How Do Pilots Build A Life Around Paragliding?

In 2003, as a complete novice who had not yet done a forward launch, Benjamin Jordan set himself a goal: fly a paraglider from Mexico to Canada. He soon realised that cross-country flying meant finding invisible thermals, which he could not yet do, and that a powered paraglider needed money and skill he did not have either. What was left was that he could walk and skateboard, so he skateboarded across Canada, and learned how to organise a long project, work with a team and raise funds. That led to a powered paraglider flight across Canada and eventually, during COVID, to flying from Mexico to Canada, which he says still stands as a free-flying vol-biv record. His method: boil the big idea down, cross out everything you cannot do, and focus on what is left.

Sandrine Roy's idea came about ten years before she set off; the first version, Greenland to Antarctica, was too big. A flatmate taught her to sail, a French pilot's book about a seven-year world tour with his glider inspired her, and she left fifteen days after finishing her PhD, with an alpine climbing background and little other preparation. Damien Lacaze found paragliding at 22, when he and his climbing friends got bored of walking down; he bought a wing on eBay, tried to teach himself, then went to a school. Instructor training required competitions, which he calls a revelation. Chris Garcia, whose father is from Cuba, had always wanted to run a paragliding tour there; his first tour, in Macedonia in July 2023, helped pay for the Cuba reconnaissance.

Sandrine Roy is cycling home to France the long way, sailing across oceans and flying where she can, using as little fuel as possible; the point, she says, is feeling the land in your legs and seeing how big the world is under your own power. She has flown about 100 sites, probably under 50 hours a year, in flights from two minutes to two and a half hours, and often lands near a village where nobody knows paragliding, which breaks the ice. At a new site she sits for 15 to 20 minutes, watching and working out the airflow before deciding. She admits that after a month on the bike without flying she sometimes pushes beyond her capacity, but says she is not a big risk taker. Her best flights include one near Fuego in eruption, keeping her distance, and the Langtang Valley in Nepal, at about 5,000 metres among 7,000 metre peaks, turbulent and sometimes terrifying.

Damien Lacaze won his first hike and fly race, in Annecy in 2016, with no training at all: a lucky move on the first day, then 30 kilometres on foot on the second, and a week to recover. He trained for the X-Alps from 2021, and in 2023 raced an almost perfect race to finish second, which he says was not even a dream. Away from racing he flies the big mountains. He does not carry oxygen: after a week of acclimatisation, sleeping at 4,000 metres and walking higher by day, flying at 6,000 to 6,500 metres is fine, he says. His best flight was in Pakistan with Antoine Girard, on a 15-day self-sufficient trip near the Chinese border, when a 13 m/s thermal took them to 7,960 metres by GPS, about 2,000 metres above the summits. It was like the moon.

Benjamin Jordan skateboarded across Canada for five months and nine days feeling as if he were on the moon, and a year later found himself in Vancouver with no friends, not knowing how to reach the next project. It happened again after the powered flight across Canada, and he has spent up to a year at a time in those ruts. What ends them, he says, is a small flicker of an idea that he feeds, writing about it, talking about it, researching it, until it grows; the inspiration never comes from wanting to get back to the moon. Expectation is the other trap. Organising a skateboard event in Toronto in 2003, he stopped fearing that nobody would come by telling reporters at least one person would. Fifty came, then a hundred, then 150, and two or three thousand people now turn up. Sandrine Roy's mantra on hard days is avance: keep going.

Damien Lacaze says that in paragliding, as in the mountains, the risk of a big mistake is dying, and if you cannot accept that you cannot really progress. So he builds skills and keeps a safe margin, and when a moment turns tricky he can put everything else out of his head and focus only on what he needs to do now, then debrief afterwards. Races bring their own trap: seeing other pilots flying makes you think you can too, and forget your own limits. In the air it is much harder to decide to land than it is on the ground to decide to walk; in the wind you can usually still land, he says, but in a storm, by the time you want to land it is already too late. Chris Garcia asks for a beginner's mindset somewhere new: take the forecast with a grain of salt, and where rescue or retrieval is slow, make your usual margins bigger.