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.