Pete Thompson had a hell of a summer in Colorado. After years of planning and trying to fly big, epic FAI triangles across the highest terrain in the lower 48 he finally beat a record set only last year by Galen Kirkpatrick when he put down a 275 km FAI in early August. A week later he went even bigger with a 292. Then just two days later he did it again, this time cracking the vaunted 300 for the first time in North America with a 305 km perfectly drawn FAI across some serious Colorado deepness. Pete shares his journey in the sport which began in the early 2000’s, including his recent vol-biv across the state and flying competitions and tandems.

This past XContest season (2025) Ariel Zlatkovski decided to take on a fantastically bold and totally mind-bending mission: Fly 100, 100km flights in a single season. To pull it off he’d have to spend a full 10% of his hours on Earth flying (nearly 20% of daylight hours), he’d cover 12,000 kilometers of open distance, and rack up 893 hours in the sky. He’d live the entire year away from home in India, Colombia and the Alps and while one imagines this would be most pilot’s dream year, it was often lonely, and often very intense. Much of it was a real grind and subjected Ariel to too much risk. Ariel shares his rather obsessive journey into paragliding, how Project 100 took hold, and the challenges and emotional highs and lows he faced along the way.

Two weeks ago at the World Championships in Costelo, Brazil a competition pilot was killed. This tragedy sparked an immediate and fiery response on social media calling for a top-down change at CIVL, the governing body of Category 1 competitions. Interestingly, two years ago during the World’s in France there were over a dozen incidents, many which lead to serious injuries…but the blame was more sequestered to the pilots ability and decision-making, not the organization. Last week Chrigel sent me an 8 minute voicemail during a training session laying out his own personal thoughts on this charged debate. So we made an effort to sit down immediately and discuss it all without all of the online emotion.