If you’ve never run off the steep edge of an Alpine mountain, climbed out to cloud base and headed back into the higher, ice-covered regions of the European Alps, you havn’t quite experienced true hang gliding freedom just yet. After twenty-some intense years of competition flying, I eventually figured this amazing sport had to be about more than just winning, and flying relentlessly against each other on reoccurring tasks started feeling a lot like the unending mission of a Flying Dutchman. Flying exploratively across and not along mountain ridges suddenly made a lot more sense to me,
and back there amidst these majestic remote rocks I could sense again what I had virtually lost while holding onto countless trophies on countless podiums. Setting up on unfamiliar sites I met new unfamiliar pilots and though they shared my newly gained passion about remote alpine flying, I did not manage to talk them into joining me. It was only then that I started realizing that not everyone could afford the luxury of a few thousand hours of flying experience and what was so satisfying and enjoyable for me, was apparently perceived as rather stressful to the less experienced. I came to understand that over time I had accumulated truly valuable “insider” knowledge about the proper moves back in there, and I would have to share that knowledge, if I wanted to share that kind of flying with others. Assuming now you feel a similar flying itch and this has caught your interest: How would you attend a course? Participants can essentially join in two ways.
• The usual way is joining as an individual participant. Upon getting in touch with us (see bottom of article) you tell us your preferred choice of course and your level of flying, and we run you through the options available.
• Another way to attend a course is through joining as a whole group (6 - 9 pilots), thereby creating your own, private course. This is typically done by clubs, or other groups of selected flying friends, and negotiated through a representative pilot, who expresses your preferences in time, location and even intended course content (we try to be very flexible with this)
Typically our courses stretch over the period of a week, which can provide as much as 7 flying days. We try to accommodate to weather change by moving operations around locally. From past experience it proofed a good concept to make the subjects of our daily lecture correlate with events that would occur during our task flying. If radio communications were poor we would discuss headsets and such, if poor climbs were expected we would talk about thermaling efficiency and different styles to suit different conditions, and so forth. Come and join us for a week of unforgettable flying memories. For my part, I would very much look forward to this.
