How Do I Stay Calm And Focused When Paragliding?

Yvonne Dathe works with pilots on stressful moments in the air, and prefers mental flexibility to mental strength: strength fixes on one point, while flying keeps changing the situation. Her central point is about thoughts. She once taught pilots to shout stop at an unhelpful thought and replace it with a positive one, and found it works only for small ones. Try to suppress a thought or feeling that matters and it grows and gains power. You cannot switch the thought off, but you can switch off the struggle with it, notice it, and bring attention back to the next waypoint or the next climb. Outside distractions are different: prepare them away before launch, starting with the sounds on your phone.

Breathing is the tool she comes back to. Under stress the rational part of the brain works poorly, because deciding carefully is not what survival needs. A deep breath into the belly activates the parasympathetic system that counters the stress reaction, and an out-breath longer than the in-breath relaxes further. That buys time, and with it better decisions. The simplest version needs no technique: focus on the breath, and feel it at the nose, in the lungs, at the shoulders. On goals, she warns that visualising only success can make the brain feel it has already arrived. Visualise the obstacles too, and what you will do about each.

Ziad Bassil test flies more wings than almost anyone and writes them up. The useful tests, he says, are not in the strongest conditions but in turbulent air when you are low and have to push on and turn: that is where a high aspect ratio wing will not turn on a dime and the differences between wings show. Across two years of B wings he found no real performance difference; the difference comes from the pilot. In the D class he thinks designers have reached a limit, with the same cloths and the same Dyneema and Kevlar lines, and he expects little change unless the certification box changes.

Two details are worth knowing when you read any review. Reflex, he explains, makes a profile harder to collapse and has nothing to do with trimming; trimming is about the lines, and the thin unsheathed lines on modern wings need it, while the thick sheathed lines of paramotor wings, with trimmers, forgive more. And on honesty, he is open about how he handles a bad wing: after early complaints from manufacturers, a glider he scores below 5 out of 10 goes into his personal notes rather than a published review, because he does not want to sink a small company's product on one pilot's experience. The implication for readers is plain: an absent review can say something too.

Kellet puts no benchmark on followers before approaching brands: what matters is being a respected, likeable member of the community whose videos are interesting and whom people listen to. When the money does come from platforms, he explains, it depends on how often people click the thumbnail, what share of the video they watch, and the total hours watched. Jordan's sponsorship method is to study what a company already spends on, then design the project to fit its existing branding, so the sponsor is buying more of what it already does. That, he says, is the path of least resistance.

Andreas Lattner and his partner Marlies built hochzwei.media from that kind of fit: she was a newspaper journalist, he took the photos, and partners liked getting story and images together. On free or discounted wings he is direct: a brand expects marketing value in return, and the only good version of the deal is flying a wing you are genuinely convinced by and saying so honestly. He also cautions against telling audiences about fine distinctions they cannot see, the way a climber's talk about grade 10 against 11 means nothing to a room of non-climbers.