Category: Podcast

Heidi Insam from Italy, Elli Törrö from Finland, Ruth Churchill-Dower and Judy Leden from the UK talk about being a flying mother.

This podcast is the second in the series of two about paragliding and motherhood. Many women give up the sport when they become mothers. This may be due to a greater perceived risk, a greater feeling of responsibility or because of lack of sleep and time. For these two podcasts I have spoken to Elli, Heidi, Judy and Ruth, all of whom decided not to give up. All flew during their pregnancy and have continued to fly, compete, work as tandem pilots and instructors as their children have grown up. Being a flying parent is not without its stresses and problems. Your life changes when you have a baby and all four of my interviewees explain what changed, how they have managed to negotiate childcare arrangements and how much flying means to them.

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In the third podcast in the series, we gave Tim-Patrick Meyer ten random flying-related questions from our bank of 250. Tim-Patrick is a German pilot who learnt to fly while living in Chile. Coming back to Germany was a bit of a shock to his flying system! Tim answers questions on his flying dreams, what superpower he would like to have and describes one of his favourite flying memories.

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Ruth Churchill-Dower and Judy Leden from the UK, Heidi Insam from Italy and Elli Törrö from Finland talk about flying when pregnant.

This podcast is one of two about paragliding and motherhood. Many women give up the sport when they become mothers. This may be due to a greater perceived risk, a greater feeling of responsibility or because of lack of sleep and time. For these two podcasts I have spoken to Elli, Heidi, Judy and Ruth, all of whom decided not to give up. All flew during their pregnancy and have continued to fly, compete, work as tandem pilots and instructors as their children have grown up.

In this first podcast I look at flying and pregnancy and in the second we will discuss motherhood, child care arrangements, responsibility and taking your kids with you to fly. 

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In the second podcast in this series, we gave Matthew Tandy ten random flying-related questions from our bank of 250. Mattew is a professional helicopter pilot with the Royal Air Force who has been flying paragliders since the early 1990s. He is the co-ordinator of the Advance British Clubs Challenge and his burning ambition is to get more clubs involved in this friendly competition – as well as beating the army and navy in the joint services championships! Matthew answers questions on diverse topics as whether he groundhandles regularly, if he has ever missed an important event because he was out flying or if he has ever shouted at anyone in the air.

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Our latest series of podcasts is called Ten Random Questions for… We have come up with 250 flying-related questions and have fed these into a random question generator. Each fortnight we interview a pilot using ten randomly selected questions. The results are interesting, educational, insightful and sometimes hilarious. No two sets of questions are ever the same. We start our series with Lee Tryhorn, proprietor of the Free Flight Academy, a paragliding school and guiding service which operates all over the world. Lee is a keen acro pilot and he has some interesting tales to tell!

Listen to the podcast below: