#212 The Most Important Flight with Marcus King

Marcus King has been flying pretty much full time since 1991. He spent many years with the early Ozone team and has been on the design team with Cross Country Magazine for ages. All those gear and wing reviews you see in the magazine (and a TON of the photos!) are compliments of Marcus. In this chat Marcus shares his background in paragliding, his work in the industry, the rise of the sports class competitions, his involvement in the Red Bull X-Alps, and his passion for flying in the French Alps. And then we switch to a very unfortunate totally benign day back in September when Marcus hit the ground hard. Marcus shares his experience of the accident, the rescue operation, and the injuries he sustained and of course the 20-20 hindsights that are always a part of the forensics of making mistakes.

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Episode 132- Bastienne Wentzel and the Beginner’s Guide to Paragliding

Bastienne Wentzel is a professional science writer, editor of Lift magazine and assistant pilot instructor based in the Netherlands. A few years ago she became frustrated with the lack of comprehensive, correct information available for newer pilots trying to learn to fly and decided to write an instructional book in Dutch. It was such a hit that the team at Cross Country magazine, headed up by Ed Ewing decided to take three years re-writing and editing her original book in English.

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Episode 22- The Alaska Traverse- Ed Ewing interviews Gavin McClurg

Ed Ewing, the editor of Cross Country magazine takes over as show-host and asks Gavin the questions many people have wanted to know about how it all went down on the traverse. We talk about the Red Bull X-Alps, how Gavin’s obsession with paragliding started and find out what led to his 6-year pursuit of a dream- to traverse the full length of the Alaska Range by paraglider and foot. We find out what went right, what went wrong, what gear was used, what happened after Dave had to leave, and hear some pretty wild stories of what went down.

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