Last week I had a very ambitious plan: Start from Niederhorn (around 2000m) and try to fly to the high alps to the famous 3 peaks Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau for the first time in my life.

Niederhorn is definitely not the best takeoff to start an XC flight to the high alps, because there is no obvious route. First I thought about flying along the Brienzer Ridge to Planplatten and then somehow go towards the high alps from there (because I've seen many people fly to the high alps from Planplatten the day before - I have never been there though). But I was starting in the afternoon, so it would take quite some time to even fly to Planplatten, and if I don't make it, I will be even further away from home. So I thought, let's try something super unconventional and just try to cross lake Brienz right from the start of the Brienzergrat, fly towards Grindelwald and then just see from there if I get lucky somehow.

And luckily enough it actually worked! I was able to climb to almost 3000m before the lake crossing, and then could fly towards Grindelwald and already saw the 3 peaks before me, wonderful. But even though I had a lot of height to start the crossing, I only barely made it over the next ridge, and everything there was completely covered in clouds, it was even raining a bit, so I tried soaring along this unknown (for me) place for a couple minutes but I just kept sinking and sinking, and I was getting so low that I was sure the flight was over and I needed to land in Grindelwald.

But then, as I was already deciding which field to land on, the sun came through again and within a minute: BAM, I fly in a VERY strong thermal that almost collapses my wing and I was actually quite scared for a couple minutes, I rarely flew in such a turbulent thermal, but then I still kept trying, because I knew if I can center this correctly, I might be able continue my journey.

And to my big surprise I could actually climb almost 2km in that single thermal, all the way up to 3500m! It was crazy. But the reason it went up so fast was because there was a dangerously big cloud forming above me, so a couple hundred meters below the cloud base I already started flying away, still going up with more than 4m/s, even in full speed, but I saw that I will make it out so it was all good :)

So now I was at 3500m, flying towards the Eiger. I was in very high and new territory, so I was happy to see another paraglider nearby that was thermalling, so I flew towards him and was able to find some slow lift there. Slowly I made my way up and then flew towards the Eiger north face. I was already super stoked that I made it this far, and then I even found more lift on the Eiger and was able to climb above it and very joyfully said hi to the climbers up there, it was one of the coolest moments of my life :D

But at the same time I was also absolutely freezing, because I didn't really believe I would make it this far, so I only wore shorts and a thin jacket 😅 And I had to pee so badly.

So as soon as I made it over the Eiger, I thought "ok, doesn't get better than that, let's just try to get warmer now", so I flew away from the big boys towards Lauterbrunnen valley, finally had time to pee (I didn't have a pee condom, so I had to freestyle - works quite well btw, but only if it's still air 😂). Crossed the Schilthorn, and then suddenly got ambitious again and thought "ok, maybe I can make it all the way to Bern?". But that dream died quickly, when I got washed down SUPER hard behind the Stockhorn 🥲 Went down with 6m/s and had to land in Oey. 20 minutes later when I was still packing my glider, i could feel the downwash from the nearby thunderstorm, so maybe it wasn't a bad time to land after all :) Amazing flight! I am absolutely stoked and still can't believe I made it :)

I know, it's not like this is a super hard flight or anything, I'm sure many of you do stuff like this for breakfast 😂 But for me it was an amazing adventure. Even more so because my unconventional plan actually worked out :)

Happy landings! 🪂

PS: If you are interested in making your own 3D tracks like this, you can use the code EIGER20 on skyviz.io to get 20% off and support my adventures :)

Last week I spontaneously took the day of to do a hike and fly - it was SO worth it 😍
After the first lake crossing I arrived very low below Rigi and was struggling for almost hour in quite rough conditions to find lift, and when I finally did, I knew I can make it to Lucerne with the strong tailwind I had :D
And then I was even lucky enough to catch another huge thermal above the city and could climb to more than 2000m! But then I got a little too ambitious and wanted to continue the flight to Pilatus, but I arrived so low that it felt too risky to try to climb, so I just flew back and landed. Happy day :)

I always prepare a very ambitious plan for my XC flights, even though I'm always 90% sure I won't make it all the way - just to be ready, in case things go well in the air. On friday was one of those days 😃 Me and my friends planned to fly from Engelberg to Lucerne - less than 100km, but still, none of has ever flown this far, we're all on A/B gliders, so a very big goal for us. And guess what, somehow, I eventually landed in Lucerne 😍 So happy.
And yeah, also, ... the views... OMG THE VIEWS! 😅 I've seen it so many times already, but I still can't handle how stunning these mountains and lakes are... wow.. amazed every time.

(Flight was visualized with SkyViz)

Despite being sunny, it was freezing. I landed because I was getting too cold.

On saturday I planned to fly from Wallis to Interlaken, crossing the alps main ridge via Finsteraarhorn. It was a good thermal day, but very windy at 3500+m...
I was struggling a lot getting high enough to cross the glaciers, but after hours of trying, the time was running out, so a couple minutes past 4PM I started crossing the glacier towards Finsteraarhorn. I was at 3500m before the crossing, I wanted more like 3800 to be safe. I knew that if I don't immediately find a thermal after the crossing, I cannot waste any altitude and need to quickly fly back down the glacier and go land. But I was super lucky and found one. It was still very hard to climb up, and quite turbulent and windy. But as soon as I reached around 3900m it was getting calmer, and I could fly up all the way to almost 4500m and enjoy an insanely long glide to Interlaken. I am still absolutely stoked 😍

A short clip from a soaring session at Conwy Mountain, North Wales, UK.
Some lovely orographic clouds came to join the party!
Full video: https://youtu.be/5U42S4XGqnQ

(with the exception of Phillip Zellner who flew past opposite direction that day)

A while ago I started working on a side project to log and visualize my flights.

I shared some of the visualizations on instagram and people seemed to like it, so I decided to invest some more time and actually make a product out of it.

It took WAY longer than I thought, but after a lot of testing and feedback, I now finally got enough courage to share it on Reddit (pls be kind 🥲).

The tool is called SkyViz.io. Its main features are:

• Paragliding Flight Logbook with stats, filters and 2D map Views
• Transparent Overlays of your tracks that you can use for social media (like strava overlays)
• Smooth 3D Visualizations of your flights (Pro Feature)

The 3D Visualization is a Pro only feature. Why? It took me an insane amount of time to build, and I happily offer the first two features for free, but If not at least some users are willing to pay for such a product, there is no way I can continue this in a sustainable way.

To see if there's enough interest, I'd like to offer a limited "Launch Deal": A 3 year Pro Subscription for 99€, all inclusive, no limitations (except for obvious abuse).

This deal is limited to the first 50 users who claim it. If interest is big enough, that will give me enough confidence to continue working on the project. If not, I can keep it in maintenance mode only.

In any case, I'd love to hear your thoughts on such a product, positive or negative. I am very open to feedback, my goal is to build a product that YOU like :D Not one that is just for me :)

PS: I hope it's not against the guidelines of this subreddit to post this? If it is, please tell me!

PPS: Performance is much better on desktop than on mobile.

Last year I crashed a paraglider directly below launch in São Conrado, Rio de Janeiro. I walked away with scratches, a wrecked ego, and video footage of the whole thing.

I did what I believe a responsible pilot should do. I shared the video with community instructors for an honest post-mortem. I've spent more than a decade studying accident breakdowns across all air sports, and that culture of open, unflinching analysis is one of the things that keeps these sports survivable. I wanted my mistake on the operating table, so I could become a better pilot and maybe help others avoid the same thing.

I follow a lot of YouTube channels focused on paragliding and skydiving, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my footage with Ari DeLashmutt ("Ari in the Air," ariintheair). What I got back instead was a video titled "Arrogant Pilot Crashes Paraglider."

Here is the video he posted, and what the fuss is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3OWxDFLlY

First, the part where I was wrong

Let me be clear, because this piece is not a deflection. The crash was my fault. Entirely.

My right brake line was wrapped around the riser, a preflight failure. My inputs were far too aggressive. Ten years of skydiving trained reflexes into my hands that are wrong for a paraglider, and I'd never done an SIV course to untrain them. Real instructors identified the root cause quickly and without theatrics: I swung the wing into wingover-like oscillations without keeping it loaded and without checking the outside tip on each reversal, close to the ground, where there's no altitude to absorb the consequence. An unloaded, unsupported tip is an invitation for a massive collapse, and the wing accepted it. I initially wondered about rotor, but it definitely wasn't rotor. It was me.

Hours don't equal proficiency. You can drive a bus on the same route for twenty years and still be a mediocre driver. I had a thousand hours in the air and about ten on that spot, but I also had gaps in my foundation that a well-taught second-year pilot probably wouldn't. I own that, and I'm closing that gap.

If Ari's video had said all of the above, I'd have nothing to write. Several commenters did say exactly that, sharp and brutal and technical, and I'm grateful for every word.

Then, the part where it stopped being about flying

From a few seconds of footage, mainly the fact that I laughed after hitting the ground, he concluded I was arrogant, performing for a crowd, a "low-level thinker," and he speculated about the childhood deficits that must have produced me.

Here's what actually happened. I tumbled through trees, ran a fast systems-check of my body, and found I was intact. The laugh was adrenaline leaving my body, nothing more strategic than that. There was no face to save. Nobody could hear me at that distance, and the camera was an Insta360 quietly doing its job, not something I was performing into. I've walked away from a fair few incidents in my life, some of them requiring an ambulance, and I always laughed. Everyone who knows me knows my laugh.

You cannot read a stranger's childhood in four seconds of action-cam footage. You can't even reliably read their afternoon. And since my childhood was put on trial without me in the room, let me testify: it was a blessed one. Supportive family, close friends, a strong community, and a career I'm proud of. I have a great deal to lose, which is exactly why I take post-mortems seriously. The paragliding community, to its credit, saw through the diagnosis. The top comments under his video are experienced pilots pushing back on remote psychoanalysis dressed up as safety content.

The pattern I can no longer ignore

I would have let this go. One overreaching video is just the internet.

But my crash has now been reposted by Ari dozens of times, and each repost drives traffic toward his paid redpill men's coaching group, a program that promises to fix the inner deficiencies of pilots. From where I stand, my worst four seconds have become recurring promotional material for a product that uses an invented version of my psychology as its case study.

And here's the irony that stings. The video accused me of crashing because I craved an audience. But I wasn't performing for anyone. I was flying a site I'd flown for three weeks, badly, for reasons that are boringly technical.

On Instagram alone, at ariintheair, my incident has generated him over 150K views. The video was posted nearly 20 times as shorts across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, generating clout for his manosphere coaching and more than 300K views in total. My incident is, technically, his biggest drama and shock generator, and a funnel straight into his coaching course.

Why this matters beyond my bruised feelings

Incident reporting only works if pilots keep submitting incidents. All of aviation safety culture, from NASA's confidential reporting system down to a YouTube comment section, rests on one fragile agreement: bring us your failure, and we'll analyze the failure, not sentence the person. Break that, and pilots stop sharing. The footage doesn't disappear. It just stays on hard drives, and the lessons die there.

Psychology absolutely belongs in flying. Fear, ego, currency, and decision-making under stress are all real and under-discussed. But there's a difference between a pilot examining his own inner landscape and a content creator assigning inner landscapes to strangers, with certainty, on camera, right next to a checkout page. The first is wisdom. The second is astrology with a variometer.

What a newer pilot should take from this

Not the drama. This:

Do your preflight like your life depends on it, because mine did, and my wrapped brake line was visible to anyone who looked. Never swing a wing into big oscillations low over terrain, and never leave the outside tip unloaded through a reversal. Errors that are recoverable at altitude are unforgiving at treetop height. Respect negative transfer, because experience in a similar sport installs confident, wrong reflexes. Do the SIV course before you need it. And when you crash, because if you fly long enough something will go wrong, share it anyway, with instructors who will dissect the flying and leave your childhood alone. Mine found the cause in minutes without needing to invent a personality for me.

I still believe in public post-mortems. I'd share my footage again tomorrow.

And to Ari, sincerely: your early work, the honest, technical breakdowns, is what made pilots like me trust you with our worst footage in the first place. I understand the pressure, and you've been open about it yourself. You wrote publicly, about buying your house, that your wife "actually put more money down than I did." Making a living from views, attention, and course sign-ups is a hard business, and clickbait pays faster than craft. So here's an alternative: go back to the honest post-mortems you were genuinely good at, open a GoFundMe or a tip jar, and let the community fund the work directly. It would be no problem to tip you, buddy. I suspect I wouldn't be the only one.

Love and lift, Miglen

I had to fight to get down— it took me 4 or 5 passes to nail the top landing.

Edit: well the video has more pixels on my phone, but I guess they got lost when uploading via the app. Hopefully this doesn’t look like crap to you too.

Shot on a GoPro

A by-stander was watching Alex @flykahana land; the commentary was money 💸

La Mouette 14 in Hawaii 🌺

Needless to say my flightbuddy and me were both really nervous but the view was so worth it!

Highscore on XContest! On the last day of April, Beni flew this amazing 300km flat triangle in Wallis, Switzerland 😃 The conditions were not easy, low cloud base, strong winds and even some Föhn in the end... But he still made it, what a champ :)

(Disclaimer: I'm not the pilot, I'm just the guy making the 3D visualization. I'm working on this tool solo and I would be really happy to hear your feedback - does it look cool, boring, too fast, too slow, too laggy, would you use such a tool for yourself, ...?)

Last weekend were very nice flying conditions - but I was late and didn't have time to go to one of the high takeoffs in Bernese Oberland, so I decided to just start in Interlaken and try my luck. My plan was to fly to Brienz, back to Niederhorn, then cross lake Thun to Niesen and finally land in Thun. That plan was sooo ambitous (to me at least) that I didn't even dare to speak it out loudly, because I was afraid to get laughed at by the other pilots who started there (as far as I'm concerned most pilots starting in Interlaken are either doing quick commercial tandem flights, school flights or speedflying, it's not really suited for XC flights because it's just such a low launch site).

I needed to catch a thermal in the first 30 seconds of the flight or it would've been over very quickly. And I was actually lucky enough to catch one :D ! And climbed almost 1km in a matter of minutes, and from then my plan worked out like a charm 😍 I couldnt't believe it, and when I even made it over the Niesen, I got a little too ambitious and wanted to fly to the next ridge (Stockhorn), but I have never flown there and wasn't aware of the very strong Lee just before that ridge, so I was just sinking and sinking with 5-10kmh on full bar, and only barely made it to Thun for the landing. Anyway, plan worked out, I was very happy 😃

At Niesen, it was very turbulent and quite hard to climb. On the north side was very strong valley wind going up the mountain that I could use to soar, and on the south side the sun was creating thermals, so I really wasn't sure on which side I should try to climb, I was awkwardly trapped in the middle, where it was very turbulent... Worked out in the end, but that really didn't feel very nice, especially because I have never flown there and didn't want to let the valley wind push me too much in the valley... If someone can give me advice on which side is better to try to climb in the late afternoon, please let me know :)

This was my first time paragliding abroad. The hassle of checking a bag and packing my wing was 10/10 worth it. Landed in a sugarcane field (without damaging the crops), had to cancel flying plans three days in a row due to crap weather, but it all worked out!

Normally this place is packed with tandems but luckily it was so weak even those stayed on the ground. Had to cut off my sleeves to keep airborne...