Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i Cross Country

I love Rob Condella’s name for ditching his job and going flying. “I called it my radical sabbatical” he tells us in this issue. Gripped by the passion that is flying and eager to learn as much as he could he realised the only way he’d have enough time and space was to devote everything to it. To quit the nine-to-five and focus on flying. If you haven’t done it at some point already then I’m sure you have at least thought about it. Ok, there is the thing about affordability, but if you can make that work then why not? You might not need a year – Olivier Laugero and family headed off to travel and fly in Southern Africa over three months. Perhaps that would be enough for you?…

The 4-x-4 was stuck in the sand, the trailer too heavy. Too many toys for big children: paragliders, mini-wings, kites. The engine was overheating. It was hot all around, summer in the Kalahari. But we would have to get out to push and to find branches to use as sand trays. Lou, my five-year-old daughter, got into the Rodriguez family’s 4-x-4, which was a little more powerful. Luna and Eléa, Alexis and Gaelle’s daughters, welcomed her with open arms. We were in the Kgalagadi National Park, which straddles the border between South Africa and Botswana. We’d just left the South African side to head into Botswana and had 200km to cover in “no man’s land” on an inhospitable dirt road. We would not see a single other car for the…

Ölüdeniz, Turkey, late September 2023. The Acro World Tour Superfinal was coming to an end. The clouds came in around Babadağ, heralding bad weather, and seeing the world’s top acro pilots start to scurry about nervously. Their take-off for the last run of the season would now be at only 1,200m instead of 1,700m, giving them less height to perform tricks. Their plans needed to be adapted, shuffled, redesigned. It was a strategic puzzle to get the best scoring tricks in a flowing choreography to score the highest points from the jury down on the beach. As only Luke de Weert, then in second place, and Théo de Blic were left waiting on launch, the sun started to break through the cloud. While the sky turned a golden yellow, Luke…

AirDesign’s Vivo 2 is a mid-B glider aimed squarely at intermediate pilots. It’s an all-rounder, designed to help pilots develop the confidence and skills to thermal and fly cross country. Launched at the start of the season this year it comes four years after the original Vivo, which appeared in 2019. At the same time as announcing the updated Vivo 2, AirDesign also announced the LiVi – the Lightweight-Vivo. This glider is aimed at the same level of pilot but is also obviously skewed towards the hike-and-fly crowd or pilots looking to save weight for expeditions or travel. Flying the Vivo 2 and its light sibling at the same time was a great opportunity to make a direct comparison between a standard wing and the exact same one in a…

The next Soviet mission, Voskhod 2, launched in March 1965, reverted to a crew of two, Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov. And this time finding room for at least one pressurised spacesuit was non-negotiable: during this flight, Leonov was going to attempt to post another Soviet first by leaving the capsule. It would not go smoothly. Indeed, it would turn into a fight for his life. Before he became one of the true legends of Soviet spaceflight, Alexei Leonov seems to have had his heart set on becoming an artist. He was a student at the Academy of Arts in Riga. However, on graduating he went to Air Force School in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he qualified as a parachute instructor, and shortly after that he was recommended for the first…

Kiritimati, also known as Christmas Island, is just over three hours south of Hawaii on a Fiji Airways 737 but in many ways, it is a world apart. Not only is it on the other side of the International Date Line but it is a trip back in time. The only paved road was constructed during WWII and has seen scant repair work in the years since. Tourists are few and fish are plentiful. People are economically poor but socially rich. I can imagine Hawaii having the same vibe 100 years ago. Mo Sheldon and I shipped our motors to the island two months before our time travelling trip. His son Benjamin came along as crew and three other friends came with us to fish and snorkel. The six of…

Since its introduction at the 2017 Red Bull X-Alps, Skywalk’s lightweight harness the Range X-Alps2 has proved very popular. In 2017 10 of the 32 X-Alps pilots used Skywalk’s groundbreaking harness and even during the 2021 edition it was the harness of choice for several athletes. But time moves on and today most manufacturers have a harness in their line-up with similar characteristics: lightweight ripstop fabric and a DIY inflatable airbag for protection. This year’s X-Alps saw the introduction of the next iteration of the Range X-Alps harness, which was released in a consumer version shortly afterwards. We had the opportunity to fly it for a few weeks this season and compare it with the previous model. Design and construction The Range X-Alps3 is delivered with the same type of…

Being a lightweight pilot in paragliding is a disadvantage. It’s no myth that the smallest paragliders fly worse than larger ones. Some competitions such as the BGD Weightless have a scoring system that takes weight into account for this reason. But recreational pilots struggle as well. Reader Angela Bonato (“considered lightweight by most wing manufacturers”) emailed us: “I unfortunately only fly with much heavier guys and at almost every flight I have the feeling we flew in a very different air from what they say to me.” Lightweight competition- and ex-test pilot Joanna Di Grigoli can fully relate. Among other wings, she flies an XS EN-B glider below mid-weight range. “I feel light against the wind. It has no bite.” On a lightly loaded glider it can be harder to…

The idea for a cable car to the summit of the Aiguille du Midi (3,842m) above Chamonix in France was first proposed in 1909, but it was not until 1955 that it opened. It then held the record for the world’s highest cable car for about two decades. Today it sweeps people up from the valley floor at 1,035m in two sections: the first goes from Chamonix to Plan de l’Aiguille at 2,317m; then it goes directly to the upper station at 3,777m without any support pillar. The journey takes around 20 minutes and costs €55 (buy in advance online for best prices, montblancnaturalresort.com) To get to the take-off you must walk down the precarious Aiguille du Midi arête. This is a steep snow ridge that requires ice axe and…

I’d been waiting for a flying window for three weeks that would allow me to fly above 7,000m. My goal was to use my paraglider to fly and climb to the summit of a 7,000m mountain, mixing my flying skills with my mountaineering ones. I had done it before: most recently back in 2021 I successfully flew XC and landed high on Spantik (7,022m) before making a solo ascent to the summit. What takes traditional mountaineers two weeks I completed in 24 hours. (Julien Dusserre and Guillaume Omont did the same thing the very next day.) My goal this year was Diran, a 7,266m Karakoram mountain that lies east of the famous Rakaposhi (7,788m), in the Nagar Valley. However, the long wait for conditions meant I was gradually losing my…

Where do you live? I’ve been a bit of a wanderer for the last ten years. My base is Queenstown, South Island, New Zealand, but I work six months of the year in the North Island. My trusty Citroen Jumper van is home for European summers. How and when did you start flying? My sister lives in Lans-en-Vercors, France, and I did a couple of intro days there. There was a lot of gesticulating as I don’t speak much French. After a year of travelling, I came home and learned with Infinity Paragliding in Queenstown in 2012. I was Swanny’s first signed-off student. What got you hooked? My fifth flight, thermalling with a hawk for 20 minutes and being in that complete feeling of flow. Before that flight, I remember…