a simple C two-liner" and stuff like that. But that will probably behave differently in terms of safety, or rather, place different demands on the pilots. Do you notice that in your SIV training too? I mean, do you notice differences between pilots coming from the top—say, from CCC—to your training, and the people moving up from a B-class who say they're coming for the first time with their C two-liner, do you notice any differences there?
Yes and no. If you look at this development a bit, I started with the RL R12 from Ozon a few years ago, back when the R10-2 came out, and how all those wings were flown back then. I've followed the development a bit, and I'd say the competition development is inevitable; if it works, it will eventually make its way into the lower categories, where it was sometimes a matter of certification that it wasn't allowed. I believe that if the certifications were there, we would have had that much sooner. And as for these two-liners, whether C or D, the difference isn't that tragic; they behave a bit differently, but you can still fly a C-2-liner exactly the same way as a paraglider from 20 years ago.
You go in with the weight, pull on the brake, and it flies a turn. And the principle has remained the same. You just have significantly fewer lines in front of your eyes, which is okay for some at the beginning. But then you notice while flying, they give very good feedback. It actually feels good. But the technology has also evolved a bit. In these situations, there are certain reactions that have become well-known by now: two-liners, speed bar and brake is a no-go. This habit change—if I say, in the past, speed bar, I was also on the brake and corrected it, that's simply counterproductive now. And this habit change, for me, the brake is always a control factor.
You sit under it, you have the brakes, I can do something. I have something in my hand. And that trust, giving the glider, I release the brake and hook into the rear risers, is a very difficult point for many when I move from bottom to top. From the top side, on the other hand, it was like, okay, we have to do this now, because the wings fly faster this way and they stay more stable. I trust the gear more, I give up more and more pilot control to the system. And I say, okay, through the shape, through the profile, they actually stabilize themselves through the rear risers. When I understand the system, I say, okay, I'm not pulling the trailing edge, but the B- or C-plane downwards.
I stabilize the system with it but still maintain power. And as I said, then a sharknose is formed with the rods, which also have that nose automation and whatever else they say that works to self-stabilize. I'm giving up more and more and am actually more of a pilot, letting the system fly. You could maybe put it in a box like that. Some people have become more friendly with it, but they have the problem that they fly straight for way too long. The ones coming up from the B are more into maneuvering, they're more into rolling and so on. They say, I'm only ready to fly it like that. And I think everyone has their own issues where they say, yeah, I have to work on this one now.
And I notice it specifically in this C2 category, that it happens automatically; there's a bump in the air, you get startled, you let go of the B or C and jump on the brake. And then you take a proper collapse. That's basically how they work. The others have mostly said, I really need to learn to fly turns again. So to speak.
Now with these C2 lines, or also the same with D and CCC 2-liners, you just can't practice everything in SIV training like you can with classic 3-liners or something like that. If you want to induce a collapse, it's always like, depending on how they're rigged, sometimes you can't induce them at all, or if you do, you just throw the whole rig away. So you need folding lines and other things. But if you always want to mount those to do it properly, isn't there a bit of a gap opening up with the rise of 2-liners and especially now the C2 lines, where they're getting wider and the gliders themselves are becoming more stable? Like, is there a possibility that pilots might be able to practice extreme situations less because they just can't get to them anymore?
That happens so rarely. And while it happens less overall because people say the glider takes a lot of the hit, when things really go south, it's still really intense. How can you even train for that in SIV training?
The collapse will be difficult, not at all. Folding lines,
Yeah, no. So I had this example, for instance, they have these fold lines, if you look at them, they're installed, and with the fold lines, there are also cross lines that go slightly over to the opposite side, and they came to me for SIV training and installed the fold lines themselves, and I said, I'll do it, I want to try it, and then he had the cross line from both sides, he basically had two crossed lines on the front, and I said,
That won't work, it's just not the way the thing is designed. And the collapses were flown, plus you can... I've always said, theoretically, you'd have to teach someone how to collapse first, because it's not just a matter of taking A-straps on a normal glider and just pulling down blindly whenever you get one. If I occasionally get one, I'd say test the glider, approach totally comfortably, let the collapse roll in very calmly, see what the glider does, and you can see it—when you fly the first collapse in a training session like that, already under tension underneath, and if it snaps like there's no tomorrow, then I feel like you'll more or less get scared.
Maybe it's also become known now that when a collapse happens, you don't lean your body weight into the opposite side anymore, but rather you go with it and work with the system, which has certain effects—that if you go with it calmly, in some cases in the calm air over the lake, the gliders hardly turn away anymore, sometimes even flying straight ahead with zero brake, while the pilot remains rather passive. Now the question for me, because I had another discussion with other instructors, why are we flying the glider collapse at all in the normal category where collapse flying is possible? Yes, so that the pilot gets to know the glider's reaction today, definitely, great.
But for me, it was actually much more about teaching the pilot, hey, half of the glider is missing, you can't sit upright in your harness anymore. That's not possible. Accept it, it's okay. Actually, this moving with the collapse is much more essential; accept the system as it is now. I imagine it like this: if one side of the glider collapses away at the top, then the side that stays on my right side can't stay on the outside to my right anymore, it has to roll, it has to move over me into the center. The sooner I let that happen, the sooner I have a profile flying over me again, just only half of it.
Because it's above me, the projected area increases, as if it were standing next to me again. For me, that's the much more important effect—getting out of these collapses, accepting it, it's okay. And I can't trigger this learning effect on a C2 liner without lines anymore. I need a different maneuver for that. I need a different maneuver, for example, the negative start. I pull one side, I over-pull the side,
it relieves pressure, so where do I tip? Into the negative side. I have to follow it. That obviously has a great effect, but I have to steer it out again eventually.
But I have similar effects where I can do that. Then, of course, there's wing-over flying, rolls, where I go along with the system. And for me personally, I used to hate nodding. That was a maneuver for me where I'd say, you put your hands up, the thing shoots forward, and you just hope it goes well.
That's why nobody likes it. You've already got a pitching motion going, you brake once more, the glider is way back, you hold, and then you put your hands up right above you. Then the thing shoots forward and you almost close your eyes and say, please let this go well this time. And I changed this maneuver and said, let's fly it slowly for once. Recognize the pendulum motion, recognize these movements, try to feel it somehow, like a swing. From me, it doesn't matter where you look, look at the glider, look at the horizon if you want to orient yourself, or close your eyes, but feel this movement. It's okay.
Keep the brakes pulled and give it forward, release the lines. Train active line release again. Release, let go. Don't just release everything suddenly, but relax them and guide the glider forward by releasing. And I set up a thing where I said you actually have to teach very few people how to pull the lines when it comes to something.
Pulling is okay. But active guided releasing, you have to actively train that. And that only works if I have a bit of trust in it and can do it slowly. Because, for example, with a negative approach, I'm breaking the flow, I have to divert it at some point. And the diversion is crucial. Initiating it isn't the problem, pulling through it. That's just a matter of do it or don't. But I have to get out of the maneuver again. And the diversion is releasing the control lines. It's not a sudden, fast release, it's a guided release so that it's diverted in a controlled way. And with these maneuvers, you can also do the exact same thing on a two-liner, if you introduce them step by step—train that same effect, this going along, this passive, active, partial going along into the rotation, into the tilted side.
So there are other ways with different approaches. From my point of view.
Well, it's called two-liner flying, or it's also the case that more and more pilots—not just with two-liners, but performance-oriented pilots—are saying, I fly a liege harness.
And what safety issues do you see there? Or maybe you don't see any at all and say that a liege harness is just as good as a seat harness. How do you see that?
I have to take a step back for a moment here, starting with the seat harness. There are huge discussions in the scene about how, well, now they've cross-locked our harnesses over time. It's always such a point of discussion. Cross-locked harnesses mean the pilot can't shift weight anymore; it's blocked by the manufacturer. And we've always said since the old days: more body weight, even more weight, shift over with the weight and move, use the harness, utilize it. And now we suddenly go and have a harness that says it's no longer possible. Anyone who has flown anything with more easiness, or something like that, for example, or a strapless harness that is light, notices that not much happens with body weight anymore.
Active. If the side is gone, it still goes down. And I said, well, is that really bad, or is it actually even good? I asked myself that question, and I had some intense discussions about it at Lake Garda and also with Dani Loritz. He
is a strong advocate for the very
wobbly seat harnesses. Yes, exactly. Or also with Nesla Michi. And I said, I don't know if the solution is to have the harnesses have full range of motion again. And then I just decided for myself, no, I don't support that. Because I said, we've gotten more dynamic gliders. We have more power in the gliders. We have more energy in the system. And I suspect the manufacturers aren't that stupid to say, I'm going to take that away from people and block it. I just think the communication hasn't happened. Why did we limit these harnesses? And actually, something happened with that. The harnesses were limited because people also noticed that if we leave them open, things will fly apart.
And I experienced a really funny example of this. Josi Landaler, flight instructor trainer and such. Last year, someone said, "Hey, we're going to fly some stalls again." And he said, "I still have a few old acro harnesses." And he says to him, "That's not going to be any fun." And he says, "It's fine." And then he comes over and says, "I didn't think it would get so brutally tippy with the new gliders that it would actually be barely controllable anymore." Now I said, "Okay, now we've restricted it." And what naturally happens, especially in training, is people say, "You have to use more body weight and more body weight." And I tell someone,
...shift more weight, but it's just not possible from the harness anymore. I can't shift more weight than the harness allows, because then I have to tense my body. And with that statement, more and more people get blocked who say, I have to push harder. And they're working beyond the system of the harness geometry and trying to somehow push it through with body tension and strength. And in the process, they can hardly feel anything on the brake anymore. That's basically how I started thinking about the whole thing. And then at some point I went and said, I don't feel good when I pull my feet in while doing maneuvers in the streckengurtzeug. I somehow had the feeling—I did that at the beginning too, pulled my feet in and back then I did a Niviuk Icepick
7 Pro, something Pro, and an SAP Air competition harness—I forgot the name back then—and I flew it and said, okay, I'll create one now and try to fly the Namextol 2 Heli or SAP 2 Heli with the 2-liner, all with straight legs. And then I realized I have no risk of twisting. And everyone said the risk of a straight harness with straight legs is the risk of twisting. That it turns me in. And I then realized that the risk of twisting comes 90% from a blocked hip. That I'm resisting the system when I have a negative rotation and the glider is already turning away negatively.
I can't do anything else. The situation is a fact. I'm turning negatively. I can basically only go with it and use the trailing brake line to steer the flight figure back out. If I fight against it and work against it, then it accelerates the side flying positively. I get more load on it.
At that moment I'm working against it, I'm blocking it, the glider keeps turning, but I stay still. If I pull my feet in at that moment, everyone knows the office chair—if you pull your feet in while they're out, you'll turn even more. So I asked myself during the training: do I pull my feet in from the outside now?
or I say, okay, learn to handle the harness, even in an extended position. Try to learn to use the harness for yourself, because in truth, we also have another attachment point on the footplate outside, where I can say, okay, I can work with this, I can do something with this. And the function of this leg plate is to keep you as a pilot in position within the harness.
For most of what we fly, the seat board tilt or the hammock tilt is forward and down. If I take my legs away, I get a jolt to my body, my butt slides forward. I lose my grip on the backrest, I develop an arched back, and with that arch, I inevitably need body tension, and with that body tension, I block my entire body again.
And then I asked, hmm, what makes more sense now? How do I actually fly in practice? I think everyone who has a stretch harness will also fly in an extended position in practice. At least, that's what I assume. It makes sense too. But then we also train the maneuvers in the position we actually fly in. And then there was a very interesting effect; I started doing this—I didn't know exactly at the beginning how to teach it, how to explain it—and then, by chance, I spent an hour and a half with Peter Gröninger in the evening during a private coaching session down in Carinthia, just based on pure reflection, talking about geometry, rigging, leverage, and power transmission.
...about the stretch harness or the stretch harness with a leg bag. And I said, fuck, that's it. That's exactly what it's about. So it always comes down to communication.
and I teach it that way too, and I say, for me as a trainer, it's much more work to say, learn how to handle the harness. I also have to watch the pilots in the air when looking at the videos and say, hey, lean back again, rotate your shoulders backward, take some of the tension out of your legs, let your hips go loose, but stay connected to the harness. It's much more work for me, but then it goes relatively quickly once you get the trust and say, that's okay. And so I said, choose for yourself, as a pilot, you have to decide whether you pull your feet in, switch the system off, or if you say, I'm going to learn how to handle the system now.
And then some funny effects occurred. I obviously have competition harnesses, which have more stability, the seat board inside where you're still thinking, okay, should I be in a circle of 4, do I do it this way or that way, high inertia, etc. I had people, that was back then, I think a Leitner, who ripped off massively during the SAT initiation. That was one of the first things where I thought, feet ripped off, that's it. I had already prepared, rotation direction, counter-steering, rescuer in my head, and absolutely nothing happened.
He simply learned how to work with the harness; he did something similar to two negative rotations in the McTwist, brought his hand back up, the system stabilized it, and he rotated along with his legs extended at the bottom and nothing happened. I think I watched that video about 20 times and saw that he did exactly that. What do you do during a SAT? You brace yourself on the riser and push your hips into the initiating side. Now, when you pull away, where is your body weight automatically due to the bracing hand? On the inside. If the bracing hand stays, the weight inevitably stays there as well.
It's exactly this moving with it. If he had been startled and shifted his weight to the other side, he would have twisted. Because he moved with it, or simply rotated with it, even with his legs extended, the mass was already in motion, so it didn't matter. And specifically during the exit, if he had tucked his feet in there, the glider would have stayed still and at the moment he would have tucked his feet in, he would have twisted even more. It works, it's doable, and I said I'm going to teach it like this now. I'm really trying to teach people to work with the system and I think 90% say, I'm going to go for it, I'll try it, I get the feedback, that was so cool, I've finally learned how to work with the system, even in practice outside.
It was so cool, I went with it, just properly unloaded the foot, moved with my hip—it was zero stress and it works. And of course,
by now, several people have taken over the training, as well as other trainings; we were the first ones back then to really go through with it and say, against all opinions, let the feet stay extended. And I had to take a lot of heat,
I was actually proven right, that people have learned to handle the gear better. That's how it turned out.
Did you actually observe any effects in your SIV training? Especially in the last 2–3 years, more and more harnesses have come out that have a long tail. So, where you don't just have the leg loop at the front, but also another meter at the back—so with the large competition harnesses, there's basically another 1.50 meters at the back acting as a tail. If you now get into those kinds of rotational movements,
does it actually cause a rotation or does it stabilize it? So, do you see a disadvantage or an advantage there in terms of safety?
The rear wing—depending on the harness, if you're unlucky, you'll keep flying blind. Because it just hits you right in the face. Yeah, exactly. So there was a problem once, I think, with submarines in that direction, if those wings hang in front of your face because there's just enough room, then it's rather unpleasant. Otherwise, I haven't observed anything else where they really get in the way. I had a video of that somewhere,
with the Hikenfly harness from Nova, where you then turn in the heli, the belt stands there at a 90-degree angle to the side. If someone wants to call that a tail fin, yeah.
Whether it
I don't really know what it actually achieves. But in the stall, for example, the straight legs have exactly that effect when flying backwards. They even stabilize it a bit.
And then there's a second question about the new harnesses, especially in the competition area. You also mentioned that there are more and more of these cross-tensionings. But there are also ones where you can say, especially for accelerated flying, you can tighten it up properly so that it becomes really stable. It's not just a slight cross-tensioning, but basically, you close it off completely. If you're flying your SIV training with people like that, do you let them fly with the open system or with the closed one? Because that probably makes a big difference in how you actually feel it, how you tilt, and how you can follow the movement.
Principally open. Open first of all. I've tried flying with closed cross-bracing myself. You feel much less. But as I said, if one side is unloaded, I can basically tension the harness however I want. It will still tip over. There's no other way. It will of course try to work against it, and the way it follows you in itself will be more difficult. And I think we're at a point where, step by step, this extended position and so on is slowly gaining traction in the scene, where people say, okay, that makes sense, I'll go along with it or whatever. And to increase it step by step. First of all, to make it easier to feel this following motion.
But at the moment when half of the glider is missing, I think I can tension it however I want. It's not a rigid connection in that sense, even with cross-bracing. I will still tip over. However, because of that, I also naturally get some heavy collapse reactions at times, because the glider's rolling moment is delayed or builds up more slowly and tends to turn into a canopy adjustment instead. I've actually kept it more in the open range during the training now. I tried it myself and said, okay, let's stick to the basics. As I said, we now have three years of two-liner training and for me, it clearly counts from simple to difficult. One after the other. And I think we are now at the beginning of maneuver flying again, where it's become fashionable again, so to speak, where people have noticed, yes, freestyle does bring something.
That it's about rebuilding trust and saying, okay, now I'm going to increase the skill level again. Now I'm going to fly the whole thing with cross-tension. So now we're flying into the valley with cross-tension. How does that feel? It might even become more stable in these areas. But one thing at a time.
You don't call your own SIV training SIF anymore, which stands for simulation of incidents in flight, but you now speak of Safety Pilot Coachings and you've introduced the acronym SPC for that. What is different about SPC compared to an SIF?
What's different about SPC? I simply tried to put the pilot in the foreground and not the maneuver. I just realized for myself that when I explain a flight maneuver to someone and say, "Look, this is why you have to do it, or this is how it's flown, or why it's flown this way," I have to give them the opportunity—I then talk about feeling it, trying to feel it, trying to sense what's happening there—and I realized, about 10 years ago, the first time I had someone sitting in a simulator and said, "Shift your weight and pull there," and I grabbed their arm, upper arm, shoulders, and thought, "He's made of iron, he's rock hard, he's tense," and then I tried, I went up a week later and said, "Now I'm going to try what happens if I fly up with the wings and fly myself with full body tension, keeping everything tense."
After the second round, I took a massive collapse and turned it into a descent, and I realized I have to first give someone the opportunity to feel the body mechanics, the person, the muscle tension, the distribution of force, the transfer of force—to feel it at all, the thing I'm talking about, so that they can eventually get in the direction of what I'm saying. So that they understand what I mean by that too. And that only works if I, as the pilot, control certain muscle groups differently. Like I told myself, we actually have to take on a sort of passive-active body posture, which is a contradiction in itself, which now means, for example,
With the harness, your feet shouldn't be strapped into it; they're supposed to hold you in position within the harness. Your hips should stay loose so you can move with it when the time comes. Your back should be against the back of the harness, your shoulders relaxed, actually slightly rotated back, and your hands should move externally from the body, decoupled. As soon as full body tension builds up, nothing is decoupled anymore and every movement of the harness is automatically transmitted to the control line. And that is the basis, and that's when I start coaching the pilot first. The maneuver is actually only the next stage. And especially in maneuver flying, you often end up in
situations where you haven't been before, maybe even situations where you didn't want to go at all, and I try to observe the pilot's reactions, this overview—this "go with it, relax, feel the pulling motion"—and then suddenly he realizes, hey, this works. And that's when I talk about pilot coaching and no longer about maneuver training. And I said, that's where I want to get to. That's why I want to give the pilot something he can actually use later. And it works when I say, okay, fly the maneuver, so you pull the collapse in or you pull through there, then you go with your hands to the carabiner, then you're roughly in the flyback, now the hands back up, and the whole thing was flown digitally, 0 and 1, with full muscle tension.
It might work, but you didn't feel anything.
Can you see from below, or can you tell from below how much and where a pilot...
...is tense? I'll say this once: depending on the altitude, if I fly out to one in Zweilein at Lake Garda and arrive at 1,500 above water, I usually say "spiral off." But, yeah, you can tell. You see it in the movement, whether the system moves together or if the system is fighting the pilot, behaving differently. And there are certain visual cues by now. If the head pops up between the three straps, then it's definitely not relaxed anymore. In that case, the shoulder harness has rotated forward and there's full tension in it. The hand position can no longer be held accordingly, the pull position can't be done properly anymore, and a blocked posture is created automatically.
I can tell from below. About 80 percent of the time. But the good thing is, there's also the video.
How do you get that stuff out of the pilots then? So it's also a lot of saying, I work with a simulator, where you put the people in there and say, now show me how you would move, and I put my hand on your shoulder and notice immediately, oh, that trapezius muscle, it just shot up or something like that. He shouldn't be doing that. And I press on it and say, now keep it steady or what are you doing there?
Yeah, just putting your hand on them doesn't help.
You're still at that point
not that putting a hand on them helps.
We're not there yet. Yes, I do that when I just notice where it's getting stuck, where it is that I... I actually do it at the beginning, I go through the movement sequences with each person for this harness, I say, these are your pulling movements, you can do this, and if you look at a group, every one of us is built differently physically,
lean, tall, a bit more belly, a bit less, more range of motion, less range of motion, and I notice then, I say, hey, maybe he can't do the movement at all, but what's the most efficient way possible, what else is there? And I try to explain why that is, and that's exactly where this effect happens. I explain why, and he says, okay, I get it, and the pilot is ready to work on it. If I say, do it this way because it's like this, why, I've been flying like that for 10 years and it worked too. But if he understands, hey, that makes sense, it's logical, it's simple, it's clear, then he's ready to work on it.
And that's why, at the beginning, no matter what training—basic maneuvers, pitching, rolling, whatever—where I pay close attention to specific things, I always say: for the first one or two flights, it's only about the pilot, it's only about the motor skills, it's only about the movement. The maneuver itself is actually, so to speak, pretty much irrelevant to me. I want to see how you move, and we'll look at that in the video too, and then everyone notices—there's that "Jesus pose" where the hands and feet are stretched out to the left and right in the harness, where you're like, well, that doesn't look very compact, if you want to put it that way. Sure, in that posture, I'm hardly going to gain any control over the system in an extreme flight state.
And with this understanding, maybe replay it later, maybe even readjust the harness again, that works out relatively well. Of course, there's always—I wouldn't even say resistant to advice, but rather it just takes time. If I've spent ten years learning something, automating it, relearning it is really hard work. And I see it like this: someone comes to me, I stand there, and he says, "Look, I've been flying for 25 years, since the very beginning, and now you come here and tell me I should change that." That's quite a slap in the face, too.
Changing it so that you don't go to the open side, but you have to go with it. Yes, no matter what.
I go up and say, look, what you've done until now isn't ideal. And I think there's a very high psychological factor involved, where as a coach I just have to be careful about how I say it. For example, I've experienced very, very simple things where someone adjusts their speed bar and someone goes over there and says, hey, which housewife tied this knot?
Who could have done it?
Just a little bit of empathy, a little bit of saying, hey, nobody does anything wrong on purpose. That's definitely one thing, nobody comes into a training session and says, now I'm going to mess one up. I can't imagine that. There are one or two cases where another pilot is suddenly put into an Akkuschirm and they suddenly stop the Infinity and I think, shit. And then I realize, oh, they swapped the glider, there's a pilot in there who can do it anyway, but they have the radio with them. That's an asshole.
But it was also cool because afterwards I asked him, hey, how were my instructions during the rhythmic to the Infinity, and he said on point. Perfect. It's also cool in hindsight because you get that kind of feedback.
It's quasi training the trainer then. Let an unknown pro fly along for once and then you'll find out if you at least coached them properly or not.
And it's much more about me creating this understanding. Why am I doing this? And everyone is still ready to work on it, and you have to admit, I only have five or six days to train something, and the goal is to give someone something they can work on. I had one last year who needed four days, and on the fourth day he says, "Man, now I get what you mean." He just felt it suddenly because he just really did it once, and suddenly he sits down and says, "I just learned how to fly again in this flight. I have to fly all the maneuvers again, I have to train again." And for me, that's just such a huge...
a weight falls off my heart, like, thank you for fighting so long, actually against me, and then realizing, wow, this works. When someone fights for four days, they want it, they want to do it, but I only have, I say, words I can give over a distance of 800, 900, 1000 meters and try to somehow steer them there, I say, try it once, give it a go, relax, lean back, go with it. And suddenly this aha-effect happens and the pilot walks away knowing, okay, it was never about this stall, it was never about this negative approach. But I have learned to master my motor skills.
I've learned how to work together with the system. And in that case, building up strong muscle tension is exactly counterproductive.
Severe muscle tension and stuff like that has a lot to do with psychology too. A lot, yeah. Like saying, I'm tensing up because I'm scared or something. How do you deal with the
Fear? Like I said at the beginning, I'm actually a scaredy-cat and I notice it over and over again, even in myself. Fear when I'm somewhere, hike and fly, and it's thermalling and the plan was actually to go up and fly down, then I freak out, get stuck somewhere at 3,000 meters and have no plan, and I sit up there thinking to myself, without wanting to fly anywhere, like, what am I actually doing right now? And then I keep getting height anxiety, it's hilarious. But if I'm doing cross-country or distance flying, say 3-5, plan, it goes there, there's no fear, there's a plan. And that's when I first experienced this plan thing.
And mostly with the fear, I know that anyone doing something new,
...has some fear involved. That's where my task, my job as a coach, comes in: to take some of that fear away from people and tell them it's okay to make mistakes. And I think that's a very important point. If you don't make mistakes, you won't learn anything. If you only stay in that green zone—like a traffic light system—where you can't do it, then the fear is kept relatively well-contained. You know it's impossible, it fits. But to develop further, I have to step out of my comfort zone a bit and face my fear. And I once said—I mean, a friend of mine told me, I'll give you an Akros glider, just imagine, I'll give you an Akros glider, you
you spiral him down, switch sides, pull, and initiate an infinity tumbling. And you know 100 percent that it goes well.
You know 100 percent that it's going to be fine, that it works. That's when I'd go and do it. And now I'm telling you, if you do it exactly like that, then you're 50 percent sure of what's going to happen now? Fear arises. Fear isn't actually knowing. What's happening there? And the further, the slower I do this—and for me as a trainer, I have to get someone out of the green zone, push them into the orange zone, to face this fear too, to see, ah, that what he told you before—body mechanics, distances, belt time, degrees, holding tension, that's okay. Now you've actually overcome part of your fear and said, that's okay.
I've moved up a bit. Because fear is, exactly as you say, the muscle tension, the strain, the different states. There are people who give up and don't do anything anymore. There are people who fight and want to tear everything apart. Or there's the state of shock. So I stay exactly as I am and don't do anything anymore. And the third is this giving up, hands up, doing nothing more, surrender. So these three variants. And the funny thing is, this giving up, hands up, is such a standard maneuver that you hear again and again in SIV training. Hands up. And I introduced the command where I said, "release is, you move the brakes up."
And when you hear me say, hands up, that command is actually, man, give up. Let it go. Stop. Give up. And it's amazing that in 90 percent of cases, the system stabilizes on its own if the pilot gives up. In very many cases. And that way, you can reduce the fear bit by bit, step by step. Like one of the Liga participants told me, on the third day he said, you know, I can slowly imagine that this is actually fun.
And I imagined it like this—a mandatory requirement was introduced in Germany for Liga flying. Okay, you have to do SIV training, maneuver flying, and stall flying so that you're allowed to do Liga flying in order to increase safety. And for me, that was something where, of course, some people were definitely driven there, and also talked to someone who said, "Dude, 10 hours of driving and 8 hours, or 6 hours of that, I'm scared. I'd rather have turned around and driven back home." So, in hindsight, we talked about it. And it only really hit me then that there is actually fear involved sometimes, even on the way there. You start imagining things in your head.
and then everyone is like, okay, let's do the first round with a nod and everyone goes, wow, that's awesome.
And notice, because he's the one who comes to me and trains me, I have to get to know him and he has to get to know me. So I have to trust him, he has to trust me, to a certain extent. And that's how you slowly build down excessive fear. And I always say, this fear, for example, I once asked myself, theoretically in training, if someone flies out over the lake towards me, yes, they can crash. And I'm monitoring that. I'm sitting there on the radio, I've given these instructions. I've explained it to them. They can fly out there and they can theoretically crash and hit the lake under a spiral,
that's not funny. That's also a stress factor for me. Down there, where I say, before that, I'm already scared. That's also what I said, I have to, as best as possible, beforehand, as much as I can, in terms of understanding...
call the pilot to let him be the pilot. And don't say, I'm doing whatever he says now. Because he's just a pilot himself, but he has to say, okay, but I can still hear his voice, just go along with it, stay loose, relax, so that he's still listening to me. If I start shouting commands into the radio, not much gets through. It's a struggle. It has to be joint training. And that requires a build-up and overcoming the fear, transforming it into respect, saying, yes, what he explained makes sense, I can trust him. He won't maneuver me into any situation where I'm completely overwhelmed. And that's exactly the game from the trainer. To stay in the orange zone, and it happens to me from time to time too, I've crossed the line by one step once.
And afterwards, it's a lot when I realize, wow, our gliders forgive us a lot too. That's how I would handle this issue of fear a bit.
Do you ever get scared as a trainer? Like, sitting down there and knowing, oh, here he comes, he was already so tense on the last flight and some other stuff, and now he's supposed to do the maneuver and shit, and if he fucks it up again, you might just lose it or something, so from that perspective, you sometimes think, hm, maybe I'd better hold him back a bit.
So there are definitely situations where I think, wow, I don't really like this at all. But he insists. He really wants to do it now. So there are situations where I say it's actually just one step too early or it's very, very difficult to find a middle ground. But I don't actually have any fear down there, because as I said, I've already excluded someone from the training where I just said, hey, you, the two of us just don't communicate. I simply can't help you with that. I believe as long as you're not willing to open up to me to some extent—and I try to address that very straight in advance, to clarify, to say, look, like that...
is that simply potentially critical or dangerous.
I've also had some very, very difficult decisions, to give you an example: I had a girl who was very esoteric as a person, which is perfectly fine, and I tried to explain the psychomotor tension, the whole thing a bit... she said, "Yes, yes, I understand, it's clear what it's about," but she just couldn't put it into practice. And then at some point the question came up: I want to fly a spin-stall, this one-sided break and then let the glider slide into the stall. And I thought to myself, "Wow, that's not going to go well, is it?" I mean, it just won't go well. And then we did a flight, no, now we'll do one negative approach first, and that was sort of okay, but she kept lagging because she was always working against it.
Then she says, you know, it sort of worked out, like, "I've already flown it, I've done it once, a stall flight. And that was okay. Just pulling through, shaking, giving way." And then I thought to myself, okay, if she doesn't do it with me, maybe she'll do it somewhere else. Or by herself, or whatever. Then I thought, okay, let's do it. But I'm asking you, focus so that it works. And then she initiated it and it was actually really good. It was really okay. And then during the exit, the concentration was missing; it was the fourth day, the second flight, and it just
fought. Body tension was completely blocked again, worked against it, the glider shot forward, got tangled, seat flip. Rescuer thrown, rescuer tangled, rescuer eaten, no more reaction and hit the lake in the seat rotation. Nothing happened except a shock, thank God, knocking on wood. But it showed me again, I say, the intuition I had would have been right. And on the other hand, I spent a very long time, three-quarters of a year, dealing with myself over whether this is my fault now? Was I to blame? I have to process this for myself until I can eventually say,
better now over the lake, where there's still a rescue, where I am, where the boat is, than somewhere else where maybe no one would come. And maybe it also showed a limit. And I'm not a fan at all of the "learning through pain" thing; for me, that's a no, I don't need that. And then at some point, maybe it was good, maybe it didn't have to be. I can't change it anymore, it happened like that, but I keep questioning myself: would I have insisted and said, no, I'm not doing this with you?
Could I have spared myself that? But then she came back and said, no, I'm working on it, I'm coming back, we'll do it again. And I was like, okay, good. There are some funny stories where I think to myself, okay, thank God it turned out that way.
Have you had a really bad accident with your...
your training? Not really. I had one that first spiraled into the sea with a Zeno, also situations like that, where I said I want to train these stalls, but that was a while ago, I want to train these stalls, I definitely want to do that. And I noticed that it would actually only take a week or two to coordinate your motor skills. But what do you do, you're there for six days and say, let's do spin-stalls, and that was all okay. And then he was actually at a point where now he's got it, now he has the system, the sequence, the movements are calmer. And it was very clearly his task, I want to fly these stalls down now.
It was the second to last training day. And I knew he actually needs repetition, repetition, repetition. But I already noticed that he's getting tired now.
And there were only about 600 meters left, 700, just barely. He's getting tired, he notices his concentration is slipping, and he says to him, you have to decide for yourself now; actually, it's okay, let's call it a day, but if you just want to keep going with the stalls, go ahead.
Because I just say, he has to make a decision at some point. The pilot has to decide at some point, "Am I doing this one more?" And I've actually always said, if you're asking yourself whether you should do one more or not, don't do it anymore.
And he also said, "Now I can train, bite, do it again, did it once more, hung up, shot, sentence collapse, rescuer eaten." And that also turned out well, thank God, except for a few bruises. That is exactly the difficult balance you have as a trainer. Where do I move towards that? I've already dealt with that repeatedly, like, how do I handle that mentally? And I've said, I can only explain it this way: I think I'm doing a good job. I think I try as best as I can to explain these things, to understand them, and also to pay a bit of attention to my own psyche, my own physical performance—what can my body do? How far does it go? And the pilot inevitably has to assess himself. I can't actually take that away from him, to say, "No, you can't."
And if he says, "But I want to," then I'd rather help him out and say, okay, but that would be the way. And with this approach, I've managed to avoid really serious accidents so far.
And just at the very end, there's one more small change of topic, but it's also related to that. In 2022, you took part in the X-Pure. But then you dropped out on the fourth day. And if I understood correctly, fear and psychology and stuff like that played a role. What was going on there?
Yeah, that was a thing, I imagined myself after the X-Clubs 2019. It's actually cool, the High Can Fly, and I really want to take part in the X-Pure. And I was pretty slammed with SIV training and also privately there were two or three things. And I worked quite a bit towards this competition. I trained little and knew I had to go there. I'm registered, I want to do it. And then I went relatively, from the SIV training in Gardasee to Vienna, then out to Germany, to France. And it all happened so directly and then I was there, on that one day, thin Pilar, where some people told me, man, you shouldn't better look at the routes.
And I actually said I need half a day of rest, I have to calm down a bit. I'm just so done from the SIV training all week and then on top of that. And that half day was like, okay, we can do this, we'll manage, that's fine, calm down. And then I ran the half marathon, which was better than expected for me. Then for a few weeks, it was a relatively slow climb, I was already K.O. because I hadn't trained. But it was okay, physically it was okay again. We kept running and then I had that flight I just told you about, with this 40 km/h wind into this valley and I let myself get pushed in at, I don't know, no idea, 70 km/h, slightly braked, I don't know.
The wind slammed into me and I pushed myself into the air. Man, what are you actually doing? I questioned myself so much and said, okay, it's fine, we're somewhere back there, in the back third, somewhere, maybe half, but it's okay, the competition is still long, it's still flying. Then I landed, my support guys came, what washed me down there in that fierce wind, I landed and I basically played it off a bit mentally. It's fine, I can do this. And then I walked along the roads, up the pass, over there, and at some point I sat down briefly on the guardrail and started to cry. And I thought, I can't do this anymore. So physically it's okay,
but my head just said, man, what are you doing? You're not present, your head is still back at the last training sessions, you're already thinking about the work you have to do afterwards, where the training sessions are coming up again. And that was the reason, then I called my guys and said, guys, I'm sorry, we're giving up now. And that was something for me, I actually didn't want to at all. It was, honestly, I sat there for ten minutes, I just can't do it anymore. I think it was the right decision there to say, it was a huge production, driving over there, packing all that stuff up, and after two and a half, three days I think, and then to say, okay, that's it for today. Then we drove to the race office, I lay down in the back, slept through it, the guys drove off to Innigeau, and said, hey, I'm sorry, this and that is happening, it just isn't working.
And he said, just come back. Although, that was two years later. And that would be this year, and I also applied again, I would have been there, but I had ACL surgery on November 15th. So that's for next year, it's dead for this year. But it will happen, of course.
So you want to participate in the upcoming Hike-and-Fly competitions again.
Yes, definitely. I actually had nothing to do with Hike-and-Fly until 2019. That was, like, halfway through, my first Hike-and-Fly competition, just jumping into the deep end. And somehow, I started enjoying it. To be honest, I was always totally underprepared for these Hike-and-Fly races. But I knew I could fly relatively well technically. I have to say, even if the conditions are shitty, I can get a lot out of the maneuver technique, which is just what I do constantly. As for hiking, I'm pretty mediocre. It's okay. I'm reasonably fit.
And I said, I'd like to just participate in Hike-and-Fly competitions until I'm 50 or 55. And I still have goals. I want to take a look at the younger generation and say, you can still do this. Maybe. We'll see.
If I calculated correctly, you're 40 now, I think? Yes, exactly. So until 50, you've still got 15 years. You could still fly some X-Alps and some X-Pirs and Dolomiti Superflys and whatever else is still on the agenda. When you're celebrating your successes there, I'll invite you back to the podcast. Then we won't talk about SIV training, but about Hike-and-Fly competitions and what lessons you can draw from them. For today, thanks a lot for your great storytelling. Very insightful, and very in-depth. It's turned into a long episode, but I think it has content that carries it. I hope that many people who listened until this point feel the same way and certainly learn a lot, and maybe then also look at, okay, where can I get my safety pilot coaching, whether with you or if this approach applies more to the pilot and less to the maneuvers.
Maybe this will also become more common in the safety scene or SIV training scene. You might then be a pioneer and a role model, showing that we can get to the point of saying, okay, I need to work more on my movements and my attitude as a pilot.
Thanks, Heli. Thank you. I'd be happy if we can take this further.
That was episode number 127 of Podz-Glidz with Heli Schrempf. In the show notes on the Gleitschirm-Blog Looglides, you can find some additional links. For example, to the Paragliding Bingo Cutaway video mentioned at the beginning and Heli Schrempf's website with his course offerings. If you enjoyed the episode, then please subscribe to Podz-Glidz. You can do that anywhere there are podcasts. If you also leave a positive rating there, you're helping to make Podz-Glidz even better known. Or just tell your pilot friends about it. Podz-Glidz and Looglides are free of paid advertising. I do this out of conviction and in the interest of independence. Nevertheless, a lot of professional work and, of course, costs are involved in these offerings.
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