Cross Country magazine, issue 129, May / June 2010
Fly with a guide and you can skip weeks of do-it-yourself learning – but you want a sky god for a guide, not a cowboy. Is it time for an internationally recognised standard for fly-guides? By Ed Ewing
Standing in an airfield in southern France glider pilot Louis Poiller, a retired Swiss architect, explained why he has flown with world-record holder Klaus Ohlmann for 20 years. “You learn such a lot,” he said, “his depth of experience is immense.”
We had just landed after a five-hour, 500 km flight – Klaus called it “a short one”. I’d been in the passenger seat with Klaus while Louis, who has flown gliders since 1979, followed about 50 m behind.
“He teaches you how to fly big distances, at speed, through the Alps,” he said. Louis is an experienced pilot but still feels he can learn more, and likes to do so at the hands of the best. Ohlmann holds 13 world records, and every day in the summer flies hundreds of kilometres through the Alps, often with a gaggle of pilots right behind him, all keen to learn from the master.
While in gliding, like climbing, skiing, diving and many other adventure sports this type of nose-to-tail guiding is common, structured and organised, in the paragliding and hang gliding world it’s a lot less so. Many pilots go on cross country courses, often considered a form of advanced instruction, some pay a local pilot to help them out with ground support and site briefings, but it is rarer to pay to be guided mother-duck style, like Ohlmann does in the sailplane world, on a hang glider or paraglider.
Yet it can be argued that free flying, more than many other sports, is about going to the right places and avoiding the wrong places. What better way to learn where those places are than to be guided by the hand of an experienced pilot whose decision-making you trust?
Many would say that free-flying guides play the role of mentor, passing on skills and knowledge. If that is the case, goes the argument, why then is there no internationally recognised qualification to ‘fly guide’? Instead, most flying guides are forced to operate beneath the radar of officialdom and under scarce or non-existent insurance policies.
Read more (3,400 words) in Cross Country magazine
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