16 november 2012 19khaleejtimes.com/wknd

WHO: HANNES ARCHWHAT: STUNT PILOT

9 november 201218 khaleejtimes.com/wknd

By OksAnA TAsHAkOvA

The Adventurers ALL In A DAY’S WorK

For 45-year-old, Salzburg-based Hannes Arch, staying grounded is a life motto. But follow his soaring career — from mountaineer and B.A.S.E. jumper to hang glid-

er, paraglider and finally aerobatic and stunt pilot — and you realise that the Austrian action hero seems to have done ev-erything but keep his feet on the ground.

Hannes started young, obtaining his Austrian Special Pilots’ License at 16 and dedicating himself to hang gliding, before emerging as one of the best acrobatic paragliders and aero-batic pilots on the scene. He kept pushing his physical and creative limits: starting an extreme sports production company (he was hired by fashion designer and filmmaker Willy Bogner to fly an Audi A6 from the top of a 3,000m mountain in Aspen, USA) and becoming the first to B.A.S.E jump from the Matter-horn north face in Switzerland (a feat that allowed him just two seconds to open his parachute before the 4,000m plunge). “I was not being crazy — which is not difficult, to be honest,” he deadpans. “For me, it’s always been about being creative.”

But Hannes’s real love was flying. He became Race Director for the Red Bull Air Race World Championship in 2005. Two years later when they went big, he was asked to stay on but he had other plans: to fly. From there on, the stunt pilot com-peted in air races from the UAE to Brazil, securing several cov-eted podium finishes, including World Champion in 2008 and vice championship the next two years. Last year, he combined his two passions — aerobatics and music — for an impressive world premiere show called ‘Rhythm and Air’ in Al Ain.

Sure, a lot of things could go wrong. “My airplane could break or I could make a mistake. Either way, I could die.” But 30 years of extreme sports taught Hannes that if it’s one thing he needs to avoid, it’s risk. For him, the adrenaline kicks in only if he makes a mistake that brings him close to “the edge” — a situa-tion he’s been in several times before. “Before a show, I always try to be early so I have time to introduce myself to the task at hand. All my energy is focused on the job... nothing else.”

Despite the high-flying, Hannes doesn’t have his head in the clouds. “I grew up in a small place in Austria and led the simplest lifestyle for 10-15 years... Those are my roots.” And while he loves stunt piloting, he maintains he’d be fine even if it were all taken away from him because he’d still have “my family, my friends, my mountains, my nature — it’s like my backup plan for every situation in life.”

High-risk, adrenaline pumping and fraught with action — for some professionals, this is the nature of their jobs. What may surprise is not that they do this for a living — but that they wouldn’t have it any other way. We speak to some highly skilled adventurers to find out what drives them on and

keeps them living life on the precipice — day after day.

LIVING ON THE EDGEWhat would push you to call reporting from the war front or car-racing your ‘dream job’? It’s not

the thrills that make you want to push the envelope: it’s a calling that goes much deeper than that

By kAren Ann MOnsy

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T here’s a ‘war kit’ in Dubai-based journalist Stuart Ramsay’s house that he says is “almost never un-packed these days because it’s almost always about

to be used”. As chief correspondent for Sky News, the multi-award winning television reporter has been cover-ing conflict for the past two decades, spanning about 16 wars — from Chechnya to Sudan and Israel to the FARC guerrilla war in Columbia. He was posted to the channel’s Dubai bureau 18 months back — a time that coincided with the recent turmoil in the region; therefore, the con-stant ‘ready-to-go’ war kit at home.

At the time of the interview, the 48-year-old Briton had just returned from Syria (the ninth time he’s crossed il-legally into the country) and mentioned how recent events have “actually begun wearing the team out” — physically and emotionally. “There are a finite number of us who do this and we’ve been doing it constantly now since last year… I’d spent the end of 2010 working to-wards and then spending a few weeks with the Taleban. We came back and Tunisia happened… Egypt started, the tsunami happened, then Libya, then Syria, then Libya again, Syria… And that’s on top of having to do an average of 4-5 embeds in Afghanistan; I did that six years. So it’s almost like you’re at permanent war,” he says, with a hol-low laugh. The coping is hard, he admits, especially for the family “when you’re away so much. But ultimately you’ve got to remember this is what you do.”

When he first started out, Stuart “wanted” to do hostile environment reporting because he found himself able to deal with it, having got his first break when he covered a disaster (an oil tanker crash with a British boat) off the coast of Europe and managed to “get film that nobody had seen, through various skullduggerous ways from the local naval rescue teams.”

But more than that, he says, “The others and I who do this genuinely believe that we are there to bear witness to what happens, that somebody has to do it and if we don’t then any government, army or rebel could commit the atrocities they wished to and there would be no voice for the ordinary people if a journalist didn’t go and rep-resent them… Some people say we do it for the excite-ment; I assure you we do not.”

While covering war zones, his team members use a ratio of “how risky an operation is to what they’ll get out of it” to decide whether to go in or not; they’ve cheated death far too many times. Take their time in the Bab-al-Aziziya compound in Libya last year. “I was with [special correspondent] Alex Crawford. We were the first two re-porters to actually go live from inside the compound at the same time as it was falling. Just as we were leaving, we were drilled by 50 caliber rifles — and we thought: this is it.” But they didn’t get hit and, for Stuart, the multiple close misses he’s experienced in war zones has taught him that “it is never as you expect. Ever.”

Wars are not the only topic Stuart covers though (he’s done everything from London Fashion Week to Formula One) but would he consider another career if he had a choice? “I wouldn’t mind helping my wife with her reno-vation projects, which she does in addition to being an interior designer,” he muses. “But I’m in pretty good shape now and enjoy what I do.” So for the foreseeable future, Stuart says he’ll continue being the poor man’s voice — among other things, of course.

W ith most professional racecar driv-ers, it’s a slow, arduous drive to success; it usually takes years to

get anywhere. Humaid Al Masaood seems to have missed that memo when he broke fresh onto the UAE motorsport scene, about four years ago — and zoomed straight into the spotlight with a podium finish in his very first season.

There was no applying the brakes from there. The relative newcomer went on to take a class win during the 2010 Dubai 24-hour race, before an impressive debut in the 2011 SPEED Euroseries gave him the op-portunity to race an LMP1 car with Oryx Dyson Racing in the American Le Mans se-ries where he took four podiums (out of seven), including a straight win at Balti-more, the same year.

As the most high-profile Arab racer on the circuit today, the question on everyone’s

minds that first season was: where had he been all this time? “Most people would’ve started with go-karting as kids,” Humaid agrees. “I didn’t have the chance to start when I was as young, but better late than never!”

The 32-year-old Emirati, who is also deputy chairman of the Abu Dhabi-based family business Abdulla Al Masaood & Sons Group, never really had a need for speed as such but soon realised it was something he really en-joyed — and wouldn’t mind doing full-time. Racing can be a lot of fun but can also be dangerous if you don’t do it properly, he says. “I think there’s risk in all things but people don’t necessar-ily realise that. In my case, the car could break down on the track but that generally doesn’t happen if you have a good car and team. Then there are all

the other drivers to watch out for...” Humaid’s had a few close calls himself but points out, “Racing’s about staying on the track… so [the idea is to] try not to have accidents. Keeping your head on your shoulders helps.”

Before a race, the sporting champion ensures he’s prepared both physically and mentally, studying the track through videos or getting to the circuit early and walking it. “The 24-hour ones are particularly gruelling, especially the night sessions,” he admits, adding the longest he’s driven clocked in at more than two hours, at a stretch. “You’ve got to work it as a team though — that’s how those races were won.”

While Humaid took “a bit of a break” this year, he promises there’ll be lots of racing next year and he’ll be back, burn-ing up the circuits again.

WHO: HUmAId AL mASAOOd

WHO: STUART RAmSAY

WHAT: RACECAR dRIvER

WHAT: WAR CORRESPONdENT

The Adventurers ALL In A DAY’S WorK

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WHO: RAUL BOCANEGRAWHAT: SkYdIvING INSTRUCTOR

Dubai-based American citizen Raul Bocanegra never intended to be-come a skydiving instructor. In

fact, the first time he jumped off an air-craft (at Fort Bragg, North Carolina) was because he “had no choice”. He was serving in the US army at the time and it was peer pressure — “the need to be-long to the group” — that finally saw him leap into the world of the high-adrena-line sport.

The 47-year-old still remembers the sheer nerves of that first experience but the finer details have since been lost. Once he hit 50 jumps, however, Raul started enjoying it and practising over the weekends too.

He’s been skydiving for over 25 years, taking up instructing as a career in 1999 and going on to become Safety and Training Adviser for the entire Middle East region, as appointed by the US Parachute Association. As manager at Skydive Dubai 2 (the company’s second

drop zone in the emirate), he has done well over 10,000 jumps to date (averag-ing anywhere between 3-5 a day these days) and needing no extra persuasion from his peers to get back up there.

“People ask me if I get bored after all this time but I don’t,” he says. “I get bored if I jump by myself; it doesn’t do anything for me. But when you jump with a student, every single time is so different, you just never know what you’re going to get once you’re out of that airplane.”

Skydiving can be dangerous, but only if you have no discipline, Raul stresses. “We’d never force a student to jump if they suddenly freeze at 12,500 feet in the air. Unfortunately, even during a jump, some of them don’t follow in-structions to a T (the cause for 78% of injuries in the sport today) and it results in a few broken legs here and there, but nothing major, thankfully.” In the last two years, Raul says they did about

96,000 jumps in the desert campus alone. The number of injuries they saw in that time was about seven.

For Raul, his most challenging stu-dent was his own son. “It had nothing to do with the jump itself; he was per-fect in the air. It was just the pressure of him being my own son… and the anxiety of coming home to your wife if something happened to your kid!”

There isn’t another profession he’d rather do though — and that’s despite his minor, almost illogical fear of heights. You’re what, we ask again. “Afraid of heights, it’s true,” he laughs, before explaining. “Once I go past 1,000 feet, it doesn’t matter anymore… but if I’m in a 10-storey building, looking down, I don’t like it at all.”

So how long is he going to keep at it? “Well, we used to have a 78-year-old guy who’d jump here every day — so probably till I can’t do it anymore!”

karen@khaleejtimes.com

Suspended from spheres or chan-deliers in shimmering body-con suits almost 100 feet off the

ground without a safety net and, at times, by no more than an ankle, Vale-ria Baigacheva’s assertion that body strength and flexibility are critical to her profession is easy to believe.

The 34-year-old Dubai-based Rus-sian, who started at eight, went on to train with the Moscow Aerial Circus and the Ukraine Mira Aerial Circus before her performances — covering routines using silks, rings and crescent moons — took her from those early days as an acrobat contortionist to shows all over the world.

Valeria’s mother, who also started out a gymnast before switching careers, wanted her to become a doctor — but more than having a decent counter-argument (she was “scared of injec-tions”), the artist was sure of her true professional calling from the start. “Be-ing a performer is what I’ve always wanted to do, even as a child… It’s the only career I ever wanted.”

Nothing is easy about her job, she states. “There’s a lot of practice and choreography that goes behind a five-minute show. You end up training ev-eryday for hours, and if I were to stop for even two weeks, I’d feel the differ-ence. You have to be extremely strong and flexible — but also look beautiful and elegant doing it.”

Her greatest motivation is the won-der her gymnastic feats evoke in people during every performance. Chances of injury are plenty but so far, she’s man-aged to keep them at bay. “I train hard because at the end of the day, it’s my life on the line.” And there’s no way she can leave that to chance.

WHO: vALERIA BAIGACHEvAWHAT: AERIALIST

The Adventurers ALL In A DAY’S WorK

FreeFALL: raul bocanegra (right) helps train a student, together with another instructor, at Skydive Dubai's desert campus