Team Pilot AirDesign

What is your nationality?
Czechia

What’s your name?

Tomas Matera

Introduce yourself in a few words…
I come from Czechia, but I spend a lot of time abroad in the Alps, especially in recent years. I’ve been involved in sports and racing since childhood. From mountain biking I’ve gone through other cycling disciplines, triathlons, adventure racing, paragliding, swimruns, and also some winter sports like ski mountaineering and cross-country skiing. Besides sports, I like traveling and technology. I got a master’s degree in information technology and I work as a software engineer.

How do you practice paragliding?
Since the beginning of my paragliding career, I kind of knew, that hike & fly was the way I wanted to follow. Either hiking up a mountain with a wing in my backpack and enjoying long XC flight afterwards in summer or taking a wing on a ski tour, flying over the valleys or avoiding endless descents in lack of snow in winter. Even after quite a few years in paragliding, I’m still amused, how you can effectively move in the mountains just with a piece of fabric and some lines sewn together, which especially nowadays fit with all the other gear into a small and lightweight backpack.

and AirDesign in all this?
I’ve been flying AirDesign gliders for the last 5 years. It all started when I was looking for a lightweight glider for the Dolomiti SuperFly race, which was my very first multi-day hike & fly race. I’ve chosen the Hero model, and since then I’ve done lot of competitions with it, including X-Pyr 2022. For the last seasons I switched to Volt 4, which showed me benefits of flying a two-liner. As I’m focused not only on paragliding and I don’t spend many hundreds of hours in the air every year, I really like and appreciate nice behavior of AirDesign gliders while maintaining performance.