I
I think paramotor and paragliding are extremely similar. But they're like two parallel worlds. People don't really know each other. So either they only do paragliding or only paramotor. And in the paramotor scene, they looked at me a bit skeptically. They made comments like, that's impossible. On the other hand, in the paragliding scene, I'm approached regularly. Not in a bad way, but just out of curiosity, they asked me, what's the challenge? You have an engine, after all.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast. Stories from the cosmos of paragliding. Today with Andi Abbi. And I am Lucian Haas.
The largest FAI triangles flown so far with a paraglider come to around 350 kilometers. Even with foot-launched power wings, the records for triangle flights are or were in a similar range. That's why it was already an imposing statement that made the rounds on social media on July 15, 2024. Someone is on their way to crack the 1,000-kilometer mark on a closed triangle course. Will he make it? The live tracking lines were glowing. This guy is no stranger to the paragliding scene. The Swiss Andi Abbi was a test pilot at Advance for years, won the Paragliding World Cup in 2008, and became world champion in 2009.
In this 142nd episode of Podz-Glidz, he talks about how he came up with the idea to go on a record hunt with the powered paraglider. And of course, he also talks about what he experienced along the way, because the flight didn't go perfectly smoothly after all. The fact that Andi was still able to submit a distance of 883 kilometers as a new record for ratification with the FAI is also thanks to his great experience and the mental training from competition paragliding. In any case, it's not just about powered paragliding here, because basically, Andi Abbi fused two disciplines. He completed the flight with a high-performance two-liner, but with only 13 square meters of projected area, in order to ride through the skies quickly and fuel-efficiently.
And so we also talk about, among other things, how motor flight and free flight can fertilize each other. If you enjoy Podz-Glidz, then support my work as a patron. You can find out how to do that very easily on the Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz, specifically on the "Fördern" page.
Andi, how hard is it to do a foot launch from a flat field with a motor, 60 liters of fuel, and an aircraft that's only 13 square meters?
Yeah, it was challenging. And I don't want to do it that regularly because the takeoff speed is already very high. We were hoping for wind, but it was actually completely still. There was even a bit of a tailwind. So, getting the takeoff speed was already a limit. How long was your takeoff run? Yeah, I have to estimate that now. But I already ran about 80 meters.
80 meters? With 60 liters of fuel and all that? So do your legs actually start getting heavy? Like, you're hoping, "Come on, finally carry me" or something?
Exactly, exactly. So your legs just don't want to keep up anymore. And of course, when you start thinking, "Okay, abort the start," it just has to work out, right? If you're at a certain speed, stopping again would be really difficult. Have
have you tried that in any way
Have you tried that in any way before? Trained? Like, just flying with less fuel? So not with 60, but maybe with 30. Yes, I did that. But really, the fighting weight, the 60 liters, I did that twice. Once last year, when I flew the 600 kilometers. And the second time was during the record attempt, or during the record, yeah.
But it's not like you're saying I'm building a frame or something. I just go out without a glider with the corresponding weight. I run quickly on my back, just to get a feel for how it actually feels. So, of course, I've...
I've already done that. During the assembly, on the simulator, during the sewing—let's say, in terms of construction. I've obviously spent hours on that. Where do I put it, where do I hang it so that I have a good balance? I've practiced that, of course, during the whole build. But then the actual start, pulling up the glider, the running motor. That was, as I said, just twice during the flights. How big is the fear of tripping in something like this? To be honest, I didn't sleep at all the night before both times. Wow. That was intense, yeah.
But mainly, is this start really the exciting part? Is it basically the hardest thing about a flight like this? Getting off the ground at all with that kind of weight?
Yes, that's one of the challenges. The takeoff. I'm under time pressure. I have to take off more or less exactly on the minute because the flight is already planned. Regarding the speed, the later I start and have a failed takeoff, the more it would just eat into the time I have in the air. There are other things to consider as well. The takeoff is just such a milestone, I'd say.
Now, you had a 1000-kilometer FAI triangle planned. For a normal pilot who thinks, okay, you can do it with a normal paraglider, the best ones are currently 350 kilometers or something. That's currently the record for what can be achieved with a paraglider. Now someone comes along and says, okay, I'll do it with a motor, I'll reach 1000 kilometers. Before we talk about the actual flight and the process of it, how do you even come up with the idea to say, I'm going to set myself this 1000-kilometer goal, which is probably extraordinary even for motor gliders. Yes,
that's still funny. Opinions are a bit divided.
Paragliders started doing that regularly. It's not just one. There are already several who fly 350 kilometers FAI. That's already impressive. A lot of things have to line up perfectly. They also need a lot of approaches. Then I saw on the X-Online XContest page that there's a category for paramotors. Out of wonder, out of curiosity, I looked up what they do. And then I found that the Germans are doing a bit of advertising for it. It's such a small scene. They're doing 350-kilometer FAI triangles. I took a look at one of the flights. He started somehow in the morning at 7 a.m. and landed at 1 a.m.
Yeah, it was actually a bit surprising to me that the paramotor scene doesn't really do much longer flights than the glider scene. The record is already higher, so it's already at 500. Or the official world record is, I think, if I looked it up correctly, at 540 kilometers. There are unofficial flights of nearly 600 kilometers. But that was still two years ago, they didn't have those yet. And then I spoke with Benni Hörburger. Something has to be possible there. You just have to manage longer flights. I said to him once, we can build a glider right out of the gate, optimize a few things, and then we'll fly 700 kilometers.
Then I saw that some people are already getting close to 600 kilometers, FAI triangles. Then I spoke with Benni again. Ideally, it would be 1,000, just in terms of the number. A four-digit number. And for me, the goal was also to do it with as little effort as possible—meaning, without me having to train for years, what can we simply build technically to fly 1,000 kilometers? That was sort of the starting point, how the idea came about.
Now you're Swiss, you live in the middle of Switzerland, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly, you're actually not allowed to fly a motorized glider in Switzerland, are you? No. No, that's right.
That's forbidden in Switzerland. The only exception is electric paramotors with a mandatory launch site. And the scene there is already very small. We were there, and also at ADVANCE. There was such a gold rush atmosphere regarding the development of electric paramotors. ADVANCE was involved in that too. And that was also around the time I took my exam and got a bit into the scene. Since then, I've also had an electric paramotor that I fly a few times. But for leisure, it's still the gasoline one I fly abroad, where we always do a trip with a few colleagues for about a week a year, flying from A to B.
and try to do some fun stuff. That's just what I know. But it is extremely fun. I mean, it really fascinates me.
What fascinates you about powered paragliding then? I mean, you're someone who has already celebrated quite a few successes in normal paragliding, someone who really belongs at the top of the world. You were once a world champion, you were an overall World Cup winner. One in 2009, the other in 2008. You're actually the type where you'd say he's a paraglider at heart, who fights with thermals and all that, knows how it works, and exposes himself to the freedom of the skies there. And now he chooses powered paragliding just to barrel off there with a motor-glider on his back. What
What appeals to you about it? My heart beats for flying, of course. And paragliding, you can do that in Switzerland, and I was able to start at 16. And it's truly beautiful, the freedom. What it's like with paragliding is, you go to a mountain, big or small doesn't matter, you turn up in the thermals, you can go on a route, you can do aerobatics, motor flying, you can do hike and fly, it's all beautiful. But what you can't do is, you can only choose the route to a limited extent. So you can't do 5 kilometers, 10 meters above the ground, yeah, maybe along a coast, but that's also predetermined, where you can fly through. And with paramotor flying, you simply have even more freedom.
So it complements paragliding in certain areas, in that you have more options—let's say, flying over a cloud, flying over the fog constantly, so not just passing by briefly in glide, but really planably. Or flying over certain terrain structures, completely independent of the thermals. And that's fascinating. You also have,
In terms of flight technique, there are a few more things; you also have the motor shoe that you can play with, which is fascinating. I mean, if you can really utilize that, even in a turn, a meter above the ground. Normally, you would just hit the ground with the paraglider, but with the motor, you give it a little gas. It's different. It's just different. You have to like it, you have to want it, but if you recognize the possibilities and then actually use them, you can really experience things that are truly unreachable with a paraglider. And personally, I also find it more social. So I can go with a group, four, five, six, seven, eight colleagues,
we can arrange something and fly it. Without stress, without anyone drowning. That's the fascinating thing I love about paramotoring.
So you also really do hiking tours, so to speak, with the powered glider, where you say, I'm on the road for a week and we start somewhere, land together somewhere else, pitch our tents there or whatever, and then we continue the next day.
Exactly. That's exactly the point. They do something like an X-Alps with paragliding too, but that's for the elite. And like I said, not everyone can join in. And with paramotor flying, it's obviously much cooler because people actually join in. You can have fun in the air, you can plan things, you can say, okay, we see something on the way, we can also change the plan in the air, take a lunch break, and take off again. And I've never experienced that with paragliding—that it's so predictable; that might happen once, but that would be a once-in-a-decade experience.
And with paramotoring, you can control that very consciously, and yes, that's the difference. You
You also just mentioned this low-altitude flying, where you say you can fly a curve and with the paraglider you'd just crash because it still has its sink rate, and you can only just compensate for that sink rate with the motor thrust so that you fly level or something. Are there things where you'd say, because you can feel a bit with the motor how much energy I actually need to stay at an altitude with a paraglider or something, are there things where you'd say I'm also learning certain things by flying the paraglider that I can then apply again when free flying?
Absolutely, absolutely. It starts with the fact that you can get into flight time relatively easily, yeah, you just fly, right? So you get into training relatively quickly and can then consciously, maybe on a day when there are no thermals, practice things that I might only get four or five glides for every ten minutes during normal paragliding, but with a paramotor you just have, yeah, hours in a row. And yeah, I can definitely practice more and also train things better because I can fly into a calm flight zone more easily. I've also learned new things that aren't present in paragliding, besides, as I said, the motor thrust.
But it still helps me, of course, to better understand the angle of attack, how it reacts to that when paragliding, and I can then apply that when paragliding. Definitely.
Did you become a better pilot through powered glider flying? Like, even better, the best? I'd just say,
broader. You simply have a better understanding.
The knowledge simply becomes broader. Whether that makes things better is still difficult to define for a specific aerobatic maneuver or a technique in the air. But it definitely becomes broader. And I just think that the broader a pilot's skillset is, I'm sure that's an advantage. Definitely.
If it were possible, let's talk a bit about the future or just visionarily—would you like to offer a combination, even in the training, where you'd say, "Look guys, first you're learning paragliding, then I'll show you a bit of powered flight, and then with motor support, because you can maintain this altitude and not lose it, we can practice certain things much better again?" Or if you have a very light motor, maybe we'd say practice thermals, but if you fall out, you don't lose altitude, you climb again and fly back to the same spot towards the thermals, and then maybe we can achieve much more success in a shorter amount of time?
That would be amazing, of course. But it's obviously difficult to think about something that just isn't possible by law. And from that perspective, yeah. But it definitely wouldn't be like that. It would be a really nice addition if it were feasible.
Let's go back to your record flight. It should be a 1,000-kilometer triangle, which basically means a triangle is the same as a schenkel triangle; you basically have to fly more than 300 kilometers in a nearly straight line every time. In terms of execution, isn't that also kind of boring when you know, okay, I have to fly straight for 10 hours now?
Yeah, that's how it is. It's certainly not super exciting.
Although, for example, with the flight I had, the first leg towards the north, the air was super calm, I had a bit of a tailwind, you fly so fast like that. At times I had 91 kilometers per hour on the GPS, and I hadn't even accelerated yet. That was simply the tailwind pushing the thermals. And in terms of the landscape, you see things that I don't see during normal paragliding. So the landscape passing by you, you really get a different picture every fifteen minutes, which isn't the case with paragliding, for example. There, you look at the same mountain for longer until you're over it. And yeah, I don't want to sugarcoat it, it has certain boring aspects, but it's maybe more interesting than it sounds if you just say, hey, I just flew 330 kilometers straight.
At what altitude did you mainly fly? Because I imagine, to save fuel, you'd probably try not to climb too high, since the climb obviously consumes the most fuel. So, what was your average altitude that you tried to maintain? Yes, that is
of course, there's also the legal situation in Germany, which says you have to be at 300 meters AGL over populated areas and a maximum of 1500 meters above sea level or 1000 meters above ground. That's not a huge range you have to work with. And I mainly paid more attention to the weather forecasts and the wind—which height allows me to better utilize which wind. And then there were already countless airspaces where I had to fly over, under, or past them sideways, which I also had to take into account. And ultimately, as you say, it was important not to go up and down in a zigzag. That takes distance and power.
When you try to gently increase, maintain, or slowly descend back into a glide when an airspace comes up, that was kind of my goal. So, between 300 meters AGL and 1500 meters above sea level.
I took a look at your track and it looks pretty straight. How difficult was it to plan this track or these waypoints so that you could say you can somehow aim past most of the airspaces or at least fly over them without having to do a lot of zigzagging? How long did it take you?
Yeah, it's still hard to say. I had planned different sizes of triangles, but I'd just say it took about half a day's work.
The departure airport was a personal request of mine. Wildberg, because I did my training there. I know the flight school there, they're very nice people. It was a real wish of mine to take off from there. Benny Hörburger also gave me a meteo tip regarding the local weather phenomena there throughout the day. And then I looked at how I wanted to do it around the airports. Munich, Nuremberg, planning. It wasn't entirely easy, but with today's maps, you can plan it like that. Everything is done relatively quickly on the computer where you can enter it. It was also just difficult to remember the airspaces in your head—when, on which route, approximately which airspace comes up, so that I already know.
Because during the flight, on the GPS,
Yeah, you have to know when the airspaces are coming. You can't just fly blindly by the GPS.
So did you have something like a cheat sheet in front of you, saying to climb to 700 meters after 70 kilometers to fly over the small airfield this way and that?
No, I tried to memorize it in my head. It worked out pretty well. I might have one small story left, but basically, I could remember it in my head.
I lived in Argentina for a while during my childhood. There's a lot of flatland there, like the Pampa and Patagonia and stuff like that. And there are roads that go straight for sometimes 2,000 kilometers. And the locals, at least back then, before there were cruise controls and all that, would sometimes just saw broomsticks to the right length just to jam their gas pedal down so they could drive straight. They'd say, I'm now always driving at 100 km/h straight ahead. And if something comes up, I can just kick the broomstick with my foot and then it's gone. And then I can also brake and so on. If you're flying straight ahead for that long with a motor glider like that, do you also have, well, not a broomstick, but a way to somehow jam your gas down?
Or do you really have to hold it the whole time?
Well, of course there's a locking gas lever or whatever you call it. That exists. I didn't have that. I actually got a tip about it. There's a simple way, a simple rubber band. Then you lock it with your rubber band. I didn't have that. But you have, let's just say, a Velcro strap on the gas lever. And that Velcro is there so that the gas handle stays in your hand, so you can strap it down and it doesn't fall off. But you can just attach this Velcro and then you can wrap your wrist around the gas lever a bit and clamp it down. I had to do that because I was having some problems during refueling.
And then at least I could lock the throttle a bit. But otherwise, I mostly had it in my hand. For me, that was also a bit of a safety aspect, especially then in the thermals.
Besides the takeoff, what was the biggest challenge for you during this flight? After...
after the launch, so when I was in the air, as I said, the launch itself was the milestone. After the launch, I definitely had about five minutes of work where all the things I had hooked onto my shoulder, neck, and carabiner then needed to have a place in the leg bag while flying. I built the leg bag myself, and there was a main tank inside it. I had to move that to the leg bag in the air after the launch. That was a bit... yeah, it sounds easy now. The problem is that the small glider reacts extremely fast to weight shifts. And you just start to roll, and it was a bit challenging to fly straight,
...everything still had to be hooked up in the right place. But okay, that was done after five minutes. Then I had my seating position and, just to say it briefly, as mentioned, the first leg, with calm air, was the most pleasant. Just, like I said, keeping the airspaces in your head, keeping the altitude in your head, because I think the corridor was 300 meters AGL, 1500 meters above ground, that was the corridor, so 700 meters plus or minus. There isn't a huge amount there, but you really have to keep an eye on it. And then maintaining speed with the thermals. The second leg was headwind. Even with a headwind, I have to maintain an average speed of 65 km/h.
You really have to accelerate there. And flying the Mekong, a task like that at the World Championships, how long was it? Four hours, maybe five hours. And the final approach, if it was long, that was maybe like half an hour where you were fully concentrated, fully accelerating. And that's the difference. I had to fly for eight hours fully concentrated, fully accelerating. And that was probably a challenge that many pilots might not be fully aware of. Because even in the lowlands—the Swiss fly in the mountains, and in the lowlands, you think you're just thermal flying—but in Germany, where there are no mountains for miles, there is definitely thermal activity in the lowlands too.
And that's where you just have to fly actively. It started to get on your nerves, and physically, it wasn't exactly easy either. Also, what might be another thing is the seating position. I mean, it's really, really not as comfortable as when you're mountain flying in a prone harness.
With this thermals flying and balancing out and understanding the gusts that are there, would you say that as a trained and really experienced competition pilot and such, you have real advantages over...
classic powered glider pilots, who maybe only fly powered gliders because they're not really used to it? So, could a normal powered glider pilot even attempt a record like the way you just approached it?
Yeah, that's still hard to say. I don't know the scene that well. But from what I hear, the way they fly—yeah, they usually fly out of old thermals. They have their paramotor gliders, which have reflex profiles and have trimmers on them. And then it really says, yeah, yeah, don't brake, which means if I want to fly actively, I have to close the trimmer first before I can really intervene actively. And that takes way too long, so if a turbulence comes and the glider tosses you around, you don't have time to close the trimmer by hand, right? From that perspective, either the gliders are really so stable that nothing ever fails,
I would never rely on that. From my experience with cross-country flying over the 25, 26 years I've been flying a paraglider, I would never rely solely on the glider to not collapse. Or those that are so stable, they also have no performance because they focus on stability. And then the route doesn't work with the fuel consumption. So that's the challenge: finding a high-performance glider, a mix between performance and stability, that you can actually manage. And there, the advantage was definitely that I flew actively; it was a two-liner, I had trimmers on so I didn't have to accelerate with my feet, which would have been physically exhausting; I wouldn't have lasted 16 hours on the speed bar.
That's why I built trimmers on it. But of course, because it was a two-liner, I could actively brake back on the B-handles whenever it was necessary, at any time.
You flew a two-liner, which is completely atypical for any kind of powered paragliding. Why did you even come up with the idea of saying, I'll take a two-liner for that? Yeah, that
was pretty obvious to me now, because I simply wanted the best performance available on the market. In paragliding competitions, they only fly two-liners anymore. I wouldn't have dared to fly a competition glider, a purebred competition glider. Even then, you would have had to scale it down in terms of size anyway. So I had to find a manufacturer who would help me out. And two-liners are becoming quite popular in the C category. And they already have a cool mix between performance—very good performance—and also speed. Yes, and in terms of size, if you take a normal, large paraglider that you can use for thermals, you have to accelerate to 60, 65, whatever.
But they don't have the same good performance at 65 kilometers per hour as they do in trimmed flight, because you're reducing the angle of attack. They're also not as stable then. And the idea there, of course, was that the optimum would be to build a glider that—if you say you have to fly 65 kilometers per hour all day—has the best glide at 65 kilometers per hour. So, scaling the size so that it flies at 65 in trim and has the best glide ratio. The problem is, then I can't launch; it's too fast for launching. So it's simply the compromise of what size I can still launch and where I can't accelerate as much in the air. And that's where the size of 13 square meters was projected.
When I look back at my launch, I was glad it wasn't smaller. In the air, it might have been nice to have two square meters less. But for the compromise between launching and flying, I think 13 square meters was chosen pretty well.
13 square meters. That's not a two-liner competition glider you take into the air, is it? Wouldn't that be terribly aggressive already?
Yes, a competition glider, definitely. So you also have to take into account,
which surface I had at my takeoff weight. So until it works, that takes quite a bit. Towards the end of the flight, you're lighter. That makes a pretty big difference between takeoff and landing. But if it's smaller, it reacts more aggressively when it collapses. Of course, it won't collapse as quickly then. I also tested the glider a bit. And the scale I flew in is already pretty tame, relatively. So the collapses I practiced there over the lake, just for me to practice, were manageable.
Training for a collapse over the lake, did you do that with the corresponding weight? Or did you go solo flying with this 13 scale and do that over the lake? Or did you say, I'll take an extra 50 kilos with me and see how it reacts?
No, I did that with a normal mountain flight weight. That's obviously significantly lighter. But you can interpret it a bit. Okay, what would happen, how fast would it react at a higher weight? But the basic character—I was a test pilot for a long time too, so I could already imagine what that would mean.
Well, you had 1,000 kilometers planned, but in the end, it didn't quite make it. Why? What happened? Why didn't it manage to reach the 1,000? Yes, that was a
technical defect. The paramotor manufacturer even pointed that out to me. He was pretty disappointed that I didn't react to his warning. I used a special fuel cap. It was like an extension. It's a bit easier to refuel with. Then I thought, that's great. The level for catching it is a bit higher. Then I get a deciliter more fuel with it. I thought that was great. But what I wasn't aware of—I didn't quite grasp what he said—was that the fuel cap was jammed. Like a cork in a wine bottle. It's not welded on, it's pushed in. Of course, it was already quite tight.
Normally, it holds. But I had a setup where I connected his fuel line to the normal tank in the back, which was 18 liters. The fuel line was a bit short. I had three auxiliary tanks in the front: one to the left of the carabiner, one to the right, and one in the center. Quite early on, I started making sure that the main tank in the back, the 18 liters, stayed pretty full. I always started drawing from the auxiliary tanks early on. The first ones were the second tanks. They offered resistance. Those were the first ones I wanted to empty. The one on the right was no problem.
But if I only empty the one on the right, then my weight is asymmetrical. That's why I switched it around a bit. Sometimes right, sometimes left. And with the one on the left, the fuel hose from the rear right tank to the front left auxiliary tank was just a bit short. I plugged it in and didn't think much about the fact that the fuel hose was under a bit of tension. When I moved around a bit, I suddenly saw it in the mirror, because I can't see the rear tank. I can't turn around in the harness. I have a mirror with me, and with that mirror, I can check the fuel level. And then I saw, I'd say after about 100, 200 kilometers, that the fuel was leaking out.
So I saw it dripping in the mirror. And then I saw that the tank cap had been ripped off. In that time, I don't know how much, just a few deciliters, a few liters, you don't know exactly, had already leaked out. In the few minutes I didn't notice it had been ripped off. Then I had to improvise. I mean, the tank cap, I couldn't do it in the air—I saw it later on the ground—it would have been impossible to unplug it again. So I had to rip the cap off, which was still fixed to the hose. I then stowed the cap in the side pockets in the leg bag.
And the hose, as I said, it was already short. And then I had to stick it into a small opening on the tank—the cover was off now, like on a car when you open the fuel cap, that small opening—I had to push the hose in by hand and hold it, because the draft was blowing it away. So I had to hold it with one hand and hold the auxiliary tank with the other and press it in. That was already difficult. And then it happened to me once more, a few hours later, that I couldn't see the opening; I had to feel for it with my fingers.
Where is the hole? And then the hose can go in, and once—there are so many of them, that was the hole from the tank, but there are also different slots and weird... yeah, it feels similar to the tank cap. And I put it into the wrong pipe and just didn't notice. For a while, gasoline was leaking out again. So I lost gasoline a second time. I always refueled regularly, so I didn't fly with it completely empty, because the danger was just there—if I suddenly took too much time refueling, I just wanted to keep it relatively full in the back. Then for a while I also...
hose, I just left the fuel hose at the back. I looked at it a bit and thought, yeah, that's enough, it'll hold if I don't move. Then I flew for half an hour and when I wanted to refuel again, I looked at the hose and it had just flown out during the flight. That's exactly what I feared during refueling. That's why I always held onto it while refueling. But during normal flight, it was just inside the cap. Then it got sucked out and into the propeller. So it got cut in half. Then the tank was really, really, really short.
And that was already a mental challenge. It was a bit demotivating because I really thought, "Now I've just messed it up," because it's simply my own stupidity. Not prepared enough, not meticulously prepared enough. Yeah, well, okay. But from competitive flying, I practiced mental training for a while. Like, a bit professionally. There's just a point where it simply doesn't matter anymore. You have a problem, you have to put it aside or just look at what I can still influence, right? And you look at what you can influence and push the rest aside, because getting upset about it doesn't help.
But it was like this, I had a hose that was, I don't know, 50, 70 cm long, and then I had to remove the tanks while holding them upside down with one hand, 50 cm above the main tank, holding the fuel hose in one hand, and holding the tank in the other. You have to give it gas, you have to fly straight, and the thermals were also a factor. Like I said, it reacts extremely fast to weight shifts. So it starts to roll, right? That was quite a challenge. On the one hand, the positive thing was, I really didn't get bored.
That was the positive side.
That's one way to put it. How would it be if I had been standing down on the ground and watched you refueling, without knowing that you were refueling right then, and I see you, like, flying there in a straight line, and then suddenly it was really like you started rolling while refueling, and seen from below, it would have looked like he suddenly does some kind of maneuvers for two minutes and then flies straight again?
That's how it is. You can even see that on the track. If you know where to look, the second leg, roughly in the middle, you see significant differences in speed over and over again. I had naturally already returned to trim flight by then. That's only logical.
Sometimes I didn't care if I banked at 45 degrees. The main thing was that I could keep refueling. You could definitely see that. Definitely, yeah.
How close were you, even if you say in your head, "I've trained for this before," but how close were you to saying, "Oh come on, I'm giving up. I'm going to land now, it's maybe too dangerous to be handling fuel in this thermal air and holding it upside down like that and all that."
Yeah, it's still hard to say how close I was. Basically, in a situation like that, it's just a bit like a competition situation. You keep going until it's technically just limited—okay, for example, I lost the hose, then you know, it's not possible, then you give up. But as long as there's a possibility, I tried it, okay, it worked in terms of length, then for me it was simply clear in that sense: keep going, don't give up.
That means it's also something where your previous competition career as a paraglider really benefited you. Because you also know, I have to find a place to settle in somewhere—well, not settle in in that case, but with normal paragliding maybe, okay, I have to endure this stretch here, the thermals aren't pulling through right now, but at this point I'll settle in hoping that in half an hour maybe the next bubble in that stable air down there will still trigger, and then maybe I'll still make it back to the base and can manage to reach the finish line.
I definitely think so. But I've already had that experience. As I said, I once had...
had someone advise me, I took hours with the metal trainer, and I didn't do that for fun, but really because I realized, ah, I have to work on that, there's still a bit more to learn, that's necessary for competition flying and it was definitely like that with that flight too, even just a few years before that, I had flown the 600 kilometers the year before and I actually wanted to give up then too, in hindsight I was very glad I didn't do that, and that was a lesson for me too, even in normal paragliding, then you take off, you land, after landing you analyze the flight, once you've recovered a bit, and when you analyze the whole thing very soberly, you come to the conclusion,
I wouldn't have had to give up now, or I could have done this and that, and that's definitely experience you take with you, where you just think back during a flight like that, you know, don't give up, I had a lot of support from below afterwards, so many people who were rooting for me.
also also mentally supported me, and yeah, that was really motivating, I wanted to say, to keep going, so for me at that moment, as long as I can still refuel, keep going, no question of giving up.
Well, it was clear that you wouldn't make the 1,000 kilometers in the air anymore. How did you replan in the air so that you still... where did you have to go? I'll do an FAI triangle and maybe I can somehow actually get back to the starting point?
So, it's still difficult because I didn't look at the flight x-times or meticulously check exactly how much fuel I'm actually consuming; that's just harder to measure than you'd think. You have different weights, it's heavier at takeoff, and then there's the wind and so on. In any case, it was a feeling, a gut decision where I told myself, okay, it's not enough. So the decision was good because the tank was really empty by the time I reached the destination. It was a gut feeling, okay, it's not enough anymore. As I said, I had the airspace at the 1,000-kilometer mark; it was a bit of a mental thing. I really had all the options for shortcuts in my head, I had various triangles in mind where I could cut corners, but the possibilities were very limited. I was then still around Munich Airport,
it's relatively large, so I couldn't just fly directly back, and I just cut so many corners that I still managed to fly around the airspaces; I landed with about 2 deciliters, so 0.2 liters of fuel, and if you think about the fact that I started with 60 liters and landed with 0.2 liters after 14 hours, you can't really calculate that—it was just luck and a good gut feeling. So, luck of
...a lot of luck at the end there.
Exactly, exactly, yeah.
Do you think a record like the one you flew will—I don't know how it's being discussed in the motor glider scene, I'm not really into that myself—but do you think something like that might, in a way, set a precedent there? That people might start thinking about it now, and maybe two-liners will see increased use in the motor glider scene soon because it suggests we might need these performance-oriented gliders to be able to fly at least these long distances in record time? Yes,
regarding the material side of things, since I'm no longer a test pilot, that's still difficult to say. I just hope the development continues like this, but the past has shown that it always keeps going; you think it's finished, and then something new, something better, always comes along. That will surely continue. The other thing that will be educational is that maybe other people will be motivated, and I really hope so, because I did this flight without any preparation in the sense that I didn't train for it ten times and it worked on the eleventh; I just flew it. I simply waited for the weather forecast and flew it. If it hadn't been for the refueling problem, we had 79
kilometers short of completing the thousand, which isn't actually that much; that would have been five liters of gasoline. I actually lost more the whole day on the way, and that's a sign that the others—they should do it, they should do the 1,000 kilometers. I would be very happy if someone took that on now; they can see the route, they can buy the equipment now, the motor is freely available, it wasn't anything special. They should do it, because I don't think it's right that the paramotor scene—I'm saying now, not necessarily the records, but those who fly along, who do the longer distances—don't fly further than those who fly without a motor in the Alps and
what is very special for me is that I find paramotor and paragliding to be extremely similar, but they are like two parallel worlds. The people don't really know each other; they either only fly paraglider or only paramotor. In the paramotor scene, they looked at me with a bit of disbelief when I told them something, even during the day, during the flight, when it started circulating a bit on social media. They could follow it live, and the comments came in: that's impossible, it's not possible, it won't be possible, so from the paramotor scene. On the other hand, in the paragliding scene, I was approached,
regularly—not in a mean way, but just out of curiosity—they asked me, what's the challenge? You have an engine, after all. So you see the two worlds very typically: one side says it's impossible, the other side asks where the challenge is. The truth lies somewhere in between, but it was really funny for me to experience those two worlds colliding like that.
Now that you haven't reached the 1,000 kilometers but still celebrated the success, saying, "I flew a record and I actually made it back home," meaning back to your starting point, and you really managed all the problems that arose in a way that was actually good—would it still tempt you to say, okay, next year, if it's another long day and the conditions are right, I want to try again to actually hit those 1,000? Does that number 1,000 mean anything to you, or is it enough for you now to say, "I could have made it if those problems hadn't happened"? Like, have you already shown that those 1,000 kilometers aren't that important to you anymore?
So, right now, it's not that important to me to do it again; maybe I'll do it sometime if I just feel like it, but I actually hope more that other people might take it on, that they get the urge to keep flying or just to see what's possible. It doesn't have to be a thousand-kilometer success, but it can also be a nice tour, 400 kilometers from A to B, so they can see, hey, that's doable, and just simply doable. Yeah, for me personally, finally hitting the 1000, yeah, it would have been nice, of course; at the point where I turned back, where I really made the decision for myself, okay, I'm turning back, I'm cutting it short, that was already very
it's not mega demotivating because it's exhausting to stay in the air for so long, I don't necessarily do that every day, it was more about the goal, just do it once, but you can see quite clearly on the track what the goal was, because for 880 kilometers, I could have flown that much easier by only flying 880 kilometers in real life. So you can see, it would have been doable, you can take off, and yeah, I hope there's a boost for paramotoring, maybe that new people start flying, who see what can all be achieved there, what the challenges of the flight itself might be, I can explain the 1000 later,
but basically, it was—I don't think it was extremely difficult to fly, so for me, it's not mega challenging, purely from the
demand, more about flying again, because I think many people can fly it, maybe not everyone, you just have to want to, have the endurance, but technically anyone can fly it.
You said that in Switzerland you also fly with an electric motor, partly because that's all that's permitted, and with requirements like mandatory launch sites or something like that. If you were to look outside of Switzerland, there are always these ideas about whether you can't also use a small electric motor to fly a paraglider classically, using it only as a starting aid, and then maybe as a short bridging aid for the dead phases, where you'd say, like a glider that can maybe switch on its motor in between and say, before I land out here, I'd rather use it to get a bit further. But it would be a way to open up completely new possibilities for free flight, if you say, I can briefly bridge these dead phases.
Would it be a goal for you to also tackle some completely new things?
Yeah, as I mentioned at the beginning, I think it was around 2006, plus or minus in that area, there was a real gold rush atmosphere with really many well-known manufacturers. Advans and really many other big manufacturers were involved too; they were trying to make an electric ascent aid. And they were really working intensively on it, with broad support—they researched and tested in many different directions—and nothing hit the market. And that just shows that the material isn't ripe yet; they didn't manage it. Exactly what you're saying now, something small, just to get started, go up 500 meters and then fly thermals—it would just be stupid of me to say, "Yeah, that would be great, let's build something," they've really been trying to do that for over a decade now.
and nothing actually made it to market. But the gasoline engines, if you just look at what's available abroad, they're also relatively light and quiet now; I'd say from about 15 kilos, you can get something. A competition setup with water ballast is 33 kilos, so from that perspective, it's significantly lighter than a competition setup with water ballast. No problem for launching, and with a bit of practice, you can fly thermals beautifully. I can also just turn off the gasoline engine; you're a bit more sluggish in the harness from the extra weight of those 18 kilos, but it's not like everyone...
So you could already fly thermals wonderfully with a normal gasoline engine if you buy something light, and in my opinion, you don't have to buy such a super heavy engine with mega horsepower because paragliders are better in terms of performance than they used to be, so you can reduce the engine power and save a lot of weight. At the end, you would
I'd like to discuss one more small idea with you, whether you've thought about this direction before. I read it somewhere, I don't know, on a paraglider forum or something like that, there was a discussion: couldn't you say that with electric motors, where you can measure very precisely with the electronics how much current is being consumed—so how much power it's currently delivering—you could basically compare paragliders in terms of performance by saying, I'm doing a real, absolute level flight, set it like that and see how much current, how much power I need so that the paraglider can just fly out and absolutely hold its altitude, in order to also say, I know now which is the paraglider and which is the slightly less good one, based on how it carries and stuff like that.
Have you ever done any tests like that for yourself or thought about it in that direction? Absolutely, absolutely.
So if I were still a test pilot, the first thing would be for us to acquire this here in Switzerland and then do such tests abroad. I also do this myself when I fly with colleagues who might weigh about the same; you take the same motor and have the same basis as a harness and as a motor unit. We've often done it where—you don't even have to—well, of course, you can hold level flight as precisely as you say, then you obviously have a great measurement, but it's also enough if you say, for example, you're just flying from A to B for an hour, doing roughly the same turns, curves, and the same maneuvers together in the air, and then after an hour you see how much fuel you or your colleague consumed, and then you swap the gliders, fly for exactly one hour again, and look again, and then the same thing keeps coming up over and over—that one glider simply needs less fuel than the other—and that was really, that was noticeable. So that is mega reproducible, and with most gliders, you go up a mountain every day and have a 1,000-meter or 1,500-meter difference, but then that's already a pretty high mountain,
In terms of ratio, that's a short glide flight; you still have to adapt. But with a paramotor, you can go up at 6 a.m. in absolutely dead air in the flatlands and fly 10 kilometers without any problems, and you can repeat that over and over. So from that perspective, that's exactly what I said—in terms of breadth, you always get much broader in terms of knowledge and possibilities, and I think that's brilliant, absolutely. Do you know
Are there manufacturers who already use this possibility? Yes, I know that. Who does that, for example?
For example, Fee, even where I have the glider—so Benni, who also flies a lot privately with the paramotor—he can quickly start his glider again in the evening, set something up somewhere in a meadow, land again, and do comparison flights together. So he can save a huge amount of time there, or fly the same results in simply less time; he definitely takes advantage of that.
Would you like to be a test pilot again with these kinds of possibilities?
Yes, definitely. I mean, if you can say you can take off right from home or if you have an airfield nearby, that definitely makes the job easier.
Wonderful, Andi. Thank you so much for your story about your record flight, the comparison between powered glider flying and normal flying, and how both scenes or both types of flight can actually complement and enrich each other so wonderfully. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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