Kris Holub

When I started paragliding I took a relatively unusual path at the time - I found myself almost immediately drawn to aerobatics and received my first taste of SIV at the conclusion of my first season, and knew that this was going to become a significant part of my life. While cross-country flying was and continues to be an important part of my flying career, as a fledgling pilot I spent a significant fraction of my flying opportunities pursuing acro. By the end of my second season, with only a handful of short cross-country flight under my belt, I was already highly proficient at full stalls, wingovers, sats, and had eyes for more. I was so captivated by acro flying that I quit my job as a successful aerospace robotics engineer and moved to Europe for 4 months, where I lived, ate, and breathed acro flying. For those 4 months I flew whenever it was flyable - which was nearly every day - all day, 7 days a week, attempting to feed my insatiable appetite for knowledge and progression. 

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By the end of that summer, I had familiarized myself with all of the basic acro tricks and even mastered the infinite tumble. When I returned home to Boulder, Colorado in the fall of 2018, the opportunities to practice acro were few and far between, so I set my sights once again on cross-country flying. The cohort of pilots that I learned with were now accomplished XC and comp pilots and were routinely pushing the bar on what was thought possible from our little home site. To everyone's surprise including my own, as soon as I returned home I found that my acro skills had transferred to XC flying in an unexpected way. In a span of 6 days I flew 3 100km+ flights, which was simply unheard of at the time, including becoming the first pilot to fly from Boulder past the Wyoming border - all starting from our tiny local 600' high hill.

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I returned to my engineering career for a another 3 years, flying as a weekend warrior and staying as current as possible, mostly improving my XC skills and helping to grow our local burgeoning community, but also making a point to make at least one acro pilgrimage each year. On each of these trips I would bring a couple of friends with me and share my hard-earned knowledge with them, unintentionally gaining experience in how I coach and communicate. 

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In the Fall of 2021 I once again felt the draw to leave the office life and pursue my passion, so my now fiancee Ariann and I moved to southern Brazil for nearly 6 months. We found an apartment right next to a small ridge soaring site. The altitude was less than ideal and a reserve deployment into the jungle below would be inconvenient at best, but training there on a daily basis came with an unexpected side effect: I gained a much deeper understanding of how all of the maneuvers work and how to approach progression in a gradual, consistent way that minimized major errors. I spent my time learning how to break the progression of every maneuver down into the smallest steps possible, which largely removed the element of chance of and uncertainty from my training. And thanks to my training as an engineer and an abundance of free time, I was able to gain a more conscious understanding of what I had learned so that I could communicate it to others.

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My mission now is to combine my talents as a communicator, my knowledge as pilot, and my passion for this community in order to help others accelerate their learning curve. It is my sincere desire that every pilot I work with is able to learn as much as possible, as safely and efficiently as possible, so that they can become better, safer, and more confident pilots whatever their dreams and aspirations are.