Leading Edge

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."