UPDATE to this podcast: Cross Country magazine has just (July 2nd, 2025) broke an incredible story that Eliya Zemmour, featured in this episode has been regularly faking his flights on XContest, using other pilot’s flights as his own. As Cross Country wrote, it is both sad and shocking in equal measure. This remains an interesting and exciting show, but we have no idea what is truth and fiction…
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Andrey Kuznetsov has been on the national sky diving team for many years, holds several world records and the genius record (100 way canopy formation record) and has been a long-time test pilot for reserves. He made the transition quite easily from sky diving to paragliding in 2009 and skipped the C class altogether as he found it too slow! He recently flew across Vermont and landed on the beach and owns AirQuest paragliding, a professional reserve packing and line-trimming company. In this episode we talk about his history of sky diving, the transition to XC paragliding, why SO many people don’t pack their reserve correctly, trimming gliders, why it matters and a lot more.
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5 time Red Bull X-Alps pilot Honza Rejmanek and his son Martin return to the Cloudbase Mayhem this week to recount yet another incredible vol-biv tandem adventure in the Alps. Martin is now 14, and he and his dad have been tackling some pretty epic lines in the Alps since Martin was 8. In this episode they recount their 3rd attempt at hiking and flying from Annecy to Zermatt last summer and hooking into incredible weather which allowed for an amazing flight right up on the Matterhorn massif and then continuing well past their goal of Zermatt and carrying on all the way to Davos. This is inspiration on a magical level.
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In this episode we discuss Philipp’s zen for going big, being a professional pilot, the importance of having an acro background and acro training, vol biv, and just some good old fashioned storytelling in the highest mountains on Earth. Tuck in for some inspiration!
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This week we dive into spring with the current World Champion and long-time Ozone test pilot Russ Ogden and multiple US National Champion Nick Greece. Year after year we see accidents in free flight spike in spring. Spicy conditions, rusty skills, new unfamiliar gear, heightened stoke, another year behind us, lack of confidence… we explore the many things that might have an impact on why we see the spike and what you can do to make sure you’re not in the data set.
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There are times in a pilots career when things do not go according to plan. This is one of those times. Nikolay Lipko had a rather unusual (but not unheard-of) event flying in Chamonix, France that thankfully ended quite well thanks to a successful reserve deployment. As with all incidents, there is hindsight and modifications to how to take to the skies. And if anything else, this story is a case study for why SIV training is so important. In this instance your host and our guest don’t see eye-to-eye on the cause and effect but the take-aways are valuable.
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Our Mayhem editor Myles Connolly is about 350 hours into his flying journey and is leaving soon for an SIV course with Jocky Sanderson in Turkey. We thought it would be fun to connect and have him fire questions at me about all the things he’s currently curious about as his XC skills and training progress. Hike and fly; risk related to big events like the Red Bull X-Alps; how to approach Vol Biv (gear, locations, top landing, distance, etc.); Wing and gear developments and the new 2 liner C wings, gear choices and a lot more.
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Gaspard Petiot is a mountain guide and very accomplished pilot who competed successfully in the Red Bull X-Alps in 2015 (5th, Monaco), 2017 (broken wrist, withdrawn after leading day 6) and 2019 (7th, Monaco) despite having very bad knees. In this episode we rewind the clock as we have done with the others in this X-Alps series and hear the behind-the-scenes stories that the fans didn’t see on live tracking.
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Manuel Nubel has competed in four Red Bull X-Alps, starting in 2015. On Team USA 1 we call him the comeback kid. He often starts in the middle or back of the pack but gets stronger and more crafty as the race goes on. We rewind the clock to 2015, his first race and find out the back story of landing in a tree on his way to Monaco and the hilarity that ensues, the ups and downs of his campaigns, (for example having to quit due to exhaustion in 2017, and making a series of magical moves in 2021 which saw him climb from 16th to 6th in the final days of the race) and his decision to not compete in 2023, but why we may see him again in 2025.
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