When I come down I’ll be a better pilot

Flight 30: A new day brought enormous anticipation. I’d had 3 tows and was about 300% the pilot I was the morning before.


Teamwork ensures maximum tows.

The morning’s lecture was about stalls and spins. The thought of deliberately stalling your wing is insane. The fact that you’re up in the sky safely flying due to the aerodynamics of a fully inflated canopy is a miracle. To pull the brakes beyond the sustainable angle of attack and force the air out of all those cells will remove the wing from above your head. In fact, the force of the air leaving those cells pushes the wing behind and possibly under you. You fall to earth accelerating at 32 feet per second per second.

The pictures on promotional materials from paragliding vendors make this kind of incident look worse than a point-blank bullet. A full stall causes you to go into a full fall. That was on today’s curriculum.

Gabe spared no details in describing what would happen, including how the wing would return over head and how to re-inflate it.

The main thing here is the feeling: knowing what it feels like to free fall and restore.

As it took so much time to set up my video the day before I decided I had two choices: be the first or last in the tow order. I quickly set up the camera and asked to be the first up. I gained an enormous amount of cred from capturing the previous day’s events on HD video. Everyone was fine with my going first, or there was still some fear.

I had some fear. Fear is a natural part of flying. People don’t fly naturally: we don't have wings. To free fly well requires some physical retraining, reprogramming really. As I stood waiting for Robin to begin the tow I checked in again with all my internal state. There was fear but it was not a “No” signal from within, just plain, natural hesitation at being hauled 4000 feet into the sky.

I had an inspirational thought: I’m not doing this for kicks, I’m doing this to become a better pilot. I’m facing the worst possible scenarios now in a safe environment so when I encounter them on my own I’ll be prepared: When I come down I’ll be a better pilot.

That was the mantra the soothed all my anxieties, I mean, they vanished.

I’ll pulled the tow cord and the top, took my 90˚ turn signaling to Gabe below that I was ready and dug in. We did a few collapses to start out. I ripped the shit out of those A’s getting more than a 50% collapse from left, right and center. Then it was time to stall.

I double wrapped my brake lines and started pulling down, down down. When Gabe said “Push it through!” I locked my arms down in place. It’s hard to stall an Independence Marlin. The wing is designed with vents 2/3rds of the way down that open only on stall which simulates the extra flaps of birds that open as they land.

It’s a beefy wing, but, if you pull on those brakes with an extra wrap and hold it the air will rush out of the front of the wing, through the cells, and you will begin a free fall.

First you feel your head fall back slightly. The wing loses it’s air as it fall behind you so you begin to follow that path. Soon the pressure on the limp canvas pushes the wing back above your head as it tosses like a flag around above your head.

I heard Gabe count “1… 2… 3… 4… 5… Okay, half release. Now full release, arms straight up”. The wing fully inflated on my half release and surged. I didn’t apply any brake as I’ve handled many surges by this point and this looked like all the others. I had survived my first full stall.

Gabe said, “Great job on the first full stall of the day!” I was pumped. Then he said, “Okay, let’s do it again to make sure we weren’t dreaming.” I was dreaming alright, but this was a good dream, better than a twosome with Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, on acid. I sat up straight and began to push down on the brakes. Down a second time into free fall, counting 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… half-release and then full release.

These wings are amazing. I’ve said it before, the are the ultimate technology of our age. Nothing from Apple or Motorola can come even close.

Then I did a b-line stall. This is the elevator-down maneuver. It's amazing to watch on video as you just go straight down. I pulled on the b's initially and had a tough time. You're literally doing a pull up, and I weigh 210. I redoubled my commitment and gave them a pull. Again I heard Gabe count and then I popped them back up. Another successful maneuver.

Gabe had me do some wing-overs. I’m weak on the left side of my wing-overs. I’ve got to work on that. I did some spirals and came in for a landing. I didn’t want to stop. I was like a kid in the playground. I just wanted to keep playing.

When I landed I gave Gabe a bear hug. I told him about my self-fulfilling prophecy and my mantra: When I come down I will be a better pilot. It’s my new mantra when I face irrational fear. When I face real fear, and I do know the difference, I will not fly. But, 99.9 percent of the time it’s just the jitters, it’s just the crape we face every day that keeps us from truly living. That’s the very issue I came here to face, and I nailed it!

Flight 31 was my 5th tow. I ran through the same routine now looking to build some mastery rather than bare essentials. I can feel the time to shift weight more in my ass than in the view of the edge. Gabe’s instructions are to look at the outer wing, that is when you’re turning right shifting right you’ll look left to watch the top part of the wing as it’s lines begin to go limp; that’s when you weight shift to begin your left. To me it was the feeling of the lines communicated to my ass that gave the signal to begin my next turn. I counted on that for this wing-over and did a much better job.

I thought as I completed this run that’s what I’ll look to next time and see if I can nail this with a progressive, even wing-over.

As it turns out the gusts really picked up. When I got rigged up for tow #6 they were blowing around 15, perhaps gusting to 20. When Robin laid on the throttle I picked straight up in the air, but made not forward movement. My wing collapsed backwards and I fell down about 20 feet, still 10 or so feet in the air. I was going for it. I figured as I got over the lake I’d keep rising, especially with some speed bar. Gabe called it off and asked me to kill it. I landed safely but was a bit confused. Apparently it all looked horrible. After all I’d been through up in the air the actual most dangerous situation that I had been in – close to the ground – felt like nothing at all. I was surprised that Gabe called it off.

We packed up to go do some thermal runs. Towing was out of the question for the rest of the day. It turns out the winds continued to build, well beyond the point of safe flying for any of us. The SIV clinic was over.

8 Rim Road

Back at the home we reviewed that tapes more like returning victors.

I’m a much better pilot than I was 2 days ago. I’ve had many people tell me that nothing is more valuable than attending am SIV clinic, well, it’s true. I’ve grown in many ways. In many ways I’ll never be the same. This was a beautiful growth experience where the rewards far outweighed the risks.

My life wish

I told my wife that I wanted to do this SIV clinic because I don’t want to die paragliding. She has taken a lot of heat on my behalf from people who think she’s crazy to let me do this.

My point of view on this is that I have a life wish: I want to live before I die. So many people live their lives cowering in fear. Fear dominates their every move, it clearly dominates politics, some would even say it’s the primary motivation for religion.

I can’t live like that.

Bryan rigging up Danielle

I admit that when I started paragliding it was for a kick, just to get a thrill. But there’s something about this sport that reveals your character. I’ve heard it said that football doesn’t build character, it reveals it. I think that’s very much true for paragliding. Somehow with each flight another layer of the onion is peeled off.

My life wish is to love every moment of my life connected to everyone and everything around me. I want to embrace each incident of my life, each loss, pain, pleasure or gain, equally without judgment. I want to express the creative powers of the universe without any limitation and yoke it out of those whom I meet however I meet them.

There’s something very private about paragliding: it’s just you, God and His creation. You need to be in the moment with His forces. I have no idea what God is, but I feel Him in my heart and hear Him in my body and mind. He’s not in outer space and He’s never far. He’s in me. The only way to reach Him is to reach inside. The only way to reach inside is to shut myself the fuck up, stop the noise, the chatter that we all have, the insane cravings. Hanging by a handful of threads 4,000 feet in the sky has a way of bringing that focus and awareness.

I have no need to test God or prove anything to anyone. This experience is just for me. At the end of the week, after I’ve payed my bills and taxes, provided for my family, offered my ear to those I love and opened to those I don’t understand, after these things I need to look back and have something for myself. I’ve had the best food and wine the world has to offer, the best things: homes, cars, gizmos, whatever. Having things is empty. At the end of my week I need to know that I did something for my mind that touched who I really am, where I truly lived. That’s my life wish.

Flight 28 : As I towed up for the 2nd time I asked for God’s blessing and heard nothing, which took as a “Go for it!” God and Gabriel only were in my ear. This time I needed to really pull those lines, throw my weight, see what I could do.

The wind was starting to pick up and there were visible wind lines on the surface of Isabella. I committed to making this flight work. As Gabe ran me through the routines and gave it my all, but my timing was a bit off. I ran through the first set of wing-overs and nailed it. All right!

Then Gabe walked me through an asymmetric spiral. These things are really cool. You do a right, go back to neutral and then hit it hard right again and keep it on. You get some g’s on this, apparently enough to knock you out. Gabe said 4 or 5 pilots die each year because they get into these spirals and hold them too long. There’s no way to exit the spiral other than pilot action. These 4 or 5 guys just spiral unconsciously to their death.

I still had enough air after my asymmetric spiral for one more set of wing-overs. This time I went a bit weak. I think my head was light from the spiral. My timing was way off; too early with my weight shifts. Gabe saw that I let me bag it. I came to the LZ and chilled out.

Of all things a flying boat came into the lake and started doing touch and runs. Of course we had to stop everything. Gabe called the local airports and military bases to see what was up. It was the kind of plane that scoops up water and takes back off to drop it on a fire. If I weren’t so impressed I’d have been pissed off at the interruption.

After an hour or so the plane left. We never found out who it was.

Flight 29: I got one more tow in and again gave it my all. This time the challenge was getting high. The wind increased to about 12 MPH steady with infrequent gusts. I had a great run, with minor improvements from the 1st 2. Fear had turned to confidence. The issues now were the actual maneuvers: feeling the wing, turning and shifting with accuracy.

When we got back to the home we watched our amazing HD videos. The details as I mentioned earlier were very rewarding, but the general picture of progress was the biggest reward.

Listening to God and Gabriel

This week I was fortunate to attend the Torrey Pines SIV/Maneuvers clinic at Lake Isabella. SIV stands for “Simulation d'Incident en Vol” and that’s pretty much what it is: you induce all kinds of wing incidents and then recover from them. These incidents include:

• Frontal collapse
  
• Asymmetric collapse
  
• B-line stall
  
• Full Stall
  
• Spins
  
• Spiral
  
• Wingover, and,
  
• Reserve deployment
  

I got to do all of these except for throwing my reserve. This experience has completely changed how I look at flying, how I handle my wing, and, I regret, I can’t call myself a beginner anymore.

The view from the tow zone.

Flight 27

The guys at Torrey have a home at Lake Isabella that sleeps just about everyone, but it sounded a bit crowded to me. I don’t get many nights of sleep away from my kids and I take sleep pretty seriously so I stayed at a hotel: The Paradise Cove Inn. At $65/night is was nothing but the basics, but clean with hot water.

Cingular is the only cell provider that works at Lake Isabella. I have a t-mobile phone and verizon ev-do card so I can usually make a call from anywhere in the world. Not on this trip. That took me a bit by surprise. I found it hard to imagine there was anywhere in the state of California where you couldn’t make a cell phone call. I know, I know, that’s a positive – that’s what we like to tell ourselves.

Last time I was on a Torrey Clinic it was in Baja and things got started at 8:30. I assumed that would be the same here. I got up at 5:30 and couldn’t fall back asleep, showered up and looked for a coffee place. I ended up in a small market scrounging around their packaged goods to put together a breakfast.

When I said to the cashier, “I don’t smell any coffee here.” she put a pot right on with the kind of exuberance you only find in small American towns. A couple of the locals started telling me about the Budweiser fishing contest the weekend before. A friend told me about this too. He said if you ever wanted to attract all the white trash out of Southern CA to a single place clamp a few tags worth $20,000 on some bass and throw them back into Lake Isabella. The joint is shoulder-to-shoulder with fisherman throwing back cold ones ripping up the lake for those bass.

I love these guys. One told me a long story about how he finally left LA and moved to the lake. He told his boss to “take this job and shove it – each shit and die”, to find out a few moments later that he worked for his cousin and remained on the payroll through his Internet connection.

That coffee was soothed with the milk of human kindness, a milk I’ve had more than my share of traveling all over this country – the world for that matter. It’s America’s abundance that makes it different I think. Norway and Switzerland are both wealthier on average than the US, but you don’t get that openness and kindness there to strangers, especially so early in the morning.

After that cup I made my way to 8 Rim Road, the Torrey-rented home. On my arrival I found I missed the whole morning’s lecture. They started at 7. Shit! Gabe assured me I’d get the condensed version of the story. I did.

Gabe’s girlfriend, Danielle, rode with me to the LZ, a very cool, very attractive crazy pilot. All the girls, there were 3 on this clinic, that paraglide are hot. I don’t just mean you like them because the do something cool, I mean they’re sexy. This is something I like about this sport. Maybe that’s just a SoCal thing.

The team.

When we arrived at the LZ/tow-zone we quickly got to work. Gabe said the more we worked as a team the more tows we got in. His job was to guide us down alive, ours was to lay out the wings, rig each other up and take care of all the little things that go on between flights. I have to say we did a lot of great teamwork.

I brought my HD video camera, a Sony HVR-Z1U. I have a fluid motion tripod that I knew would get some great shots.
Everyone on the team had a task. Mine was being the video guy. It turns out to be very demanding and you do not get the benefit of watching everyone else go through the maneuvers in air. You watch the little screen. I’ve been wanting to make a paragliding video for some time and figure this was one of the best ways to get started, so I took the bad with the incredible opportunity.

It turns out, and you’ll see soon ,we got some great video, better in many ways the the phenomenal DVD Instability 2, plus ours is in HD. The clarity of the image was so sharp that when we reviewing the tape that evening we could see ourselves shifting our weight, even wrapping brake lines in our hand on each slow-motioned frame. This is good stuff. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because the video took so long to set up I was the last to tow up. I watched each of my teammates here go up, do 2 partials, a full frontal collapse and take a shot at wing-overs. When my time came I rigged up and as I waited for the boat to pull out asked for God’s blessing.

From my Kung-Fu training I’ve learned to listen to the voice of God in me and trust it more than any other voice. If for any reason I even suspected that voice was saying “Don’t go up”, I wouldn’t go up, regardless of the consequences. I heard no such warnings. In fact, I believe I distinctly heard God telling me to “Rip it up!”.

On the tow up, nearly 4,000 feet, the view is incredible. The lake is teaming with fish even after the Budweiser-sponsored fishicide. As you just begin the tow you can see some well-fed birds resting and the hapless fish going about below. There are more species in Kern county than any other in California, a statistic that surprised me when Robin was reading the local tourist brochure out loud that morning. When you get in the air you begin to see all the diversity.

The lake turns from a teaming petrie dish to a topographic map as the snow-covered Sierra peaks come in to view. First tow in the morning is absolutely still, dead silent. You can practically hear Robin’s walkman in the tow boat below. As you reach the summit you kind of begin to panic: “I am going to fully collapse my wing right now. Holy shit! What if I fall out of the sky into that water. People die falling from the Golden Gate bridge. I’m about 8 times higher than that.” These are the panicked thoughts that went through my head. I’m sure everyone has their own custom oh-shit thoughts as the complete their 1st tow.

Then I head Gabe’s voice – clear, completely calm, relaxed, been there a thousand times – snapped me fully back into the moment. He said to me, “Put the tow bridal between your legs and make a right 90˚ turn when you’re ready.” I said to myself, “I’m only going to listen to God and Gabriel.”

We started with some asymmetric collapses. The first is the hardest to do. Gabe said, “Reach up and grab your right A-line, pull it down to your chest and let it go right away.” I timidly did the first one. The wing turns right, you shift left. Easy.
The second time I pulled more aggressively. Hmm. I’m not falling to my death. This isn’t so bad. Then I did the left side.
Now it was time for the full frontal collapse. Every video I’ve seen of this makes it look like you should just rip your eyeballs out when this happens – there’s no chance of survival, just pray as you spiral to your death. Again, I timidly pulled both A-risers down the first time. The wing tucked in, and then recovered. There was a bit of surge, but hardly the end of the world. I did the second much more aggressively. There’s nothing to this.

In fact, that was my biggest lesson of the whole seminar right then and there, there really is nothing to it: just don’t panic. Anticipate what will happen, be calm, the wing will self-correct for the most part providing you don’t do anything stupid.
The biggest value of the SIV clinic is the experience of living through these incidents and knowing it’s going to be okay. It gives you the confidence to trust the wing, let it get back overhead, let it inflate. You can’t learn that by reading. You have to do it.

Then I started a set of wing-overs. I’ve never done a wing-over before. I’ve never turned aggressively. I’ve always pulled the brakes so slowly and gently that I’m amazed I got any turn at all now that I’ve finished this clinic. Gabe said, “Take a wrap on each brake, weight-shift right, then brake right”. I turned into my first wing-over with my heart in my throat. “Shift left, now left brake.” You swing out of the right and into the left with the wing parallel with you to the ground, right, you’re looking straight down at the water on the biggest swing-set in the world. If I wasn’t holding the brakes I would have reached for my balls!

You really do just swing down like on a swing set. The idea is to opposite weight shift into that down swing and then apply brake to get both the pendulum and pivot motions of the wing into play. Wing-overs get the full movement of the paraglider into play. Also, you have to time your movement to the wing. It’s a phenomenal holistic maneuver.

I pulled it off for my first run, but timidly and not with a lot of style. When I came to the LZ Gabe said, “Great job”. We greeted each other with applause and kudos after most runs. I thought, “Wow. I love paragliding. I really really love it.”

One more thing… I told Gabe that when I was up top I said I made a commitment to listen only to him, and he added, “…and God”.

Flight 26

I've had it with work.



I've been hammering on kapsize and pingnote. The good news is having been single-threaded on those two products since January I've made a lot of progress. I believe I'll be launching both next month. The bad news is of course I haven't been up in the air. That ended today.

I felt like I just had sex when I landed. Actually, more like I hadn't had sex in a long time, really needed sex, and then had sex which wasn't perfect but was overdue enough to not matter, and was having that post-coital high. It was great to be back in the air.

We flew from Rancho Penasquitos today, just outside of Poway. (Click on hybrid on that map and you'll see the exact hill.) Gabe as usual gave a phenominal lesson on what he does to survey a new site, a site where he's never flown before. He called it: P-WAIT.

P - How do you feel personally. What's going on physically and emotionally. Are you in a good enough condition to fly?

W - How's the weather. We looked at and talked about micro and macro factors, all affecting the safety and enjoyment of the flight plan.

A - Alternatives. We surveyed the lanuch and landing sites for alternatives, picking places to bail on takeoff and landing.

I - Indicators. What could we see that were giving us a heads up on conditions, rising air, cumulous clouds, birds, other paragliders.

T - Terrain, both of the air conditions and ground. He described where we'd find lift and sink, and what to avoid.

Obviously there was a lot more to it than that, but I believe I'll remember it better having written in down and it gives you an idea of how articulate Gabe is. We're blessed indeed here in San Diego to have him.

I picked up a vario today, the flytec 4020. I strapped it to my leg and prepared for launch. I always ask silently for God's blessing before I take off and listen carefully for any advice. All I heard today were my usual mild physical apprehensions. Man was not made to fly, it's not natural, so some anxiety is expected. I've had strong feelings before not to fly, like the day I whacked my wing. Not today. Today it was just enjoy.

Robin monitored the cycles at launch and I got a beauty catching a lot of lift right at launch. I heard the vario beeping up for the first time. That adds some excitement for sure.

I'm concerned that having a vario on may take away from the silent beauty of paragliding. I didn't catch anything bad today. It was nice to know when I was ascending and just moving about.

I was airborne well before the ledge. I turned into the lift Gabe said I'd find on the left and looked around for a bit more. I followed Gabe's advise to head to the rocks on the ledge for more lift, but the cycle ended.

Gabe said he's never had a good day flying where he didn't see birds. There were very few today.

In fact it turned out to mostly a sled ride. Except when I started approaching the LZ the vario started pinging again. I like my vario very much.