I've wondered about that too. I can't answer it because it would be interesting to see. What if I lived in the mountains or near the mountains? Would I blog less and podcast less if I had more time to go paragliding? I don't know. For me, they're actually two completely different shoes. They deal with the same thing, of course. It's always about paragliding. But basically, they're two different hobbies, because one is the hobby of being the "explainer," so to speak. And the other is the hobby of flying for myself.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
paragliding. Today, with me as a guest in my own podcast. And stories from the cosmos of
paragliding. Today with me as a guest in my own podcast. And
I'm Stefanie Westerhals, the conversation partner from podcast number 106.
For this 150th anniversary episode of Podz-Glidz, I simply swapped roles with Stefanie. And with that, I'm handing over the floor. Over to you.
Lucian Haas is the most well-known paraglider blog and podcast host in the German-speaking world. His blog Lu-Glidz will soon be 20 years old. And the podcast Podz-Glidz is also celebrating its 150th episode. On this occasion, I asked him if he wouldn't like to give the listeners a glimpse into his own paragliding-shaped life. He talks about how he only started flying thanks to his wife Saskia. We discuss how he acquired a huge amount of knowledge about flight meteorology through self-study. We explore the question of how much time he actually invests in blogs and podcasts and whether he will eventually include advertisements in the podcasts to better finance his work.
He also gives tips on how to find out if a test glider is a good fit and shares his thoughts on two-liners. And finally, he reveals how he keeps himself busy with his work. He also talks about what he himself has been able to learn from his podcast.
By the way, I fund Podz-Glidz and LooGlides solely through contributions from my listeners and readers. If you want to get involved too, you can find all the necessary information on the Gleitschirm-Blog LooGlides, on the "Support" page.
Yes, hello Lucian. Yes,
Hello Stefanie. Are you nervous? Uh, a little. I'm mostly just curious. Let's see what you do with it. Usually, I'm on the side of the one asking the questions. Usually, I'm on the side of the one asking the questions. And now I'm being interviewed myself. Hm, let's see.
I thought I'd jump in. So we all know you're a science journalist, you're a podcast host, you write blogs. But what kind of pilot are you, actually?
I'm definitely a pilot who loves to fly and tries to fly as much as possible, but since I live in Bonn—which is more of a low mountain range region—I can't get as many total flight hours as I probably would in the Alps. Even so, I still manage a relatively high number of launches because some flights here only last three minutes, and then you have to run back up quickly to launch again on the same day, whereas elsewhere you'd be flying for hours. And I'm a pilot who, I think, probably flies relatively well, but I'm not performance-oriented at all. I do enjoy cross-country flights, but at the beginning of my career, it was still exciting, so to speak, to look at the points and all that. And while I do upload my flights somewhere, I'm a pilot who always takes care of the points. But not to get to the top of any rankings; I'm really more of a pleasure flyer who does cross-country.
So it's not like I'm just saying I'm circling around somewhere like that. And I'm also someone—this has a lot to do with my glider testing, but I'm someone who really likes to experiment. Both in terms of the gliders themselves, but also regarding things like, what are the airflow conditions like here? I'm just interested in what it's like over there, is the thermals really going off or not? I have different thermal models in my head and I often like to test those out. And I don't fly the long distance, I just fly a thermal five times to try out different things.
Which glider do you fly now when you go out flying for yourself?
I'd say I do about 70 percent of my flights a year with test gliders. And the glider I still have for myself, that's more like my winter glider. It's a Skyman Cross Country 2, which I've had for several years now. I bought it back then because it has such super easy handling. It's light; I wanted something light for hike and fly as well. And it's not hyper performance-oriented or anything. But that's the one I always fly during breaks when I don't happen to have a test glider with me. But as I said, during the thermal season of the year, I almost always have a test glider with me. And then I always fly something different in between.
And how does the testing process work? I mean, how did you start and how does it work now? Do you just get the gliders sent to you en masse and then you have to somehow carve out time to actually get around to flying them? Or do you see what's coming out and then proactively reach out to the dealers and say, could you please send that to me?
On one hand, it started with me saying at some point that I could write a glider test on my blog. And then I said I wanted to buy a new glider soon. When did I start? I started with the tests over ten years ago. Back then I said, I want to buy a new glider. I'll just test out a few models now and then write something about it. I think my first tests might read quite well, but back then I was nowhere near as experienced, both in terms of testing and what matters to me and what is actually important.
People could probably still use that information, I think. But nowadays, since I've tested so many, many models, I have a much better comparison in my head. Like, how does this one fly in relation to another glider or the types of gliders that exist. As for the test gliders, on one hand, sometimes manufacturers write to me or call me and say, Lucian, we just have the new XYZ glider, do you want to test it? That's one way. The other way is that I write to the manufacturer because I'm always trying to get as broad a picture as possible of what the market is currently offering. Although I have to add that, in practice, I actually—well, not actually, but basically—only test B-gliders anymore.
On one hand, because I'm at home in the B class and fly those. I do fly a C glider once in a while to see what it's like, but for testing purposes, I actually want to have as broad a market overview as possible. And if I were to say, I'm testing a B glider, then I'm testing a C glider, then two liners, then I'm testing an A again, and then a light D or whatever. Then I wouldn't be able to make a comparative statement for the individual gliders because they are just so different by type. But if I say I mainly test B gliders, there are still huge differences between a low-B and a high-B and so on. Nevertheless, I've tested so many by now that I have a good pool of memory for comparison to say what it's good at, what it's not so good at, what I like about them, and what I don't like so much.
And that's how it is. There are manufacturers I write to and say, I'm interested in this and that glider. I usually have a list of gliders I'd find interesting for the market or where I think there's a new feature. I just want to see if I can feel anything from them. Does it do anything? So I pick out the manufacturers after that and write to them. But then it's not every manufacturer that immediately shouts for joy and says, yeah, Lucian, we'll send you the glider for testing.
Or there are some who say, well, we only have a relatively small pool of test gliders. And I'm the type who says, yeah, I don't just want the glider for the weekend, I want to have it for a bit longer because I really want to test it thoroughly. And then there's the point that I don't live in the Alps, but here in Bonn; I do drive into the Alps, but I don't always have the best cross-country flight conditions and thermals and stuff. Because of that, a test can take a few weeks for me, especially if the weather is also shit, like it was a lot of the time this year in the spring, for example. It all dragged on for a very long time. So I have to tell the manufacturers, yeah, you actually have to be able to spare the glider for at least four weeks.
And then a few of them quickly decline or say, yeah, ask us again in the fall when the main test season is over or something. So you always have to play back and forth a bit like that. But if you play back and forth and have various different manufacturers, there's usually always one that has something free right now, where I then say, okay, I'll take that one next. And that way, almost the whole thermals season is through, except for short breaks. I rarely have actual overlaps where I have two gliders at my place at the same time; I try to avoid that too. There are these short phases where I'll go out flying with my own glider again on the weekend, and then I fly the others again. Although flying with my own glider is also always quite good to recalibrate my own reference a bit, to say, ah, now that was, ah, okay, yeah, that's right again.
Has it ever happened that you received a glider, flew it, and then thought, "This just isn't my glider," and you didn't even bother to write a reference for it at all, because you don't want to write anything completely bad about it?
It happened once, and I'm sorry it happened because I don't think I did the glider justice. It wasn't in recent years, though; it was a while ago. I've learned over time. So for me, there are many gliders where I do the first flight and think, oh my god, what is this? Oh, like, it won't turn here or something. I have to say, especially with us in the lowlands, we have several starting hills where you have a chance to get into a thermal. If you don't catch that thermal and aren't basically in the thermal with the first circle, then you've lost, you're stuck down there. Simply because we don't have the corresponding altitude and we don't have any alternative thermals.
that we can still approach. And then it's just, when you go out for a flight on a glider you've never flown before and do the first turn. And of course, you're basically flying it with the control technique you're used to, or that you've picked up from the previous gliders for the phase you flew them in. And then it happens that a glider comes along that doesn't fit at all. Before that, maybe there was one that you always had to brake a bit on the outside, otherwise it would always dive away immediately. So I fly the next one like that too. And it doesn't handle braking on the outside at all and won't turn the corner anymore. And I initiate a turn and think, "Yeah, when is the turn coming?" only to realize, "Oh God, I'm not going to have any fun with this glider." But then with more flights, you eventually notice, "Ah, okay, no, if you open the outside brake completely on this one and initiate the turn with a small kick of weight,"
then it suddenly turns into the curve beautifully and you can still spiral out of the thermals relatively tightly with it. But those are experience-based things that I only learned over the years, learning more and more about how you actually have to adapt your control technique a bit for all these different gliders. And when you do that, you very often find out that there are actually no real piece-of-shit gliders that I'd say I wouldn't want to fly at all. Unless there are gliders where you notice, actually, they're quite good, but they have certain small quirks. For example, you have a glider that flies wonderfully, but it always has a tendency to overshoot at the start. That's become less common now because most gliders today have profiles that dampen a lot and don't lunge forward or pitch forward as much.
But there were some for a while that flew great in the thermals, but at the start you always had to brake them terribly, hold them back, or do something like that. And those were things where I said, okay, that's why I'm not returning the glider now. Then I'll write that down, too. I'll include that accordingly in my test report. Although over the years I've also noticed that it's actually getting harder to find real flaws in the gliders. So apparently, the development of the software and so on has progressed so much that I haven't actually had any gliders in recent years where I'd say, no, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, or something like that—not as a whole, but basically advising against them.
Would you say that the gliders are all very similar now and aren't evolving that much anymore, or is that not the case?
No, it's not like that at all. Although I would say the range of differences has become somewhat narrower. I mean, in the past, there were really gliders that were true performance crutches and others that were already way ahead in terms of performance. But today, it's actually... it's actually like, if you get a modern High-B glider from any manufacturer—of course, there are still significant performance differences—but this range has become significantly narrower. Probably also because you can't really squeeze out that much more at the top end, and from the bottom up, they're converging; even the perhaps less sophisticated gliders are somehow approaching this average and are then better in terms of performance.
Where there are still differences, it's simply... it's really in the handling, and there, every manufacturer and sometimes even from glider to glider, or depending on which test pilots they are, you notice they have these typical preferences for how they set the brake. You really notice these differences in flight, and it's truly the case that every brake setting requires a different way of steering. As I mentioned, sometimes you have to intervene with the outside brake, sometimes you have to let the outside brake run constantly. There are some where you notice, okay, it doesn't go. It doesn't go immediately, immediately around the corner, because, for example, the outside wing is barely braked towards the outside, but the initial braking effect kicks in more in the middle of the wing or the middle of the half-wing, the side wing, so to speak.
They won't turn into the corner quite as sharply at first, but if you give them half a second more, it actually gets just as good. These are things where I'd say there are still significant differences between manufacturers or between... the gliders. But it's also very good because I think it really gives you a choice. So for the people buying gliders, at least if they're in a weight range where there's a lot of variety, they really do have a choice where you can say, I can choose based on my preferences. I want a talkative glider, or I want a very smooth, gliding glider. I want one that turns into the corner very sharply, or one where you say, no, I don't need that at all. I just want to cruise around comfortably or something like that.
I don't want anything that conveys any kind of excitement to me as a pilot. I want to fly as calmly as possible; that's when I feel most comfortable in the air and have the most fun. And there is, I'd say, a really huge selection available now.
Do you have any tips on what to do when you're looking for a new glider and you take a test glider, or most people don't have the opportunity to test ten gliders? You might manage to find one or two, and then you do the first flight and you're not so sure. Like, is it the glider or have I just not really figured out how, for example, the brake impulse works yet? So what can you recommend so that you get to the point of learning to control the glider properly in just a few flights and then be able to decide if I like it or not?
The big tip everyone always has is ground handling, ground handling, ground handling. So when I get a new glider, I try to test it first through ground handling, and you can already pick up so, so much from ground handling. Just for the sake of it, okay, a lot of the inflation behavior, the behavior of it—that's really inflating with different techniques, also different speeds, where I say, okay, I'm pulling significantly on the A-riser, how does the glider react then? Does it collapse at the front or does it shoot up quickly, or does it still do everything quite calmly? I leave the A-riser completely long. I leave the A-riser completely long, actually only pulling up with body weight. Does the glider even come up then?
Does it come up perfectly straight? Or many gliders, if you just pull them up from how they fell down, really just with weight, this weight impulse, depending on how flat and stretched or however the line steering is there, many of them will kink in the middle and then the ears come a bit earlier before the center switches back up. Just testing something like that to notice, okay, what... difficulties might a glider like this give me during takeoff. You can also just do it on the ground, if the glider is over you for ground handling, really slowly pull the brake down on both sides and just look at the trailing edge and see where the first brake impulse or the first brake deflection happens, where does it start?
Is that across the entire span? Is it only in the middle of each wing half? Is it emphasized more on the eye? And from that, with a bit of experience or something, you can derive a little something for yourself about how quickly a glider will probably react in the air. And that can help me when I go flying later and see, okay, this is a glider that, from what I can see, feels like it steers the outer wings more than the center of the glider. That's something where I'll say, okay, I'll just initiate a turn now and see how quickly it actually turns with the very simple turn initiation... without weight shift, how well it turns away quickly. And those are things you can estimate and compare a bit.
I saw that, I expected that. Does he do that too? But what I also always find interesting, especially when you have a thermal that flies relatively well or climbs well, or a home thermal that's always there, is that you shouldn't just say, "Ah, I'm turning into it and I'm happy now, I want to fly," even with a test glider. Instead, if you have a test glider, you should really say, "I want to test this to find out for myself if it's right for me or not." And then really say, "Okay, I'm turning out of this thermal with the technique I always use," then maybe I'll sink next to it for 200 or 300 meters, then I fly back into this thermal and try out a different control technique. What does a different control technique mean? Okay, I'll fly the outside brake completely free now.
What does the glider do then? Does it pitch forward the whole time and I have to... Actually, I feel like I have to steer it. Constantly, constantly catching it. Is it too nervous for me or not? Or does it still make very calm flights, calm circles in that moment? These are all things you can test out accordingly. What also belongs to a classic test flight for me is simply pitching and rolling. They don't have to be high wing-overs or anything like that, but simply to be able to compare gliders, to say, okay, I'm making the initiation of the pitch movement as identical as possible and see, okay, how quickly does a glider pick up that forward motion accordingly and how quickly does it catch itself again if I don't force it any further.
And the same goes for rolling, where I say, okay, I'll first only roll with weight and do the same rolling movements on every glider and see how high it actually gets into a roll with just weight, and how easy it is after the first and second roll. So, how well can it be built up and then immediately go neutral, and how quickly does it catch itself again. These are also things you can derive a lot from regarding how these gliders actually behave in more turbulent air in the end, i.e., how much nervousness they convey to you personally. And the other thing is really your gut feeling, or rather sitting in the harness and watching how much I get shaken around by this glider, or how much fine information I actually get from this glider, predominantly.
And is that something I like? Well, I like to have a lot of information. Or is there someone who says, no, that's too much for me. If you're flying a glider and after an hour you think, okay, my adrenaline level is too high—which can of course sometimes be due to weather conditions, but sometimes the gliders themselves are just so much more talkative than others that if you don't have that much flight experience yet, it can become really exhausting for you. And then that would be something where you'd say, okay, then maybe I'd prefer the glider where you just feel more comfortable flying, because in the end, that's more fun too.
What are your thoughts on the development of the two-liner? There have been many C two-liners for a year or two now. Maybe the first B two-liners will come soon. Are you looking forward to it, or do you have a bit of a gut feeling of unease about it? What do you think?
So I don't think the B two-liners are going to come, at least not in the near future. Because for that, the entire EN would have to be restructured first. And I don't think anyone really wants to push for that right now. That's why, from a certification standpoint alone, the B gliders will all remain three-liners, or at least very much in the high-B range. This two-and-a-half-liner will probably become the standard, where the outer wing is rigged like a two-liner and the center wing like a three-liner. And you can see now that basically all the brands coming out with new high-Bs—not all, but very, very many—are already tending in that direction and building the gliders accordingly.
With the C two-liners, I think it's one—from everything I hear and also what I've flown with two-liners—it's really a bit of a different way of flying because of the very good control through the B, but it's a great form for performance-oriented flying.
And that's certainly something, but where I see the main problems is actually that with this construction of the C two-liner, you can train many things much worse. So it's mainly about SIV training and where you can't pull decent collapses anymore and other things. I think the longer you fly two-liners, and also many of these maneuvers—or not maneuvers, but glider reactions—that are rarer but can become more violent in extreme cases, the less you actually train for them. And that's a bit of a situation where the safety gap is widening. The gliders are becoming more stable and thus safer on one hand, but on the other hand, from everything I hear, when things go south, they usually react more violently than corresponding three-liners and
...they simply have a much higher demand for the pilot to catch something like that again. And from what I'm hearing now, I mean, C two-liners haven't been on the market for that long, but it's starting to look like you can already see that the accident numbers with C two-liners are proportionally higher than what we had before with C three-liners. And that's already a statement that we should look into a bit more closely, and where I think, based on experience, we'll really end up saying: let's not let the two-liners go into the B-class. Because if even less experienced pilots also have fewer training opportunities, then they actually have no chance of properly preparing themselves for such extreme situations.
Did you ever have an accident yourself?
No, at least not one that you would call a real accident. I've had a few hard landings, including one where my heel hurt for half the day afterwards. Also once, some kind of butt-landing where I basically slid forward onto the protector and realized it had pulled quite hard on my back, and then I had some tension for a while after that. But a real accident, where I permanently hurt something or had to go to the hospital or anything like that, I've never had. There was one case, but that was a long time ago in my flying career, I was in Norma, which is a launch site in Italy. And the wind came in a bit sideways and I thought, there's that alternative launch site, which is kind of cliff-like or something.
I took off there, but then the crosswind just ripped me away and slammed me pretty hard against a rock standing there. I ended up with a badly scraped knee. But it was like I thought, there probably wasn't much energy missing; I would've gone right through my shin or something. Just based on the feeling—it also turned into a big bruise later on. But for me, that was also a bit of a wake-up call where I said, no, Lucian, you don't do that anymore at such exposed launch sites with crosswinds or whatever. And I'm a very stubborn person in that regard, that I actually impose these kinds of rules on myself and then actually stick to them.
You've been flying for a long time now. Do you feel like being out there just lies in your nature, that you've never had an accident? Or were you just lucky? Or are you really the type of person who was aware from the very first year of flying, like, "Hey, this is a risky sport, and I'm setting these and those rules for myself so that I always stay accident-free"?
Everyone wants to fly accident-free. So, of course, that was my goal—to fly without accidents. I'm certainly a, yeah, I'd say I'm a very deliberate pilot. That doesn't mean I'm a risk-free pilot, but I do think about what I'm doing, and sometimes even if I don't have a big goal somewhere, I'll say, I don't have to fly into that lee over there, which I know is a lee. I'd probably get lift there, but I don't have to right now. I can do something else with this flight day. So I'm more of a reactive person. Like I said before, I'm not the performance-oriented pilot who says I have to fly this massive distance now. I just enjoy flying and trying things out. What also comes into play is that very early in my flying career, I learned or realized that I have to understand the weather.
I want to know what's happening in terms of aerodynamics or airflow in the air. And I've been digging into that more and more. And since so many accidents I follow are weather-related, I'd say that with a good understanding of meteorology and, at the same time, the attitude of saying, "If it's too risky or the risk is too great, I'd rather hold back," I've actually flown quite well. And that's certainly one reason why I haven't had an accident as such. Although I have to say just as clearly, that was a year or two ago,
I launched once and then realized I hadn't fastened the leg straps. I didn't actually launch, though; I noticed it during the run-up and aborted immediately. It was a classic situation, blah blah blah, at the launch site, ten other people, people chatting. And then someone else came up and asked me something and walked away. And boom, I got distracted from my actually very meticulous launch routine and had a harness where you couldn't see that the leg straps were still open because the leg pocket was closed. And then I start running and notice the harness pulling up on me at the back. I immediately ripped the brakes down. And then I ended up a bit in the blackberries down there and then came back down. It was all safe, it wasn't bad at all, not at all.
But for me, it was also a "wake-up call" moment, like, hey, no matter how meticulously you go through everything, these kinds of mistakes can still happen, especially from distraction situations. And that's where I'd say, yeah, okay, better to take one step back and think about how I can manage to completely rule out such sources of error. You can never eliminate them entirely, but you still have to bring it back to your consciousness even more, and tell yourself: when I'm at the launch site, even if there are five people standing behind me who want to start now—and that's often only ten or fifteen seconds—that's enough time for a quick basic check, a five-point or seven-point check, depending on what harness you have or something, to really say, I'm going to go through them again very consistently.
...right up to, is my speed bar hooked up as a reference point, for example. Yeah, because if you get out there, if you fly out and realize, oh, the Brummelhaken just came loose again, that's also stupid. And if you really make that a habit and say, I basically implement it too, then a lot is gained.
You mentioned the weather earlier. Nowadays there are even lectures and workshops on the topic of meteorology, but originally you didn't, like I did, do a meteorology degree. And how did you get into diving deep into it and, above all, how did you do it? I mean, did you have a book? Did you have a book that had a lot of influence on you? Or did you comb through accident reports? Or yeah, what led to you being able to call yourself a real weather pro nowadays?
I can tell you the beginning story. I had just gotten my driver's license.
What year was that?
Oh, 2006.
And we were on a club trip to Greifenburg. And I hadn't flown much thermals by then.
And the thermals were super great, and I'm flying and turning up and I'm totally happy and all that. But as it goes when you don't fly that much, after about half or three-quarters of an hour of flying thermals, everything was a bit bumpy and whatnot, at least it felt that way to me back then. So I said, now I'd like to go land. So I fly out and go to land. But only where I flew out, it wasn't going down. It wasn't an overdevelopment day where it's lifting everywhere. There was just a phenomenon, or there is a phenomenon in Greifenburg, where sometimes a relatively large convergence sets in over the valley and over the Greifenburg landing field. And if you fly out relatively high there, it can be that you get into this convergence.
And then you're over the landing field and think, it should actually be going down here. I learned in meteorology class that the wind goes up the slopes and always goes down in the valley. And then you're here in the middle of the valley and it's not going down. And I just kept flying there. And the longer I flew there, everywhere I flew to, it wouldn't go down.
I didn't fly very far because I thought it had to be like this somehow. But the longer it went on, the more uncomfortable it naturally became for me. And I said, hey, you can't enter a medium where you're flying around and don't know why something is the way it is—at least not to some extent, that I have an idea. And I really had no idea. It didn't fit almost any of the models or concepts I had learned up until then. Then I said, I need to deal with this more. Not long after—it didn't take that long—I landed, I was down there, but I told myself, okay, Lucian, you have to learn to understand a bit more about meteo.
And then I started reading basically everything I could get my hands on regarding meteorology. I ordered the corresponding books. Not meteorology textbooks, which you might have had in your studies, but rather general meteorology literature—the kind you'd see on Amazon now, like "Basic Meteorology for Beginners" and "Mountain Weather and Cloud Patterns," and stuff like that. I started reading those and trying to visualize it. But I quickly realized that a lot of these weather books and the weather theory that exists—and also what meteorologists learn—don't really cover what we as paragliders actually experience.
I can confirm that. The books you read in meteorology studies really don't help you at all to understand paragliding phenomena later on.
Yeah, because for us, it's so small-scale. You're flying on a slope, and then every 50 meters is basically a different air mass moving in some way. And meteorologists think of this chaos. So maybe they have it in the back of their minds that a lot of chaotic stuff is going on in the atmosphere. But when they run their models with a grid spacing of two kilometers to eight or even more, all of that just doesn't happen, or it's just completely parameterized in some formulas. But you can't derive anything from that for yourself.
And what finally helped them achieve that breakthrough? The breakthrough in meteorological understanding, if you will?
On one hand, because I dove into it so deeply, I realized pretty quickly that I knew significantly more than other people. Simply out of my own interest. And because I always looked at it through the lens of paragliding and then started looking at things like, okay, what do the internet forecasts say? What data can you find there? And what is it that I actually experience at the launch site, or similar, and I learned to relate that better and better. And back then, I started writing a weather forecast or a flight weather forecast every weekend for the club I'm in here, DGC Siebengebirge. Where and how you can fly on Saturday and Sunday.
And I always described a bit of how the weather was. Back then, there was no Windy, no Meteoparamount, or anything like that; there was really only the weather center or wetter3.de, where you could already read GFS maps and stuff, but they were all very coarse. But still, if you had a bit of understanding and could also look at upper-air charts and upper-level wind maps and such, suddenly there was someone who could explain significantly more to people about what was going to happen than what people could normally do. So it happened quickly that it wasn't just the people in my club who looked at my weather. Basically, almost all the pilots here somewhere in the region started looking at these pages.
I eventually started writing about that on my blog too. And every weekend, there was basically the Lu-Glidz weekend flight weather. And that actually reached wider circles. I always focused on the regions around Bonn, mainly the Eifel region as a low mountain range. But then there were also people who lived partly in the Black Forest who still read along with me. Because they said I sometimes provided more, additional info that they couldn't see elsewhere. Including some assessment of the large-scale weather situation and stuff like that. And I learned an incredible amount from writing it down so regularly.
Because you constantly have to deal with it. And every week, I mean, just writing this weekend weather alone always made me look into it. And otherwise, it usually cost me two hours of work time. But at the same time, it was two hours of training for me, where I learned more and more. And that's mainly how I figured it out, how I grew into it. And over time, yeah, you just get finer at describing what you can, or what you can put together from your own experience, from the flight weather, and your own flying experience and stuff like that. And while at the beginning I focused a lot on what you can pull directly from the models, over time I also learned more about describing things that might not even be in all those meteorology books.
Flow conditions along a slope or how thermals distribute at certain points, where you're most likely to find thermals further upstream in terms of flow for certain slope shapes, and stuff like that. A lot of what I've simply tried out over time, developed theories that I then actually found to be confirmed when I discovered it myself, so I could say, okay, I'll talk about that again. And then I wrote something for the DAV magazine and put it down in writing. And so over time, more and more of that has built up, so I now actually have a collection of theories that I've come up with myself, or not just myself, but also ones that have grown on my own experience, accordingly.
where I can pass a lot of that on. And I see that many people benefit from it. I also see that I benefit from it myself when I stick to my own theories sometimes. Often I forget them too and just fly around, and afterwards I think, Lucian, you once said that in these conditions you should actually be looking ahead. Why didn't you do that? And then, well, on the next flight, I do it differently again.
Would you ever write a book called "Meteorology for Paraglider Pilots: The Collected Knowledge of Lucian Haas"?
Yes, I've had that plan for a long time. But I don't have the time, or rather, I haven't made the time for it yet. You actually have time—I always say, you don't have time, you make time. The thing is, I keep realizing, no, you could... how can I put that more simply? My first descriptions were also very meteorology-heavy, let's say in terms of the language used, more like how meteorologists express it. Then, since I'm a science journalist and try to simplify things sometimes so that regular people can understand them, I started saying, okay, how can you express the things described by the meteorologists in a slightly more colloquial way so that people can actually use them?
But then came the points where I say, okay, now I'm getting into subject areas that the meteorologists don't really describe like that. What's your language for that? How can you explain it? And the longer I explain, and the more lectures I give and stuff like that, every time something new comes up, or I learn something myself again; questions come up, for example, and I say, ah, that's a question someone could have there, then I could express that a bit differently or maybe I need a different slide where I can explain something a bit differently. And it actually keeps growing like that, as I always notice, no, my style of meteo-communication is also changing over time. And sometimes I even say, well, it's a good thing I didn't write a book ten or five years ago, because I would write it completely differently today.
Or sometimes I think maybe you shouldn't write so much at all, but just present a lot of images. Yes, and explain many things to people using visual models, so that they can... because you actually need images in your head of what's happening in the air, of what I can't see, to project an image into that invisible. What does this thermal look like right now, maybe? Where am I in relation to this thermal? How can I fly into it? How do I have to set my thermal circle, maybe, so that I can fly out of it best, and stuff like that? And if you have such images and handle them imaginatively, and can awaken a bit of that imagination in other people's heads too, then I believe that helps very, very much.
A lot of text is nice and all, but it gets dry very quickly and the imagination falls a bit behind. And my own standard for how I want to convey things is actually higher than what I can always deliver right away myself. And that's why there's still no book by me, because I say, ah, then I'd need very good graphics. Well, then I'd actually have to pay an expensive graphic designer. Then my book wouldn't really be worth it anymore if I want to do all these graphics. Or I'd have to make these graphics myself. But then I'd first have to learn how to use all these graphic programs properly so that I can get it done in a reasonably amount of working time. And that's mainly where it fails. So far, at least.
You said that you don't have time, you make time. How much time do you take on average per week for your podcasts, your blogs, your meteorology research? Have you ever actually calculated that, or haven't you even attempted that calculation?
Well, I can say too much, if you look at it from an earnings perspective. By now, thanks to the grants and such, Blueglides and Podz-Glidz have become part of my income. But if I were to say, okay, I'm putting in this time for the blog and podcast and so on, I'm putting it in so that I can focus even more on my science journalism and sell my pieces for the radio and stuff like that, then what I would earn in the end, calculated per hour, would be significantly better there. At the same time, for me, the blog and podcast are also a passion project, and because I get so much more feedback from readers and listeners, it's also something that gives me a greater sense of satisfaction in a certain way.
So, a lot of the radio reports I do get broadcast. Then maybe some colleague comes along and says it was nice, but you never hear anything more from them. And maybe a hundred thousand people listened to it, but you don't know—did they understand it? Did they like it? Did they find it interesting or not? With the blog, however, I get follow-up questions, especially for the more in-depth texts, in the comments. A lot of the time, people don't even write comments, but send me a personal email to ask something further or leave a note or something like that. And that's something I wouldn't get otherwise. And that's basically part of my pay. To your first question, where you asked how much time I invest in that?
I'd say that out of the working hours I have—I'm not calculating a 40-hour week or anything like that—but I'd say that, financially speaking, unfortunately, I devote at least half, if not two-thirds, of my working time to the blog and podcast. But since I can somewhat make a living from it overall—I'm not getting rich, not rich, but I stay happy or something like that—then I can do it that way.
How did that develop for you? I mean, you didn't write the first blog post and then immediately think, "Here, people can sponsor me." Did it eventually start gaining traction and then you were able to, I don't know, reduce your other work, or how did it settle into a routine?
All those first ones—yeah, I think for the first ten years of my blog, and the blog has been around for 18 years now—I didn't earn anything from it at all, or besides positive feedback, I got nothing back. And it wasn't aimed at that at all. Yeah, it was just a project I started for fun, also because I wanted to learn a bit about how to even do blogs. That's what interested me back then. And then it grew slowly from, yeah, from those first roots, and now it's turned into a huge bush.
So I read the number somewhere—already 4,000 blog posts. If you round that up, considering you've been writing for 20 years, that's 200 blog posts per year, which is truly an enormous number.
When I look back at it myself, like when I see those kinds of numbers and reflect on them, I think to myself, Lucian, you've put a lot into this now. But it's also just a part of me. It's part of my life, it just belongs there. And I never actually feel like writing the blog is an obligation. It's not something I have to do. And that's also one of the reasons why, when I started saying you can support me—like you can send me a contribution somehow—it started because I saw somewhere while googling, oh, you can easily put a PayPal button on your site with an iFrame link, and then people can just send you something via PayPal.
Then I said, I'll give that a try. I'll just put a PayPal button on my site. Then people can click on it and say, yeah, I'll buy you a beer or something. And at the beginning, the first amounts came in, and they were really just beer amounts. That was two euros, that was five. When it went up, it was ten. So. And at the beginning, it was really just a small, really small contribution. But then it grew a bit from year to year, well, actually more and more, and then it made a relatively big jump when I started doing the podcasts.
That was in 2018.
Exactly.
That was around 2000, 18 or 19, yeah, whatever. About five years ago now.
When I started the podcasts, I realized, ah, in my blog, I hardly appear as a human being at all. Yes, I don't write a personal blog. I do write sometimes, and in some posts, the word "I" appears. But it's rare. Mostly, I don't write about my flights and the great experiences and stuff like that; basically, it's almost like a journalistic paraglider magazine in blog format. And I could write that, but ten others could too. It might not even be noticed if there wasn't always a name above it saying who the author is. And that's how people consumed it, actually, as a faceless—or nameless—product.
what was useful and helpful for them, but where they didn't say, "Oh, there's a human being behind this doing the work," but rather it was like one of those free offers you see all over the internet that you can just grab. And with the podcasts, I noticed, "Oh, now I've suddenly become visible to people as a human being, but I've become audible." And suddenly I was sitting with them in their car or in their living room or wherever. And people picked me up as a voice and suddenly saw, "Oh, there's someone there, I might find them likeable based on their voice, or they're asking questions that I also wonder about." So somehow, I maybe need to give back a bit more or show, "Oh, there's really a human being who's also taking a lot of time for this." And it's almost like a breakthrough where it reached a point where I can say, okay,
now it's not just a pittance anymore, but ultimately it's something where I can say, I still can't live off it entirely, but it's becoming more realistic in terms of how much time I'm putting into it and so on.
And did you actually put in more time than was possible to somehow offset something financially that you might not be earning at your other job, because you invest less time there?
So I've certainly put in more time, but it's not necessarily because I'm saying, "I want to do this" because it's now this income thing. I've always been the type to do it based on the workload I get from the radio, and if I have time in between, I'm actually immediately at the blog or reading, researching, on the podcast, messaging people, "do you want to maybe join me once," and other things. With the podcasting, my workload for Lu-Glidz and Podz-Glidz has certainly increased significantly, because simply doing an episode every two weeks actually means at least one full day of work per episode with all the bells and whistles, if not sometimes even more.
And that's something where I have to say, okay, I didn't invest this workday into the blog before, it didn't just switch over, and I'm actually doing the blog just as intensively as I did before. So something has grown there. The income has grown along with it, but that wasn't the goal or one thing resulting from the other; it was out of fun, because I realized that podcasting is also so much fun for me, because you can, as they say, tell stories from the cosmos of paragliding, because you can suddenly pick up topics or people and stories that I could never or wouldn't pick up in written form in the blog. Or if I did, only as a short news item about something or other. And then you can suddenly have the story behind it told to you and get to know the people behind it and learn how diverse this whole paragliding scene is, with all the different ideas that are out there.
And that's something that gives me a lot of motivation to keep at it.
How did the very first podcast episode actually come about?
About ten years ago, a pilot colleague of mine said, Lucian, I'm always driving. He was this kind of sales rep and sat in his car for five hours every day and always had to drive around somewhere. And he said, Lucian, I'm always listening to podcasts, why don't you start a paraglider podcast? And at the time I thought, oh god, what are you supposed to talk about in such a podcast or I don't know what. And now I'm supposed to turn my blog into a podcast format, and I couldn't make heads or tails of that or couldn't imagine how that could work properly. But because he said he's always listening to podcasts, I looked into it, okay, what do these podcasts even sound like? I came across them then too, at that time Gavin McClurg had just started his podcast,
how was it called, Cloud-Based Mayhem or something like that, started. And then I listened to it and said, ah, okay, a kind of conversation podcast, yeah, I could maybe imagine that. And when I say, I won't do it in English, but I'll focus on the German-speaking scene, that could maybe, that could maybe be interesting and work. But it still took a few years until I finally worked up the nerve to do it. And because I didn't have a real concept yet, who do I actually want to ask like what, and how exactly is it supposed to work? And then I met a couple at one of our practice slopes who told me they had just returned from a one-year trip where they traveled through all of Europe with their bus to go from flight site to flight site.
I had a great conversation with them at the launch site and then said, hey, that would be an interesting podcast story. How do people like that do it? They gave up their whole jobs for this, built the bus, bought the bus, converted the bus, and then set off, and now they're coming back and have to return to their normal lives. I said, that's a great story, I want to hear about something like that. Then I arranged it with them and said, yeah, then maybe that's the start of the podcast. I'll see how it goes, how much fun I have with it, how much work it costs me, and what it's like overall. Yeah, that was the first podcast episode. It got relatively good views, and then I said, yeah, okay, then I'll take care of the next ones.
At the beginning, I didn't have this two-week rhythm yet. I think at first I had more of a four-week rhythm, or whatever came up at the time. But then it became so much fun that I'd already start looking into the next one. The next one would be like, "Yeah, I've already got it, but we could do it the day after tomorrow." And then the timelines became much tighter. At one point, I basically had three podcasts lined up and thought, "Yeah, but waiting four weeks every time, they're basically going to be old news." And somehow, I also felt like doing more. So I said, okay, I'll just do one every two weeks for now. And that's how it stayed. Since then, I've really been trying—and so far I've actually managed to stick to it—to put out an episode every two weeks. Although, because I'm putting this pressure on myself, I actually want to put one out every two weeks, it's sometimes the first time I don't really stress about it because I also tell myself I can skip it if I want, but I still feel a bit of an obligation toward myself.
I have to move things forward. And the actual blogging in relation to that—it's also a lot of stuff related to current events or something, the topics just pop up every now and then. And if they just popped up, I write something about them. And if nothing just popped up, then I don't write anything right now.
How do you choose the people you want to do a podcast with?
How do I choose them? Actually, based on whether I see a story in it.
So you have to look for it. Do you sometimes have those moments where you think, "Okay, next podcast, I can't think of anything," and then you google your way across the world until you stumble upon a name or a story? Or do you always have a list of 50 people you'd like to interview?
So, if I knew that I'd have to spend a long time googling for every single podcast and that it would be exhausting to find an interviewee—or at least the idea for one—then I wouldn't do it. But somehow, people just come to me in different ways. For example, for the blog itself, I read quite a bit or follow a lot of people and pages and stuff on Facebook and Instagram, and I read a lot in forums—the German kiteboarding and dragon forum, the German paragliding forum in English, and others. I read along there and keep up with many of the developments being discussed. And then sometimes something just pops up where I see, oh, there's a story behind that.
And it might be mentioned or described very briefly there, and then I think, oh, that might be something for the podcast. For me, it's that I've said I don't just want to interview the big names for the podcast, because people say, yeah, a Kriegel Maurer, a Paul Guschlbauer, maybe a Stefanie Westerhütz or something, you have to have heard them or you want to hear what they think, but I also said, oh, if there are others—even just normal pilots—who sometimes have great experiences, from positive to negative, I said I actually want to spread it as wide as possible. And with the, let's say, the big names, you actually know the stories because they're always present.
With these lesser-known people, I probably wouldn't find them by googling because many of them are private stories. And it's 50 percent of the time that I happen to follow them through random reading somewhere. The other 50 percent is that I actually always get topics and recommendations now—people write to me and say, "Oh, Lucian, you're looking for conversation partners for this and that, right? I know Conny, who did something amazing, or she had a really strange experience," and so on. Then I listen to that and think, "Yeah, that sounds interesting." Then I contact them. Usually, you get a rejection first or something like, "Oh, but why?"
I'm not important at all, and I can't speak, and how is that even supposed to work, and stuff like that. At the same time, I notice with everyone that on one hand, they feel a bit self-conscious because I'm asking them for a podcast, but on the other hand, usually these topics—if they are somehow worth telling—are also weighing on them. Yeah, so maybe they had a bad experience, they came out of it somehow, and so on. Most people actually have an interest in that or feel like telling it when someone comes along and says, I'm interested in this and that story. I want you to tell me about it. And then people show up or are more willing to actually take the time for it.
They're often very nervous at the beginning, though I've found that once that initial nervousness has worn off and you really get into the topics they have something to say about on their own, most of them can actually tell their stories very beautifully.
How much time do you need to post-process a recording like that?
It depends a bit on how the conversation went. In most cases, I hardly cut anything content-wise. Unless something happened in between where one person says, "Look, I just told you something that I don't want—I've thought about it again briefly, I don't want that to go public." Then I say, okay, I'll cut those two minutes out or something like that. And depending on that, I basically have to listen to the whole podcast again. If I have an hour of recording, I have to listen to at least an hour again. With all the cuts and fine-tuning I do, it's actually at least two hours for every hour. Then, with the whole online posting and everything else, it's at least another hour and so on.
So overall, yeah, every episode takes at least a full working day. Even if the actual recording was only an hour and if the research and everything else beforehand was maybe an hour or two, depending on how much work you put into it, it ends up being a real working day of eight or ten hours or something like that.
If you add it all up across all platforms, how many times are your individual podcast episodes listened to?
From what I can track, since every platform keeps its own statistics, I'd say the average episodes with higher numbers are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000, although individual episodes can go up to 10,000. For that, I'd say, okay, I'm only in German and I only have the German-speaking...
In terms of paragliding knowledge, 10,000 is already relatively high. Although it can also be a question of, okay, out of those 10,000, how many actually listened through or just listened for a bit, I don't know that. And I also don't know how well the double-counting can distinguish between that—if someone plays a podcast five times briefly, does that count as five times or something? I don't know. Since I don't market my podcast and don't have any advertising clients in there who would say, "Yeah, tell me how often you're heard, look into that," I honestly don't track that much at all. Instead, I'm interested in the people, I'm interested in the topics. I find that, every now and then, I'll take a little look at how it went.
But I don't keep regular statistics to say, oh, this topic did much better than that one, so now I'll only do topics from this specific area or something like that. Instead, I find it just as important to occasionally pick up a topic that's a bit off-topic, where I know it probably won't get many views. But maybe there are just a few people who are interested in it, and then they're the ones benefiting from it right now.
You mentioned the value proposition in podcasts. I've always understood it as you not doing it out of principle, because that's what a proper journalist does. Do you ever think to yourself, "I'm such an idiot, why did I do that?" It would be such easy money to just slot in a few more ads, or is it not really like that—would it be a huge amount of effort? So, what's your take on this, or could your attitude toward advertisers in podcasts ever change in the future?
I always wanted to keep the podcast very independent. To run it independently, and not just independently from manufacturers and advertisers, but also independently from any other dependencies. I wanted to be able to write what I want, but also be able to write when I want, and also be able to not write at all if I don't feel like it. And I've always said that if I were to start selling classic subscriptions now, people would expect something in return and say, "You're promising me 12 issues a year," or "If I get the subscription, I also get 40 podcast episodes or whatever." I never wanted that, and the same goes for ads. I never wanted to have to hold anything over people's heads or put on a show just so they could see, "Yeah, this is worth it and for that."
And I wanted, especially regarding advertising, that was very important to me, I didn't want to have any dependencies, like for example I write a glider test and then somehow a manufacturer comes and says, but Lucian, we just have with you,
...you can't write about it that critically. Or, what is a very established term in journalism, the "scissors in your head," where you tell yourself, hey, they just transferred 2,000 euros for the advertisement or whatever. I thought, this glider has a certain feature that I don't think is so great. If I were to point it out the way I normally do, it's clear, they'll probably lose a few sales. But if I'm unfriendly now, I'll probably lose them as an advertising client. I don't want that. And that's why I said I want to basically waive that. Whether that's for the long term—actually, I want to keep it that way for the long term—the question is always,
how much I earn from other things and what the earning potential is there. You have to make sure you can still make ends meet yourself. As long as it works out and is as fun as it is for me right now, I'll keep doing it this way.
To what extent did your wife influence you in your aviation career, or even now for the written and audio productions you do?
So, in my flying career, my wife has definitely influenced me because I wouldn't fly without her. And she already had it from her family; she had a father who was a kite flyer. Her mother even flew kites too, but then had to give it up because of, not because of flying, but because of an accident. It just wasn't possible anymore, but they said all the children then learned kite flying too. Saskia, my wife, was a kite flyer for a while, but then at some point, when she was at university, she had such a huge kite and it was all way too much effort. Then she didn't fly for a few years. That was in the 90s, and at the end of the 90s, she learned that paragliding might be an option for her, and then she started getting her paragliding license. And when she started getting that paragliding license, that was exactly the time we met.
And she said, look, I'm doing this training—it wasn't here in Bonn, the training was nearby, in a hilly area. And she said the flight instructor offers these introductory courses, if you feel like it, you can come along one weekend. So I said, yeah, I'll just come along. I did the introductory course for the day. The flight instructor—I guess I didn't act like an idiot—the flight instructor then said, well, Lucian, you have talent, you should definitely keep going. I drove back to Bonn; I didn't have a car back then, I only had a bicycle.
and I thought to myself, paragliding is actually something for the mountains, it's not for Bonn and the low mountains and flatlands. If it were, you'd have to constantly drive far away somewhere. At the time, I was working as a press spokesperson for an environmental association and I said, no, that's not really what I want, always driving that far just to go fly somewhere, and I said I'm not doing it. But my wife kept going. At that time, she wasn't my wife yet, she wasn't even my girlfriend at that point, but it just happened one thing after another. Eventually, we had a daughter. Because of that, my wife didn't fly for a while and at some point she said she wants to go flying again. We were on vacation in the south of France at the time. She had her glider with her for the first time again.
We drove to the launch site at Saint-André. She wanted to launch, but she hadn't launched in two years. The wind up there was pretty strong and she didn't dare. At the same time, there were three French flight schools and all sorts of things. The sky was full of paragliders, all along the west edge of Saint-André—for those who might know it, it's a beautiful long ridge where the sun hits it in the evening, some nice thermals still bubble up there, and you can simply soar along that ridge until sunset. And it looked so great, how they were soaring along there, that—to put it briefly—on the way back, Saskia actually said, "Look, I'm quitting. This is going nowhere." But I was hooked by what I saw, how beautiful it is to fly there, and we also considered maybe driving to the south of France there more often,
...that I then said, Saskia, before you quit, I'm starting. Then at least we can go flying together. And then not long after, that was three weeks later, in the autumn, I booked the paraglider course, well at least the basic course, and then started right away for a week, then continued accordingly the following spring. But that was basically the initial spark. Later on, it was the case that I fly significantly more, or even today, I fly significantly, significantly more than Saskia. Saskia also felt a lot of frustration in between because she was much more limited by time than I was, regarding what she saw. I actually got into flying through her, and then at some point I had overtaken her and was flying much more and much better.
And when she flew with me, I was up top and she was down below, or whatever. It was also a bit stressful at times. But over the years, we managed to get that down pretty well.
While preparing for this podcast, I was thinking to myself, well, Lucian lives in a place where, as you've already mentioned, he doesn't fly that often. Is your work in the podcast or blogging also a bit of a substitute for the fact that you don't get into the air as often?
Ah, I've wondered about that too. I can't really answer it, because it would be interesting to see—if I lived in the mountains or by the mountains, would I blog and podcast less if I got to fly more? I don't know. For me, they're actually two completely different pairs of shoes. Although they deal with the same thing, it's always about paragliding, but basically they're two different hobbies, because for me, flying is really about experiencing the elements in that moment and being in the moment, dealing with what's happening right then and experiencing exactly what's going on at that very second.
Writing, on the other hand, is more of a passion, because I also learned it from journalism; apparently, I'm quite good at being able to explain things relatively well and presenting complex matters in a simplified way so that people can visualize them. Or rather, I work as a science journalist, and you have to be able to read into topics quickly and pull out the most important points from complex subjects fast. And I think that's also something I do quite well in the blog, because I read through so much of the whole scene, and all the manufacturers and stuff like that, so I have a very good overview of what's going on where, what's really a new development, or something like that.
and then also understanding relatively quickly what it's actually about, what the decisive point is. And that's what I enjoy doing. But where I would say, one thing is the hobby of being the "explainer," so to speak, and the other is the hobby of flying for myself.
With all your work, whether it's blogging or the podcast, I assume you've learned a lot too. Was there ever anything in particular that stuck with you, like a specific podcast episode where you thought, "This has actually helped me personally with my flying"?
Yes, I have one, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. One episode, it's an episode with a flight instructor, Paul Seeren, and the episode—I don't know the number right now, I can add that in the show notes—the episode is called Kurvenlehre. And Paul Seeren is a flight instructor who also builds model aircraft, and he builds a special type of model aircraft that aren't remote-controlled, but are just set up in a way that they basically fly in circles, and there are actual competitions for who builds a model that stays in the air the longest. And these models have the ability to center themselves in the thermals. For that, they have to have a special setting for how the wing constraints and how the wing can work and stuff like that.
And regarding this auto-centering of the models, Paul Seeren said, "Yeah, I'm going to test out how well that works with paragliders." And he tried it out and said, "Yeah, you can paraglide just as self-centeringly." And he explained in the podcast itself how that works. And I said, "Ah, that's something I want to try out." Since then—this podcast was, I think, two years ago or something—since then I've been working on doing less as a pilot and letting the glider do more when paragliding in thermals. The more intense, the stronger the thermals are, the more you still have to do as a pilot, simply because so many things are disrupted by the pendulum effect and such, and of course, the glider needs to stay open and not collapse or whatever.
But with slightly weaker thermals, you can let the glider do a lot of the work. And that's something I'm still learning more about and practicing more, and I also find it interesting to see with every new glider I have as a test glider, how well can you do this now? So, it's basically a new task in my test catalog where I'll say in between, "Okay, glider, I'm curious to see how well you can center yourself," because every glider is actually a bit different in those aspects. So many things come into play, from curvature, to the twist of the outer wing, to how stiff the gliders are, how well they react to weight shifts or not. So they do it with varying degrees of success, but actually, all gliders can do it, and that's something I really learned and took away from the podcasts and what I still find a lot of fun when I say, "Hey, you're just letting yourself be flown by your glider,"
and if it works, it's a great feeling.
Last question. Christmas is coming up soon. What do you personally wish for—either for the podcast, for the blog, for the paragliding world, for the female paragliders? What would be a wish for you that has something to do with paragliding?
If I had to make a wish, it would be that as few accidents as possible happen and that people—and me included—can have as much fun as possible while flying. Yes, without too many negative experiences.
And is that something you also consciously address in your podcasts, or do you deliberately invite people who can provide input on that?
Yes, definitely. It's quite common for topics like safety to come up in the podcasts, or I've invited people who had a bad experience and asked them how they dealt with it. What did you learn from it? Or I once had a woman who hadn't flown for a long time because of a bad experience, and then she started flying again and is now very enthusiastic about it; we talked about the switches that flipped and got her back into flying. I always find those to be the most interesting topics, and I notice it from the feedback I get—not always as a comment I can read, but also in emails where I get a personal story from the next person saying, "Hey, I experienced something very similar."
Sometimes, depending on how good the story is, I'll say, I'll put that on the list; I'm not doing that as the next podcast because it's a similar topic again, but maybe I could do it in six months. But sometimes it's also just people saying, "Hey, that really helped me because I suddenly got an idea of how I might deal with it or that I should get help," or that in a few episodes, the topic of hypnosis, for example, kept coming up.
And apparently, I haven't done it myself yet, but many people always say that they managed to overcome some flight phobias again with hypnosis.
And since that came up several times, there were also people who said, "Hey, because of this podcast, I got in touch with this and that hypnotherapist, and it actually helped me or something." And I always find that great when I find out that, okay, the podcast really helped people. And then I don't care at all if it was just—even if it was only this one listener who tuned in and got something out of it—then this podcast was definitely worth it.
Alright, Jan, I hope you can continue to do a lot of good with your contributions in the future and give many people something they can take with them when paragliding. And I especially hope for you that you keep the joy in it and can enjoy many beautiful flights yourself. I want to thank you now, not just on my behalf, but on behalf of everyone listening, for doing this and investing so much heart and soul into it. I believe there are few people who devote so much time to somehow bringing paragliding closer to others. Thank you very much, and I wish you a great 2025.
Yes, thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine. And as long as I enjoy it, I'll probably keep doing this for quite a while. The beautiful thing is, in my life, I've actually had a very positive life so far, and I've always seen that whenever one thing eventually falls away, something else grows in its place that also brings me joy. So I'm not worried now if I ever lose the desire for paragliding or the paragliding podcast and stuff like that; something else will certainly come along. I have the joy right now, but there's no sign of it ending. So you'll still be hearing and reading a lot from me.
I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
That was the 150th anniversary episode of Podz-Glidz with me, Lucian Haas. My thanks go to Stefanie Westerhuis, who brought this idea to me in the first place—to interview me so that you, as bloggers and podcasters traveling through the cosmos of paragliding, could get a bit more of my story and my motivation.
By the way, you can learn more about Stefanie, the meteorologist, in episode 106 of Podz-Glidz. It's worth giving it another listen. If you'd like to support my work on Podz-Glidz and Looglights, you can find all the important information on the website looglights.blogspot.com. There's a "Support" menu item there. See you soon. Don't fall from the sky. Ciao.