Most of what I know about patience, I learned waiting for air

My interest in the outdoors started early, at a camp for kids who wanted to learn outdoor skills. That turned into Outward Bound, and then into a degree in wilderness leadership and business management. Paragliding was the thing that finally put all of it together.

Teaching

I started WNC Paragliding to provide gear and coaching support to the flying community in Western North Carolina. Teaching someone to fly is the most concentrated version of teaching I have found. The stakes are real, the feedback is immediate, and you have to be honest about what the person in front of you is actually ready for.

Most mornings on a training hill end with nobody flying. The air does not turn on, or the wind is wrong, or the cycle never comes. That is the job too. Learning to call it off is a skill, and it is the one that keeps people alive long enough to get good.

SkyGear Hub

The hardest part of buying paragliding equipment is that there are dozens of manufacturers worldwide and no good way to compare across them for your size, skill level and goals. I spent about a year building SkyGear Hub to fix that: a unified research interface for pilots, with GearMatch for narrowing things down. It launched in 2022 and it is still the project I am most pleased with.

Al Bowers and the bell spanload

One of the best things flying has given me is the people. Meeting Al Bowers was a highlight. He spent his career at NASA Armstrong, and his work on bell-shaped spanload distributions, drawn from Prandtl and tested in the Prandtl-D aircraft, is the kind of research that quietly rearranges how you think about wings, birds and adverse yaw.

I spent three days in California filming educational content about his research. He is one of the kindest and most genuinely generous people I have met in aviation, and he explains hard things without ever making you feel small for not already knowing them.