What makes a good flight? Is it flying further than you’ve flown before? Flying a new site? Flying an old one with new friends, or a new one with old friends?
Is it heading off alone through the wilderness, or is it soaring the beach and waving at the people below? All of these and more can be the answer, and for me that is what makes our sports so challenging, interesting and engaging.
If we get bored of chasing personal bests we can go climb a mountain and fly off. If you’ve had enough dust in the flatlands you can take a trip and fly the alpine pastures and high glaciers of the mountains.
Fed up driving to distant launches? A paramotor opens a whole new world from your backyard. Want to push? Sign up for the comps. There’s a lifetime of exploration, learning, adventure and fun whichever way you look.
One of the joys of Cross Country Magazine is that each issue we try to bring you a bit of all of that. This issue we take our hat off to Olivier Peyre and his amazing achievement of cycling and sailing around the world with a paraglider. Chapeau!
We also check out the adventure flying in Tajikistan, fly down the São Francisco in Brazil and take a leftfield look at our non-flying friends we meet along the way. It’s a journey, and a good one.
Pierre Bouilloux mastered much of what we try to do. A founding father of the sport of paragliding he was happiest in the mountains flying free, exploring alone for days at a time. He also flew records, knew how to compete and was a master of many of our disciplines.
As I write later in the magazine he was an inspiration to many who met him, and thousands more who didn’t but strapped themselves into one of his harnesses every time they took off. Thank you to his daughters and partner Linh for sharing their memories of him with us for this issue.
Spring is here in the north. There is a blue sky with fluffy clouds outside.
See you on the hill!
Ed Ewing
