People often ask me what makes Pure Paragliding different. The easiest way I can explain it is to describe a typical SIV course. On one course I might have someone with five or ten hours after qualifying, someone flying a modern two-liner who wants to perfect their stalls, and another pilot who’s returning for their second or third SIV. They’re all on the same course, but they’re not doing the same course, because every pilot arrives with different strengths, different weaknesses and different goals.

The pilot with five or ten hours has so much to learn before we even start talking about the safety side of SIV. With those pilots I’m looking at the movements of the paraglider and the relationship between how the wing moves and how the body moves, because understanding that relationship changes the outcome of almost every situation you’ll encounter later in your flying.

We’ll spend time understanding rotations, how the wing moves towards the edge of the turn, what happens as it rolls through the exit, and what the wing is telling you throughout the whole process. That isn’t just about learning SIV manoeuvres. Those same movements are the movements you’ll feel every day in thermals.

When you really understand the angle of the wing, how to regulate the roll and how the exit develops, you don’t just become better at spirals—you become a better thermal pilot. We spend so much of our time on a paraglider in some form of rotation that understanding those movements pays you back every time you fly.

One of the biggest problems I see is that many pilots get their licence, start flying in thermic conditions, and become frightened by movements they don’t understand. By the time they come to SIV they’ve already developed fears around perfectly normal wing behaviour. I’d much rather teach those movements before that fear develops.

Once you understand what’s happening, you know when to let the wing work, when to stop a movement and when to use it to your advantage.

From there we start building the fundamentals: how you use your harness, how you use your full brake range and how you improve your situational awareness. Only then do we move on to collapses and more advanced exercises. By the end of the course, you don’t just know how to recover from situations—you understand why they’re happening in the first place.

One of the biggest differences in the way I teach SIV is that I’m pilot-focused, not manoeuvre-focused. For me, the manoeuvre is a by-product of how you are as a pilot. If we build the right foundations, the manoeuvres become much easier because you understand what’s happening rather than simply copying a sequence of control inputs.

It’s very easy to look at SIV as a list of manoeuvres that need ticking off. You go away, do collapses, spirals, stalls and a few more advanced exercises, and by the end of the course you’ve technically completed everything. The problem is that completing a manoeuvre doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve learned anything from it. I regularly see pilots who have done every manoeuvre but are still missing some very basic piloting skills. They’ve experienced the manoeuvres, but they haven’t really become the pilot in command.

That’s why I spend far more time looking at the skills behind each exercise than the exercise itself. If you’re not using your full brake range and we simply add more power, you’ll start getting frontals. By the time you’re learning stalls, you shouldn’t still be getting frontals on the exit. If you are, then there’s no point carrying on with stalls. We need to step back and work on your catch and release until that part is completely natural.

The same thing happens with rotations. If you’re exiting every rotation weakly, I don’t just tell you to try harder. We’ll work on spiral regulation, natural exits, rapid exits and the whole rotational family until you really understand what’s happening. Then, if you unexpectedly find yourself in an autorotation later on, you’ll already have the understanding and confidence to deal with it.

That’s why I rarely look at one manoeuvre in isolation. Every exercise tells me something about the way you fly. If an undesirable characteristic appears during one manoeuvre, we can often use a completely different exercise to develop the underlying skill that’s missing. It isn’t about getting through a programme in a fixed order. It’s about recognising the skills you need and building them one by one.

Most pilots arrive with an idea of what they want to achieve. They might want to master stalls, improve their collapses or start flying higher-performance wings. Those are good goals, but my job is to identify the skills that sit underneath those goals. Once we’ve built those skills, the manoeuvre usually follows naturally because you understand the situation, you have the brake range, you have the body position and you know how the wing is moving.

For me, that’s what progression really means. It’s not about collecting manoeuvres or being able to say you’ve completed another SIV course. It’s about becoming the sort of pilot who understands what’s happening, makes good decisions and stays ahead of the wing instead of reacting to it.

The manoeuvre isn’t the goal.

The goal is to become a better pilot, because once that happens, the manoeuvres become the easy part.

One of the easiest ways to explain how I teach is to describe a typical SIV course.

On the same course I might have someone with five or ten hours after qualifying, someone flying a modern two-liner who’s trying to perfect their stalls, and another pilot who’s returning for their second, third or even fourth SIV.

They’re all on the same course, but they’re not doing the same course.

The pilot with five or ten hours has so much to learn before we even start talking about the safety side of SIV. At that stage, I’m much more interested in helping them understand how the wing moves, how the body moves with it, and how those two things influence each other. We spend time understanding rotations, roll, exits and the movements of the wing because those are the things they’ll meet every time they start flying in thermic conditions. Once those movements become familiar, we build on the fundamentals before moving on to collapses and anything more advanced.

On that very same flight I might have someone flying a modern two-liner. Our conversations are completely different. We’re looking at the finer details of stall technique, how modern wings behave and the small changes that make a big difference on higher-performance gliders. The techniques that worked fifteen years ago have evolved because the wings have evolved, so the coaching has to evolve with them.

Then I’ll have someone returning for another SIV.

The hardest SIV you’ll ever do is normally the first one because there’s so much fear of the unknown. You don’t know the rhythm of the day, you don’t know what’s coming next and you’re trying to process a huge amount of information all at once. When you come back for your second or third course, you’ve freed up that mental bandwidth. Instead of simply keeping up with what’s happening, you can start concentrating on the details. That’s when I really start to see competent pilots emerge.

For some returning pilots, the next step is becoming more dynamic. For others it might be spin-to-stall, dynamic stalls or refining their autorotation recoveries. There isn’t one progression that fits everybody because everybody arrives with different strengths, different weaknesses and different goals.

That’s why I don’t give one group briefing and expect everybody to progress together.

It does happen occasionally that I get a group at exactly the same level, but it’s rare. Most of the time I have complete beginners alongside very experienced pilots, and every one of them needs something different. My job is to work out where each pilot is today and what they need next, not where the rest of the group is.

If you’re a blank slate, that’s brilliant because we can build one skill on top of the next in a logical order. If you’ve had a bad experience, though, we might spend the course rebuilding confidence and undoing previous fears. Sometimes that’s far more valuable than learning another manoeuvre because confidence unlocks progression. A pilot who’s completely confident will continue learning long after the course has finished, whereas a pilot who’s still carrying fear is far more likely to hold themselves back.

That’s why I see every SIV course as an individual course, even when we’re flying as a group. The boats, the radios and the timetable are shared, but the coaching isn’t. Every pilot gets the coaching they need, at the level they’re ready for, because that’s how real progression happens.

When I have a pilot with five or ten hours, there’s so much to learn before we even start talking about the safety aspect of SIV. What I’ll be doing with those pilots is looking at the movements of the paraglider and the relationship between how the glider moves and how the body moves, because that relationship changes the outcome of almost every situation you’ll experience later in your flying.

We’ll spend time understanding the movements of the glider in a rotation, how the wing moves towards the edge of the turn, and what happens as you come through the exit. When you really understand the angle of the wing, where the edge of the turn is and the feeling as it rolls back through the exit window, that doesn’t just help you in SIV—it translates directly into becoming a better thermal pilot.

When you understand how to regulate the roll of the wing, you don’t just become better at light spirals or deep spirals. You also start to master your thermalling. We spend a huge amount of our time on a paraglider in some form of rotation, and there’s so much detail in what you see and what you feel during those turns. You don’t need a lot of energy, and it doesn’t need to be extreme, to start understanding those movements.

It’s important to learn this early. A lot of pilots get their licence, start flying in thermic conditions and become frightened by movements they don’t understand. They then come to SIV with those fears already ingrained. I’d much rather teach those movements before that happens.

Once you understand what the wing is doing, you can either use those movements to your advantage or cancel them. From there we start working on the fundamentals: how you use your harness, your full brake range and your situational awareness. Then we move on to collapses.

By the time you leave, I want you to understand the movements you’re going to experience in thermic conditions, and I want you to have the safety skills to stop any rotation that develops into something you don’t want.

For me, that’s one of the biggest benefits of SIV. It’s not just about learning manoeuvres. It’s about understanding how the wing moves, because that understanding will stay with you every time you fly.

Another thing we do differently at Pure Paragliding is the online learning platform. When you book a course, you get access to different sections covering the site briefing, safety briefing, how to throw your reserve, and a basic knowledge section with tests before and after the videos.

Those videos cover the basic movements of the glider: being in a rotation, how to stop rotations, the difference between natural exits and rapid exits, catch and release, and what happens if you catch too early or too late.

The benefit of this is that you understand my language. You know what I’m going to brief you and what I’m going to say in the air. You can also start to visualise what is going to happen, and the power of visualisation is really important.

When you arrive on day one, we are all talking the same language. You already have an understanding of the glider’s movements before you’ve done them.

On the platform, we also have the doctor’s recommendations. I’ve been working closely with Dr Matt Wilks, and we have the science experiments he has been doing with us and by himself. He has also made a bespoke PDF about preparing for the course, with exercises you can do during the course and information covering fatigue, nutrition and other things that can affect how you learn.

We also have a goal-setting section. This looks at how to set goals, how to set SMART goals, and how to use a SWOT analysis to look at your strengths and weaknesses. The idea is to uncover the type of person and pilot you are, and the type of person and pilot you want to be.

I had another instructor, Caris, come here recently to do some filming. He sat in on the first briefing with the students and thought I had hit the jackpot with the group because everybody understood exactly what they wanted to achieve from the course. They knew what I was talking about, and he thought the knowledge in the room was amazing.

That came from the pre-course learning.

Students have time before the course to absorb the information: the site briefing, the safety briefing, the basic knowledge and the tests. They can take in the information, go away and play with a few small experiments themselves, and then arrive with more precise goals.

When you arrive, you understand the level you are at and where you want to go. We are all talking the same language, and that really helps your progression.

The other advantage of gaining this knowledge before the course is that we become more efficient on the day. We don’t have to bombard you with the site briefing and safety briefing all at once. It is much easier to recall something you already know than to learn it on the day and then try to recall it straight afterwards.

Another difference with Pure Paragliding is that we don’t just look at the technical side of flying. We go deep into the technical aspect of the pilot and the wing’s movements, and we use bespoke software during the debrief so we can zoom in on the video, draw on it and record our voices alongside it.

Alongside the technical side, we add the mental aspect as well. Without the mental training, you can’t unlock the technical knowledge. We have to take that technical knowledge and pass it through a human filter.

We spend a lot of time looking at how people learn under stress and making sure we understand exactly where your level is. We don’t know what we don’t know, and one of the biggest strengths we can have is starting to understand our own level of ignorance.

Part of my job as a coach is understanding where you are as a pilot. Are you naturally cautious? Are you naturally confident? Once we understand that, we can start looking at how you take everything you’ve learned on the course and integrate it into your everyday flying.

We’ll talk about box placement at your local site. We’ll talk about the different height requirements for different manoeuvres and the internal and external factors you need to check before you start practising by yourself.

You might only have fifty metres at your local coastal site, and there’s still useful training you can do. Or you might have a few hundred metres at your inland site. Depending on the wind strength and wind direction, you’ll have the knowledge to know what is appropriate and what isn’t.

It’s important that you go away and put this into practice because this is a progression course. It’s part of a much longer journey. We go into enough detail during the course that you’ll understand what’s going on, and that means you can continue learning effectively long after the course has finished.

We’ll also spend a lot of time talking about mindset. We’ll look at positive mindset, the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and different aspects of sports psychology that you can take away and continue working on yourself.

One thing that’s really important to understand is that the technical and psychological aspects of flying are two separate things.

As we progress, our technical knowledge grows, but a scary experience can suddenly knock us backwards mentally. You can be technically better than you’ve ever been and still lose confidence because of one event.

That’s why we have to work on both.

Most pilots spend a lot of their flying career scared, but they don’t have any tools to deal with that fear. Technically, they may know exactly what they should do, but when the moment comes, the fear response blocks them from doing it.

That’s why we spend so much time talking about how we work under stress and how fear affects the decisions we make. Fear starts as a mental response, but it dictates the physical response that follows.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to become technically safer. It’s to become a safer, more confident and happier pilot.

One thing I think is really important is that just because you’re a good pilot, it doesn’t automatically make you a good instructor. A lot of SIV instructors come from flying. They might be very good pilots, they might fly acro and they might have a huge amount of experience, but very few have actually studied the art of teaching. For me, that’s a completely different skill.

Teaching isn’t just about knowing the right control inputs. It’s understanding the psychology behind learning, understanding how people respond to fear and making sure you don’t create new mental barriers while you’re trying to build technical skills. You can be a really good instructor without being the best pilot in the world, and equally you can be an exceptional pilot who struggles to teach. For SIV, though, I think you need both. You need to understand the wing, but you also need to understand the person underneath it.

You need to recognise when someone is ready to move on, when they’re overloaded, when they’re carrying fear from a previous experience and when they simply need more time to build confidence. Instruction is an art, and I don’t think enough people talk about that.

When I first came into SIV, I thought I was a good enough pilot to teach it. Looking back, I knew enough about wing control, but I wasn’t a good instructor. The biggest turning point for me was spending a year shadowing Fabien. I sat on the boat, watched every course and asked questions constantly. What made the biggest difference was that he never simply gave me the answers.

Instead of saying,

The other thing that accelerated my learning was volume. For months we were teaching seven days a week whenever the weather allowed. We only stopped when the conditions were unflyable. It was exhausting, but it meant I saw everything very quickly: every type of pilot, every mistake, every fear and just about everything that can go wrong. There’s no shortcut for that kind of experience.

People often say practice makes perfect, but I think practice only makes perfect if you’re constantly analysing what you’re seeing and learning from it. That’s what those years gave me. They gave me thousands of repetitions, but more importantly they taught me to look beyond the manoeuvre and understand the person flying it.

For me, that’s what makes a good SIV instructor. It’s not just about being able to fly well. It’s about understanding how people learn, how they develop confidence and how to help every pilot progress safely.

One of the problems with SIV is that there is very little regulation. Anybody can set themselves up as an instructor, and that means there’s a massive difference in quality. Every instructor brings their own experiences and their own way of teaching, which is great, but without any real structure or minimum standard it can also lead to some pretty disastrous teaching.

I do think the culture is changing. There’s a lot more knowledge available now, and SIV is becoming much more accepted. More and more pilots see it as something they need to do rather than something they might do one day. That’s a really positive change. The downside is that badly run courses are still creating horror stories that put people off before they’ve even had the chance to experience a good course.

For me, a good SIV isn’t about throwing people in at the deep end. It’s about building things step by step. It’s very easy to push someone past their limits. Sometimes they come out the other side with more confidence than knowledge because they’ve survived it, but they haven’t really understood what happened. The next time they find themselves in that situation, the outcome could be very different.

More often than not, I find myself undoing fears from previous SIV courses. Pilots have been pushed into nose-down spirals, they’ve experienced all that power for the first time, but nobody has shown them how to manage it or regulate it. Instead of building confidence through understanding, they’ve simply been overwhelmed by the experience.

Those are the little instructional details that make a huge difference. It’s the difference between somebody feeling in control and becoming confident, or somebody feeling completely out of control and deciding they never want to do another SIV again. Small changes in the way you teach can be the difference between installing confidence and installing fear.

I don’t think there’s a shortcut to that. Good instruction is about understanding where the pilot is today, taking them one step at a time and making sure every exercise builds on the last one. When that happens, pilots don’t just complete the course. They leave understanding what they’ve done, why they’ve done it and with the confidence to keep progressing afterwards.

One thing people often ask is why we’re so open about what we teach. We’re happy to share our knowledge because this isn’t something we want to keep to ourselves.

Even if you know exactly what we teach, it’s still difficult to teach it well if you’re not a good instructor and you don’t understand the methods behind it. Teaching isn’t just about knowing the information. It’s about knowing how to pass that information on to another pilot.

That’s why I’m happy to do interviews like this and explain the way I think about SIV and pilot progression. If more instructors start thinking about the psychology behind learning, how to build confidence and how to teach people step by step, then the overall standard of SIV improves. That’s good for everybody.

I don’t come from a position of fear. In an open market, I think you just need to focus on being the best you can be. Even if you share your knowledge, other instructors are still going to bring their own flavour, their own experiences and their own way of teaching. They’re not you.

I also think the market is big enough. There aren’t enough good SIV courses, and there isn’t enough supply for the demand that’s out there. One of the biggest problems pilots have is simply knowing who to trust. Most of the time it’s based on word of mouth, and sometimes it’s trial and error, which isn’t the safest way to choose an instructor.

If sharing knowledge helps raise the standard of SIV, then that’s a positive thing. Better instructors create better pilots, and better pilots make the sport safer for everyone.

For me, that’s much more important than trying to keep everything to ourselves.