Infinity Paragliding

14/10/2026

Every school in this sport promises you a safe flight.

It is the one promise none of us can keep. I will not be at Coronet Peak the morning you drive up on your own, look at the wind and decide.

That call is the whole thing. Not the glider, and not the card in your wallet. It is the reason you can say out loud for going, or for walking back down.

So ask a school how they teach the call.

Save this before you book.

14/10/2026

Your logbook only fills on the days you said yes.

So the pilot with more hours in it might just be the pilot who has never once stood down. Not the same skill. A number cannot tell you which of the two you are looking at.

I have flown with both at Coronet Peak. One of them I would send up alone.

10/10/2026

The flight I keep putting off has nothing to do with the weather.

I fly for a living and I still do it. A mate of mine died at thirty-nine, and since then I have been honest with myself about what I am actually waiting for.

The answer is nothing. No better week is coming, and the hill has not moved.

10/10/2026

09/10/2026

Start at the start of the season,,,

08/10/2026

Wind inside the limit is question one of six.

So the number clears, and five questions are still standing between you and the wing.

I watch it every season at Coronet Peak. A pilot holds the meter up, reads an average that sits inside what they were taught, and the decision is over before it has started.

They tell me the wind is fine.

So I ask two things back. What was the spread between the lull and the peak, and which way has it moved in the last twenty minutes.

What comes back is usually the average again. Not because the pilot is careless. Because the average is the only input anybody ever handed them, and a wing flies the peak.

Gust factor. Trend. The thermal cycle. What the terrain does to air that was inside the limit down on flat ground. Then the reason, said out loud.

Across the twenty-one days, you give me a go or no-go with a reason on every day you spend on the hill, long before you are up there on your own.

Save the sheet, and run all six on the next day you are weighing up.

Tell me which of the six you have never checked, and I will tell you what it hides.

P.S. Which one did you skip?

07/10/2026

He was thirty-nine. That is a number I have not been able to put down all week.

A heart attack. Last week he was here. This week he is not.

His list would have been an ordinary one. A trip. A call. Something he was going to sort out when work went quiet.

I have a list like that. So do you. The only difference is that ours are still open.

06/10/2026

Which of the twenty-one days do you think hands you the call?

Ask around and the answer comes back as day twenty-one, the day the licence gets signed.

Day one of ours never leaves the ground. Wing anatomy, launch, control, stop, flare, and not one flight all day, because the launch is the most dangerous moment of every flight you will ever fly.

People tell me that sounds slow. A whole day on the grass when they came here to get airborne.

So I ask them what they want to be holding on day twenty-two, standing on a hill with nobody from the school beside them.

The answer is never a logbook. It is being able to look at a morning and know.

That is what the sequence hands over, one day at a time. Training hill under radio. Coronet Peak at 1,177 metres on day three. Then five flights a day while the meteorology runs underneath all of it. The licence is not issued at 34 flights. It is issued when the calls are already yours.

Go back through the last course you paid for and count the days that handed you a decision of your own.

Put that number in the comments and I will tell you what it is missing.

Bookings for the next twenty-one day cohort open on 10 October.

P.S. Which day was yours?

05/10/2026

Another amazing woman of Aviation - We salute you Choppy !!!

In honour of 40 years of Over The Top, we'd like to reintroduce you to the woman who started it all.

Louisa Patterson, aka Choppy, founded Over The Top in the mid-80s with a simple idea: to share New Zealand's most remote and breathtaking places by helicopter.

Four decades on, she and our pilots have taken thousands of visitors to some of Aotearoa's most extraordinary places.

Her flying career now spans nearly fifty years, and along the way, she's earned multiple prestigious safety awards, become Vice President of the New Zealand Helicopter Association, and continues to push aviation safety forward through the Eye In The Sky project.

We're not sure how she can top this, but we have no doubt she will 🙌

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