Hajo smit

Biography

Hajo is a through and through mountain lover. The only problem is: he was born and grew up in the Netherlands, from a German mother and a Dutch-Swiss father. His Swiss genes woke up immediately when his parents took him skiing for the first time in 1971. He was 5 years at the time and hooked right away.

After doing an MSc in environmental sciences, specialising in meteorology and climate, in 1991 he dropped his first job at the Dutch meteorological institute after 3 days. That winter he did his first of many seasons as a ski teacher. On the side he started a business as a freelance copywriter.

In those years he saw the first paragliders flying around. In 1996 a friend of his allowed and encouraged him got do a first “wild” flight from the impressive Salève mountain just over the French border from Geneva. Again Hajo was hooked, but he decided to wait for a good moment to enter a pilot course. That was over the winter of 2005/2006. By then he was already a father: his son Tim was born in 2001. A few years of intense international flying followed.

A second long term relationship drew Hajo back to The Netherlands. In 2009 his daughter Micky was born. He used his meteorological & writing skills to launch a weather prediction website that became wildly popular in The Netherlands: wintersportweerman.nl. After a divorce in 2016 Hajo decided to finally fully emigrate to Austria and become a tandem pilot, a profession that had always interested him.

In 2018 Hajo started flying fanatically again in Austria. In October of that year he got his license. He gathered his first 100 tandem flights with friends and dozens of season workers. The covid lockdown hit him when he was just ready to fly commercially. Luckily he could start flying in Austria again in August 2020. He worked for several existing tandem companies before launching VIP-paragliding in June of 2023.