The fourth throw was it, so it came out perfectly, I was able to stabilize the glider nicely above me, remove the safety, and yeah, then Scharpen basically went flying onto the big Jochen Schweizer branding in the Prater, and yeah, that was just brilliant. I'm getting goosebumps again right now.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding. Today with Roland Brunnbauer, perhaps better known from social media as Akroli. And I am Lucian Haas.
When paragliding makes the news, it's usually about accidents. Roland Brunnbauer recently showed that it can be different too. Roland, known in the scene as Akroli, took off from the top of a gondola on the big Ferris wheel in the Wiener Prater. From there, it was a drop of just under 70 meters. And then he landed gently on a meadow. The spectacular images made it into many news outlets worldwide. The flight lasted less than half a minute. The planning and preparation for the project, however, took more than a year. What all had to be considered and which hurdles had to be overcome, Roland tells us in this 138th episode.
Episode of Podz-Glidz. The conversation also covers what keeps him doing unusual stunts with the paraglider. The 31-year-old is one of Austria's best acro pilots and has turned his passion into a profession. As the initiator of the Austrian Acro League club, he also aims to establish acro-flying more broadly within the paragliding scene. Other topics include show flying with team Airbound and his flight partner Norbert Winkler, and the thrilling story of how Roland once feared being eaten by sharks after a failed D-bag jump from a helicopter. If you enjoy Podz-Glidz, please support my work as a patron.
You can find out how it's done on the Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz, specifically on the Support page.
Roland, how did you come up with the idea of wanting to go paragliding from the Ferris wheel at the Wiener Prater?
The idea came to me during the night; I woke up and just had this thought in my head that it would be something exciting to fly down from the Ferris wheel. And because of all the negative coverage—since paragliding is usually only picked up by the media when accidents happen or when things aren't so great—a lot is reported about that, and I actually wanted to bring something different into it. I wanted to have some nice, positive coverage of our sport and to show that our sport doesn't consist of accidents, as it's mostly portrayed in the mass media, but that you can really have some special experiences.
The sport is so much more than that. From that perspective, I had the idea that it would be something special. No one has done something unique like this yet, and that's how the idea was born; I then committed to it and worked on making it a reality.
Well, flying off the Ferris wheel isn't exactly part of our, let's say, normal activities of our hobby. Do you really think something like that will land as, oh, that's a normal paraglider, or what does normal paragliding mean, but that it will still have a positive impact on paragliding as a whole?
That would be my hope from it. Of course, it's not a normal launch site, it's not a mountain nearby or anything, but because it's so unique, we simply get a look at ourselves and our sport, and because the sport has actually changed me so much, I really want to pass that on. When you find a sport that is, like, so unique and so special and cool—I mean, I'm absolutely addicted to the sport and that's sort of what I just wanted to convey. People, there's more, there's our sport and it's simply great.
How did that actually happen or how did it go down? You wake up, you have this dream or this vision, you're flying off this giant Ferris wheel at the Wiener Prater, but how does it go from there? Do you tell other people about it first, or do you say, I'll call the operator of the Ferris wheel right away and ask, do you mind if I jump off the gondola from up there, or how did it happen?
Yeah, well, we're already getting into the core problem there. That was just a thought I had at one point. Then I sat down at the computer, looked at the terrain, and checked if what I had in mind was even possible. I realized right away that while it would be a cool idea, I don't think I could actually pull it off because it's just too exotic. And I found it very hard to imagine getting the whole ball rolling. It was really difficult to get the whole thing off the ground, but yeah, we did it.
What was it about it that irritated you so much, that you'd say, "Actually, I don't think this can work at all"? Why, for instance, the technology, the authorities, whatever all that is, where you're already saying beforehand that it probably won't work. But you still tackle it anyway. What was the appeal? Why did you want to crack that hurdle after all?
Yeah, that's kind of a trait of mine. You could see it as a problem. I see it more as a positive incentive now. One of my mottos is: if it's not possible, it doesn't exist. From that perspective, I didn't know the subject matter at all. I mean, of course I'd submitted various applications or something like that before, but I'd never done anything like this. And it was kind of like, that caught my attention. I had something I wanted to do, and until I had a final written "no" from the authorities, I couldn't let go of the whole thing. Because I didn't know much about the whole permitting process, I was also just interested in how something like that even works.
What steps do you have to take to get the whole thing on track and have some kind of light at the end of the tunnel? And yeah, I knew it could simply mean, well, it's not going to happen, you won't do it. At least not within legal limits. But yeah, that's what it was with what I had to deal with.
How many authorities were ultimately involved? Is it just one you have to ask, or do you then have to deal with the aviation authority or I don't know what else that's involved?
Regarding the authorities, I had negotiations and there were about nine or ten of them. Ten people were involved in the negotiations. These were all separate departments that I had to convince of my project. Ten different ones, wow. There were two people from the same position involved at one point, but overall, I needed three different magistrates, the expression control, the airport, air traffic control, and ultimately, I even had to submit an application to the magistrate for gardening and landscape maintenance because I basically want to land in the Kaiserwiese, and that's actually private property, but they basically manage the flowers and plants in there.
Those were intense conversations with all the different authorities to somehow find some common ground. What
was the toughest nut you had to crack?
The toughest nut to crack was actually the Magistrat, meaning the district authority in Vienna, whom I called quite early to basically ask how I should submit the application; they actually told me at the beginning that it wouldn't happen, that it's not permit-eligible.
And how did you manage to convince them after all?
After the phone call, I was a bit down for a moment, and I thought to myself, okay, I've already completed quite a few steps up to this stage. I already had the Ferris wheel and Prater GmbH basically on my side; I'd already convinced them, and they'd already said, yeah, cool, let's do it, it's great publicity for them too.
But after the magistrate actually told me it wasn't going to happen, I was somehow even more tense about finding a way to navigate the whole mystery, to read through the entire legal situation,
to just dive deeper into the whole thing, because I just couldn't accept the "no." And yeah, it took about a month; I called a lot of colleagues in aviation, with others who had received somewhat special notices or had been rejected, and I dug even deeper into it and found arguments for why it's permittable and how to get the whole thing onto a legal footing.
How long did it take, from the first idea until the point where you could say, I have all the authorities and everything I need on board now?
From the initial idea to the day we actually pulled it off, it took over a year. So, it took between one and a half years and one year to work through everything and be able to implement it in reality.
One thing was the whole administrative side. What did you have to do as a pilot for this project? Or was it just a matter of you saying, for me it's easy, I'll ride the Ferris wheel, climb up onto the roof, and just launch down?
Yeah, from a sporting perspective, it was of course also a lot of preparation for me to be able to do that. It all started with me getting a P3 from Advance, the production glider, the 16er. That was the first glider I had. With that—and we already know that with light gliders, throw and go starts are possible. Even with larger gliders, that's of course also possible; it just needs more wind. And with that, I set off, explored the mountains a bit at home, and specifically looked for places that are actually unthinkable for starting with a light glider.
So, with the 16er Pi, I started on the wall of a castle ruin. I felt like I started there for half a day, trying to develop some kind of technique, because the width of the wall was about half a meter and the length was somewhere around three meters or so. And yeah, the line length was longer than the wall itself was. From the way I climbed up there, it was like, okay, I'm not sure if this is going to work somehow. I stood up there. At the beginning, the wind conditions were weak.
I think I threw about 50 launches into the bushes, fell off the side, then walked about half a meter and somehow got a feel for the fact that I feel more comfortable in such a tight space. Because on one side, it just went steeply down, and on the other side, towards the ruins, it was a meter high. That was like the escape space I had if something goes wrong, okay, I'll duck towards the inside so that I don't fall off the outside, because that would obviously become dangerous. That was the first one. Then I realized, okay, with the glider we have some challenges where we can simply improve things.
I then spoke with Advance and told them about the project or the idea. And then we built a glider, a 14er Pi, which isn't on the market, it's not available. And then, I think about three to six months later, I got the glider. Until that point, I hadn't actually talked to anyone about the project. So it was really just a very tight circle I communicated with regarding what I was actually planning to do a bit. Because I didn't know if it was actually feasible or not, until the THW also had, basically, very little contact with the Ferris wheel.
I was still in the phase of, okay, how do I get in touch with them? At that point, it was really just a very, very rough idea. Once I got the 14er, I basically went up all the mountains near my home. You can't actually take off from anywhere normally with a paraglider. And I think I did about five hikes in three or four days. I went to launch sites—or actually not launch sites, they were just next to the summit cross—and tried to somehow get into the air. It worked really great. I mean, the glider is just brilliant.
So I'm absolutely convinced of it. And it's actually become my favorite glider now. I've flown so many places that you'd normally think it's impossible to fly from. And that's how I knew, okay, I think I can pull this off. Later on, of course, it was also added that if you're standing on such a small area and you don't get the glider perfectly into the air the first time, you obviously have the problem of having to prep the glider again for the next throw, and because the space is actually lacking, we had to find a way for me to sort the lines again in such a tight space.
how I can just get back into the starting position, so to speak. That was a bit of a tricky point because, of course, when you have wind—everyone knows that feeling—when you're standing there with the rosette in your hand and the wind catches it, the rosette inflates and... if you let go of the lines somehow, the glider goes backward and might pull them down at the back, and that was a bit of a tricky point to refine, to really have the possibility to prepare again even in high winds.
You've also sort of trained for that, you've actually gone to places and said, I'm going to stand here in the wind now and try to re-sort the glider again and again.
Exactly, so I'm a via ferrata climber, and I went up what's right on my doorstep, basically stood myself on the cliff edge up there. The front side just dropped off steeply, but there was a bit of a buffer zone on the back side where I could have jumped back if something had happened, and that's basically how I started training for the whole thing.
Now, on the Ferris wheel, you didn't have a buffer zone; it went down to the right, left, front, and back, and the roof—as far as I could see in the picture—the roof of this cabin is also slightly curved, so it probably slides off quickly to the sides, which means it's slippery, but faster, so you could somehow slide off or something. How did you do that? Did you secure yourself somehow?
The roof is curved, so the maximum dimensions of the roof were 1.90 m by 3.90 m or 1.80 m by 3.90 m, and it's curved, and I basically lost the outer half meter on the left and right because it wasn't really walkable; I would have slipped off. From that perspective, during my preparation, I really kept to myself, I just stayed 100% still and I had to basically manage to get the glider up into the air from the stand. I actually wanted to do it unattached, but the authorities wouldn't let me.
So I had to install a safety line just to get the whole thing approved; I basically had to create a massive safety concept just to get it through. From that perspective, it was like, okay, I have to set up a safety line. The safety line is cosmetically nice, but it doesn't actually do that much, because if I had fallen with the safety line on, I would have been hanging upside down and would have swung sideways onto the wagon or underneath it. So that would have been a situation that had to be avoided at all costs, because it would have been pretty brutal.
But that still meant that for the start, before you actually took off, you had to release this safety line as an additional step.
Yes, exactly. I naturally put a lot of thought into that point, like, how do I do this now? Because of course, on one hand I have the glider, on the other side I have the risers; I throw the glider, it goes into the wind, then I obviously have to control my glider with the brakes, and now up there at 65 meters, where I don't really have a radius of movement, I can't let the glider collapse or anything if it goes to the side—it wasn't an option now to take my hands off the brakes and basically disconnect from the safety. So we sat down, and a friend of mine, Jan, helped me figure out how we could do something so that they could basically pull the rope out completely without me having to disconnect anything on my end.
Exactly, that way I was able to keep control of my glider at all times.
How many attempts did it take before you were finally able to take off?
The fourth throw was the one where I ended up falling down. On the first throw, there was too little wind—so, in the city, that was a new phenomenon for me because, of course, I've never stood on a high-rise or anywhere like that before, and in the morning, the wind there was actually quite turbulent. So the angular velocities were varying the whole time. They weren't like gusts coming out of the city or whatever the city was dictating. It was everything from 30 km/h down to just 5 km/h during the time I was up there.
Finding the right moment, of course I only started thinking, okay, this is right, this feels right now—I could never say exactly what's needed there in terms of km/h. I basically thought, okay, this is it, a good phase is coming, a strong gust has just died down, and I took that phase, threw the glider, and the wind was just less, it had become less, and from that perspective, not much moved on the glider. So I threw the package backwards, it just fell sideways. That was the first attempt; the second attempt would have been great. The glider caught the air nicely, it came up nicely, but at that moment I was just standing there a bit stupidly.
The glider then sort of fell sideways over the wagon and I couldn't guide it back up over the brake anymore. To some extent, I could have still intervened, but I would have had to, yeah, move sideways, and so I just braked it sideways and let it go. That was the key moment somewhere, which was obviously the problem for the next throw. The glider fell sideways and I didn't see, okay, how it twisted down there. It was the wind, of course. Now I've pulled the glider back up and I think it was twisted once more. Now we've untwisted it as far as we believe it's right.
and then I prepared the whole thing again. On the third throw, I had the problem that I threw the glider and somehow got a line tangled in another one, and I managed to get a tension knot in there, and I just threw it away and then there was just this huge knot in front of me. From that point on, it wasn't possible anymore. That was the moment where I got a bit, let's say, nervous and thought, shit, this could have been it. So if I can't get that knot out up there, I have to go down, have to lay the glider out completely, have to check all the lines again, have to go back up, but because we were also under a bit of time pressure since we can only do this in the morning, I was already thinking, okay, this could be it,
that it just wouldn't happen anymore. Of course, I applied all the techniques we learned or were taught, and I tried to get it free as well as possible. Luckily, I succeeded, and it was the fourth throw. It came out perfectly, I was able to stabilize the glider nicely above me, remove the safety, and yeah, then it went off into Prater onto that big Jochen Schweizer branding. And yeah, that was the brilliant part. So, when I stood there at the bottom, it was like, did I really do it? Did I really get through the whole process?
and the whole mass of what I moved there. I had 35 people with me so that I could basically realize the project. 35? 35 and I'm getting goosebumps again.
That was just, yeah, it was just so, so brilliant. It's really hard for me to put into words what I went through, being able to actually turn that into reality.
How long was the actual flight?
Well, to be honest, I never actually counted the seconds, but I think about a minute and a half passed from the jump until landing. So the flight itself was just a few seconds.
Was a flight like that, there are things where, if you have extreme experiences, time seems to slow down, like you perceive it as incredibly intense. Was that also such an experience for you?
No, not really. I mean, I've never thought that it went extremely fast or extremely slow. But I think that's because I'm in the agro-flying scene, I'm quite active in aviation, and I actually learned all my skills through agro-flying. You often have situations there where you just have to deal with what you've got, and just hitting pause or something simply doesn't work. You just have to act. From that perspective, I think I have a pretty realistic sense of time for what happens in those moments.
Well, you've pulled that off successfully. The thing is, the images and everything like that also made it into the media. Based on the feedback you've received so far, would you say you've achieved your goal of somehow conveying a positive image of paragliding to the media?
Definitely. I think we've massively exceeded the goals I set for myself. I wouldn't have thought, back when the idea first started, that it would get so big and that we'd actually get such a media reach. We've been in the news and on TV everywhere—from Austria to Hawaii, China, and America. I think with this project, I succeeded in showing our paragliding sport to a much larger group of people.
Do you actually make anything from a project like this? I mean, you do live off agro-flying to some extent. So, do you keep anything from it, or is it more of a project where you say, at the end of the day, with 35 participants and at least a year of preparation and all that... all the time you put into it, it's actually more of a prestige project or a passion project, but not one where you can say these are projects you ultimately make money from.
That's not my approach—that I'm making money from this. It was never about, okay, do this because I want to make money from it; I did this more for the sport. Of course, for me, it was also simply about showing that limits can be pushed. Thanks to sponsors like Jochen Schweitzer, Samsung, Glorify, and Advance, the whole thing actually became feasible, because of course I had extremely high expenses from all the authorities, all the permits, the whole team that has to travel. They have to stay in a hotel, they have to eat, they have to drink.
So, I had extremely high expenses, but thanks to such strong sponsors that I'm working with, the whole thing actually became feasible. I mean, the math isn't fully finished yet; I'm still processing all the details, but there should be something left over. But that's not really important to me right now. I'd basically just reinvest that money into the next project so I can keep carrying out initiatives like this.
Can you already say what the next project will be? Or is it one of those things where you say, well, I have a vision, but I'd rather not say anything about it yet?
There's a whole list of things I still want to do, but to be honest, I don't want to go into detail just yet. I think it's because, until the day it actually happens, I just don't know—was what I did nonsense? Is what we're planning even feasible? So, in that sense, I'm a bit more discreet about things right now; I don't say "I'm doing this, and I'm doing that, and I'm doing this," only to end up standing there realizing, "Okay, I actually can't do it at all," because of the weather or some other reason, it's just simply not possible.
But definitely, there are more things coming that I think could be quite exciting.
Yeah, well, I'm curious to see what else comes out of you. If someone asks you what you do, like for a living or something, do you say you're an agro-pilot or what do you say? Or do you say you're a stunt pilot, because you're doing these stunts now that don't really fall under classic agro-flying?
I'm actually two things. Well, if you look at my whole past, what I've learned and all that, I have three things. But basically, I see myself as an athlete. Then I'm also a social worker, and originally I was an electrician. But I mainly see myself as an athlete.
And there, I obviously have my roots in agro-flying. Agro-flying is just what fulfills me massively. It's where I have the most joy. But of course, a bit of cross-country flying, a bit of hiking, things like that are definitely in my repertoire too, things that just give me pleasure, that I simply enjoy doing. One part is also just doing the stunts. Now, of course, it's debatable, okay, what is a stunt? For one person it's a stunt, for another it's not a stunt.
In short, I'd see myself as an athlete.
I'd say stunts are always things that involve a certain amount of risk and include some tasks, movements, or other things that not just anyone can do, but where you have to be daring and also have the skills to back it up. How did you actually end up becoming such a very good and, I'd say, semi-professional aerobatic pilot?
How did I get there? That's actually a good question. I never thought I'd become so rooted in paragliding that it would become such an important part of my life. I kind of ended up there by chance. I've always been fascinated by aviation. I used to live in the flatlands. Back then, I saw a picture of paragliding maybe once, or something, that it existed somewhere. But I think I also still had the difference between skydiving and paragliding mixed up, which most people actually can't tell apart anyway.
I don't really know if I've recognized the difference yet. My interest in aviation started with a friend of mine, or rather, my sister's ex-boyfriend. They flew gliders and PPLs, so they flew motorplanes. I often tagged along with them, and they flew me around. It was like, okay, I want to get a glider license, I want to do a motor glider. But it wasn't financially that easy to do at the time, or rather, it just involves an immense amount of time. I was very busy with my job as an electrician, I've very
I've been on so many construction sites there, I've worked a lot.
and then I somehow ended up with kitesurfing. Kitesurfing would be great too, and you can do it on land; we have large flat meadows where you can do the whole thing, so I just bought some kite equipment with another friend. We had never bought a kite before, we just had it by hand. Then we went to the meadow and just tried it out through trial and error. We were pulled across the meadow a lot, many lead patches. Before that, of course, yeah, it was like the first contact with a glider, just once. Then we went snowkiting in the winter, and in the summer we were out with land kites, and that's what I did. Because of that, since we are in Austria, basically,
...have to do civil service or the federal army, so it was like, okay, I actually want to reach the level 9 fitness rating. That's the highest fitness level you can get in Austria. If you have that, you can basically join the federal army, and I actually wanted to be trained as a pilot there. So that was the idea. But then the position took a completely different turn. Because I have asthma and a slight visual impairment, I just didn't reach the fitness level at all, and then I knew—or that was actually my decision—if I have a level 9 rating, I'll join the federal army and try to do pilot training there.
If I don't achieve it, it's settled for me: I'll go into civil service. That's how it was, I ended up in civil service and met a very good friend of mine now, Stefan, on the first day. And his brother, who was there, went paragliding. They were like a small clique. They went flying every now and then and got to talking, and he said, "Do you want to come along to a small slope with us in Upper Austria? You can watch the whole thing, you can try it out." That was it—the switch flipped toward paragliding. We did it, and that day it was clear, okay, this works, we called the flight school, we're coming for the trial day, and then in a week...
did basically the basic training, did all the practice slope flights, did the 300-meter flight, and then basically went up the mountain and did our first flight there. That's when I saw that you can do flips with a paraglider and I was absolutely fascinated by it and basically said, yeah, that's what I want to do. That
but you saw it happen to others, right? It didn't happen to you as a flip. No, that's
Fortunately for me, yeah, fortunately that didn't happen to me at that point, because I just didn't know what that was or what was happening right then.
Exactly, I saw that you can do flips with a paraglider and thought, okay, that works, I want to do that.
So just from watching it, you were hooked and said, okay, ACRO is my thing.
Yeah, I just had this goal in mind, okay, I want to do a flip with a paraglider. That was sort of the goal I pursued for a long time. The clique we had there, I mean, we turned it into a small, unofficial club. We basically gave it a name. We were the Parabomber Kopfing and it was a fun time, a fun clique. We drove from flying site to flying site, gained our experience there. And yeah, that's basically how I slipped into the whole flying existence. And maybe one point that's only becoming clear to me now was how I told them I wanted to learn infinity tumbling, and they said, no, that's not possible.
You can't do that because only people who basically live in the mountains can do it, and we live in the flatlands. You can't just learn that casually on the fly. You'd have to train extremely intensively, and it's basically impossible. I think that might have been a trigger for me, something that did something to me, where now, just like with the Ferris wheel, the realization is, like in the clique, again...
doesn't work, it doesn't exist. Exactly. You said that
it has to be possible somehow. Exactly. I don't think I can just settle for something like that. I have to experience it for myself, have the experience myself, and have to reach that limit and say, okay, maybe it really isn't possible. There are things that aren't possible. They just aren't possible mathematically. But maybe that's what pushes me.
Then did you head into the mountains to train better, or did you find a way to train in the flatlands?
That continued after the basic training and the whole course; they branched us off pretty quickly because we didn't want to do performance flights or anything like that. So we basically had our mentors in our cliques and drove to areas where the goal—or where we'd kind of challenge each other—was who could get the most meters per second of sink in a spiral, and then we just...
So the name Parabomber was sort of part of the program.
Yeah, that was, of course, our logo was the evolution of paragliding. I think everyone knows it, where the paraglider is flying and then it gets hung up in a tree, and because we were so integrated with trees in our hang gliders, everyone has had that experience of being in a tree somewhere. Or walked past somewhere where it was a bit stuck. One thing led to another somehow. The problem we had, or what I had back then, was, we didn't really have—or at that time, and that's 11 years ago now, there wasn't a scene like this.
it didn't exist on such a large scale as it does today. There weren't just a few scattered people flying out there. We didn't know that very well, of course, because we lived in the flatlands. For us, it was just day trips or multi-day trips. We'd drive into a flight area. And everyone knows how it is when it's a group of five people. You don't just join some other larger groups. You're kind of in your own bubble, sort of. Social media didn't exist at that time either. From what I saw on Facebook—that was Schlögl, and he was my absolute hero—I watched and studied his videos, but I just somehow...
didn't really have a guide on how to approach something like that. And that immediately became my downfall right after the training, because my train of thought was sort of like, okay, spirals, and what comes after the spirals? Yeah, that the glider basically spins like a helicopter. And at that point, that was just massively wrong. After the spirals and after a few months, basically with the training certificate, we drove to Kössen and the goal was like, okay, it fits, today we're going to rotate the glider. I took off and shouted over to Stefan, hey, look, now I'm going to do a helicopter like I saw it in the video.
And that's quite simple. You just pull the brakes twice, release one, then it spins, and then you release the other and it just flies again.
Yes, in theory it's quite simple, on the videos it's quite simple, but in practice, I think it's one of the hardest maneuvers to learn in all of acro flying. And if you just can't do a full stall, have never done a seat drop, and simply lack the flying skills for wing-overs, spirals, yes, it is, and of course rolls, pitches, all the basic maneuvers, pulling a collapse and stuff like that, you're definitely not at the point where you should be trying helicopters. I didn't know, but I basically did it, then I got out of control, basically stalled the glider or put it into a deep stall and it started turning. So it did the whole... I went from top to bottom.
The intro was still good. The intro was good, yeah. I just didn't know how to get out of there now. And I kept thinking to myself, I have to repair the glider now; he told me it wasn't flying because it was somehow dented at the top, and then it turned again and then it stopped again, and I just completely forgot that I'm flying B-gliders. Actually, I just had to let my hands go up and it would have just flown normally again. I really spent almost the entire altitude trying to get it flying again somehow. I didn't succeed, and at some point, the moment came, okay, that's it, I can't do this anymore, and somehow during that time, as of course with all the equipment and stuff, we didn't know that you could...
...have to deal with more closely. I had it from the flight school that, okay, if anything happens, you have the red handle, you pull it out, and I thought, or our mindset was, yeah, then everything's fine again. Yeah, as I found out later, that's definitely not the case. Hanging from the rescuer is not a pleasant situation. Did you pull the rescuer back to get out of the heli? Yeah, exactly, I got so low that I decided, okay, that's it, I have to throw the rescuer now. At the moment I threw the rescuer, I of course let out the brake.
Yeah, and I think everyone knows how that ends. The glider shot forward a bit, then flew nicely again with a tail like a flag trailing behind, and the rescuer was straight, so I just tried to reach back and pull the rescuer back in, because now I was flying again. Of course, it didn't work, and the glider just, yeah, shot forward again and I was hanging on the rescuer, becoming part of a mountain rescue exercise. So the mountain rescue that day actually had an exercise planned, and yeah, I was the subject of the exercise.
It also had something positive about it in a way. But that wasn't the point where you said, "Oh, now I'm going to put all my aggression—my demands or goals—aside. This is a bad experience," but rather it was more of a motivation for you.
Not at that moment. I mean, we just thought for a second, okay, this is it. It's not as easy as I thought at the beginning. There are definitely dangers there that I hadn't accounted for. We were in our little bubble where we'd definitely never had a situation like this before. I briefly thought, okay, is this the right thing for me or is it actually not worth taking such a risk. But luckily, and this was something I started doing pretty quickly, if something goes wrong or has gone wrong, you bake that stuff back together immediately, get back up the mountain, and just do another flight right away, just to neutralize the experience there, so to speak.
Crossing. Yes, exactly, exactly. And not with the quasi-driving home. It wasn't possible at that point because my glider was broken. I got my Epsilon back in several pieces because the recovery wasn't that easy. But then I borrowed a glider from a friend and did a flight with it the next day—or on the same day, no, not the same day, but shortly after—just to have a good experience again, so to speak. But without the heli. Absolutely, yes.
That's where I...
So, that was the point where I realized, okay, it's not as easy as it looks in the videos, where things are made out to be massiveley simple, and that in reality it's going to look really different and it would have just required more.
Was that basically the worst experience you've had in your agro career so far?
No, that wasn't the worst experience. The worst experience I had was at a competition in La Reunion, where I'd basically already given up on myself and thought, okay, I'm not getting out of this alive.
That's what happened. I qualified among the top 15 most aggressive pilots worldwide, and we were basically invited to La Reunion for a competition where we exclusively exited the helicopter via D-bags. I had never done D-bags before, so I learned how to pack them from the other pilots. I'd had a friend show me at home once, but of course, it wasn't at the point where I could say, okay, I can pack it this way and it'll work like it does today. The problem there was that we jumped in conditions where the wind was simply way too strong.
Before we got into the heli, we already said, "The wind is getting stronger," and "Is it still okay?" But somehow, with the competition and all the other slopes, you just can't... I mean, you can, but today I know, okay, I'm not doing that anymore. If I already have those thoughts beforehand, then I'm definitely not doing those things anymore. In any case, it was a combination of several things. For one, extremely strong wind, and then the wind was also blowing from the land out to sea, meaning we had already dropped over land. The helicopter was flying too fast—no, not too fast, I was in the heli's downwash.
That means we'd already had a few rounds before, and everything went well, so in terms of the situation, I knew—it was a good feeling—but then during that jump, because the wind was so strong, the heli was flying too slowly and I was right in the downwash. I jumped out and somehow felt like the wind was hitting the package head-on. So the lines were really, they really sagged, and I flew out quite far. The
The downwash basically pushed the canopy down towards you faster than you were falling. Yeah, exactly.
And at some point, there was just a snap, but in the meantime, the package had already rotated several times without catching any air anywhere. And then at some point, there was just a snap and it opened, and I just had, like, eight days, two twists at once. And so, if it twists on me now, I already know how to react—I just pull the outside a bit deeper and then it automatically untwists. And I did that and it just kept turning and turning and turning, but I somehow just couldn't get out of all the twists. And what might be important to know is that in La Reunion, the risk of being attacked by a high is quite high.
When we got to La Reunion, a few weeks before, there had been a high attack on a swimmer near the shore. And that was like the core point in my head, like shit, there are highs everywhere under me now. I was basically still trying to get out of the twists somehow and at some point it was just the point, okay, I can't get out of this, I have to throw a rescue. I threw a rescue and now, I'm hanging on the rescue and I pulled the glider, like you're actually supposed to do, basically towards me. I hadn't felt yet that there was so much extreme wind. I basically pulled the glider in and then I kept looking into the water the whole time like shit, high, high, high. I was somehow scared of the highs.
I hit the water and at that moment I knew, okay, the highs are no longer my problem.
The rescue chute immediately laid flat on the water and I was dragged across the surface at an insane speed; of course, I had the paraglider caught, I basically had the lines and the glider everywhere, and because it pulled me so sideways, it slammed my head into the water and I had trouble catching air again. I tried to fight, of course, to somehow get my head out of the water and what...
Were you wearing life jackets because you were flying over water too? The
In competition, we actually never fly with life vests because there's a rescue crew in the water, and that was the decisive point of why it became so dangerous. The water rescue just drove away way too late. Because of the strong wind, it hit me and pushed me away so far; the other pilots were already screaming at the water rescue, saying, "Go, go, go, he's about to get caught on the rescuer." So they saw very early on that it was going out of control, and they just did nothing. They just stood there, and there was a boat and jet skis available, and eventually, they just drove off, quite late, and the guy with the jet ski came towards me and tried somehow, like, to get me onto the jet ski so that he could basically lift the jet ski up.
We were, of course, gliding over the water at about 40 km/h. He reached out his hand, it went into the water, the jet ski flipped over, and we were immediately, I don't know how many meters away from him. Then the rescue boat arrived, and the main problem was that they didn't know how to destroy a rescuer when he's caught in the wind. And by then, I was completely exhausted, and I tried to somehow explain to them—La Réunion belongs to France, they aren't very proficient in English—I just tried to explain how they have to do it, that they have to destroy the rescuer. I mean, they kept pulling on me, and I said, no, not on me, but on the rescuer; you have to destroy the rescuer so that we can get me out of the water, and they just couldn't manage it.
They then pulled me up onto the boat with four or five people, and then I showed them with my last bit of strength how they were supposed to basically destroy the rescuer just by going over the center line. And then we had him inside, and then he just lays him down in the boat and of course, boom, the rescuer inflated again and almost ripped me off the boat again.
Yeah, it was a bit longer than... well, it was very detailed, but that was the experience where I basically gave up on myself, at the moment I got my head pushed underwater and had already swallowed a lot of salt water, and was somehow searching for where I could still catch some air. That was the worst experience I've had in the sport. And since then, whenever we have a competition or something, I specifically ask the water rescue if they know how to handle such situations, and I'm amazed at how few people know how they have to act.
So you often have to explain things, like what you're actually thinking, okay? Events are being organized and you don't really know how to get a rescuer out of the wind.
That means, just to make it clear again here, if you mainly pull the center line, that it really then, it collapses in on itself,
in the end. Exactly, and you have to grab it high, so you can't pull the main line down where the lines are basically spreading out, but you really have to reach in a meter or a second meter, or if you reach in half a meter, and then you just take the line and pull it until the reserve canopy basically collapses outward, so it just has no chance anymore and then hold on. That is a very important point, not just laying it down on the side somewhere, because especially with those round canopies, they just catch where the air and tension stop.
How did you deal with the experience? Did you say, just like before, I'm flying again tomorrow to get it out of my head, so did you do another D-bag jump in La Réunion the next day, or did you say, I've had absolutely enough of that for now?
Not the next day, because my glider was, of course, torn again multiple times.
I had extreme physical complaints; I couldn't really move my neck anymore, I had extreme tension, and the organization naturally took care of me and provided massages and everything possible. They even got my glider repaired for me, and two or three days later I packed it up again and basically did a D-bag just to really...
to be able to end it on a good note. Everything just clicked perfectly again. So it was really just the combination of things: way too much wind, the helicopter flying too slowly, and the untrained water rescue, plus of course myself too, because I could have said from the ground, okay, don't get in now. It was a huge learning experience for me, very formative experiences where you just have to see if you either, of course, let it go or deal with the whole thing. We were then, of course, hung from the heli by the rescuers for the first time again.
I analyzed that very, very intensively for hours. What happened? What could I have done differently? And I think I made progress pretty quickly. I always have a camera with me to film it, and while I don't always have the camera with me now that I'm learning, I always filmed during that learning process and analyzed it over and over. What happened? What can be done differently? I asked other people how they would have reacted in that situation. And I think that's how I was able to learn the whole agro-flying thing pretty quickly.
Is that something that makes it perhaps easier, faster, and maybe even safer to learn agro-flying today? Especially with all this filming, having so much as a cross-check and being able to actually see what I did? And then someone else who might have the experience can say, "Look, I can explain exactly. Look at your hand position at that point or whatever." So that you can really make much, much better progress.
Definitely. So, I'd say social media is naturally very influential when it comes to learning agro-flying. On one hand, we just see so many people flying at roughly the same level as yourself. From absolute beginners to absolute pros, there's everything in between. And you just see so many of them on social media. And of course, you also see many crashes that people post every now and then, where you can then just analyze it and say, okay, this and that happened because of this and that reaction.
Analysis is immensely important in the whole world of aerobatics.
Would you say that agro flying has become safer today, even though they're actually flying much more extreme maneuvers now? There used to be no infinity tumbling, and there weren't all those twisted maneuvers like they fly today. Would you still say that agro flying has actually become safer?
Yes, absolutely. We have much better equipment, and our level of knowledge has simply grown immensely. We have different communities where the whole thing is well-described and where you can ask follow-up questions. That was one of the reasons why I eventually started the Austrian Agro League, because I actually wanted to reach out to people just like I used to be—people who simply didn't know where to start, where to go to ask their questions, and in that stadium, you just feel like you're asking stupid questions, but they're absolutely not stupid questions at all.
These are exactly what make our sport simply safer. I've had so many experiences over the eleven years I've been flying—experiences that don't need to be repeated by someone else—and I want to use the Austrian Agro League to basically inform people about this and that, how you do this and don't do that in this situation, because it's going to end one way or another. From that perspective, the sport has become massively safer. One thing is the learning process, the other is the equipment. We have better and better equipment; for example, when I started, there was a canopy, but basically no one had one.
There was Rogallo back then, but people were actually overwhelmed because they didn't know how or what to do with it. Now it's simply the standard for agro flying. You have a canopy in there, you have Rogallo in there, and in the best case, you have a BASE. So the three options are simple: you have three rescue devices and can react perfectly in any situation, and you have almost a solution for every problem. What that means now, of course, is that you have to deal with the whole thing very intensively. So it doesn't help if I'm lying inside the glider and pull my BASE. That just doesn't work. So you really have to engage with the whole subject.
but there are so many people who are already involved in the subject and can pass that knowledge on. From that perspective, we're already much safer. And then there are the paragliders. I mean, who could have imagined ten years ago that we could just release from a full stall and go into infinity tumbling? We can release the glider from almost any position right now and go into infinity tumbling. From a heli-deployment, from anything—it's all possible now. What has happened in glider development is simply impressive.
Let's talk briefly again about the Austrian Acro League, which you also founded, as you say. Is that its own club or how does that work?
Exactly, so I think I called a few pilot colleagues in 2019 and we basically brought the Austrian Acro League into existence. On one hand, it was to simply have a club in Austria, an acro club, that can organize competitions and train for them. But my thought was simply that I want to reach out to people like I used to be and give them a platform where they can just ask everything. How do I approach something like this? What is necessary? What I didn't know back then is that you need at least two rescue devices, so those only came later.
We went to Krüppenstein and my hero, Schlögl, was standing there and he basically told us: step one, you need two rescue devices. Step two, you take a D-glider and do 100 full stalls. Step three, et cetera, et cetera. That's how it's passed down. And all the knowledge that was passed on to me in that roundabout way, I just want to pass it on too, simply to make our sport safer. So that's how we basically got the Austrian Acro League started. We are a club that spans all over Austria. So it's not just in my Upper Austria, but it's from Carinthia, Tyrol, the club is basically really all over Austria.
And the basic idea is simply to have a platform where we can reach out to everyone who's just interested. And it doesn't have to be Acro League per se, or it doesn't have to be the goal, okay, I want to go for competitions now.
Of course, from the name itself, we chose the Austrian Acro League, which makes it seem like the level there is extremely high. But that's not the case, I mean, yeah, that's just the name that kind of occurred to us for what we've done. I noticed that, okay, that stopped a few people at the beginning, because those are basically the pro flyers. They are in
their own league, something like that, and that's now the Austrian Acro League, which are the really good ones who still train together somehow.
Yeah exactly, and that's not it at all. We're a very, very diverse group of people from all directions, so those who are simply interested in acro flying but don't do acro flying themselves. Others who just want to support us a bit. Then, of course, we have our competition, our competition pilots, and everything in between. So
I think we had, or I think that's what it was, that just hadn't existed with us before, and that gap wanted to be filled with that, just to make the sport safer.
And to protect others from having to make mistakes that they themselves have already made.
From your perspective, has anything clearly improved because of that? Is there perhaps, due to this incentive, more acro pilots in Austria and, at the same time, more safety-oriented or safety-conscious acro pilots in Austria?
Yes, in my opinion, it has. Especially in freestyle flying, we used to be portrayed as being death-defying or like maniacs. Of course, there's a bit of image work involved there, and I think we've seen by now—or the whole scene has seen—that the best safety trainers, the best training programs, they all have an aerobatic background. If now
Heli Schrempf or Xandi,
Theo, what do I know, I think all those people who lead the SIV trainings have a background in acro flying, and so over the years, the perception of acro flying has changed a bit. Acro flying...
basically supports the safety of the entire scene. Completely
exactly.
At the beginning, I perceived it as, okay, they're all looking at us like we're some kind of suicide paragliders, but now it's basically flipped, okay, we can learn a lot from them. Every cross-country pilot, every XC pilot should actually be able to stall their glider, because you're just going to get a collapse somewhere and you have to be able to recover from it. Now, from the Austrian Acro League, I think we've already moved a lot, so we're growing steadily, you can see there's interest, we also do events where you can really
...saying, okay, that works, we'll meet up there, we'll just go flying together and anyone can just ask questions, anyone can now say,
what level he's at, you analyze each other, you fly out into the box, you do a trick and the other person sees, hey, okay, you made a small mistake there or there, so we've already made good progress, especially in the areas where I'm active.
you can already see, I think, that safety is increasing and that really senseless mistakes are being made less often, and the community that's growing there—yeah, everything is actually perfect. I've never regretted getting the whole thing started; of course, there's an organizational effort behind it to make it all happen, but I believe it pays off, and with the support from the Aero-Club, I'm basically in now and can just get into the whole world of aviation.
across the board in all sections, so to speak
purely radiating, in a sense, radiating, yes exactly, and people know, okay, if someone is at the flight school now and says, hey, I want to try aggro flying, then they know, okay, that works, get in touch with them. What we are definitely not, is a replacement for SIV training, so we don't do professional supervision or anything like that, so the best prerequisite is, of course, that you've already done an SIV and you know the basic stuff and just want to keep going with that.
Towards the end, I'd like to bring up another topic where you're also a bit of a specialist. You do synchro flying, but also synchro flying where you're still connected to the other pilot. That's also called canopy relative flying. Explain what that actually is.
Canopy relative flying comes from skydiving. In skydiving, it's literally called Canopy Relative Flying. You fly into each other, climb down the lines, connect, and can then get into flight positions that wouldn't be possible for us. So it's possible for one person to fly normally while the other, who's hanging off them, is simply upside down—they're actually flying stable headfirst. That's canopy relative flying. But it goes much further than that, of course.
There are so many things possible that just wouldn't be possible without the other person. That's exactly what we do. And we get booked for shows quite a bit where we show the whole thing off.
Is it actually particularly demanding, or do you just have to dare to connect with someone else and then realize that the forces actually balance out—so you reach a sort of equilibrium while flying, and can then fly side-by-side or over and under each other, and still feel safe? Or is it that when you're hanging there upside down, you think, "shit, if this just comes apart, I'm going to fall into my sail or whatever?"
Yes, definitely. So this isn't anything everyday. We didn't invent it ourselves either. The Renegades were basically the first to do it with paragliders. They then passed their knowledge on to the Freestyle team, and the Freestyle team passed that knowledge on to us. So this is something that hasn't been extensively tested by various pilots. Of course, there are several people who have brought it as far as we are now, but doing the whole thing is no small feat. The forces involved increase immensely.
Normal gliders wouldn't withstand that. So we have special equipment for this. Even if it looks brief, it might seem like we're using production gliders, but they've been modified. The lines wouldn't hold up if we flew the downplane turned. It took a lot of training to be able to do that, and it's very, very intense, especially in terms of physical strain. We usually only have a G-load where it pushes us into the short bag. That means we have difficulties—like the blackout that people know about when you're just spiraling and not paying attention to your breathing.
That's what you actually only know from paragliding. The problem we have with canopy-relative flying is that we have exactly the opposite happening. That means all the blood rushes to the head and we basically get a blackout. So, from a physical strain perspective, it's very, very challenging and we can only ever proceed in baby steps because we simply have to see what happens next, what we want to change now, and how the body reacts to it. So, the first downplane we attempted, Norbi and I were like, "Whoa, what just happened?"
That's something completely new. Paul told us what's going to happen, but to actually feel it with that kind of speed—you just don't experience that in paragliding. Dealing with that is sort of the exciting part, and our goal is more or less to combine canopy-relative flying and acro paragliding to create some really special flight shows and see what we can show there.
Bringing them together in the sense that you fly acro figures in a connected way, or that you say, okay, you fly connected, then you separate and then you fly a quasi synchro acro program—not simultaneously, but sequentially. So, what is the connection between canopy-relative and acro for you?
The connection is basically thermals in the whole thing. We start and hook up and do, for example, a downplane, or we're working on new maneuvers that you've basically already thought through in your head—things that you can basically expand canopy-relative flying with. So, you can do connected stuff first, then you can basically incorporate acro figures in between, where you separate briefly, then you basically bring the whole acro paragliding repertoire together with the canopy-relative repertoire, and then you can fly them together again, you put them back together and move into other positions again.
And just creating something like that—the connection from high-level acro flying, so being able to actually fly infinity tumbling with the gliders and mixing the entire acro flying portfolio with that—that hasn't existed before, and we're the first ones trying to bring that all together.
Would a connected infinity tumbling be possible?
Yeah, the theory exists.
Then I'm really looking forward to the first video. But you'd probably have to be completely worried about losing the connection, because the forces would probably tear you apart completely, wouldn't they?
Yeah, what we're struggling with is the altitude. I mean, we're losing... the altitude
...on the ground, because you lose so much altitude with every rotation, right?
When we turn, we lose even less altitude. So we lose the most altitude really when we basically go down from the side-by-side and both gliders are lying on their noses, because there's just no surface area left and we... we literally fall towards the ground. If we then get the whole thing moving and start turning, then the descending becomes a bit better again, but being able to rhythmize that requires an extreme amount of altitude and is just so extremely taxing on the body.
Not impossible, theoretically possible. I think we probably need about 3,000 meters for that.
Wow. How do you train something like that, I mean, or how often do you train it, so that you actually go flying together and say, okay, now we're doing all these canopy-relative exercises?
We're training very intensively. Especially at the beginning, when we first started learning the whole thing.
We try to be together as many days as possible, of course. What's a bit of a difficulty for us is that I live in Upper Austria and Norbert lives down in Carinthia. Because of that, we have certain stations where we basically train, and if the weather is bad, it's already happened that we just fly somewhere else to be able to train there too. It's a massive amount of hours we train together just to make it happen at all. But in that case, I might even suggest doing that in a separate podcast, because there are also some movements happening within the Airbound team right now.
and there will definitely be some very exciting and interesting news soon. Where it might make sense to maybe even do the podcast together with Norbert at some point.
Yes, gladly. Let's take another look at that. Just one last question to wrap up. When you're flying together like that and you're hooked to each other and the forces pull outwards and all that, do you have to be very well coordinated? Does it have to be the same glider size and do you basically have to have the same weight that you're flying with? So, do you have to coordinate perfectly with each other for that?
Yes, exactly. So, one thermal is basically about being able to give each other that trust that the other person... because if one of us makes a mistake, it just goes crazy and things can happen that we don't want to experience. It's a lot about the material we're working with, and Advance supports us totally in this whole project and really provides us with the equipment we simply need, because it's just not possible with off-the-shelf stuff anymore. We obviously have to coordinate on that.
Weight is a very, very important factor so that we fly and sink at the same rate, because of course, if one is massively heavier, he'll constantly fly away from the other and we'll never be able to stay together. It's very, very important to be on the same page regarding mindset, equipment, as well as weight. That
It means that from the pilots' side, it wasn't about one person saying, "Okay, I'm a 70-kilo little guy" and the next saying, "I'm a 100-kilo man"; they actually wouldn't be able to fly something that heavy together.
Exactly, so it would be harder, but it would probably be possible now to adapt it to different sizes with the equipment. But that makes the whole thing massively complicated and, I believe, it's just not worth taking on more risk and making attempts at something that is somehow difficult to control.
How many shows do you do a year?
It varies, but on average we do about 10 shows.
Okay. Roland, I'd leave it there for now. Great, everything you've told us about Team Airbound and canopy relative flying, which, in many ways, you really have to understand how the whole thing works first, because in the end it's so different from actual paragliding, which is probably a completely different challenge for you as pilots, and it's certainly nice to have that with Norbert. But thanks for telling us all that, and I'm curious to see what else might come from you in the near future in terms of stunts, shows, and other elements. Thanks for that, in any case, and also for what you do for the scene by co-founding the Austrian Aircraft League and pushing so many things forward.
Thanks for that as well.
Yes, I want to say thank you for inviting me to your podcast, I was very happy to do so. To be able to give a bit of insight into all my aviation stuff, and thanks a lot for the
recommendation.
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