We've already noticed that this kind of motivation also pushes people to experience more adventures or things that otherwise just wouldn't have happened. And that's how it is—this gamification, this playful element in flying, isn't supposed to take away from the seriousness, but simply to motivate people to get out there.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Bernhard Fercher and I am Lucian Haas. There are such different types of pilots. For some, airtime is everything. They hang on the ridge for hours like they're nailed down in the valley wind. The main thing is that they have no ground under their feet. Others, on the other hand, only have the XC points in sight, constantly heading out on routes, even if they're flying the same triangle for the x-th time. And then there are these pilots who somehow get into the air. They just wander around aimlessly for a while, then eventually fall out of the thermals due to a lack of focus, and soon they're back on the ground, looking longingly at the sky and asking themselves, why didn't I fly any further?
We can especially help that third group I described. Since the beginning of 2013, the Airtime group has been helping each other. The Airtime group is one of the most important multipliers in the world. It's called the Easter Egg, or rather, it's a small one you can do that challenges you in a way that makes you feel like you're in the space. That is to say, the Airtime group is a very simple and very fast, quiet, and very segment-based challenge with leaderboards and trophies, where even entire clubs can be involved in this game, as Bernhard Fercher explains in this 165th.
episode of Podz-Glidz. Since you're listening to the podcast, why not become a supporter of Podz-Glidz? It's very easy to do—you can find out how on the Lu-Glidz paragliding blog, specifically on the support page.
Bernhard, have you ever stood at a launch site and had no goals anymore? Like, you had no idea where you actually wanted to fly to?
That happens regularly. That means you're standing at the launch site, getting geared up, and then you start thinking, what am I even doing today? And often you just head out without a plan, or I head out without a plan, fly for an hour or two, and then I actually don't know whether I should go land now or fly somewhere else. And that happens regularly, though less lately because we're running a summit-collecting challenge in the club, and it's much easier to have goals then.
This aimless flying, what's it like?
What kind of feeling is that?
So the question is, why do I go flying? And often it's this feeling that it pulls me out or up to the launch site and then into flight. But then I'm in the air and wonder, what am I even doing here? Or if it's one of those stubborn days, you're climbing at four or five meters per second and it's really turbulent, and then I often ask myself, what am I even doing? Wouldn't it be much nicer to be lying down in the pool down there? And without having a goal in front of my eyes, I also think to myself, or it's often like this, that I don't pull myself into the air anymore. And then it's also like, I go to land, I'm down near a swimming pool and think, why am I not up there with the others anymore?
And that's kind of annoying too. But then you look forward to the next flight again if you maybe plan better or set a clear goal to stay motivated, where you can actually feel safe—but in this dragging-down feeling of flying. Mentally, you're somehow on the ground. But I think having goals helps you push through, to shake yourself off, and to enjoy it much more.
What kind of paraglider pilot are you? Are you a cross-country pilot, or what are you looking for? Or what kind of goals are you seeking in the air? I think that has evolved over the
What kind of paraglider are you? Are you a cross-country pilot or what are you looking for? Or what kind of goals are you seeking in the air? I think that developed a bit over the
I got my paraglider license in Pinzgau. And I was relatively quickly very motivated because in my club in Viergen in East Tyrol, they are very ambitious cross-country pilots. Alois Riesinger, for example, has already won the Austrian cross-country state championship, and there are also several others who have already flown over 300 kilometers. And the ambitions there were very high. That means, after my first year of flying with a B-glider or Low-B-glider, I moved up straight to the C-class. In hindsight, it was very unreasonable. I noticed pretty quickly that it was very unreasonable. But my ambitions were already cross-country flying. So the further, the better. And back then, 100 kilometers was still a long way.
So I also saw success very quickly in that regard. From 2012 on, I was with the team pilots at Skywalk. And that was my goal as well.
But for professional reasons, I was a bit held back from flying. I was in the air less. And nowadays, for longer than three hours or four hours, I can't stay in the air at all because that's enough. And then I find myself asking, what's the goal if I'm not flying as far as possible? And in recent years, it's been more like sightseeing flights. Like flying into the glacier in the Stubaital, for example. So you set these mental goals. Where do I want to go at all? And then I fly back again. And exactly, I would describe myself as a pleasure flyer.
But if I have goals, then I enjoy it afterwards. That feeling of having achieved something in hindsight. Or maybe...
To have flown outside of my comfort zone. And that already provides a sense of satisfaction at the...
landing field. What are you looking for when you go flying? I mean, you said you're more of a pleasure flyer now, but still goal-oriented. So is it a kind of tourist flying where you say, okay, I want to go to the glacier. I want to reach peak ABC or something. No, the mountain hut is over there. I want to reach that. So are those the kinds of goals that are interesting to you?
Personally, I wouldn't have called myself a tourist pilot. But it actually sums it up very well. Because lately, I've been looking for new peaks, new routes, and I'm just flying routes I might not have flown otherwise. Simply because I set myself a goal, I'll fly to a mountain that might be higher than anything I've flown so far, for example. Or I go... I also spend a lot of time on foot, at a launch site I've never been to, trying to bring some variety into my routine and not just take off from the same launch site, to the same peaks. In that sense, it actually captures the tourist aspect quite well.
Because as a tourist, you're looking for things, or you're a visitor, and much more than I am here in Innsbruck, where I'm from. I don't go to the museum regularly anymore and I try to discover new parts of the city. But as a tourist, you actually move around quite differently. From that perspective, you've summarized it very well. I'm a tourist pilot.
And what about this personal, "touristic" flying experience led you to program your own special flight motivation app?
I was at the landing field in the Stubertal last year after a flight. He was looking for a new flight. I then invited him to the flight motivation app. He was relatively aimless. The day wasn't bad. It wasn't particularly good. After two hours of flying back and forth, I landed. And then I noticed two pilots—well, a female pilot and a male pilot—discussing something down there. They were locals from the Stubertal. And I eavesdropped a bit. And it was like, yeah, and I was at the Haarwicht in the back. And just now I didn't reach the cylinder. For that, I was in the back of the Mutterer See. Now I've got this checkpoint. And I overheard them and then asked what they were doing.
And it turned out that the Jochtolen in the Stubertal have already had a summit collection challenge for several years. That means they have defined goals within the club—mountain peaks, huts, or lakes, basically prominent landmarks. The goal for the pilots is simply to fly to them within the flight season. They can just fly to these points whenever they want. It doesn't have to be on the same day; they can pick the days themselves. And that was a key moment for me, because basically, you have a common goal. And I absolutely wanted to take part. So, I'm not with the club in the Stubertal, but I'm in Virgen, in East Tyrol, with a club, and I presented the concept there.
And I did, and the feedback was very positive very quickly, and then we tried it out. Within a very short time, people were so extremely motivated to fly to the Großglockner and the Großvenetier and collect all the points that I realized I had to go all in. I mean, it can't be that only 20 of us are motivated by this. So I offered it to other clubs, and it turned out that through these new goals, new flights, and new adventures, new hike-and-fly routes and new launch sites are discovered, and it actually brings a new, different perspective to flying, especially in the regional clubs, because you're not always standing at the same launch site and not always flying the Gränte triangle from Gränte or the Delfröckental or out in the Pustetal, but are really going on a journey of discovery off the beaten path.
And you then said, okay, we can define these kinds of summit challenges, I'll program that as an app. How can you do something like that?
The early days of the evaluation were very tedious with Excel and Google Earth. That means for every new flight, people uploaded it to XContest, I downloaded the IGC file, uploaded it into Google Earth where the waypoints were marked, and then manually checked whether they reached the waypoint or not, entered that into an Excel list, and awarded the points. And that was very error-prone because with 20 flights per person, 20 people with 20 waypoints, those are already a lot of variables and possibilities where you can make mistakes. But did you do all that
visually checked? So you went onto the maps and looked, are they really there and did they reach the waypoint? That's not just error-prone, it's insanely time-consuming, isn't it?
Exactly, that was very time-consuming. At the same time, I was on vacation in Southeast Asia, so I was constantly on Google Earth at the airport or during the stops checking routes. That started to annoy me a bit, especially because I'd post a new result in our WhatsApp group and then the feedback would be, "Oh no, I reached that point too, you might have missed it." So I started writing software for it, because I learned that I could do it. It was a web app, a very simple evaluation of the tracks to see whether they were within the radius or not. And depending on that, points were awarded or not.
And then the margin for error was zero, and the time it took me was also zero. Or rather, I put my time into programming and less into checking the flights.
But at first, that was still a program running on your computer. So it wasn't its own app yet.
Well, it was already a web app, but it was purely for our club in Viering. That means there were no other users or anything like that. But the individual rewards, in our club, they already had an account and uploaded their flights themselves. But then I realized, this works. I then started writing to other clubs to see if they were interested. And there was a lot of interest very quickly. And that's basically how it happened, that many clubs tried out these challenges. So that was very early on, like a pilot phase in the autumn of last year. With about ten clubs.
So you basically made your web app available to all of them, and they ran it accordingly on their end, right?
Exactly, so I sent them an Excel list where they defined the coordinates or the goals, the summits, and sent over the coordinates. I then entered that into my database and that was basically when this challenge went live. So it was still a bit of work for the club members back then. Now it's significantly easier; they can mark the points and define radii themselves. But that's how it started.
It's available as an app for iOS and Android now, and it's something that's freely available to everyone. So anyone can download it.
How did it come about that you said, I'm going to make a completely original app that I'll make available to everyone?
So, last autumn, I asked myself: Is this really a web application or platform like XContest? Or could it work better as a smartphone app that you always have with you and which has completely different technical possibilities with GPS recording, tracking, and push notifications? And the goal was already to build an app that connects the community—connecting the individual pilots to each other—while also offering the possibility to record flights, like in other flight apps like XCTrack or FlySky, but in a very integrated way. And for me, the decision was already clear: this really has to be a mobile app for iOS and Android.
And then I started developing in December. In January, I went live with the first version. And looking back, I think it was a very good decision to make it an app, because you can already see in the numbers how often people open the app again to check out flights from friends or club members. And it's simply easier for the individual pilot and for the user.
You named the app Sidekick. Why? I mean, what does that name mean to you?
I remember that I was traveling from Vienna with three friends, and I was on my way from Vienna to Innsbruck. And I was chatting back and forth with ChatGPT along the way. I was actually looking for another word for wingman, but one that doesn't sound quite so masculine. And
then ChatGPT said that Sidekick is a very good name. Then I asked my friends if the term Sidekick meant anything to them, if they could do anything with it. Including me, nobody had ever heard of the term. But, well, Sidekick is on one hand another word for Wingman, and on the other, it's the partner or the right hand of a superhero. That means just like Batman is to Robin, the Sidekick app is the partner of the pilot, who is ultimately the hero. And that felt very consistent to me. I think it fits the vision quite well that it's a companion that isn't supposed to be in the center, but simply should support the pilot in achieving his aviation goals and accomplishing his heroic deeds.
A helper who helps me perform my own heroic deeds as a pilot. That's a nice vision. So, describe a bit what Sidekick can actually do? I mean, if I install it on my phone as a pilot, I have an app I can open. What can I do with it when I go flying? Does it help me while I'm flying, or does it ultimately only help me with the evaluation afterwards, because I just have a tracked flight that I can look at again later? So, what kind of functions does Sidekick have?
So, maybe I'll give you a bit of background. The concept is built on three main pillars. The first is setting and achieving goals, and currently, that works best through these club, association, or flying community challenges. That means these peak-collecting challenges or Hike-and-Fly challenges where you set points, define common goals, and then within a certain period, I can—or the pilots can—reach these goals, collect points, and climb the leaderboard. And you can see who has collected the most points. So, on one hand, that's the goal tracking and achievement.
The other thing, well, the second pillar is community. That means, similar to social media, I can follow other pilots, or other pilots can follow me. And that way, I always see the flights and Hike-and-Fly adventures of the people who are important to me—my friends, club colleagues, flight personalities—for example, Bene Dornauer from X-Service always posts his peak-bagging flights on Sidekick, and you can just follow people like that so you never miss a flight. That means, for example, I did a beautiful sunrise Hike-and-Fly. My glide was three kilometers.
On XContest, for example, it's somewhere on page 25 and nobody sees it, so I can't inspire anyone through that. But with Sidekick, through this follower system which is modeled after social media, I can share that with my fears too.
That means at least your friends will notice, because whenever I open Sidekick, it always shows me my friends' latest flights, and I can see what they did today, or yesterday, or whenever that was.
Exactly, you can think of it like an Instagram feed or Strava, if any of the listeners use that too. I open the app and then I see the recent flights of the people I follow, or I can switch to Discover and then I see other flights—like flights in other areas, longer flights, or hike-and-flies, depending on what's important to me.
So those are flights that are just assigned to me by chance, meaning they're shown to me? Is there some kind of algorithm behind that which says, "For Lucian, he gets the flights in South Tyrol," for whatever reason, or how does that work? In the future...
is that how it's planned? Currently, the algorithm is very basic. That means flights are simply displayed chronologically. That's still possible now because on good flying days, the feed gets very crowded, because over 200, 300 flights are uploaded and then you very quickly lose track. Flights in Germany, in Hamburg for example, like winch tows are also recorded, which personally don't interest me much right now. And it's already planned that this will work better and that I'll only see the flights that are also interesting for me. But the main goal is for the flights to be displayed from the people I follow,
because that's already a very high indicator that I'm interested in it, or rather, that my club teammates are too.
Then there are the flights that I document, or others document, which I can then look at and comment on. You can also upload pictures with them and other stuff. And then there are these summit collection challenges, as you called them, where you fly to individual waypoints and probably get certain points for them and so on. But I saw in your app that if you open those and upload a flight, you get points assigned directly and get a level. With a flight I uploaded there once, I'm still at level 0. But what's the point of these levels?
Exactly, that's the third of the three pillars, and that's the topic of gamification. That means you get points—so I get points for everything I do—and there are leaderboards everywhere. That means in the summit collection, the summit collection challenge, there's a leaderboard for that challenge. So I can see where I stand compared to my members. When I upload a flight, depending on how much flight time it is, or if it's High-Count-Fly, it's total activity time, and I get more or less experience points, which I've named, and I can level up to the next level like that, and it simply motivates a certain type of person.
Is there an incentive? I want to get to the next level now, or I want to earn this new patch. And you wouldn't believe what a difference it makes if you can earn a few bonus points—we saw this last autumn during our High-Count-Fly challenge, where people would still quickly go for a High-Count-Fly at six in the evening just to reach the next rank or not fall too far behind. We've already noticed that this type of motivation also moves people to experience more adventures or things that otherwise simply wouldn't have happened. And that's how it is—this gamification, this playful element in flying, isn't supposed to take away the seriousness of the whole thing, but simply...
motivate them to get out there. And that's the idea behind it.
But that's also something—I mean, with cross-country flying, if you take an XContest, I think the six best flights are evaluated in the end to get a final score. But you're not just evaluating the six best flights, or only the six, yes, only the six best; basically, every flight gives you more points and with each one you can somehow move up, depending on what you're looking at—whether you're just looking at the levels for how much you fly in total or how active you actually are, right up to challenges where you can collect corresponding challenge points.
Exactly, so it's in no way a competing product to XContest or intended to represent competition in itself, but rather a playful way to get to know other people. So if I look at the leaderboard now and see the five people ahead of me whom I might be able to overtake with the next flight, I might then think about who these people are, where they fly, and that's more of a community feature than it being a competition. In that sense, for me personally, my level is currently Level 2, and the best ones right now are somewhere around Level 5 or just under Level 6. For me, it's an incentive to get to Level 3, but not to get into the top 10 right now.
So I don't look at it as, well, it's less about comparing who's better, but rather motivating—at least it's supposed to have that effect—to do one more flight.
Are these levels cumulative? I mean, the more years I fly and use Sidekick, do I keep climbing up in level, or is it calculated per year, where you say you start again at level 0 on January 1st and have to work your way back up, or fly your way back up, during that year?
So it's not defined yet because it's only the first year, but I think it's better if it resets for that motivational effect—this level, so that you keep at it and can't just rest, let's say, at level 7 or 8 and stay there, but that it's actually a continuous process.
Then there are also trophies in the app. What are those?
If you participate in a peak-collecting challenge and collect at least one of these points, waypoints, then I get a badge or a trophy for having participated in this challenge. These trophies are then collected, so I have my trophy collection. In the future, it's planned that you'll be able to collect many, many more different badges, for example, for very prominent waypoints like the Großglockner in Austria or the Zugspitze, so you get those kinds of badges, but also for personal milestones, for example, I've reached my 10th.
...flight uploaded, or I've climbed above 4,000 meters somewhere, or such aviation goals, or in cross-country flight, it's my first 30-kilometer cross-country flight. Or my first, first hundred, that you can also collect trophies this way, it's not that far along yet, but it is already a very big goal to develop a kind of single-player mode, let's say, over the next few months, what is then possible for the individual pilot to set goals and achieve them, regardless of my club or what other people do.
Because I believe that many people are not in a club, or are in a club that doesn't want to organize any kind of summit challenge for some reason, but still
Looking for goals. And I think that's a really good way to provide a little path for how to get out there more, have more motivation, and then maybe also become a better pilot, step by step.
And these goals, even if you haven't realized them yet—not in terms of programming, but in terms of your own thinking—I can set them for myself as a pilot. Like saying, I want to reach an altitude of 3,000 meters. That's a goal I can define personally, and once I've reached it, the app shouts "Hurrah" or whatever and shows me: you've reached your 3,000-meter goal.
So, it's still, it's very, very early in the idea stage, but I remember back when I got my license in 2008. I was out of flight school, had my license, and then I was in Viergen at the launch site and was completely on my own. I didn't know what the next thing I should do was. And I think, for one thing, for
For beginners, or for those first major cross-country flights—meaning accompaniment until the B-license—I do believe there are milestones one should reach before setting the next higher goal. For me, it was immediately clear that I had to fly 100 kilometers, even though there actually would have been 25 other milestones in between that were probably more sensible to reach than the 100 kilometers with the C-glider in the second year. And that's why I think that especially for beginners, or for pilots who don't get to fly that much, for people who are on vacation just to fly, there needs to be an instrument or a path where I can move along a bit and reach my next milestone in a relatively safe way.
And on the other hand, I do believe that even for more ambitious people with more experience, it can be like you already said. I can define my personal goal. That could be, for example, defining a distance, like 100 kilometers, or I want to have 50 flights a year, and the Sidekick app—your partner in this case—accompanies you in reaching this goal and also repeatedly reminds you: you have this goal. Is it still your goal, or is it something else? And if it's still your goal, then you're actually chasing your goal right now, maybe you should go flying or something.
that it reminds you and accompanies you. But it's still very early in the idea stage.
But I always thought of it as a motivational aid. One feature I also noticed that you have in there—I think you added this relatively recently—are XC segments. What are those?
That is
an attempt to bring cross-country flying and competition flying a bit closer together. In competition flying, I have one day and everyone has the same task, and that task is to fly the points or the task as fast as possible and reach the goal, and the best or fastest wins. And in cross-country flying, it's about flying as long a distance as possible. Not necessarily, so whatever the day provides, but not necessarily as fast as possible. And XC segments are simply sections of cross-country routes, so of known routes, for example in Pinzgau or the Pinzgauer Spaziergang, maybe many from Schmittenhöhe to Pasturen for example is a segment, and from a certain starting line to the end line in the air, the time is then measured.
And it's like I can look at other flights on the leaderboard—how fast was I, how fast were others, which line did other people choose, what day was it—and so I can potentially improve or learn new skills, like fast flying. But as I said, it's an experiment to see how it's received and maybe make cross-country flying a bit more interesting, or redefine it in a new way.
So, in the sense that it's no longer just about the final result, the total XC points, but that you can also say, okay, who is flying particularly efficiently at certain spots, and I can then really say, well, now I'm flying the Pinzgauer Spaziergang, see, I have 20 minutes, well, it takes a bit longer, but I have what I needed, and the other person did it in half the time, and then I can see, pull up his flight, and see, ah, he always turned up 500 meters less than I did because it doesn't need that much altitude and he was already flying on directly all the time, he always found connections, so maybe next time I can also turn up 500 meters less. I'll just try that to find out, yes, I'm actually a third faster on the Pastoren than I've ever been before.
Exactly, and I think, well, in cross-country flight, there are a handful of days a year where the really good cross-country pilots fly their really big triangles, which ultimately contribute to the final standings—so the six, or in Austria, it's three flights, the best three—but in between, there are many days that have a lot of potential, but then we have a fast overdevelopment, so I can't take advantage of the day for big cross-country flight, and yet I can improve and see, or compare, what I could do if it were good cross-country flight weather or if the whole day were productive, or I have another little mini-task again.
achieved, where I just say, today I'm going to try to fly from, for example, the Winzgauer Spaziergang as fast as possible, and then I have a way to compare myself. It's actually very difficult in reality for me to compare myself with the best cross-country pilots because, above all, it's very regionally different, but that brings a certain comparability to it—what are others doing differently, as you've already explained.
Who can actually define these summit challenges and XT segments? Can any user do that and say, "I'm setting a segment challenge now," or is that something you, as the app operator, provide centrally and say, "I'm working with this one now"?
With the summit segment challenges, any club can do that, or any member who creates a club—so not necessarily the registered Barglatt club, but it could also be a flying community that says they're the thermals sharks and want to host a challenge. Even if there are only five or ten of them, they can do it very easily via the app: create a new account, create a new club, and then they can host it. The person who creates the club is automatically the admin and can then define a challenge, like a summit collection challenge with points. As for the XT segments, that's still very much in the experimental stage,
So I have to see if there's any interest at all, how it's received by the pilots, and currently, it's like this: I'm specifying these segments, which are currently very well-known routes in Tyrol, South Tyrol, Salzburg—so more the Austrian area, or rather where many clubs or club members are active, like in Salzburg for example. But it's already planned, or at least being considered, that if the XT-Segments concept works, people will then be able to create segments themselves and release them for others.
You said these challenges are created by clubs or flight groups. How many clubs, or clubs and groups, do you have in the app now that are actually using it actively? I mean, the app only launched in January, as you said, so it's still relatively fresh.
So there are 35 active clubs that also organize challenges, and there are over 60 clubs registered in total, but that's also because when someone registers as a solo pilot, they're asked which club they belong to when creating their profile. That means there are also clubs on the platform where only one or two pilots are members, but they aren't actively doing a challenge right now, but there are 35 active clubs, to be precise.
And did you just become known through word of mouth, probably?
Partly, partly. On one hand, neighboring clubs see what their neighbors are doing and then want to do it too, like in East Tyrol for example. Or in South Tyrol, people have already approached me saying, hey, can we try that too? And on the other hand, I just looked up a list of clubs online and wrote an email to the officials there, and depending on how motivated a particular person is or how it fits into their schedule, they've said they'll give it a try or they won't.
You're the one programming the whole thing. How much time do you actually put into it?
That's a good question. I don't really want to know either. But me? No.
I wouldn't even know. You don't track it exactly because there's so much that you end up flying less yourself. It's already...
a lot of time has flowed into it and on good days I don't struggle with it, but on flyable days, let's put it like this, I do struggle with the thought of whether I should just go out and fly or try out a new feature or program or unlock something. I struggle with myself there because I just love building software so much, and I'd rather build software where I have a very high connection to it and can also see how other people are motivated by it or use the new features. It really does, or it pushes me a lot, let's put it like that, and that's why it's always difficult—do I program or do I go out to fly.
When you invest that much time into it, and the app itself is free—even if I just use it as is, I don't have to pay anything—how do you eventually figure out your bill? Because somewhere, that time probably needs to be compensated.
The time—well, the goal, the goal is, or let's not say the goal, but my personal professional dream, is that I can eventually make this my job or live off of it. It's obviously a huge challenge. On one hand, writing software or building apps for end consumers is incredibly difficult because the bar is just very, very high, and building something that people find enough value in to spend money on is very, very hard in the end-consumer space. That's one thing, and on the other hand, the paragliding market is also very small compared to other sports or other market segments.
From that perspective, it's a big dream and at the same time an incredibly huge challenge, but it is already planned to generate revenue through additional features for pilots, as well as clubs and sponsors, via these three, two sources of income, so that the development is simply worth it, or that it's even possible to keep building on the whole thing.
Additional features—there are basic features that everyone can use and everyone can participate in for free, and then maybe at some point there will be Pro features where you can say, you can now define your own goals and
do personal challenges and I don't know what else, and you get a much more precise evaluation of your flights and so on. Exactly. If you're in the East Tyrol region right now, where you can follow this well with the clubs participating, you probably have a lot of contact with the pilots—would you say that the mere existence of this app has already led to people flying noticeably differently?
Definitely. So it was really exciting—now, at the beginning of May, everyone can probably remember those brutal flying days, the best flying days in history ever. Where incredible routes were flown, and I also followed along on Sidekick to see what people were doing. The really motivated cross-country pilots, who are obviously at the front in the national championships, of course, they went out on routes, but I also saw that many ambitious pilots who actually go out for cross-country flights were out on such days collecting summits, because they were also very good days with a high base to fly to the Großglockner or to very high goals deep in the mountains, and they took the chance to collect points and also try out other routes, as
just going full throttle to collect kilometers. And that was already interesting. I also got a lot of feedback from individual pilots that because you have a goal, flights happen that otherwise wouldn't happen at all, or that you actually want to land for some reason, but then you still find enough motivation to collect more points—or I don't even know what it is for the individual that drives them—but you keep flying to the next turning point anyway, or you go for that one extra turning point, and you can really tell, it's a different kind of flying.
Maybe it's this "tourist flying" that motivates people.
Is the app actually set up so that if I—I can also call it up during the flight, I can have my flight tracked live in the app—is it set up so that if I say, for example, I'm taking part in Peak Challenge XY, that when I get near a peak, the app tells me, Lucian, you just have to fly a bit further or turn another 200 meters up, then you could reach Peak XY, the Habicht, or whatever?
Something like that. There is the option to use the Sidekick app as a flight companion app, which means the flight is recorded and I also get support during the flight—meaning I see airspaces, I see cables, I have the current KK7 thermals map in there, so I have support, and at the same time, I can load in these summit challenge points. That means it shows me the points with the radius, and well, in the points system, there are bonus points if you fly closer to the center of the radius—so to the summit or to the defined waypoint. The closer I get, the more bonus points I get, and if I now...
If I use the Sidekick app during the flight and I'm within a radius, it shows me how close I currently am, in meters, and what my closest proximity was—how close I got to the center point—so I can better figure out how many bonus points I have now. And that's used a lot because, once you've reached a point, it's not just about flying into the radius and back out; if I'm right in the center, I get the full number of bonus points. That means someone could overtake me on the leaderboard even if they have the exact same number of points, but were further toward the center at the individual waypoints, and the Sidekick app helps you with that.
to have more success, so to speak.
And with gamification, I basically get a "hurrah" sound played, or something, whatever you know from old Nintendo games and stuff, where you're like, even in the air, I'm getting extra motivation? So there's this sound,
but it's not that motivating.
Maybe you could improve that. That would be good input. But it really does make a difference when you fly into a radius and you might know it from XCTrack or other apps—that sound the phone makes, which is the confirmation in the air that I've got it now. And then I can turn around, head to the next target, and fly.
Would you say that you've become a different or better pilot yourself, both through programming and flying with Sidekick? I'd say yes,
definitely a different pilot. I caught myself doing that last year too. I was thinking, should I go flying or not?
But I actually noticed that I'd love to be in Osttirol right now for Gipfelsammeln, but I'm in Innsbruck, and then I caught myself having set a challenge for myself.
and defined the summit, and then I just went for it and tried it out for myself, set my own goal, and then I achieved it and was happy. I was the only participant in my challenge, but in that sense, I believe I'm moving more goal-oriented and also on more of a journey of discovery. That means exploring new goals and new starting points based on the system behind it, or rather, the idea behind it.
And that also means, to go back to the beginning, it doesn't happen as often anymore that you're standing somewhere at the launch site or you're in the air and say, what am I actually doing now? The swimming pool is down there, I could go there. I don't have a goal anymore, but now in the Sidekick app, you always find something where you say, no, that peak over there, I still want to go there.
I think my last flight is a very good example, or my last major flight. I was back in the Stubaital, and there's this public Stubait Challenge where you can win Skywalk stuff and hiking passes if you participate. That means it's public, so anyone can join in. I flew into it up to the glacier, where it turns back into the Ötztal. And then I really had to use the bathroom. So I flew back out and landed back in on November 11th. If I were doing cross-country flying right now, that would have been it, because the flight is finished. And so I looked and thought, yeah, where else do I need to go?
Yes, I still had to go to Serles and the Habicht. And then I had pretty much hit all the peaks that were possible for me personally on that day. Then I took off again, and with the new goals, I had completely new motivation. And then back to, or up to the Habicht to fly at 3,800 meters and then to Serles. And that was an incredible, beautiful evening flight that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Your own app really motivated you there. Bernhard, thanks for the story. I wish you much success with Sidekick, and I think—well, the concept could be really interesting to give some kind of incentive to many pilots who aren't just chasing XC points and sometimes wonder what they're actually doing in the air, to try something new or to fly further and get a bit more out of it. I think this approach could be really interesting. Maybe it could even keep some people flying longer because the motivation stays high.
Definitely. Thanks, Nuzian, for the conversation. I had a lot of fun. And to the pilots out there, download the app and give it a try. It's completely free, you have nothing to lose.
The Sidekick app is available in the Play Store for Android and for iOS smartphones. You can find the links on the website www.sidekick.com.sidekick.cloud and, of course, in the show notes for this episode on the paragliding blog Lu-Glidz. Important: Sidekick is spelled with a K at the end, not CK. If you enjoyed this episode, please recommend Podz-Glidz. Tell your flying friends about it or leave a comment on Lu-Glidz, Soundcloud, Spotify, iTunes, or whereverver you listen to the podcast. If you want to hear more interesting stories from the cosmos of paragliding, then become a supporter of Podz-Glidz and the paragliding blog Lu-Glidz. As a freelance journalist, I put a lot of time, work, and also costs into these projects.
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