That was a Harakiri move. But back then we were just full of enthusiasm, and since I came from a filmmaking background, I always wanted to show new perspectives. The dream, of course, was from the glider canopy. Only the camera weighed nine kilos back then, and there was obviously no chance of starting with it in the canopy; it was way too heavy. So, during the flight, I pulled the camera up, secured it with the power supply cable, of course, then turned the camera on and filmed myself.
Podz-Glidz, the Lu-Glidz podcast.
Stories from the cosmos of paragliding.
Today with Henry Hauck. And I am Lucian Haas. At
In the early history of paragliding, everyone was a pioneer. People would throw themselves off mountains with only slightly modified, rectangular parachute canopies and glide into the valley without a helmet on their heads, without a rescue device on their chests, and without a protector under their butts. Henry Hauck is one of these pioneers, and in a double sense at that. Because he was also one of the first to capture the fascination of paragliding with a camera and bring it to television as a film. From 1986 to 1981. In the early 2000s, which was still before the founding of YouTube, Henry was one of the leading documentary filmmakers of this sport. Many notable figures of the then-young paragliding scene worked with him.
Moreover, as a trained cameraman with cinema experience, he mastered the art of not just evoking longings with his images, but also telling captivating stories. Today, Henry is 74 and still addicted to paragliding. As he tells in this episode 178 of Podz-Glidz. It mainly takes us back to the early days of paragliding and parafilming, when capturing action required far more than just a GoPro on a helmet.
I can only present these kinds of special conversations in Podz-Glidz because there are supporters who financially support my work on the podcast and blog. Are you in? You can find all the necessary information about this in the Gleitschirm-Blog Lu-Glidz, specifically on the Fördern page.
Henry, have you ever flown with a GoPro on your helmet? No. Why not? You're a filmmaker.
Exactly. No, I have to admit, the GoPro now has a resolution that's even cinema-grade. But I've actually always resisted it. And during the time I was making films, there actually weren't any GoPros at all. The GoPro only came around the turn of the millennium, I believe. And I started making films much earlier than that. And I'm happy to admit that the GoPro has changed filmmaking a lot. What used to be very, very cumbersome and complex has become much easier thanks to this small, super-light camera. Would you have
would you have wanted to have a GoPro back then, during your early film projects? Your first paraglider film is from 1986. Looking at what's possible with it today, would you have wanted one back then?
No question, no question. I actually have to correct myself a bit right now. I filmed a movie much later, Adrenalin. And back then, I had a predecessor to the GoPro from GBC. It was, it was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Maybe a bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes. And I could mount it inside the glider back then. I fastened it between the A and B lines in the middle with a foam pad. And I could just film myself, those shots. And above all, I think I filmed a movie with Mike Köhn of how his Agro program was plowing thermals, with that camera in the glider.
But in other words, yes. I would have liked to have something. Because I always wanted to have these influences. These settings, from the glider canopy down to the
Pilots. This first film I saw of you, the one from 1986 called Gegenwind. It's about, ultimately, maybe not the first, but one of the first wings of several pilots who then start from the Zugspitze, from the Schneefernerkopf, and fly down. And you basically document the ascent, conversations with meteorologists, they start up there and you also show the flight. In these flight shots, there's already a short scene where it's filmed from out of the canopy.
Yeah, that was a harakiri move that I'd never do again. But back then, we were just full of enthusiasm. And since I came from a film background, I always wanted to show new perspectives. And the dream, of course, was from the glider canopy. Only the camera weighed nine kilos back then. Nine kilos? Nine
kilograms, yeah. And that wasn't a classic video camera like today's. No, that was a real
More film. 16 mm ARRI-ST, ARRI-location, with a 30-meter cassette. And of course, there was no chance of starting with that in the glider canopy. Way too heavy, yeah. So I had them—and you can see that in one of the scenes, in the multitude of lines and cables going up there. I rigged small rollers between the A and B lines at the top, ran lines through them, and then pulled the camera up during the flight. Secured with the power supply cable, of course. Then I switched on the camera and filmed myself. The downside or the problem was that when I wanted to let the camera down, the whole system got snagged and I couldn't let it down anymore.
They got stuck somewhere in the line fork up there, right? Between A and B. And because of that, the angle of attack of the glider changed extremely. Yes. Keep in mind, there were no reserve parachutes back then, yeah. So I practically crashed into the landing field. The camera fell forward, but it was a very stable camera. Nothing happened to the camera. Nothing happened to me either, except for a crash landing. But the scene in the film is also really very short. Yes, yes, because first of all, I only had 30 meters of film material left. And the only usable sequence—so 30 meters was about three minutes—and the only usable sequence from this scene was the one that's in the film now.
The other thing was that in the excitement, the camera was switched on too early or by mistake. And so, after the film was developed, they saw that those few seconds were the only usable part of all that effort. What's the risk you always have when you're not looking through the viewfinder yourself right away?
can? I mean, up there with the hoisting and all that, you couldn't focus anything or anything like that. With today's GoPros, they have such wide angles, okay, everything is somehow in focus. But back then with the cameras, I think it wasn't like that with the lenses yet. Or was it a large lens where that was possible?
That was a wide-angle lens, 8 millimeters. Actually, for 35mm, it was originally calculated for 16mm. For 16mm, that's about 8 millimeters. So, a wide-angle lens, just like the GoPro has today.
How else can you imagine the shots back then? You were always lugging around nine kilos of camera and had to swap those 30-meter cassettes in between, because you'd say, three minutes are already up. So for a flight up there, how many cassettes did you have with you? And how does that work? I mean...
First of all, this camera I'm speaking with right now was the small camera. I actually shot the film with the ARRI SR. That's also a 16 millimeter camera, but the professional camera that was used by all the TV studios back then. And I worked for television too and had to use a camera like that. That one had 120-meter reels, meaning ten minutes. And it was, of course, even heavier. Don't forget that, on top of the camera itself, there was a battery, and that battery was also very, very heavy because, back then, they didn't know about such light batteries. There weren't even any lithium ones yet.
-batteries and stuff like that? No, no, no. They were
were those still lead-acid batteries that were flashed onto them?
Those were all
Lead-acid batteries. And when you opened the batteries, which you bought from ARRI for a lot of money, you could see that there were just ordinary cells inside that you could use to charge the battery. So the big camera was already, it was already much more difficult. But I never flew with that. It was too expensive for that. The risk of something happening to the camera was too great for me.
In this film Gegenwind, besides that scene from the camera, there's also a whole series of aerial shots where you really—I assume it was you—track and film another glider from above, from the side, and stuff like that, while flying. Did you film that with the small handheld camera too, before you put it up in the canopy? Or how did that work?
Yes, yes, those were always different flights. So for Gegenwind, that was probably 20 flights in total. So this POV - flying, they call it. Where I filmed from the glider itself. The
but they weren't all from the Zugspitze, were they? Or did you go up the Zugspitze 20 times? No, no, they weren't all from there.
If you look closely, you can see that it's in different landscapes. One part was also filmed in the Zillertal. And that's the story with these companies. Up until that point, I didn't see myself as a filmmaker. I was a cameraman, worked for WDR, worked for BR, worked for ZDF, and I had an agreement with WDR. I made a lot of climbing films. I would send them the material, develop it, and they would produce segments out of it. That always worked out quite well. And one day, I came to the editor here and said, look, I've got something new. I've started paragliding. That would be interesting, that would be something completely new for you.
Yes, yes, he was enthusiastic. And I started filming and thought, this is our agreement, just like it always was. But then a few weeks later, I got a call. The editorial conference had decided that they had just done something about skydiving and wouldn't do anything about this new sport because it was so closely associated with skydiving. So there I was, having already blown 5,000 DM on material back then. That was very expensive. One cassette cost about 110 DM. Developing was the same. And then you needed a working group and all that. So it was very expensive and the money was gone. And then I had the idea, what do I do now?
And that's how this flight happened, one of the first flights from the Zugspitze. That became the story for the film using the footage I had already shot somewhere before. That's how the film came to be. And the film itself was super successful, to everyone's surprise. It also... it was at the...
aired on ZDF, if I remember correctly
know. It aired on ZDF, it aired on Rai, it was with Nicole Hubert, she did Ushaya. That was that extreme sports show in France back then.
And ultimately, the WDR, which had rejected it at the time, ended up buying it much later anyway. So I came out of that project very well. You definitely got your 5,000 euros in costs back. I actually got them back several times. And that was also the trigger to say, oh, this is ideal, it's my hobby, I enjoy doing it anyway. And why don't I make films about it? And so one film followed another until 2002, when the last one was. Then I said goodbye to Germany.
Let's go back to the very beginning. 1986, this film, Gegenwind, your first paraglider film. When did you personally start paragliding? I think that was, I...
I think that was also '86, yeah. And I can still remember very well, we were—so the backstory is, I made climbing films. Through those climbing films, I met Sepp Gschwendtner. He says, that was Sepp Gschwendtner, right? Yeah, he was one of the
German pioneers of paragliding, let's just say.
Exactly. And he then told me that he was with the Red Panthers, and I joined them too. Even though I wasn't nearly as good at climbing as they were. And he says, eventually he came and said, "Hey, we have something new. Mr. Leber provided us with some gliders. We're going to try flying them right away." Then we were in Oberammergau on a hill.
No lift, but a hill in the snow where you had to hike up. And we kept going up there. In the snow. Tramped up through the snow, and at the beginning, we put the glider on the, on the bottom seal, because we had no idea. Until we realized, "That's not how it works," yeah. And we tried to get into the air all day. I don't know how many attempts. Anyway, first of all, I was wet and second, I was exhausted. And late in the evening, I think it was almost five o'clock, I said, "Alright, this is my last try. If this doesn't work, I'm never touching a paraglider again." And promptly, I got into the air. I flew about 50 meters, at a height of 1.50 to 2 meters.
But that feeling of taking off, that feeling of flying, it was something so fantastic. And it's made me an addict to this day, yeah. You fly too, and you know, all of us listening probably fly too, and you know what an incredible feeling it is when the glider pulls you off the ground.
Back then, I mean, you can also see it clearly in that film Gegenwind—those are square parachute canopies that you have to heave up with force so they open and then start running there and so on. Was there, since you've been flying for so long now, were there moments later where you'd say that just because of the better technology that eventually came with paragliders, that the feeling changed somehow? Or does it not matter for the feeling of flying whether it's a paraglider canopy or a parachute canopy with which you probably glide longitudinally at one to three, or whether you have a glider with which you glide longitudinally somewhere at a glide ratio of one to eight or one to ten?
Well, I mean, when you circle in the thermals for the first time and really do some start-overflights, then another feeling comes into play, yeah. In the beginning, it was just flying down from the bike, yeah. The first gliders, the Maxi-gliders, they weren't really gliders. They were parachutes; Laurent Calvermatten, the first one to produce paragliders, simply took a different fabric but kept the profile of a parachute. That was okay, it was tested, they had experience with it, only the fabric was different, because parachute jumps use very porous fabric to prevent the opening shock from becoming too strong.
So he changed this fabric; he used an airtight fabric, which provided a bit more performance and allowed for gliding, but nowhere near as much gliding as later with these modern gliders. That actually only started at the first WM in Kössen, where the gliders had already been designed to provide performance. That was in 1989, I think, right? It was 1989, yes. And before that, they were simply parachutes constructed with a different fabric. But in terms of the profile, huge openings—you can see it in the old pictures too—rectangular and without much of a profile.
You also covered that World Championship in Kössen filmically, you made a film about it too. Yes, the window is open. Did you go up into the air back then too? No, no.
Did you fly with them? No, no. At the time, I had a cooperation with Deutsche Welle, similar to what I had with WDR back in the day, so they bought the footage, the stuff that was shot, and I kept the rights to make my own film out of it. That's why I couldn't have flown myself, because that was ruled out. I did fly competitions occasionally at the very beginning, I even finished ninth in the German Championship, but I wasn't a competition pilot. I was, well, if I see others like Ernst Schrogler, Uli Wiesmeier, Christoph Kirsch, or even the international ones, like Robby Whittle, I was miles away from that.
I was simply a pleasure pilot and I still am to this day. And that's why I only filmed in Kössen and didn't fly along myself.
But as a filmmaker, you basically had contact with all those early scene figures, if you look at all the names—or you've just listed some of them now—and then Toni Bender still appears in the films and so on. So you knew them all, you knew the whole scene. Well, we...
we were small at the beginning. Yes, we were—in Germany, if you add the DAV's trial year, we maybe had 14 or 15 pilots. We ourselves were a group of four pilots who started out. Later we heard that the DAV had a trial year and that DAV flight instructors also flew paraglider. Most of those from this trial year were hang gliders and remained hang gliders. Only Toni Bender switched. Toni Bender then also became an excellent Gleitschirm-Blog. But because we were such a small, tight-knit community, they all flew illegally. No one had a license.
There were no regulations at all regarding what kind of license you needed.
No, no, that wasn't the case at all. There was talk that the DAV wanted to take over, but at the same time, the DAEC—the German Aero Club—was a major competitor; they were the official FAI representative. So, at that time, the DAV couldn't even host German championships because they were in such a controversial relationship with the DAEC. Or rather, the DAEC was more so with the DAV. Later, that settled down. But in the beginning, it was like that: the DAV and the DAEC fought over who would get the authority over paragliding. And you just have to say, the DAV was simply much cleverer, had better political connections, which was what ultimately mattered, and then they were granted this trial year.
And well, then sooner or later the question came up: we all have to get a license. So I got a license in Austria, in the Zillertal, a three-day course, which was a total joke because I could already fly; we were all already flying by that time.
You already started in 1986, so you did your first flight then. And if you also shot the film Gegenwind in 1986, then you were already flying with a camera in the canopy in your first year and all that. You'd already been through a lot by then.
Yes, and I had to survive, too. I mean, today I would never dare to do that again without hooking a rescue system to the glider in the canopy. That's just harakiri.
You didn't have helmets either, I saw that.
No, no, helmets were also a thing. That was just a discussion because we didn't realize we should be wearing helmets. For a long time, we refused to wear helmets. Why, actually? Because people say,
I can't feel the air as well and I can't hear what the glider is doing?
You don't feel the air as much anymore. That's one thing. And then, we also didn't see any point in the helmet. What was the helmet supposed to be good for? That's what we told ourselves back then. The landing was still relatively easy with the gliders. Today, the landing is much more complicated because the gliders have become relatively fast. But back then, you just didn't see any need to put on a helmet just to maybe be better protected during a landing. We realized later, of course, that flying without a helmet might not have been the, the optimal idea, yeah. But in the beginning, as I said, we all flew without helmets, we flew without a rescue system.
Something I would never do again today, yeah.
Now, over the years, you've made a whole series of paraglider films. Also really long ones, that go on for almost 40 minutes to an hour and stuff like that. What was that like for you? You said it was your hobby. Was it really something where you put an enormous amount of heart and soul into these films?
Well, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to shoot them, yeah. So I did put a lot of work into it. For example, I came from film; first I was in television, later I was in feature films. And in feature films, you learn a lot about camera movement, resolution, shot-reverse shot, overhead shots, all sorts of things. I had all that terminology down. And I also tried to work on my paraglider films the way you work in feature films. That means I also made small storyboards. I drew out the sequences in advance so that when I was shooting, I knew, aha, now I'm doing this, I need a tracking shot. Here I have to show a carabiner being tightened. Here I have to show a vario being switched on.
A course shot. And that might have made a bit of a difference in my films, because I came from the industry. And many others—there weren't that many, but there were still some who also made films—they came more from the hobby scene. But I came from, ultimately, feature films. I also shot feature films as a cinematographer. And because of that, I might have had a certain advantage. But I'll answer your question right away. Of course, there was a lot of passion involved. And because I flew myself, because it was my sport, I was able to get beautiful and unusual shots.
to shoot. What I've noticed while watching your films is that there are sometimes super beautiful aerial shots where you're actually relatively close to the,
both paragliders, you also have kites in your films where you follow them very closely, but with a very, very steady approach. So if you take the kite, that kite is practically fixed in the frame and you see that it's actually only flying against the movement of the background, that it's shifting. And it conveys such an incredibly beautiful aesthetic and dynamics. Those are the kind of shots I might still know today from expensive Red Bull productions, where they fly behind with a helicopter and probably have a state-of-the-art gimbal underneath with a super telephoto lens attached, so they can track them like that. That didn't exist back then, I believe, or at least not within the budget you have for a film like that.
How did you even manage to do that back then?
Yes, there were two things necessary for that. Actually, three. The first was the Sachtler Studio Pro. That's a professional tripod.
with a very good pan-tilt head. And the second thing was a Zeiss 200 mm prime lens. So not a zoom lens, but a prime. And that allowed me to get closer to the pilots and, with this very professional tripod, pan along accordingly. On top of that, I... well, everything was different back then. I had to have a license to operate on the operational radio network. So I had two Motorola radios that were operated on the operational radio network. And with those, I could also ask the pilots to fly in a certain direction so that it was optimal for the camera.
That's how these shots were made. So, even with a certain amount of effort, once again,
Yeah. That means, but many of these shots were also, in a way, pre-planned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You say, fly in this direction and hold it for another minute, and I just follow you with my Super 100 100mm telephoto lens there.
Yeah, exactly. And I wanted to explain that earlier with the story pod, that I had already imagined it, that I thought about how I wanted to resolve it even before the shoot in Munich, yeah. Just standing down at the landing field and looking up against the sky is boring. You can do that in a short scene, but it quickly becomes uninteresting. And because I had these storyboards, this resolution, I was able to shoot shots that looked different. I also always tried to be as high as possible with the camera, exactly, to have a background that also expresses the movement, the speed, and the fascination.
With these films, if you say you're standing, you have to place it very high up. That means you actually always had your camera set up at the launch site, or did you also look for other very exposed spots in the landscape where you'd say, I'll stand here, and then the people have to fly in and basically circle around, fly around in front of my lens?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I always tried to find a position where I had a nice background.
And during competitions, or rather during courses, that wasn't possible in that sense. But I still think that the starting sequence, when that bad weather moved in from the front, turned out quite well. I mean, the be-all and end-all of paraglider filmmaking is really being able to create shots that are unusual. Not from below in the landing field against the sky, but rather filming the glider from above to have a corresponding background.
Some of your films also have, how shall I put it, a didactic character, I'd say. Some of them are almost like educational films. You also explain how thermals are formed. You even had a meteorologist with you.
Was was that all sort of scripted beforehand, where you say,
Do I want to do it that way too? Yes, because you have to—you can't just... now, it didn't take me that long, I think it was only ten or eleven minutes. But it can still be very long if you don't have a side story. And the side story was the cable car, the pilots talking to each other, then at the top, which is very important for us, the weather forecast—what's the weather and wind like? And before I stand there now and say it myself off-camera or have it said, it's much more interesting to show this meteorologist in his little hut up at the Zugspitze and have him explain what the weather situation is like.
That also adds a certain, a second layer. In
In the movie Cloudbuster, there's an Austrian meteorologist who keeps appearing to explain things. My experience with many meteorologists is that they actually understand and can explain the big weather events very well, but they aren't actually that good with paraglider-specific stuff. Oh, oh, oh, oh. He pulled that off relatively well. I wonder, was he also a pilot? Like, did he fly a paraglider himself? Or a glider or something?
Professor Herbert Pümpel from Austria Control, now in his nineties, a truly, truly wonderful person. And he gave very many lectures at paraglider clubs. He wasn't a pilot, not a pilot himself, but he knew the subject matter. So he knew the audience too. And through these lectures at paraglider clubs, he knew what resonated with us. And apart from that, he was an excellent meteorologist. You can see that, he was later hired by the Mercedes Formula 1 team to make short-term weather forecasts before the races to determine the probability of rain.
So he was already, or is, an authority. I don't want to take anything away from meteorologists regarding what they can do. No, but Herbert Pümpel is a wonderful person. And you could have a wonderful glass of red wine with him. It was lovely working with him.
In this film, there's a beautiful quote with him. When I heard it, I had to rewind to listen to it again. He says that with thermals, just like with some beautiful things, too much is dangerous. We know that from Viagra.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's just a little mischief in him. And
then I looked it up, the movie is from 1988. I had to check it myself first and then I saw, yeah. No,
'96, '96. Cloudbuster is '96. Yes,
Yeah. No, 98. I have it written here. Or 98. I then googled it again and said, "Viagra, tell me, how long has Viagra actually existed?" Then I saw that Viagra only first hit the market in Germany in that same year and so on. So Mr. Pümpel was already quite far ahead. Up to date. Yeah, yeah. He was
up to date.
In every way. Yes. A very, very nice person. Then you made a whole series of paraglider films, but 2002 was basically your last one, as far as I know. I think you said that earlier, too. Why did you stop, when you were actually so good at it, I might say?
Because I just didn't have any more decisive ideas. The last film, Faszination Paragliding, which I made in 2002, is already a bit of a patchwork film where I covered a bit of the history, a bit of safety planning, then technical things, like how to fold a rescue canopy, a rescue canopy. And you can already see that I ran out of ideas. And basically, this Faszination Paragliding only consisted of six short films. And I knew, the spark was gone. For me at least. And besides, another phase in my life came along then.
I sailed around the world for 20 years starting in 2003. And I didn't do much paragliding during that time. Even though I always had a glider on
I had a sail on board, yeah. I read in your CV that it says 2003, from a planned two-year sailing trip around the world, it became almost 20 years. How did it happen that you actually planned for two years and then it turned into such a huge project?
Well, it was about six months in, after I'd crossed the Atlantic, that I actually realized,
That's it. That's how I want to live, yeah. And of course, life at sea costs money too. I had three life insurance policies that I sold off successively just to be able to continue this lifestyle. And it was a great life. It was the adventure of my life. I don't want to miss that out on. I've had great experiences, met great people, and found friends from all over the world to this day. On my birthday, I got birthday greetings from 32 nations. That says something, doesn't it? So it was a dream that certainly not everyone can fulfill, and it naturally has its price.
So, wealth probably won't be something I'll be seeking in this life anymore. But I have... you have wealth of memories. Right, exactly. I have that, and it...
will remain. During this 20-year sailing trip, did you still have a paraglider with you? So did you go flying occasionally in between? Yes, I went to
I escaped to Cuba once. But otherwise, it was very difficult where I was. I sailed this so-called "Barefoot Route," so more or less around the equator, a bit north of the equator so that you don't end up in the Doldrums. It's called the Barefoot Route because it's so warm, or why? Because it's so
warm it is.
Because it's so warm and because it's the easiest place to sail. You have the trade winds pushing you. The trade winds go from east to west. And it's relatively easy to sail. In contrast to down at Cape Horn, which would have been completely impossible for me to sail with my ship back then. I didn't want to anyway. It was too cold for me and too dangerous. Sailing ships are constantly lost there. And single-handed sailors aren't even allowed around Cape Horn anymore. They don't get permission from the Chilean government to sail around Cape Horn if they don't have at least two people on board.
That means,
you stayed in the equatorial region the whole time. Did you go through the Panama Canal to continue across the Pacific when you say circumnavigation? Yes, I
I went through the Panama Canal, then to the Galapagos Islands and from there to the Marquesas, where I experienced perhaps the most beautiful time of my sailing tour in the South Seas. It's still just as Gauguin described it back then. The hospitality is incredible, the openness of the people there is unbelievable. And overall, I just kept sailing on to Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Palau, Philippines.
Now you're not the only paraglider, I'd say, who also sails on a larger scale. And the most well-known current example is probably Tom de Dorlodot, a Belgian who has a project he calls the Search Project, where he also sailed to various places around the world with a large sailboat—not as a single-handed sailor, but with a crew still on board and such—to go paragliding there. But that wasn't your original intention; you really wanted to sail, to sail.
I wanted to sail and I wanted to meet people. And solo sailing contributes to meeting people. You're forced to; if I was somewhere for 14 days during a crossing, I'd have the need to talk to someone afterwards. And that's how so many friendships and acquaintances were formed, because I was alone. Whenever I arrived somewhere, I looked for contacts. And that was my intention. I also filmed it. That was my intention for this circumnavigation and not so much paragliding. As I said, the paraglider was there, but flown very, very rarely.
Were there still places where you'd say, hey, from your world sailing trip, that's still one of those beautiful memories in your head, where you'd say, that was a particularly great flight I was able to do there?
To be honest, from the sailing trip, no. I flew in Cuba, but in Cuba, that was a 50-meter-high reef where you could more or less, like at the Nürburgring on the Isar at the Juventut, where you could more or less soar. Other than that, I didn't have any great flights. I didn't have those again until later in the Philippines. I had some really beautiful flights there, and before that, of course, but the "before" was still, of course, within the scope of my filmmaking.
So you're living in Germany again now. Do you still fly?
or again? Yes, I've flown here in the Philippines—I lived here for a long time too. I've flown here, and I also fly in Germany.
Preferably at Brauneck. That's where I did my first high-altitude flights, if you will. I know the area very well and I've flown there often, even recently.
Although last year, because of that other film, that true crime movie I shot, there was very little time to fly.
What does flying still give you today?
Yeah, that's a cheesy answer. It's freedom. It's just an incredible feeling to be up there, free and independent, without the noise of an engine, just with the sounds of the glider. And every time, even today, the moment is just incredible when the harnesses pull you away from the earth, when you're flying. And I don't know if you've ever done this, but every now and then I catch myself circling in a thermal and I forget everything else; I don't even see the glider above me or the brake lines or how I'm shifting my weight anymore, I'm just circling in there with my body, almost like a trance.
And that's a feeling that is so indescribable, it's even addictive. That's why I want to keep paragliding for as long as I can.
And when you look back at that world today, at that wild early era of paragliding, where you were also one of the pioneers back then, what feelings do you associate with it? In retrospect, is it more fear? Is it awe?
What we did back then was a bit of Harakiri. We simply didn't know enough and took on too much risk. And that was with the camera as well as with the maneuvers. And we also did it to each other—even in a headwind, I wanted to film a scene where another glider comes towards me and turns away at the last moment. Xavier Remaux, a very nice French paraglider pilot, played that scene. And I filmed it, so we flew towards each other and he turned away at the last second. But it was so close that I thought we were going to collide.
And that would have been fatal with the speed we had back then, and also with the fact that we didn't have rescue parachutes. So what we did was very risky. Also reckless,
Yeah. Would you still not want to miss that time? No, not at all.
It shaped my entire life. There's a reason why I shot so many films. And a film isn't just shot over one weekend; it's often months of work until a film is finished. That determined my life too. Although I continued to work in the industry, sometimes I just had to turn down jobs because I knew the weather would be right in the coming period and I had to shoot then.
If you today, I assume that as a filmmaker you also look at what today's paragliding filmmakers, at least the more professional ones, are producing, what you can find on YouTube and elsewhere today. Do you look at stuff like that and how do you see the portrayal of how paragliding is done in films today?
There are some great paraglider films. I recently saw a commercial from Ozon that was shot absolutely superbly, and I watched it all the way to the end. But mostly, as you know yourself, there are only these YouTube clips that are 20 seconds or 10 seconds long, showing some extreme maneuvers. You don't even really look at those, do you? I don't even look at those. What I also liked—and you have to help me out here, I can't remember the name, it's a French paraglider, I think he works for Nova—he explained very well which glider you can use for which maneuvers.
He sits in there, lets go of the lines and says, yeah, I'm now in an ENA glider and with it I can do this and that and I don't have to worry about it opening up again. That fascinated me. Those were longer films too, but let's say, what was his name again? You definitely know him. Yeah, I can't think of it.
doesn't come to me right now. I can't think of it either. That's how it goes sometimes. Probably in three minutes it suddenly goes pop and then he falls onto the path.
Exactly. An X-Alps also participated there,
the last or second to last one. I know exactly,
who you mean. Yeah.
Well, okay, then we know what we're talking about. But now, let's say, aside from that, there's a lot of junk to see, right? You don't want to see an insane amount of junk, do you? Exactly, because it's become so easy to film movies with GoPros. And some people think you can make a movie with just a GoPro, but the GoPro is a wide-angle. And even this so-called zoom setting that the GoPro has is, if you want to put it that way, a scam. It's not optical zoom. It's just zooming into the existing image. Yes. So the quality doesn't get better because of that. Because it has 4K, meaning a very high resolution, you often don't notice that.
Because on TV, or even for both of us here in the video right now, we have a resolution of at most 720p.
And you can, of course, zoom in quite a bit without seeing any loss in quality.
You said that in 2002, the ideas for filming paragliding ran out. So not for paragliding itself, but for filmmaking about paragliding. Now, that was more than 20 years ago. Have any new ideas occurred to you in the meantime? Would there be another film? Can we now, as a conclusion—that would be my final question—could you imagine another film where you'd say, I'd still dream of that? I'd love to make a paragliding film like that again.
No, but if you give me an idea, I'd be happy to work on it. But nothing comes to mind at the moment. That's crossed off. I've done it all. I've covered everything from instructional films to agro, SIV training, thermals, and meteorology. I've tried to portray everything in my films. And I wouldn't know what to do next; I'd have to be given an external idea. And money. And money. That's the next point. Yes.
Although with GoPro gear and stuff like that, it's much cheaper today than your super expensive cameras used to be. But aside from that, if not a film, is there another flight where you'd say, "I'd love to get up there again," or a flight spot where you'd say, "I'd love to take to the air there again?"
Bassano is a no-brainer. Bassano is just great for paragliding. Then in the Dolomites, I'd love to go back to paragliding too. At the Sella. And otherwise, which was also great, there are some super spots in America too. Point of the Mountain in Salt Lake City. That's an area where you can also fly at night because the... the moon is so bright, the stars. Yeah, it's beautiful when the moon is bright and the stars. But essentially, it's like there's a pressure difference between these two salt lakes. And the air exchanges at night. So you practically have...
You can fly wonderfully at night. We actually filmed there at night too, for that highway film. And there was already... Regosemity too. You're not allowed to fly there anymore, of course, but back then you still could. That was great. You're not allowed to fly at Dead Horse Point anymore either. A breathtaking spot. Yeah. Yeah, America would be nice again, but it's difficult with America right now. Who wants to fly to America these days?
That can be
yeah, maybe change it again sometime. Hopefully, yeah. And if you were to compare paragliding with your sailing in conclusion, what would you say conveys the greater freedom?
Hmm, that's a tough question. Sailing has this huge advantage of being so... independent. If you don't like somewhere, you just haul up the anchor and go somewhere else, yeah. That's the great freedom of sailing. You also don't have nearly as many bureaucratic problems as, for example, with paragliding, yeah. For instance, in my 20 years, I've never been asked for a sailing license. I've never been asked for insurance. That was, of course, often in tears, in third-world countries where that doesn't have such a high value.
And paragliding is still that feeling of freedom when you're in the air. That feeling of independence, that incredibly beautiful feeling when you have lift and can maybe go on a cross-country flight, even though I'm really not a hardcore pilot or haven't been, yeah. And I'd put the two differences like this. Sailing is perhaps still a bit freer and more independent. But it's also becoming increasingly difficult. In America, for example, sailing is no longer fun. You have to clear in and clear out at every port. You have to keep channel 16 open permanently because the Coast Guard could call you.
But that's America; fortunately, it's not like that in other countries yet, but it will be. Henry. Thanks.
Can you say the
anything else? Definitely. You can also say ten more words. We've talked about sailing and paragliding. There's a man whose name will surely mean something to you now, Mike Harker. He was the first to fly a glider down from the Zugspitze. And he also made hang gliding popular in Germany. And he was also a sailor. I sailed with him in the Caribbean. Yes. Six years ago. And he unfortunately had the misfortune that he was severely disabled—it surprises me that he could sail at all with his disability. And he was then robbed and ultimately passed away from the consequences of that robbery. Up at the Tegelberg, there's a nice plaque the DHV made in memory of Mike Harker.
With his first flights there, also around Neuschwanstein. Exactly. Henry, thanks a lot for your story. I think some people will be interested now, maybe in downloading your films. I know you have them on your website; you can really watch these old treasures again, not just directly. You have to buy them. But it's definitely worth it to take a look into the history. This is a little bit of an ad for you now. I'm happy to do it. Thanks, thanks. It was always as my
retirement planned, you know. Because I sold all my life insurance for my sailing adventures. And that was always intended to be, like, a pension.
I don't know if that's enough. I don't know that. Whether so many people still want to watch these old gems, no matter how interesting they are. But I hope you still have a nice retirement regardless. Financially sufficient, but also with all the great memories you have from all your stages of life, whether flying or sailing. That you can still make a good living from them. Thank you.
The French boss, the French pilot, whose name neither Henry nor I could recall during the podcast recording, is of course the agro-world champion Theo de Blick. Just as a small postscript. If you want to see the old films by Henry Haug, you can find a selection of them on Henry's website, henryhaug.de. Today, these are already documents of historical value. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Podz-Glidz as well. Then tell your friends about it, leave a 5-star review on the podcast platform you use, or write a comment under the show notes on the Gleitschirm-Blog Blueglides. If you want to hear even more inspiring stories from the cosmos of paragliding, then subscribe to Podz-Glidz on your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
Also, why not become a supporter of my work? On the Gleitschirm-Blog blueglides.blogspot.com, you'll find all the necessary information and links under the "Support" section on how you can continue to provide a basis for this project with a voluntary financial contribution, large or small. I want to thank all the supporters. Take off early, land late, fly far, but stay safe. See you soon, your Lucian.