Anna Mueller: Booster Wings, Reverse-Calculating Everything, and Bringing the Coaches to You

Why would a host turn down 45 to 60 competitors in a single event? For 2027, not one US drop zone bid to host the wingsuit championships, and the 2028 Mondial in Prostějov is going ahead without wingsuiting at all. Randy Connell has been the meet director for US nationals and world championships since 2013 and was chief judge of the first wingsuit World Cup, and he's worried the discipline is pricing itself out of a home.In this episode of Leading Edge, Randy breaks down what a performance task actually costs: seven judges at roughly a thousand dollars a day each, four-per-pass limits that turn one task into nearly two hours of turbine fuel, and 40 cubic kilometres of airspace that nothing else can use for two minutes at a time. We get into the five-minute-call requests that drive meet directors mad, whether suits need detuning NASCAR-style, and why "we're trying to make the operation fit the event" is the shift the whole community has to answer for. The takeaway: competitors can't fix this from the boarding area; it has to be designed in from the first day on the drop zone.

Douggs has been flying his body off big walls since 2001, tracking pants, Prodigy, Vampire, Venom, the onesie he hassled Robert Pecnik into building. He has lost more friends to the sport than most people will ever make. Ask him how many of those deaths were unavoidable and the answer is immediate: "Zero." This year, at 50, three decades in and with his own BASE school sold, he broke his own rules on a 38-metre antenna in Angola and is now a year out of a wingsuit.In this episode of Leading Edge, Douggs walks through the real evolution of wingsuit BASE, from the first big-wall tracks in Norway to the speed lesson Julian Boulle taught him, and the 2016 season that cost him twenty friends and a marriage. He explains why social media is a double-edged sword, what "the numbers are good" actually means when the weather changes, and what he says to the young pilots pushing hardest right now. Then he tells the Angola story, honestly: a cortisone shot, a sunset, "I'll only be five minutes," and a gut that said no. The takeaway is as plain as it gets, every mistake was individual, every one was avoidable, and the gut doesn't stop being right because you're experienced.

Every world title is decided twice: once in the air, and once by the people who write the rules, read the data and sign off the scores. Steve Hubbard has spent fifteen years and around 8,000 jumps on both sides of that line, from flying for the first US team at the inaugural World Cup in Netheravon to serving as Chief Judge at the 2026 FAI World Championships at Skydive Elsinore.In this episode of Leading Edge, recorded on site at Elsinore, Steve explains how performance and acro are actually scored, why five judges beat three, what a Chief Judge really does, and how the FAI and ISC turn a year of committee work into the rulebook. He also makes the case for where competition goes next, from acro's unlikely revival to a standalone flare event. The takeaway: competitors will always push the rules until they break, and that cycle is exactly how the sport moves forward.

Anna Mueller didn't set out to build one of Australia's best-known wingsuit events. With no coaches anywhere near Cairns in far north Queensland, she reverse-calculated the cost of flying some in and needed eight paying participants to make it work. Around thirty wingsuiters turned up. That was the first Booster Wings, and it's now the camp most Australian and New Zealand wingsuiters know by name.In this episode of Leading Edge, Anna, a registered nurse, AFF instructor and wingsuiter who became an organiser to improve her own flying, talks through what she underestimated the first time, why fatigue and delegation matter more than logistics, how she keeps novices welcome without holding advanced flyers back, and what it actually takes to start an event in your own scene. The takeaway: if something is missing from your community, sometimes the answer is to build it yourself.

Most acro pilots live for the free round. Joe Lohmuller. Moab Joe would happily skip it. The reigning US National Wingsuit Acro Champion (2026) says compulsories are the part he loves: fifteen set moves, a washing machine of docks, and no artistic decisions to make. "Just tell me what to do. All right, do this, got it, done." With 7,000 skydives, 1,000 BASE jumps and eleven years in the sport, he's also a rigger, AFF and IAD instructor, and PRO-rated and he's been training every day since 1st September 2025 to go back to back. In this episode of Leading Edge, Joe breaks down what wingsuit acro actually is, why he thinks it's the most precise form of wingsuit flying there is, how he found his way to Nationals after losing his original partner, and what competition teaches that fun jumping never will: a number, a baseline, and somewhere to go from it. He talks about switching from performer to camera flyer, coaching the teams he's competing against, recovering from mistakes in the air, and where the discipline might head next. The takeaway: "We don't rise to an occasion. We default to our lowest level of training."

Most pilots think a good start is measured by where you cross the 45-degree line. JJ Bruno thinks that number arrives about eight seconds too late. A wingsuit BASE jumper since 2018 and a software engineer by trade, JJ has spent this summer jumping by day and coding by night, building ExitEval — an app for evaluating exits, laser profiles and FlySight tracks in the field, and reviving the exit map the community lost when BASE Beta went offline. In this episode of Leading Edge, JJ explains why the cross-one-to-one is a lagging metric for modern suits, the earlier numbers he watches instead (first one-to-one and the "40X"), what energy management actually looks like on a FlySight time chart, and the biggest mistake he sees pilots make when reading their own data: ignoring conditions. We also get into cherry-picked tracks, the "worst starts" he keeps on his phone as a benchmark, preserving tribal knowledge in a more fragmented sport, and where to draw the line on documenting sensitive exits. The takeaway: "I kinda use the data to help push me in the right direction, but it doesn't always have the final say."

Sam Laming has been coaching wingsuiting since 2012, across drop zones on several continents. Ask him what makes a scene thrive and he barely mentions the flying, he talks about what happens between the jumps, and about the fact that the jump itself is closer to a cherry on top than the main event.In this episode of Leading Edge, Sam gets into why a coach's mood is quietly contagious and what that means for the people you're taking up; how the intermediate-suit flock has all but disappeared, and what we lost with it; how being mentored by Jarno handed him coaching on a plate, and why he now wants to coach coaches; and the tree strike in a Vampire 3 that scared him badly enough to redirect his entire approach to flying. Less about how to fly, more about who you become while you're learning to.

Patrick Kramer won the wingsuit acro world championship, drove away from the competition and thought: now what? Twenty years in the sport from an engineering office in Switzerland to full-time skydive instructor, wingsuit tunnel coach and world champion and the win itself felt like just another day of doing what he loves. That, he says, is the point.In this episode of Leading Edge, Patrick talks about the moment his hobby stopped being enough, what he underestimated about turning skydiving into a job, and why "there's no non-competitor in a competitive environment." We get into his radical reset, leaving it all to train Shaolin in China, eight months of being sore every day, coming back to teach at the new wingsuit tunnel in Slovenia, his idea for a three-way acro discipline that doesn't exist yet, and how keeping the next discipline in the back of your mind is what keeps twenty years in the sport from burning you out. The takeaway: romanticise things less, stay a student, and never look back saying you should have.

Tim Howell was never any good at maths at school. Now trigonometry saves his life on expedition. Ex-Royal Marine, 1,400 jumps across 60 countries, first wingsuit BASE descents in Vietnam, Kenya, Angola and the UK and a 6,000-metre exit from Aconcagua. In this episode of Leading Edge, Tim breaks down what opening a new line actually involves finding a cliff in a single photograph, sizing it against a cyclist on Google Street View, and running the start arcs, pull heights and glide ratios long before it's worth stepping out the door. We get into why the landing can be the real mission, what thin air does to a flight at 6,000 metres, and why, after six weeks of travelling and climbing, he still turned around on Lhotse twice. His takeaway: know your own ability, because "if there's any doubt, there's no doubt."

With over 37,000 skydives behind him, Pete Allum still calls himself a beginner and that's the whole point. For Pete, flying well was never about chasing bigger suits or rushing to the next milestone. It's about mastering the fundamentals and never letting experience get in the way of learning.In this episode of Leading Edge, Pete makes the case for canopy flight as wingsuiting's most overlooked skill, and explains why becoming a beginner again might be the most valuable thing any pilot can do. We get into first principles, honest fear, the discipline of slowing down, and what it takes to keep flying well across five decades in the sport.