When and how did you learn paragliding ?

RR : I started flying in 1987. My father had learnt to fly a year before, it was one of the first initiation courses in Spain. I was 11 years old and seeing him fly made me want to. Afterwards, my father set up a school and I spent a lot of time there with him, until I was 12 years old and he finally let me fly. We only had big gliders, I flew when there was little wind, I did some top to bottom flights on an 800m drop site near Albacete.

Could you share an interesting paragliding memory with us ?

RR : A lot! The most hallucinating in terms of sharing with nature was a flight to Chile in 2000, with the whole SAT team. We took off on an active volcano, at almost 3000m. The wind was tailwind, it was quite turbulent, I fought my way over the volcano and the crater. Seeing the lava, the magma, in the hole below was amazing. I landed at the top, found another place to take off again, it was completely crazy.
If we are talking about acro flying, 2 come back to my memory. The first is the flight where I discovered the SAT. I was doing negative turn, and I discovered that you can do turns by changing the centre of rotation with the glider open, I already knew that we were going to be able to do it above the glider. The second was when I discovered infinity, after 4 years of working to turn the glider until I was in the perfect axis of the wing. At the beginning we were only doing one turn, I didn’t think we could maintain it. The first time I did infinity I was in Granada and it was an incredible surprise to see the wing pass once and then again and again below my feet without ever losing energy.