Kris Holub

I first started flying in 2015 as a weekend warrior, working as a robotics engineer for an aerospace company in Boulder, Colorado. Before flying, I was an avid climber and a volunteer member of the local mountain search and rescue team. Paragliding quickly captured my heart and imagination and became my dominant passion in life, to the point that I chose to leave my engineering job to spend the entire summer season of 2018 in Turkey and Austria teaching myself Acro by flying nearly every day for 4 months straight. At the end of that incredible summer, I returned to a new engineering job doing R&D for a biotechnology startup for another 3 years to make ends meet. No matter how interesting or financially rewarding the engineering work was, I couldn’t extinguish the fire that season of flying lit inside of me, and I continued to feed it by expanding my skills in cross country due to the difficulty of consistent acro training in the United States. In the fall of 2021 I left my engineering job again, with a renewed commitment to pursue my passion, culminating so far in the summer of 2024 where I competed in the entire Acro Word Qualifier series, finishing 2nd at the Sonchoux Acro show, and 4th in the overall AWQ series, and am currently ranked as the #1 Acro pilot in the United States and #16 in the world.

Since leaving my job and dedicating my career to paragliding,, I’ve been flying both cross country and acro nearly full-time, both pushing my personal goals and abilities and developing my skills as an SIV instructor. I enjoy applying my engineering training to better understand our sport, and to break it down into the most core concepts to share with the paragliding community. In addition to paid courses, I spend a considerable amount of my free time sharing free content and wisdom with the paragliding community, both in person and especially online. While coaching is now my primary source of income to make ends meet, I find myself far more engaged, motivated, and passionate to achieve excellence than any other job I’ve had.

I love teaching, sharing, and seeing people “get it” and become better, safer, and happier pilots. My goal for every student is to meet them at their level and adapt my teaching style to their learning style and goals to the best of my ability. I believe in helping people push through fears and mental blocks by progressively challenging their comfort zone, but doing it in a way where they feel in control and understand not only what we are doing, but why. I want every pilot to bring home skills and confidence that they can continue to use, as well as new experience and wisdom to continue challenging themselves in a safe and controlled way throughout their career.