Winning in competition paragliding is a black art. As a niche sport, information about how to perform well in competition is passed verbally from pilot to pilot and learned through experience; there is nearly no writing on the subject to draw from. At the same time, there are only three main competitions each year in the US, so learning through one’s own experience alone can take decades.

As an aspiring competition pilot myself, I have been hungry to learn as much as I can. In an attempt to supplement subjective advice and my own experience, I wrote a set of competition analysis tools in Python. At its core, flying a comp task is a competition to spend the least amount of time in each soaring regime (climbing, gliding). This tooling first breaks down each pilot’s tracklog around the task into its constituent regimes, showing quantitatively how much time was spent in each regime. Alongside this, the tooling provides the second order evidence which contributes to these times, including climb rate (e.g., Pilot A climbed faster and therefore spent less time climbing than Pilot B, despite climbing the same altitude) and total distance flown (e.g., Pilot B flew a shorter distance between turnpoints and therefore spent less time gliding than Pilot A).

Outclimb.app began as a web port of this tooling so that I wouldn’t have to pull open my laptop and Python environment each time I wanted to analyze a task. The feature set quickly grew to address different needs:

• 3D task replay, to see how some pilots were gliding better on the same course
• Thermal cloud, to show how pilots were climbing better in the same thermal
• Annotation system, to take notes on the decisions made by oneself and others during tasks
• Notebooks, to connect annotations and learnings across longer timescales (comps, seasons)

As of Aug 2026, the site is in a quiet beta with a handful of pilots from my comp circuit.

Paragliding competitions in the US are scarce, and hike & fly competitions are rarer still. Europe has the XAlps, XPyr, Dolomiti Superfly, Wanderbird, on and on, and the US only has the XRedRocks. Rather than travel internationally or wait for more chances to compete, I founded the Northern California Hike & Fly League, with 15 pilots participating in the inaugural 2026 season.

The league is season-long and informal: from April through October, pilots plan and fly routes comprising both hiking and flying, anywhere in Northern California. Pilots upload their tracklogs to norcalhf.com, where they are hosted and scored. Each pilot’s top four scores count toward the season standings.

Tracklogs are scored as the sum of the leg lengths of the largest triangle which can be made out of tracklog points. A penalty is assessed for the “closing distance” of the largest gap in the triangle (usually between where the pilot starts and where they end up). All distance on the ground is awarded extra points. Triangle scoring is a well-studied optimization problem, so I lean on the open-source igc-xc-score solver rather than reinvent it. To solve ground vs. air calculation, I tuned the library’s launch and landing detection using hike and fly tracklogs.

I designed the scoring rules as an incentive system to encourage the kind of flying I want the league to produce. The closing penalty rewards planning and completing a full triangle rather than landing wherever the day ends and hoping to be picked up. The points bonus for hiking rewards strong runners just as much as good pilots. Finally, the “fly-with-friends bonus” encourages folks to get out and enjoy the sport together.

I write essays about paragliding on my website, digging into the quantitative side of free flight. Topics include MacCready speed-to-fly theory practical interpretation, how risk posture should shape flight regime, and how to analyze competition tracklogs to dig into pilot performance. Find them in the “Active Flying” subsection under the “Projects” dropdown.

I’ve been building outdoor gear since first sewing a hammock in my senior year of high school. These days, I run the quasi-small-business / brand Merlin Gear.

I generally use the fabric CAD software CLO 3D for design, and cut/sew all myself.

Micro Soaring is a browser-based sailplane simulation game. Pilots climb and glide over procedurally generated mountain range, reading the terrain and finding thermals.

The path from Perlin noise to flying:

• Perlin noise lays down the base mountain ranges in Python
• A particle-based hydraulic erosion simulation carves them into believable ridgelines and valleys
• The finished terrain is exported as height, color, and thermal maps that the game loads at runtime
• Three.js renders the world in the browser, flying sailplane models (a JS3 and an ASK-21) modeled in Blender
• An in-game flight instrument reads out climb rate and altitude
• A Python asyncio WebSocket server streams every glider’s position to all connected clients, sequences the round phases, and keeps a persistent high-score board

+One was an entrepreneurial venture to advance avalanche rescue technology.

As a Weissman Fellow and then as a part of Olin’s Entrepreneurial Engineering Capstone, I worked with my friend Bram Wathen to develop a solution to replace the outdated backcountry avalanche beacon used by backcountry travelers in avalanche terrain.

Our initial solution was a small deployable drone with radio-direction-finding circuitry to perform the beacon search on behalf of the rescuer. We developed two drones, a search algorithm, and a simulation engine.

Next, we took a step back and ran a market analysis and 30+ backcountry user surveys. From here, we chose to pivot in a different direction. Our next solution was a mobile device “backpack”, which housed an high accuracy GPS, IMU, and LoRa radio transceiver. This device would form a mesh network across all units carried by each member of a group for live position sharing, using the mobile device for display. In the event of an avalanche burial, the position of the victim could be used to find them directly. We ran this solution through three prototypes, spanning custom PCBA design, embedded systems, and the full software search/mapping stack. Field testing showed 2.5x faster discovery time and 40% less distanced traveled compared against a backcountry avalanche beacon.

Plus One Presentation

I picked up a 2-door 4x4 Jeep Cherokee XJ off Craigslist, which kicked off a four-month saga of late nights and weekends in a tiny garage stripping it down and pulling it back together. I went through nearly every system: cooling, oil, fuel, front and rear drivetrain, a full Bilstein/OME suspension refresh, steering, rust repair, and a re-upholstered interior.

While at Olin College, I worked as the lead Shopbot CNC router instructor in the woodshop. In the off hours, I loved to build projects out of scrap wood. Some of these projects included:

• A Custom Telecaster Guitar made from laminated strips of baltic birch
• Geodesic truncated-rhombic-dodecahedron speakers
• Ken Isaacs microhouse inspired 24-sided birdhouse (Now hanging in Wellesley College’s Hunnewell Arboretum).
• 3D carving of the White Mountain National Forest

Projects generally began as 3D models in CAD (Fusion 360), then were translated into toolpaths with Shopbot’s g-code generation software.