Leading Edge

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.