Risk Vs Reward 5 : Gabriel Orsini (partytillimpact)

Aninder: What is up party people welcome back to another very special episode of paragliding atlas podcast this time around we are back again with the topic of risk versus reward episode 5. Yes there's been five amazing pilots from across the globe sharing nothing but wisdom, knowledge and pure love for the art of flight, right at the top of a screen, wherever you get your podcast. And if you happen to have been liking all the content that is coming your way, please do consider dropping in a like, subscribe and a rating wherever possible. And most importantly, do not forget to share this weekly dose of awesomeness with the ones that fly with you and keep the love growing.

Alrighty, now coming to today's show as you must have noticed we are experimenting a little bit with the intro music here and that is because the guest for today's episode happens to be a believer in experimenting until making it count. Yes, as the name suggests party to impact people we are talking about none other than Gabriel Orsini. The man, the myth, the legend himself is joining us to explain why some people think he has 9 lives and some others think he has 20 but he himself thinks that he has got the one and he's got to live it to the max and make it large. So all those

tell me why's that go through your mind when you scroll through his Instagram will be answered in one of the most unfiltered, honest and straight from the bottom of the heart conversations that I've had with anyone in past one year of running this show so far. A little longer than usual so either listen to it in one go or chapter wise if you wish to but whichever way you do I promise after having a listen you are gonna discover a side of Gabe that you probably wouldn't have thought existed. So without further ado this is As Real As It Gets in Risk vs Reward Episode 5.

Gabe, welcome to Partner Learning Atlas. So nice to have you here. Likewise. All right, Gabe, let's start by putting the curiosity about your name of your creating handle, which is Party Deal Impact. What is Party Deal Impact about and why such a name? It was a funny mistake

initially. I needed to open an Instagram account because I was applying to be a videographer for an adventure series and I didn't have an Instagram account at the time. I needed to quickly fill it up with interesting content to look like a normal human. Thinking about a name, you punch in random funny sounding names and that one was available. And like that, I remember I'd seen someone saying that on a base jump before. At least one other guy called Jay Driscoll got it tattooed on his eyelids in Mexico. What was that in context about? Why did you do that? He's an Aussie, so he parties hard. I think it's something that probably a lot of people have said or used in videos. Bassjumpers, of course, with a very

dark, morbid sense of humor. I just happen to be the one who got the handle. I haven't deleted any old content or videos, so you can look way back, I think in 2014, 10 years ago. And I started out just as a normal base jumper. And then eventually, it morphed my, I don't know, personality or content to fit the name. That's exactly what I was wondering. Usually people make their Instagrams to put out what they're living. But did

Aninder: this particular Instagram handle come with its own weight that you had to do justice? And that's why you started living in that way, because you were like, I'm portraying that side of myself to the world, so I have to be like that as well. Yeah, whether intentionally or unintentionally,

life imitated art. Yeah. Initially, I was done tons of things over my professional and private career. And one of them was being a videographer and photographer. I used to follow people and take photos of them with a massive helmet and two or three cameras on top. That was a lot of the original content, filming and following other people that I thought were more badass than me. Eventually, it changed to having my own ideas and creativity. And I realized I could better suit that name. When did it happen that you eventually started growing up and

Aninder: following? Did you ever see a spike or a peak in some of the videos giving you a significant boost to your following? Or was it a steady rise over consistent performance and putting them out there? Yeah, probably one of there been a few taking a one wheel off the cliff. Some of my first big

rope swing from a reserve 200 meters with a 200 meter rope in Norway, that one got pretty big. And then, yeah, steadily from there. I see. So when

Aninder: these stunts are like you're planning to put them out there, and you're thinking about them, what does your visualization look like? What's your thought process? How do you come up with these things? The original idea is I think everyone and for a lot of stunts that I've done or that I've

taken years to frequently post updates and component status updates on an idea I have or a project that sometimes will take multiple years. I'll post as I realize a way to do it or a better way or safer way to do it. I'll post it as a story. And then finally, the video will come out unless you've been actually following and watching all my stories. It just looks like I woke up one day and did something. But for a lot of these, it did actually take years of having a silly, crazy idea. but not knowing how to do it at the time. And then eventually, you get to the point where

you wake up one day and realize that you have all the components. As far as getting the actual ideas, I watch a lot of cartoons. Unfortunately, there aren't that many people around me in this area. Almost all my friends have grown up and gone on to more adult activities. But I used to have a very good group of friends of SIV instructors and test pilots. Everyone has crazy ideas that they talk about over the years after flying. Lots of people send me ideas as well. A lot of times the implementation they suggest won't work, but there's some component or element of it that I can compile together and they're happy accidents or things that you try that you think are going to work one day and then it

works totally differently. But then that gives you an idea for something else or like to compile different things together. My

Aninder: curiosity stems from the fact that I think a couple of decades ago, when was Acro invented? Maybe around 98, early 2000s. Safety Acro team. Yeah, exactly. So I was talking to Rodriguez about it and he was very kind to come on the show as well and talk about his journey. I remember he was like, that episode is going to come out soon as well. So he was talking about the people around them kind of saying that this is not good for the sport and you should stop trying to kill yourself. In fact, they ended up inventing a way to make the sport much safer. From what I see is that there

is enough training for a pilot to see how it feels when the wing goes bad or how it feels to be under the wing and try and control. But there's absolutely zero training about reserve deployments at all or free fall through the air for paragliders. So are you subconsciously or consciously inventing training, safety training for reserve scenarios or something like that? Like, is this on the same lines as the ACRO, but in a bit of a different perspective here? Yeah, on a tangent from normal safety training, but there are a lot of things I've found

useful to normal pilots and go contrary to normal training. One big one specifically about reserves, that's a pet peeve of mine, and It's unpopular, but I discovered this through personal experience, and I've since talked to multiple very good friends who are also SIV instructors. That is just the very basics of how to deploy a reserve in an emergency. And what people are taught throughout their beginner courses and then also through their, I think, generally older SIV instructors, reach for the handle, grab it, pull it across your body and throw it outside. Or just grab it with one hand and do some kind of motion that involves throwing it to the side. Yeah, that's wrong, outdated

Aninder: information. Or tell me what's the... I would suggest just pull it in one swish, like one go, and then just throw it as far as possible. The problem

with that is most reserve handles have some variable length of bridle attachment to the bag. When you do that, you can pull it in one motion, but then what's actually throwing it out is just... a little bit right at the end because a whole bunch of your arm's range of motion is taken up just pulling the bridle that's connected to the pod. But the point of this is doing it and they throw it out to the side. And the number of people who've died or had very hard landings from their reserve getting tangled with the wing or taking a long time to deploy using that process is quite high.

There was a guy a couple of years ago in either Germany or Austria with A or B wing. doing big wing overs and he mistimes it and then goes gets all gets a frontal and then twisted and he throws his reserve it takes quite a while to like finally come out and then gets fucked up into the lines and he lands in the trees very hard that video was posted and he died in the hospital a couple days later and is a very good example of like core technique in in my opinion in 2018 i was testing how to deploy a cluster of reserves it was four reserves packed in bags then packed in a bigger bag

and attached to a pilot chute also soaked in about five liters each of gasoline and diesel and obviously they're all soaking wet and so I did a whole bunch of tests just with water packing reserves dunking a whole bunch of water and then taking it to the landing area and seeing like the best most effective way to deploy them and to get as close to 100% success rate as possible with stoking wet reserves. One of the things I found is the initial snatch makes a huge difference. Whether it's a slow release from the bag and then catching wind, or in that case, I went out in very

strong winds, ran to a static attachment point to the bag and then ripped it out and shared it into the wind. And doing that, I got 100% success rate soaking wet. And that was a very good example of that initial snatch and release and catching the wind being the most important part instead of it just slowly coming out, either dropping it or not having a good throw. That led me to my current belief in most emergency scenarios, especially if you feel any G forces, the best thing is to grab the reserves, bring it to the front, grab it with two hands, open your legs and throw it right down between your legs as hard as you can. Grabbing the bag, not the handle. Do you think there's enough time to go through all of

Aninder: that in any reserve deployment scenarios? Yeah, that just adds an extra maybe two seconds. But when you weigh that against the many videos of

quick release doing the single motion thing, a lot of times the bag basically ends up just dropping straight down. And when that happens, it just gives the wing so much more time to suck up the reserve before the reserve has actually... It drops down and then it still has to rotate slowly all the way up as the wing is spinning around, sucking up lines before it actually... inflates and gets some snatch force from the wind as opposed to instantly being released and inflating. The downside to that is then you will get flipped upside down for a couple seconds. In most cases, like in a lot of emergencies where you have enough vertical descent rate to get injured or die, like the G forces are coming straight

down. There's the wing and there's you. And the best way to ensure a clean deployment is not to throw it sideways. It's to throw it down. Because the other thing that a lot of schools teach is throw to the outside of the turn. But if you're twisted or if you have a negative rotation, it is very difficult in an emergency to know which direction you should throw it in. And a lot of people end up screwing that up. So you're telling me that

Aninder: most scenarios you will be having feet down, face up situation. Then you just throw them under your legs and that is the best deployment solution. For true emergency ones, if you can feel G- forces, the only one this doesn't apply to is being in a stall, like a stable rotation with

line twists. How does this work in twisted nose-down autorotation? How do you apply this? Yeah, when you're nose-down, there's going to be quite a bit of G-force going down. Yeah. So if you throw it out, you're never going to be able to know which is the correct direction to throw it out. Just throw it sideways with one hand, like the chances of the wing catching the reserve and the reserve lines before it actually gets some snatch force and some inflation is quite high. But the G- forces are too damn high to just bring it inside the cockpit and do all of that. A lot is

Aninder: going through your body. I remember when I deployed in that scenario, I was barely able to get to the reserve handle. Forget about bringing it to the front and doing everything else with it. So all I did was get to it and release it. The spiral was so strong that eventually, no matter where I threw it, it still went up because the spiral was so quick. It was minus 23 or something momentarily. You don't necessarily need to bring it to the

center and throw it down with both hands. That has been my emergency plan. You can also, with one hand, throw it straight down instead of trying to throw it to the side. There's a guy named Matt Wilkes who I met at Garda one time and he's a PhD and he's done a whole bunch of reserve studies and he has a really good 30 minute video on Vimeo. He was at the university, got 100 pilots and set up a zipline and some kind of mental activity to keep them occupied. And then at some random point, he releases them on the zipline and they have to find the handle, deploy

their reserve. And the results were quite interesting from people not being able to find the handle at all to one or two that had it hooked up incorrectly and either pulled it out and there was nothing attached to it or they physically could not release the handle from their harness and and one of the things that he mentioned i believe in that video or it might have been in a podcast that he did but where he he mentioned this because i i told him my theory on that And he agreed with me from what he had seen just from people's deployments in most cases. And that's the

thing, whatever you train, you should train for what, and the one that's most likely to kill you is a high G force rotation towards the ground. And that's exactly when throwing it straight down where you feel the G-forces coming straight out your butt. That is statistically the most effective way of deploying a reserve. And a lot of people, the extra one or two seconds that it takes for a lot of people, that's nothing compared to the eternity that it then takes if they have a bad deployment and they're just sitting there. They threw their one reserve and they're just sitting there watching it, maybe pulling on the lines, hoping that it'll inflate and catch some wind. And that makes sense. I think this is

Aninder: where Acro team's innovation, where they went to base reserves, was a notch up because they kept on innovating in that aspect. But from what I see, I had Helmut Chem for safety pilot coaching. Yes, he is one of my very good friends. One of the ones that I did. Yeah. So he was on the show as well, the episode of which is also under post-production. So if the audiences are interested, just stay tuned. There are a lot of amazing guests coming up in Paragliding Atlas in the weeks ahead. But yeah, he said that we need to reinvent. We need to look at a different way of SIV

coaching. A lot more needs to be played with the weight shift. There is a need for refreshing the safety guidelines in our sport. And there are people like you and others going out and inventing new things. So do you think we're coming at a stage where deployment training should be included in our SIV training so that a person at least has a feel of how it feels to be under the reserve? And I tell all my friends that I know so many

people who... refuse to fly anything without a reserve like they'll even you know fly their tiny six seven eight meter speed wing that's brand new with a reserve and then i asked them have you ever tried using it have you ever tested it over water just to see just to know what it feels like to pull it release it from the bag throw it plainly, and they're scared of trying it. When they come to Garda, it costs $25 to get picked up by the boat. He's there all day, every day. It's the best place to try it. You have 900, 800 meters and they won't, but then at the same time, they

won't fly without it. And that to me makes no sense. It's flying with a loaded gun that you've never tried using before. There are some scenarios where a reserve can save you, but I see a lot of accidental deployments on takeoff. I see a lot of failed launches because people have this big thing between their legs bouncing, hitting them as they're running, trying to take off in no wind or tailwinds somewhere flat. And then that mental switch from going from pilot mode to passenger mode, giving up, realizing you cannot save yourself with your pilot skills. You need to become a passenger on an uncontrollable airfoil. and hope that new airflow deploys correctly. It doesn't make

sense to me. And people actually analyzing when a reserve adds safety versus adding more risk than safety. There's always a risk of an accidental deployment, like tripping, hitting a tree or a bush, and getting the handle pulled. Or a lot of people don't check their handle every single time, and that's when accidental deployments happen. And those are fun and funny to watch people do. But the end results are not always fun when it's right after takeoff and it's just instant downplaying and hope you get lucky. No, I agree. And I think that is not a

Aninder: pleasant scenario. But what I'm wondering is, let's talk a little bit about the reserves and the equipment if people have to do their own bit, if they have to stay educated on the topic or being aware of this. When it comes to choosing gliders, there's a lot of information on the web that you can use, choose this kind of glider based on the scale or where you want to fly or what kind of habits you have in flying. But when it comes to choosing reserves, there's almost no information. You have the basic three, what do you say, shapes of round, square and rogalo. And then for

experts, there's base. But how a person should upgrade in reserves and which reserve to have at what time is like absolutely, I don't think that there's like people talk about it a lot. From your perspective, what should be the reserve progression career of a person? Like how should a person go in that regard in this sport? Yeah, now probably the safest overall would be a square for most people. And then if you have a harness

with two reserve containers, most people go with a regalo and a square or regalo and a round. I've seen more... We'll say fails from a Regalo. I'm not sure if that's the packing or the additional lines. Everyone thinks they can steer a Regalo, but in the real world, when you're all twisted up with a wing that does not have Quick Outs... You can disable the wing and you pull it in, but then you put it between your legs and it just flags out. And you're most likely going to have some twists. Getting out of those twists is not so easy. And so you have a... It has some forward speed, the

brakes are set, but... the actual durability is limited. And then the packing, of course, is a little more complicated and may contribute to some of the failures or longer deployments that you see sometimes as opposed to either square or round. Did round reserves go obsolete in

Aninder: today's market? Is that what you're saying? I think so. Generally the cheaper ones, but you see them side by side and squares are in general so

much more stable and a lower descent rate. So basically, if you're going cheaper, because rounds are the most cheaper, but I think most

Aninder: manufacturers have been stopped manufacturing them. Was it a compromise on safety between round and square? Yeah, absolutely.

Squares are much more expensive now. If you have a lower budget, then most people end up getting a round. But that's another thing, like the rated speed, especially of rounds, I've found is to be much lower than what the actual real world vertical descent rate. I actually have a friend who got very seriously injured on a round throwing it with a cross country wing and just happened to hit. There's grass all around and then there's just one rock right there and he hit very hard and broke his leg. I've been surprised. I had a whole bunch of people send me rounds, probably 10 different rounds five or six years ago for some experiments I was doing. I threw them all over water and a few really surprised me with

how fast they went down just looking down at the water coming up at you and being very thankful that it was water and not the ground. Whereas squares, I've never seen or experienced that. That's scary, man. And so that's where people who've been in the industry a long time or have lots of money to buy all new kits, they just don't have to worry about this. But there are a lot of people who get used gear, they get... we'll say a good round reserve or a decent round reserve made by a good manufacturer, but they haven't actually tested it. They haven't tried disabling the wing. They haven't seen if it's stable or if they're just going to be in a pendulum swinging back and forth the whole time. I want to ask, does

Aninder: bigger reserve mean slower descent rate? If as a solo guy, if you throw a tandem reserve, does it mean that you come down softer? It's for sure.

You want shorter lines. You want lighter material. You want gear that you will take with you. That's easy to maintain. That's easy to dry and pack and actually use. And tandem reserve for normal people, I don't think makes sense. And I don't know anyone using it, getting one rated for five or 10 kilos more than what you would ever fly with all of your gear included. is a good thing. Because one of the very scary moments I had throwing a reserve was one rated for 80 kilos and was an ultralight round. The descent rate was probably eight meters a second. Scary fast.

Aninder: Between choosing the shapes and sizes, there's also this thickness or whatever you can call it, the lightness or the normal fabric. And I don't recall what fabric we use in reserves, but a lot of times it's zero porosity as well. There are different manufacturers offering different fabric choices. So when it comes to you as trying to choose a reserve, what kind of fabric offers the best safety Otherwise, what kind of fabric do you recommend people look out for? It's a good question. Basically, you have the normal weight fabrics that are more

or less F111. There's the ultralight. There's the trade-off that lighter fabric results in lighter total package, which in theory will inflate faster and will get out, catch wind faster. They saw that a lot in base parachutes when they went from full weight fabric to ultralight ones, there was a few meter difference for static line openings and that snatch force when you throw your pilot sheet and it gets pulled out of the container and gets to line stretch. In the short term, I think ultralight is better and safer and results in a faster deployment. The trade-off is long-term after abuse or being left in a hot car or possibly being stored a little bit wet. Landing in a tree is another thing.

Recently, there's at least one manufacturer that is making a reserve with line attachment points with the lines just looped on so you can easily swap them out instead of them being permanently stitched. If you have a tree landing, you have to send it in instead of just requesting however many replacement lines or a whole replacement mindset, which I think is a good idea. And then also gives you the option because there's Spectra and then there's another line, thicker, heavier line variants and to be able to swap between them depending on what your priorities are. There's a very interesting point on reserve attachment points that I want to talk about. But before I get there, this thought came to my

Aninder: mind about the reusability of reserves. So let's say when they get wet, when you have a freshwater deployment, let's say there's no saltwater exposure, how many times do you think a reserve can have a safe cycle of deployments if you keep using it on SIVs or something and keep landing in freshwater, but are taking the precautions and packing it well and everything? Yeah, I think it really depends because it's not just going

in the water. Technically, the fabric could probably go in the water 50 times. If you keep it indoors, dunk it into your bathtub, gently let it drip dry a little bit and then spread it out and let it dry indoors in the shade versus what a lot of people do. They land in the water, may or may not pull it back into the boat. very well. One of the worst things you can do to fabric is drag it or pull it when it has a whole bunch of water in it instead of very gently pulling it so that the water drains out like pulling it from the apex or the tail and just like super slowly and gently instead of

if you're impatient and your friend is helping you or something and they're just pulling it out because they don't know any better. That's one big part. And then the second is how they dry. I see a lot of people here at Garda and they're in a rush. And sometimes there'll be eight wings, eight reserves, all connected to a chain with 25, 30 kilometers of winds, keeping them inflated. And they dry very fast, but there's a lot of abrasion. There's a lot of reserve lines just getting completely twisted or tangled with other reserves right next to it. And that adds a lot of taking it out and leaving it in the shade or indoors to dry over time. two days. Interesting way of having a factory of reserve

Aninder: repacking. Yeah, it depends. But I would say for most people who like on the far end of the abuse side, still easily 15, 20 deployments, I would

say, are the ballpark. So most reserves are being thrown out as trash before they're reaching the end of their lifespan in most cases. Yeah, either being thrown out or destroyed in trees or depending where you're actually using it. Yeah. Anyways, I think, and 10 years age span, is that

Aninder: like a definite no-go that no matter what happens, you're not exceeding adult? Because to me, material does not really seem to deteriorate at all. 10 years is just a recommended one and not really a forced one. So what's your take on that, please, if you can tell our audiences? That's

finding the lowest common denominator, the worst set of circumstances or the worst user, applying the rules to that person. Like someone who keeps their gear in the car in the summer all year or might store it wet or in a damp place as opposed to someone who... keeps their gear dry, doesn't use it in saltwater, limits exposure to sand, getting in there and abrasion, and then storing it somewhere at good room temperature in a dry place. I've used an own gear that's closer to 20 years and still works fine after serious abuse but making sure that it's dry and like sometimes I'll leave gear just spread out through my house for days to make sure it's 100% dry before packing it Damn, that's dedication, bro.

Yeah, and it's funny when you weren't the one who got it wet, and people get your gear wet, and they're just like, sorry about that. Okay, I'm out. You can't walk around your house for a couple days.

Aninder: I think this is such a fascinating talk, so we can always keep on going in this tangent. But I quickly want to come back to reserve attachment points. I was talking to Eric from Fineo. And for audiences, that episode is also in post-production. He has filed an open patent where the attachment points are coming out from carabiners and not from the shoulder position in the usual pod harnesses. That's basically an open stand-up system or something where the pilot gets to stand up more easily with more visibility. Currently, there hasn't been any further innovation from the position of shoulder straps. So this attachment points, do you think we are looking at a revolution of some sort? Or are

Aninder: there any benefits of having different attachment points in your opinion? Because you have been attached from all shapes and directions. Yeah, that leads me to a bigger topic. There's such a wide range of implementations of reserves in harnesses. There's no general

standard. And there's a lot of mixing and matching between components that sometimes have bad results. Just the attachment point on the container, on the diaper, whether it's straight in line coming out, or if it's underneath, on top, or on the side, And some of those combinations, and this is why people should try it, because when you actually try it with your handle, sometimes the whole bag, because of the shape of it or the shape of the actual slot inside the harness, it just pivots and then torques against it and really resists the movement of your arm of a normal throw. for harnesses. Sometimes you see people having thrown their reserve and the attachment points are coming from

behind their shoulders and they're pinned with their head forwards locked. And sometimes with the regalo, the handles are up here, but they can't see anything. They go all the way to the ground like that. Then there's the debate of breaking your legs versus breaking your back. So technically breaking your legs or crash landing legs first is the best way to absorb a lot of impact. And that's where the original concept of having the attachment points on your shoulder comes from. But then for harnesses that have really good back protection, you definitely want to use it. save your legs and not have your head pinned and it comes out and you're just you're not having this massive like body rotation that is a

little bit disorienting and then like potentially completely trapping you face down as you're trying to disable the wing that's fitting somehow i feel that when you're using these big harnesses like i fly an xr7 myself a lot of times when i've seen that by flaring or coming into land or in a pendulum the extra weight adds a lot more momentum than it would be in any other harness. So from that, I feel the, let's say the

Aninder: harness itself weighs eight kilograms. And with your body weight, that's eight kilograms more adding to whatever G-force you're enduring. I think you're going to come down hard in a big harness because of the weight. And of course there is protection, but in real life, in real use case scenario, is this protection really even protecting? Because it's just making the impact even harder from what it is supposed to be. Yeah, that's a good point. And there have been some unintentional downsides to some of the innovation in protection. If you remember,

there was the honeycomb sort of plastic protection that was supposed to be the next big thing. But I remember reading a few incident reports of people who had very hard landings and just happened to impact at the correct angle where it did not deform, it did not crush, it did not absorb any impact, and it just transferred it directly to the person's spine. There is always that trade-off, and the classic... combination of some foam, some hard stiffened plastic to prevent punctures, and then some amount of compressible airbag that can slowly release, we'll say slowly, but release air on impact to have multiple layers of protection is probably still the best all-round combination. Just having one of

those has downsides. If you just have foam, either your harness is going to be massive and super heavy, or you're just going to have a tiny bit of foam. If you just have an airbag, then if you crash right after takeoff, you have nothing. Why don't we invent something like what is that the

Aninder: packaging bubble sheet, like the one which we all love bursting at the time of moving. So that something like that, which has got like small little airbags, which deform in a certain pattern upon impact, and they just find their whatever slow impact absorption that is something that will first of all make it very clear about how the impact happened and then cover it from all angles and what's your take on that because i was talking to fly neo owner eric yesterday we were recording an episode and he was the one who was responsible for bringing choreoid in the paragliding market and he was basically talking about his journey Not at all, because I have been wanting to ask him, and I did ask him the same

question. How did it happen that the initial few use case scenarios of Courier turned out to have devastating consequences for some of the people involved? He did admit that they made a mistake in the beginning and they corrected the product. He did admit that there were some instances like this. So it was a case of technology gone wrong, which is scary in such a sport where equipment failures or technological failures are not unheard of, but I believe something like that, some experimentation going off like that, and then having lives altered as a community, you could have come up with some sort of control or I'm not exactly saying sanctions or something, but some kind of

accountability where a manufacturer is coming in with all bit of marketing and profit sharing in the hindsight with the nature of making money and then just getting to walk out of it saying that, sorry, it was just a mistake. I have strong feelings about new innovations that break

the most basic law, which is do no harm. Whatever you introduce or create and put out into the world, specifically for safety, at the very least, should not hurt people more than... We're going to be hurt already. And when a company puts something out that obviously was not tested correctly and stacks up multiple injuries as a result, it's difficult to then believe them when they say, sorry, we fixed it. Trust us. And yeah, I'm not sure. Because it is complicated, of course, but the testing for that, it's a lot easier than testing a lot of other things. You can just create a whole bunch of templates of the general protection shape, put it on a harness, on a test dummy and a test rig and drop it a whole

bunch of times like they do for all the DHV testing. And for new products like that, you should do that hundreds of times. And I'd be very surprised if... People don't crash that much. You should be able to cover.

the basic crash impact scenarios and vectors using a test rig. And for something that very clearly has this obvious sort of direct failure mode where when there's any kind of an angle to the impact, it's going to crush a bit more. But when there's something that really doesn't want to crush, that sort of should have been caught before, in my opinion. I want to give Eric a little bit of slack here because of the reply that he gave.

Aninder: Of course, it would have been a whole different conversation had we had this one-on-one with him. But his defense was that it's the only protector where you can see where the damage is. All other protectors, you can't even. So you don't even know whether they've worked or not. From what I believe it does, but it has such a blatant limitation compared to other ones which are supposed to work in whatever little capacities. Innovation is always good. Sometimes it seems like the solution looking for a problem. To solve foam and airbags, you can look

at all the stitches and feel the foam. Being able to see the deformation after an impact, that's useful. The question then is how many people actually replace it versus seeing a little bit of deformation. You're on a trip or you don't want to spend 30 bucks and you're like, that's okay, I'll put it back in. There are pros and cons to having a potentially one-time use protector. I see a lot of people after a hard impact with a helmet should replace the helmet. I see so many helmets with complete dents going in them. And I'm like, nice helmet, bro. And they're like, that's fine. If you could see all the people with choroid protectors, I'm pretty sure you'd see a lot of that as well. This goes back to the do no

harm theory. In a perfect world with probably in Germany, probably all Germans replace them after you trip on takeoff, a little bit on your butt, and they're like, nope, no more flying. I'm grounded for a few weeks until I get a new one. But most people don't fly like that. And I've had a few really good discussions with some manufacturers who have this idea in their head. As an engineer, as a designer, you design intentionally or unintentionally, but you're inherently biased. So if you're a very strict regimented kind of person, you're like, yes, this is the best possible one case use or one use solution that will save them. And then they will definitely order a new one. In the real world, it

doesn't work like that because Everyone has a budget. Everyone has a timeline. Procrastination is a thing. And you have to look at your average user and the least educated user. And that's where the 10-year reserve rule comes from. and certain other things should be included and that's where like the the replaceable lines on reserves like making everything as easy as possible for people inexpensive and hassle-free without compromising safety so if like with the replaceable lines if there was some kind of structural downside to having that, then I think that could not be used. But there's no difference structurally. All it adds is additional safety and options for people to replace a line

easily, instead of seeing a little bit of abrasion on the line because they had a tree leavening or something, or it got dragged through a bush. And they're like, I don't really want to send it to a factory and have no reserve for a month. I'll just put it back in my harness. So this is where considering all of your users and not just your best users comes in. Do you think this is somewhere where capitalism is making its presence

Aninder: felt, where eventually what I see is paragliding isn't really the cheapest form of aviation anymore. There are much more affordable ways of experiencing the art of flight and it's turning out to be fairly lucrative for the wing manufacturers and the equipment manufacturers and the broader manufacturing industry. Like anybody who's in manufacturing is making fair bit of money with new brands coming out and experimenting. So is this somewhere where it's the more fragile I make? the more Apple kind of a theory that my phones will only be serviced at my service centers. Find obsolescence. Yeah. I don't think it's that specifically, at least for most of them. It's innovation and gear is so

good now that... it's easier to get someone to buy your product because you have to assume that most people already have flying gear the best way to get them to to buy yours is to come up with something new that you can tell them and convince them is safer and that's where whether it's a choroid or replaceable line easily replaceable lines on reserve or a slightly lower descent rate or a lighter reserve. That's where that comes in. And sometimes there are valid safety arguments for it. And sometimes it's actually a net negative to the entire safety component.

Aninder: These technologies keep on coming up one after the other and any new technology is having a bit of a marketing angle to it and is not being sold at the cheapest price. So it is being sold under the context that money means safety in your flying and why would you compromise on safety? So that's why I spend this money, get the latest tech on the market and... Have peace of mind. And then you have fiascos like or any other thing. Then basically, I'm looking at this from a consumer's perspective. You go out there, learn this brand new, amazing way of moving. You fall in love with the sport that you've always wanted to. And then you want to secure it while you're trying to secure it. You are given options which

are hard to choose from. So as a person who's going to try these, how do you come to that kind of decision making? And where should the thought process of a consumer be in this case? That's a hard answer to give. Initially, you start out buying the gear that your instructor

recommends. As you progress in your career, most people end up getting the things that their friends recommend. You'll frequently find groups or clans in each area of people who fly similar gear, but possibly without proper market-wide research. There's a lot of just brand loyalty in the industry. and sometimes blindly trusting their favorite brand. Sometimes that works out, sometimes not so much. One very good metric that I like to tell people about and use personally is looking at a brand's website and seeing if they have a recall page and how thorough it is. And if there's any reports, I read constantly on both base manufacturing incidents and skydiving, speed flying, and

paragliding incidents, and whether or not there is a proper recall done. Then you look at the companies and what they recall things over and basically see how small it is. And if a company is doing a recall for a limited batch of serial numbers, that's a very good thing in my eyes because that shows attention to detail and A lot of times when you send a wing in for certification, there's usually a sheet that you can pull up on the DHB's website, and it shows the individual manufacturers of every single component, every single little piece of tape and webbing and line and pulleys and everything. And the number of manufacturers that it takes to make a wing is massive. There's potential for designer

manufacturing issues, but then there's also massive potential for just a bad batch of bullies or lines when a company is very open and transparent about recalls and problems that maybe only occurred once and they'll say one pilot had this issue and they'll show a photo of what happened to that pilot and they'll say if your wing is in the serial number or they will contact all the original owners with that that's a really good thing and a lot of companies don't do that are there companies who do that the best and everyone has a bias and i'm sure there are other companies that do this as well but the two best that i know of are skywalk and ozone if you look on their recalls pages on their websites

there are a lot some of them are for very minute tiny things that will not kill you but are some sort of manufacturing or structural failure you can get your gear replaced or repaired by them for free I'm so glad you brought this point up because this circles back to Eric's talk. Both of

Aninder: you would have been such great co-guests in one episode where there would have been such amazing discussions. But we were talking about manufacturers and because he himself is running a brand, Flyoneo, in France, employing everything locally and producing everything there. With all the European laws and norms, we narrowed down to three types of brands where it was like, there are some brands who have their own manufacturing, their own R&D and their own setup. And then there are other ones which kind of outsource, they have their own designing, but outsource the manufacturing to factories in Sri Lanka and Thailand. And then there are other ones which just go to a factory, pick up

anything, put their logo on it and start selling. When it comes to decision making, the way you explained the recall strategy of the brand was a very good illustration of admitting that, hey, we messed up and now this is how we're going to make it right. That is one way to choose your brand as a consumer where you find how much trust factor there is. If you are going out there as a student learning paragliding, it came to my mind that it would be such a good idea if schools had their accident list or something that these are the students that came in and messed up. Do you

Aninder: think people should look for something like that as well while choosing to get into the sport? Unfortunately, I don't see that kind of

transparency on the instructor school level.

That's a bit beyond the scope of what you can hope for. I see it a lot here at Garda. Some, we'll say, bad instructors, and they have incidents, and some really bad ones. The landing area here is 100 meters long, 20 meters wide, grass with water, and you can always go in the water, and it's safe, and the boat will pick you up instantly. There's no risk, essentially. And everyone has a life vest. Still somehow some experienced pilots who came here for an SIV managed to pendulum in and smash into the road that's 10 meters away on the other side away from the lake and break everything.

And incidents like that have happened both to good instructors and bad instructors. Sometimes you just have... a client who has a license, but I don't want to say they shouldn't be flying, but it sounds when you say anyone can fly. You can ride a bike, but sometimes that's not true. It's easy to judge from the outside and see who the really good instructors are versus mediocre ones. Sometimes you just get unlucky and get a student who doesn't follow instructions at all. I have personal instructors that I recommend to people and others that I tell them to stay away from. But it's hard to quantify that. Everyone says they're the best and the safest and have the most experience. Do you think we

Aninder: should encourage people asking their instructors, what is your accident record? I think it'd be difficult to actually get an answer.

Paragliding incidents in general are very poorly documented. They really do their best to scrape the person off the ground as quickly as possible and keep the thing going afterwards and pretending like nothing happened. Unlike skydiving and base jumping where there is a list of incidents and fatalities, there's a forum for skydiving serious injury ends up getting posted the same day. People are asking what happened and it reflects directly on each drop zone. There's nothing like that for schools. You just hear stories more or less, but the video very rarely actually gets shared. Help me compare this to the base community. Base is pretty much unregulated, right? It's just a

Aninder: bunch of friends. You get in the tribe, you learn the sport. There's no set regularized teaching pattern. It's just personal friendship based. You go meet the right people. And of course, there is a bit of commercialization to it. But the trust factor is placed on person's flying skills and nothing else. And then we have paragliding where everything is by the book. You have proper racing competitions, World Cups and schedules. These big certification companies are like a whole machinery working behind the sport. Tens of thousands of people running the show in various ways as tandem tourism or solo and tandem paragliding. Did all of this structurization mess up The freedom that

could have been there with no rules, that is what shows you how beautifully it can blossom if you do not have any restrictions where people set their own restrictions by themselves. yeah unfortunately for us base jumpers most base jumps are illegal it's part sport part like

white collar criminal crime trespassing and that's just accepted in paragliding that doesn't work because people want to be able to hike wait for hours for the wind to be perfect and have access to good launches and landings. And I think that's where it all starts from. Because to get insurance, if someone crashes, you need some kind of chain of responsibility. And that starts with the certified gear. With BASE, going back to the instructor thing, even though you don't need an instructor, pretty much everyone gets an instructor now, instead of the old way of having a mentor. There is definitely a wide range of instructors who are known for basically jumping during the day,

partying at night. And their ground school curriculum is loose and on the fly and impromptu at every course, as opposed to ones who are more thorough, have an actual syllabus of some kind, some fixed basic set of information with a whiteboard or projector and different scenarios where everyone is taught and shown the basic information they'll need in their career. I prefer instructors who are still current and active and pushing their own knowledge on a daily or weekly basis. It comes down to still flying, still having passion for flying, Still trying all the new gear and wings. And Heli is a good example of this. He flies pretty much every day he can. He's very active personally and as an instructor.

And there are a lot of other ones that I see where I've literally never seen them fly. I've seen them dozens of times instructing. I've never seen them in the air. I'm sure they're good at... talking to people on the radio and telling them what they're doing wrong. But their level of unbiased, neutral knowledge of gear and safety standards has remained fixed for 10, 15, 20 years. That's my main criteria for instructors. I choose an instructor who knows all the latest gear, will give you unbiased gear recommendations and not just the gear they sell that gives them the highest margins. This is so hard to make a decision on as an individual pilot when you go out looking for an instructor. It's hard to

Aninder: find the courage to question that, hey, how much do you love what you're teaching? Because I signed up for an SIV course with an instructor who just knew how to say the names of the maneuvers bro like he put us in a room put on a jockey sanderson video on the tv and then started explaining the video and then said that go out and you know you watch what he does in the video now do the same and i will say the name of the maneuver and then you do that's it that guy definitely could not do the menu like siv himself but he was still teaching it And I was stupid enough to not just do my research

and say that when was the last time you stalled your wing? But everything went well, though. But it's important to have the courage. You can have

the courage to ask, but then... whether you'll get an honest, and that's the thing, an honest answer. I can think of a few humble, very good instructors who if you ask them this question, they will probably be honest with you and their answer will maybe scare you. When you compare it to some other instructors who are not honest with you, it'll probably sound worse. And that's where the personal bias and humility of, yes, I'm an instructor, yes, I'm an expert pilot, knowing that, but you would never say that. If you pitch it to five instructors and you're like, convince me that you are the best instructor out here, the results, what you're told, and the truth may be inversed. Unfortunately, that's

where so much of flying and personal safety comes down to picking the right friends to get advice from and do what they tell you until you know better yourself. Do you think blockchain will solve this?

Absolutely. When everyone, when every instructor mints their own NFT and you can actively bid on expensive NFT to get a full training course.

Aninder: You have a flight log on the blockchain where you can see everybody's flight, how much airtime they have, what places they have flown and how much they're flying. Maybe that's a good use case scenario of AI and new technologies. Maybe we should make it on PowerLighting Atlas to begin with.

And yeah, it's one of those things that people now I'm trying to post more because like I am a rigger, an airplane pilot, software engineer, I've done so many things I actually have people think I don't have a pilot license, or flying license for anything that I do. Just randomly pull out gear and try it on the same day. I've tried to expose more behind-the-scenes stuff. What you see online versus what I actually am and say and do in face-to-face is two very different things. It's refreshing seeing some other people in person giving such terrible safety advice compared to what I now try to promote and push the stunts or things that I do where people don't know all the details. A lot of times,

by the time people have as much flying experience as I have, they're sponsored. The problem with being sponsored is then you are completely biased and contractually obligated to remain so biased.

for so many things. If your brand, if your sponsored brand doesn't make it, if you're asked a question and it's something that exists in another company but not in yours, the answer is no, ours is better. And I happen to live in a place where I see tons of accidents and incidents and very unique failure modes of gear. I can discuss that. I have no problem. I've seen enough carnage and gore that I'm quite desensitized and honest with it instead of people who try to pretend that certain problems or failure modes don't exist. Another good topic is the difference between perceived versus actual risk. For a lot of pilots, what they're actually worried about and what they should be worried about are two

opposite things. So interesting. I just don't feel like moving forward because this is such an enriching talk. We should write an encyclopedia

Aninder: together one day on this. Yeah, someday. I keep threatening to write a book. Someday I will write a book. Yeah, that's another collaboration we can make in time to come. But for now, enlighten us, Gabe. How do you handle criticism when things do not go as per plan? And how do you learn from your mistakes? And how do you get a better version and become who you are today? So I guess initially I was like everyone else and didn't

really post crash videos and mistakes. I slowly took responsibility. There was a point where people would tell me that I shouldn't post it because other people were going to copy it. And one of the reasons that I switched to being very transparent and posting all of my fails, all my crashes, all my near-death incidents, is to show the good and the bad. Show people what it looks like when everything goes according to plan, and also what it looks like when you didn't think of one little thing, or you did something that you had done plenty of times before, but that time it went wrong. like flying my nine meter speed wing into clouds for several minutes and suddenly I'm facing a mountain and crashing

straight into it. A lot of people have posted videos of scary cloud incidents. This is the last time I'm ever going to do this. They fly out from clouds. And I had done that a whole bunch of times before with a GPS watch. I got very comfortable with it. And then one day my watch failed and the results were terrifying. I will never fly in clouds again. And I posted that video the same day and took full responsibility for it. I explained my reasoning. I also explained what led me to become so comfortable flying into clouds, which in that case was that season, the cable car lift ticket system changed to where you would have to pay double the price to go back down if there were clouds. For tandems, that

meant if a tandem had to cancel, it would cost them 50 or 60 euros total, and they wouldn't make any money from the tandem. That season, there were more acropilots and tandems flying right into clouds where they disappear five or 10 seconds after takeoff and then pop out somewhere further out of the cloud. than there ever had been in any previous season here. And I started doing that and just became very familiar with that. And that same season, there were at least two incidents of tandems who did that and also crashed in the mountain. And the world will never see those videos. And even locally, personally, it was very few people were told about this. And it was very much a don't tell anyone. thing ends and

Aninder: luckily everyone survived one of the tandem pairs ended up in the hospital are you telling me this is happening in in one of the most governed spots of our sport it's hard to believe what i was like the reason why i asked this is that is this like herd mentality eventually taking the best of us, regardless of how skilled we are, how much work we put in, and how carefully we tread. If we are surrounded by people who are collectively normalizing something, we tend to become part of the herd and follow as well. Yeah, absolutely. Just like the thing of you

becoming the average of your five closest friends, you'll also become the average of the people that you fly with. And if a lot of people around you are flying in a dangerous way, then at some point you will also become desensitized to what you were taught originally and what you know is the safe way to fly. Help me apply this to the Acro team that was inventing the sport where they were looked upon as rebels and like somebody doing

Aninder: really stupid. So if you were a part of that bunch, you would be like, you're going to end up killing yourself. However, eventually pushing their own boundaries. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say knowingly, but of course, like cloud, navigating the cloud was knowingly putting yourself in risk. But even then Acro was like knowingly putting yourself in configurations where things could go wrong. So it is the same mentality is what my curiosity is that is this needed to progress in the sport or a pinch of this or like this, but up to a limited extent, this kind of mindset, if you want to progress in the sport. Well, so two things that occurred to me specifically with Acro. One, when Teo first did

Super Stall to Infinite, which was incredible and a true original innovation that a lot of people had thought about and talked about, but no one had ever actually done. That was a huge step. Since then, I've seen a whole bunch of people trying it and destroying gliders and getting wrapped in gliders. just to be able to say that they can do it. Like people who do not compete and will never compete and have a fraction of the skill that Teo does but they just happen to own or a glider that they think is capable of it and they just want to do the cool new thing. That I

personally disagree with on a personal level and think it's not worth the risk to try to prove that you can do something that Teo already did and innovated and created. Since then, a whole bunch of other people have did. But that like you personally, there's no, I don't know, I guess some people get satisfaction. But for me, just following the herd and being able to say, yes, I can do this super stall to infinite. It's not worth falling into your glider and destroying gliders and potentially destroying yourself. and potentially causing yourself a whole lot of PTSD and trauma, speaking personally, from ending up in freefall wrapped in your glider, trying to pig yourself out and throw out a

reserve or a base canopy or something. That's definitely not worth it. The other thing is specifically about acro-based cutaway harnesses. And this is something that I have a discussion about fairly regularly with people who are semi-experienced. But there's this curve where you have enough experience where you've gone through a normal acro harness with two reserves. And you have a few friends around you who have an acro-based cutaway. And you've talked to Raul and some other people who use them or Vesso. and you think that's the final step in your acro career and progression, specifically for safety. And I've seen some people get it with two years of flying experience. They're good pilots and fly

every day, but they do not know what they do not know. They have no skydiving or base jumping experience. I used to make a decent amount of money packing acrobates harnesses for people like over 200 euros the standard here in garda at the time was 100 euros for a the just the acro base canopy pack job and then you throw in a regalo and around and that's over 200 euros from people who have it and use it but have no idea how to pack it and probably have never read the manual. One of the conditions that I used to have with people for packing it for them is that they had to

be there and I was not packing it for them. I was teaching them how to pack it. yeah and that for me was my way of relieving myself of the responsibility of them potentially using it wrong and killing themselves one time when i saw a girl that i had packed for almost kill herself because she left the speed bar hooked up and she didn't have a speed bar cut away and she cut away from the ground looking at it she just goes into free fall with a canopy flagged out in a streamer and no cutaway happening and fortunately a few seconds later she threw one of her

rounds but as who was the last person to touch that pack job that was very scary and made me decide to stop packing for people the number of people who have died on acrobase setups i i personally believe exceeds the number of people that the acrobase harness has saved what the Wow. There are some very specific scenarios in places like El Hierro where being under a base canopy is statistically safer than being under a round. Some are super windy with rocks and a really gnarly place to potentially crash land with high vertical and horizontal descent rates. What people don't realize is you are flying every time with basically a stunt rig. You need to train for it. You need to maintain it. You need to inspect

it after and before every single flight. And there are a lot of people who don't. And the number of total cutaway failures where they pull the cutaway cable out and they're holding it completely, but the rings just don't release because they're locked in either because they use the wrong carabiner. It's a three ring system, not a carabiner and two ring system. Or because they haven't made the, sorry, I happen to have it right here, but this is the ring that you're actually like, this is a real three ring. And this comes from skydiving. Unfortunately, this is custom made and cannot be used for a paraglider. You have to use this other one that I have. So instead people go to a sailing or climbing shop

and buy a round shackle. that looks similar and is roughly the right dimensions. They check it on the ground and it works. And at some point they need it and maybe it works. There are also dimensional inaccuracies and manufacturing and design defects in a lot of the V3 rings on Acrobase systems where they use either webbing that's too stiff or the middle ring webbing is too long. So it gets this memory shape where the big ring just sits in it and is perfectly happy staying there under tension even when you pull the cutaway. Some other people have died, including someone that I knew who was a expert space jumper, speed flyer, acro pilot. And he was just going for a casual recreational

cutaway, like a planned cutaway. And he went and he pulled. And unfortunately, he rigged the static line bridle incorrectly. And he just went into free fall and impacted a few seconds later. And that was someone who was experienced, who was a skydiver and base jumper, was planning to use the cutaway, and he still screwed up and died. That's more experience and more planning than a lot of pilots that I've seen. There are a lot of people who had zero training, and even if their gear is rigged by someone who packed it, like me, who knows what they're doing, and even though I've done it a bunch of times, I still have the manual open, and I still verify everything, because every harness is a little

bit different. then I grill people, or I used to after I'd pack for them, I'd be like, okay, you have an emergency, you fall into the glider, it's a few seconds, and you're falling, and you see a couple lines around you. Do you cut away or do you throw around? The correct answer is you throw around. If you see any bit of fabric or nylon or dyneema around you still attached to you, going around you to the harness, you cannot cut away then. Then you're turning. Basically, it's the concepts. It comes from skydiving, where you're turning a sort of low-speed malfunction into a high-speed malfunction. You have some fabric over your head. You're still connected to it. and then you cut away, but you're still partially

connected to it by a couple lines, and it can't pull your base canopy out, and then you just made the situation faster and worse. And most pilots that I talk to do not have this experience. There's this learning curve where people think they need it and get one. Eventually, most of them realize through personal experience or talking to people that they are actually safer without it. And that's where I find quite a few top acro pilots who do not use an acro base harness and are safer with just a conventional acro harness with one regalo and one square. Does Theo have? Theo uses a normal conventional to reserve harness. That's why those reserve videos are usually Rugalum. I've never seen him do

Aninder: Akarame. Exactly. I've had this talk with him, and he agrees perfectly. I'm very good friends with Veso. Veso is one of the best, most qualified

people to be using an Acrobase harness, and has the experience and knowledge to use it safely. Most people are not. Like, you need at least a year dedicating yourself to skydiving and base jumping just to be able to understand the physics, training, altitude, awareness, and emergency procedures to operate it correctly, even with a brand new, perfect, manufactured three-ring, actual three-ring, not like carabiner two-ring system, just to use it safely. Then there's the whole other bigger discussion of brands like Supair that still supply their Acrobase harness with a square carabiner as the big ring and have it in their manual, even though that's killed, I think, two people at

least. from the ring getting trapped in the corner of the square carabiner. Originally, the Supair and the Avasport were supplied with square steel carabiners. And after that incident, the first incident in Poland, Avasport switched to a ring for their big one. Supair did not learn their lesson, and they still supply it and have it in their manual last time I checked. It's hard to explain this to people who are not skydivers, not trained. Hey, you should maybe consider changing that. They're like, no, I just bought it. It's brand new. It came from them this way. It's in the manual. I packed it. It's to spec. It's hard to tell them that the manufacturer is an idiot. Damn, bro. You just hope they survive

long enough to get past that curve to where they actually realize what is going to kill them versus... There's a lot in safety where you can add a component that might save your legs, that might technically be a little bit better as far as avoiding total injuries, but will actually increase the number of fatalities. And this is something personally that is a touchy subject for me explaining to people. I'd far rather break my legs and learn a lesson than die and just have no chance to learn anything. And a lot of people don't actually understand or believe that. That's deep. I'll let the audiences process that for a minute. Kind of anonymities in our sport, I don't know if that's a word or just

Aninder: invented, but any occurrences out of the ordinary is what I was trying to say. We see a certain way of, what do you say, performing or like way of kind of Ethics of business, you can say. So has there been some brands in particular that you have seen cross these or break these repeatedly? Because as I said earlier, we don't have any sanctions or anything. It's just an open market where a manufacturer can just say that, hey, this is what happened. We have so much rules and regulation and all of this legislation around free flight. But the unaccountability of experimenting with new technologies comes at no protection. Have you seen a certain way of handling of some manufacturers which are

Aninder: dangerous or should be brought to the notice than the other ones? Yes, you can call them dangerous or I would also just call them unethical. And

I want to keep specific manufacturer names out of this because

Everyone has a bias. You're not sponsored, man. I am not. And neither am I, so this is a free stage. Yes, but so I like I can mention specific items that I'm sure there are more instances, but for the the types of flights that I participate in that I have noticed or like I have discovered specifically and that are yes, we'll say a ongoing sore spot or point of discussion that I have publicly and that I have been very vocal about. companies doing things correctly and companies that are doing things that are unjustifiable and inarguably unethical and unsafe. And yeah, so there's three in particular and people who know me will know which three those are. But I will give specific examples of what you can do to

recognize and distinguish between good brands and bad brands. And So probably the first big one that I touched on before is transparency in mistakes. And this comes in the form generally of recalls. And there are some brands that have one in particular that has had manufacturing issues for over 10 years with a few different wings where they spliced lines and then did not pitch them. And it passed the initial factory quality control and then the final... pre-delivery QC and then were sent to the dealers and then ultimately passed to the customers with wings, speed wings, sometimes very small speed wings with a line set that would work for a few flights. And then after between five and 10

flights, more or less, you'll just like land or in flight, look up and see a line just dangling there. the for this manufacturer the first time that happened they put out a recall with a you know set of serial numbers and wings and instructions to check and how to check and then it happened again a few years later and this time there was no recall and it happened to a friend of mine and the manufacturer blamed the dealer and said the dealer should have inspected it and it was the dealer's fault. And there was absolutely no recall. And then in talking about this with a friend of

mine, who's one of the best and my number one recommended instructor in Europe, he said it happened to a student of his on a course, and he crashed in a speedway, luckily into snow, ended up in the hospital. And again, they sent the proof and the videos and photos and everything to the manufacturer. And to this date, there's not only no recall for that brand new Speedwing, but they removed all recalls from their website, including the old set of recalls that they released 10 years ago. And you can still find it on archive.org, but you cannot find it on their website. In their eyes, they've never made a mistake worthy of a recall. That, I think, is very bad, and there's no justification for it, and

that's very objective, unethical behavior. Then there was another manufacturer that put out a set of speed wings with trimmers that The trimmer webbing, normally the trimmer webbing should be the same width and is usually pretty heavy and thick and should last the lifetime of the canopy. And instead of having the trimmer webbing be 20 millimeters or 25 millimeters and thick, it was, I think, 15 and very thin, very loose, floppy webbing. combined with the crappiest metal buckle that I've ever seen that you can find on AliExpress or eBay for about 50 cents each that says very clearly on it, load rated to 90 kilos. Most of trimmer buckles are braided to 250 kilos, and that's conservative. But they're

the crappiest buckles combined with the crappiest webbing on two brand new Speedwings that I bought from them directly paid full price. I don't know, $4,000 more or less. And one look at it and it was just like, what is this? Like, how can this be? And sure enough, within a few months, there was a video of someone who had that wing with 50 to 100 flights, like not much. And they go in a spiral and one of them breaks. And you can see it in camera very clearly in slow motion. And the manufacturer, like the video was posted, the manufacturer said nothing for a few weeks. And

then eventually they said, if you have an issue with your trimmer, webbing, the riser, contact us and we'll figure it out, fix it, send you a new one, whatever. Instead of immediately realizing they screwed up, they need to contact everyone who bought that wing or those wings because it was on multiple speed wings. And they need to make a new set of risers and send new risers to everyone. They need to notify everyone so you don't have to be part of this private Facebook group to find out that there's an issue. Because most people don't have the experience. You buy a new wing and you think it's safe. You've watched a bunch of really good pilots whooping the hell out of it. and you want to be like them and

you assume that they're good pilots they're experienced and you're just buying the best gear to fly like them and unfortunately that's not the case and that i consider very unethical and there's also some i don't know how to explain it but some the nationality bias with pilots who are not from that the country of that manufacturer where i i have been sent screenshots of messages and emails that they sent to that manufacturer where instead of accepting responsibility and someone who almost died from their manufacturing error and them being like we're sorry holy we're glad you survived are you okay we're sending you a new set tomorrow and instead calling them a bad pilot and that's just despicable dude i

Aninder: thought this was like commercial aviation was bad because it had all of this wall street and shares and big kind of market economy running around the globe and it impacted it it's not a niche But if money makes Boeing blame the pilots for MCAS and in paragliding, what the hell is making these manufacturers blame? The same money is making these manufacturers blame the pilot as well because they don't want to get the whole assembly line recalled and having to start all over again and lose shitloads of money or basically give up their little... dream factory which they finally or dream brand which they finally decided to make so money is the root of all evils my man unfortunately that seems to be the

case money and part of it is money and part of it is pride and I understand this as someone who has created things for years, decades, whether it's

software or images or videos or projects or stunts, and you spend a lot of time on something and it becomes your baby and it feels bad to get criticism over it. But when it comes to safety, there is no excuse and comes again back to the do no harm. And then just thinking about it like existentially as a person, like what are you contributing to the world? Are you making the world a better place or are you making it a worse place? And I can't, I couldn't sleep at night if I was putting out something that was injuring people and I was taking no responsibility and I was just

continuing ignoring that with my head in the sand and some manufacturers are doing that. And uncomfortable. No, I completely

Aninder: agree, man. But anyways, and yeah, and then there are certain other things about like flight characteristics and things that are a little

more subjective that coincidentally also apply to brands like good brands. In general, good brands, good designers, good people don't put out bad products. And when you have an issue with one aspect, with one part, I've found a high correlation with like when you find one thing that a company is ignoring, There's often a whole lot more that's wrong with the product or the design or testing process. And that's also the case with these companies. And people don't know. And I've realized there are two different sort of groups of manufacturers and designers and testers. And there are some that are made and designed by really good pilots. And they can fly anything really well. And they're basically

making gear for themselves. They're making the best gear for the kind of terrain that they want to fly, or the lines that they like to fly, and the way they like to fly, and the handling. and they have a whole bunch of friends who are also usually the test pilots and they're also really good pilots and so they give them the wings and there's always some bias because they're friends and quite often it seems they're like yeah it's thick we like flying it too it's perfect and and it might be perfect for them as pros and small sizes but for beginners not so much and as opposed

to other brands and other designers where they're in general more humble, more accepting of criticism, and they don't consider themselves and they're like genuinely not the best pilots in the world, but most importantly, they know it. And so they design gear, but then they have test pilots who they trust and are trustworthy and who test it and can give them honest feedback. And then most importantly, if you kill yourself on an advanced wing, like an uncertified or CCC glider or something, there's not going to be any sympathy. You knew what you were getting into. But the worst thing is when a beginner gets hurt. when they bought gear that they thought was suitable for them, that they thought

was safe. And it turns out that it was not. And at some point in your career, I got to where I still have so many, around 50 parachutes, parallel-related things in my gear storage room. And I keep them as a point of comparison. I pull different things out. But I have things that I've bought. I own Speedwings by almost every brand except for Fluidwings. that I paid for. I'm not sponsored. I happen to have taught a lot of people to speed fly. And I've seen with my own eyes people that I cared about getting hurt on gear that I at the time thought was safe and

that they thought was safe and that was sold as being safe and appropriate from their skill level and was not. And that is the final argument. If every designer thought of even if you can't put yourself in in the place of a true beginner just put yourself in the place of teaching a loved one to fly and being their mistakes and then seeing them get injured and how that would affect your design testing process and and that's something that's lacking in some with some manufacturers blockchain gabe blockchain is the answer to all the problems it will

Aninder: have a database of nothing but honesty and truth truthful numbers then no no one will be able to hide the facts and let mislead the masses so decentralization and blockchain is the need of the hour in aviation you have your flight instrument instantly create a transaction put something on the blockchain when you get a collapse or when you crash at first It creates a public record of it, and then it calls the emergency

services for you. You can integrate it in the new Apple Watch. It's one of the data points that are going to be collected during your flight.

Aninder: But no, I think I really want to touch upon this last couple of topics. The first one of which is memorable flights and any kind of good close calls, bad close calls that you want to share. And then future goals where I want to know, why do you not teach? But yeah, first, let's have memorable flights and close calls. All right, memorable flights. So first of most of the things that I've done, first time... lying upside down, hanging

from my feet. The most absurd thing that I could think of that day. I went out with ski boots and a kind of complex rigging setup with three ring cutaways on each of my boots at the system to be able to fly out normally and then transfer hanging upside down. That was a surreal experience and just very disorienting at first, but then just beautiful once you got a little bit used to it. Playing with a kite the first time, both from a paraglider and from the cliff. I've had a lot of beautiful flights with friends. That's a few sunset ones where it's dark down in the valley, but

you're just the last person on the mountain with a close friend, with dreamers.

Yeah, those are the good moments where you're cold waiting on top of the mountain and you finally get to fly and those stick with you forever. Memorable for the wrong reasons? Yeah, probably getting wrapped in the glider two years ago on the failed kite stunt where I fell into the tandem wing at an acro show. That one stuck in my dreams for a long time, flying in clouds, hitting the mountain, many ones like that. And there are plenty that come to me when I see other people potentially considering things that they haven't personally experienced. the true risk of being able to publish these so that they can actually see what it looks like when it really goes wrong. One of the very satisfying things is when you're on a

mountain with other people and you decide to hike down and they follow you because they know that you have seen the consequences of making the wrong choice in this case. I thought so. a rewarding end result of a long career of sometimes making decisions that people would say that was stupid, but then a lot of times just making small mistakes or errors or lapses in judgment that a lot of people get away with and they don't realize how dangerous or how close they came to crashing. Do you have some stages of how fear comes to you when you are in fight or flight

Aninder: situation? Things where you have to act or the consequences are like, to put it simply, when you know that, hey, if I don't fix this, I'm going to die. The survival instinct kicks in. For example, whenever you deploy is to make sure that you don't get hurt and you survive. So what are the stages of your state of mind at that time? And how is the thought process going? I consider myself to be a very average pilot. Average, mediocre.

The only thing that I would say I'm excellent at is that when you're going to crash, the last kind of split second choices that you make. in the case of relaxing, tensing up, body position. I didn't grow up skateboarding or doing anything like that. I learned it all the hard way from crashing. But there's a huge difference in the end result from what I've seen from some people crashing in a very minor sort of way where you watch it or you film it and you're like, they're probably fine, I'll go. And they broke everything and are out for a year in rehab. And that, unfortunately, you

learn just through experience, bad experience. And ideally, you make good choices. so that you avoid that situation completely. But there are some things, whether it's for reserve deployments, like knowing those last few split seconds and pulling the reserve out and knowing where to throw it, how to throw it. That's where experience or training, it makes all the difference and the end result, the outcome. When I've never actually done an SIV, I taught myself to paraglide from people I was watching. There weren't really videos at the time, but just over the years. Now you can skip a lot of that and you get ahead if you find the right mentors, people to fly with and in training. And again, people to train

with and who know the value and the difference between perceived risk versus actual risk. And that's where people like my friend Heli are a very good example because they see so many normal pilots and what they do right and wrong. If I could go back in time and train with someone like him or Benny Collin, I could have skipped so many crashes and incidents and bad experiences. Benny, by the way, is another mutual friend of ours,

Aninder: and his episode is one of the top performing ones of all time. I was just flying with him twice over the last two weeks. He's the number one speed

flying instructor that I recommend to people. Amazing human and very accomplished, very humble. And a lot of people don't realize the true depth of his experience in base jumping, wing sitting, and speed flying, and paragliding, cross country, and kite surfing, foiling, literally anything that flies. I really want to ask you when you know that your playground is so amazing, the way you chase it is so cool. Why

Aninder: haven't you ever thought about trying to impart this? And like you were teaching while you were packing the reserves, why haven't you thought about opening up your school and trying to start your own movement in this regard? Hell, he does. And Benny has, because all of them have these set institutions where they are formally trying to pass on their education to the next ones as best as possible in the most affordable way. So why don't you do that rather than just posting on Instagram all day long? For the last, I don't know, five or six years, I've had tons of

people ask me if I do courses, if I would teach them, and recommend this. My reason up to this point has been one of... ethics that or morals every good instructor goes through this phase and then they grow up and stop doing dumb stuff they've learned from that and no longer promote it if they still do it they'll show you privately but never publicly because then they they become like a safety officer their entire goal is promoting safe flying safe behavior and all that. For me, there are still these unfinished ideas and projects and goals that I have. I don't want to see anyone else trying to imitate and get hurt because some people have in the past. A couple people died doing similar things to

what I did six years ago. I can't officially say I'm running courses. As soon as you become an official instructor and start charging competitive rates, you put a target on your back. The obvious attack I will be faced with is how can you promote safety while still doing such unsafe things on a daily basis? So that's been my reason so far. Starting a couple years ago, I did start teaching, and I did teach paramotors about eight years ago, or no, no more, like 10 years ago for a couple years. But since becoming who I am. I've taught some people like base jumping and speed flying. It's very much people who know what they're in for and know that what they're getting is honest, good, safe

recommendations from like personal experience. But there are times when it's generally people who have a background in extreme sports or some extreme activity and that more closely aligns with their level of rapidly accelerating and picking up a new sport. since the mustaches came out i've taught a bunch of people that and that's one of the things where i can teach someone very quickly and especially when they're coming from something like wingsuiting i know i can make them a safer better pilot and i know they're doing something safer flying a mustache than what they would do on a daily basis so i i don't have to have that argument of are they going to end up copying me and my flying style and end

up getting hurt or worse off because of it and again it goes back to that do no harm philosophy that philosophy makes so much sense the way you put it

Aninder: out so beautifully i really wanted to disagree on a lot of points but didn't want to interrupt you eventually i would say that i've changed my perception to finally agreeing to do no harm philosophy but the the thing that comes to my mind is when you are building up this open source information sharing and spearheading a new direction in the art of flight. Our acro guys were out there, not hiding their mistakes or progression and still welcoming newcomers into the sport. Everything got more refined and a community and a tribe grew around it to a point where legislation finally took notice and said, hey, we need to incorporate this as an integral part of training in order to make it

overall safer in the sport. So you might be what comes to mind is that your approach might be holding back that side of development if possible in any way, because it's a very revolutionary style of flying. And of course, you get targeted, singled out. It's very common in digital age and media where everybody is so available online and it's so easy to get your thoughts across by Typing in a few things on the screen. Are we subconsciously slowing down the progression of safety in parallel lighting with those kind of approaches where there might be other instructors having the same dilemma or other students being in the same position? From that perspective, we can have those thoughts of yours

before we close. When people ask me if I would teach them, I generally push them towards someone like Benny Collin, someone who is on the same

level or actually even past me in terms of experience and knowing what to teach, seeing people's mistakes, and also important to be a good instructor. There are lots of good pilots who call themselves instructors, but they're doing it as a job, and they're not actually good teachers. That's what I push people towards. Makes sense. I think I'll let audiences decide that because they have had quite a lot of time

Aninder: with us. I hope they are taking away something from this such a beautiful, heartfelt, soulful conversation with you. It's not very often that we come across people like you in walks of life. I'm not just saying in podcasting or when speaking to an audience. But usually it is becoming harder to say the truth in the era that we live in. It's becoming even more important to speak it now more than ever. Your approach in life is reflecting in your flying where you're being given your rewards appropriately and you're shining bright out there. Thanks. I think you

covered everything. It's a little over the one hour estimate, but that was fun.