Tom Payne, Cross Country magazine
July/August 2009
“It's going to be painful,” says Tom Payne, British pilot, pgforum.com moderator and Alpine cross-country hound. “And frightening, and I’ll probably hate it from day two onwards. But what an adventure, both physically and mentally!” He is talking about taking part in the 2009 Red Bull X-Alps. “Who wouldn't jump at the chance?”
Tom, 33, is a modest man. Ask him what his biggest paragliding achievements are and he prefers not to say. But his Axis website profile – he is an AxisUK team pilot and flies a Mercury – reveals that for the last two years he has come sixth out of 800 pilots in the French cross country league and last year he made ten 100 km+ flights, including a 130 km flat triangle, a 126 km FAI triangle, and a 180 km out-and-return.
We do the interview by email, fitting perhaps for this fulltime IT systems administrator. He lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland, and names France’s Chamonix and Annecy as his local sites. “I can leave work at midday and take off from Annecy at 1.30 pm.” It is not unknown for him to take a half-day holiday and “fly 100 km after lunch!”
Read the full article in Cross Country 124
X-Alps Fever, Cross Country magazineJuly/August 2009
Red Bull, blister packs and a will of iron – all you need for the toughest flying race in the world...
Read more at www.xcmag.com
And for the record, here are some interviews from an article I did last year. The feature went in the magazine, but there was so much good stuff we posted the Q&As online.
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