Safety was an issue in the respect that pilots would be expected to fly with helmets, a parachute, and their equipment needed to appear serviceable (no frayed wires, torn sails, etc.). However, we didn’t kid ourselves about what we were doing. I was sending eager and willing competitors on long XC tasks laced with violent thermals and afternoon thunderstorms. We were exploring the edges of the envelope. That’s how you find out what man and machine can do. What the pilots flew and how they modified equipment was entirely up to them. Peer pressure in competition has little impact.

Safety with recreational equipment is different. This type of equipment should be tested and certified. Rigorous training programs and levels of qualification inevitably become standard. Peer pressure plays an important role.

To me, paragliding is much like bull riding. I am amazed at the skill and determination these guys demonstrate and I love to watch the competitions. And despite my opinion that this is one of the stupidest things any human being could ever do, I would never try to talk a bull rider out of riding a bull. It’s his wish, his desire and passion. I respect that.

Bull riders are presently struggling with the issue of helmets. Helmets are not mandatory. Many prefer cowboy hats to helmets, fearing the weight of the helmet might throw off their balance. The PCRA regards helmets as an option. I understand that.

But importantly, the design advancement argument cannot be drawn between bull riding and automobile racing because there is no aftermarket. NASCAR has made tremendous strides in competition safety. These advancements are trickling down into consumer automotive design. However, it is doubtful that much of anything will trickle down into consumer safety from bull riding. Anything that could be developed was utilized in motorcycling long ago.

Likewise with paragliding. The ultimate safety developments in paragliding point to a non-collapsable wing and more rigid attachment of the pilot to the wing. This has already been done. As a retrograde sport which seeks greater thrill value from a lack of control, paragliding competition has nowhere to go but beyond the edges of the envelope. Therefore, I expect a third reserve parachute will be the next development in competition safety with a continuation of the present survival trends.

Interesting post on the subject matter! Thanks for sharing this information….

being completely out of paragliding now other than an occasional and hugely enjoyable flight here and there on my DHV 1-2 I have to laugh when a friend sent me the link to your excellent blog.
Do people forget Granada World Champs? same story … 20+ hospitalizations, broken backs, one death and a JOKE of a sporting event like you say. For sure after competing on British Team for only 2 seasons I became bored & saddened with the death and destruction that is always going to be “competition Paragliding”

flip the coin…..load the gun……

because chances are you will die, the odds are not on your side

Enjoy

However, one of the things I find a bit dismaying about our sport in recent years is the tendency towards stunts and “daredevil” behavior. I wrote a small piece for the HPAC magazine on this. It’s the You Tube phenomenon..the “look at me and see what crazy things I can do” phenomenon. I think this is leading to more incidents, especially in the PG world although HG has the problem too. PG’s and HG are not aerobatic machines, that was never their intent. There are a few pilots who can “handle” aerobatics but many who are way beyond their limits, and even the experts frequently meet their demise doing a “stunt”. The machines themselves, as well as the pilots, are being pushed way beyond reasonable limits. Flying at the edge of the envelope just asks for trouble, and now that flying on the edge is becoming much more commonplace, especially at competitions, so are the incidents. In my mind, having to throw a chute indicates a serious error in judgment somewhere along the line. It is an emergency device that is there to save you if you have made too many errors and have left yourself no other option. It is not something you throw when you try a stunt, push the weather, push the machine or push yourself and it doesn’t quite work out as planned.

Christopher

Any glider designers out there to comment?

1. Class comps with highly specified safety equipment and sameness of wing lets pilot skill stand out.

2. Leave gear tweakings to private and commercial testing. No tweaks of equipment in pilot-skill sport competitions.

3. Let reaching VNE unconditionally disqualify one from the competition.

To my mind the whole competition scenario of pushing faster and further to goal is not what flying is about. Is it really fun?

I have tossed alternative ideas around, but no-one is interested.
Time to goal prediction with penalty points for early or late arrival…
No vario competition, no gps, or gps logger in your harness and unavailable during flight….
Crossing goal line at a set altitude then landing on the target spot for points….
Land at turnpoint, get ticket stamped, take off and fly back to finish….

Every form of flying I’ve seen eventually hits its limits. Paragliding especially needs to realise that with no real speed control speed competitions are futile.
Hang gliders too, are pushing well past posted VNE to get that edge in comps.

Not a good idea.

Maybe I am chicken?

anti-deflation systems: reducing lines and improving performance with high pressure tubes will also result in an increase in performance.

Airbag: the car industry has a proven system which can be put tu use for us in a simple manner, just cutting different shapes for protection of the whole body. Imagine them similar to the Mars landing systems
Iwish a think tank could be put together to make these innovations available free to all manufacturers , The resaearch would be funded by the Fai or national federations .
Maybe i m dreaming ?

for me, an ‘ordinary’, no comp pilot, this hole discussion is more then overdue (hope this is the right word?).

I agree with Mark H.’s statements, especially that basic safty regulations and clever wing limitations should be implemented. Already enough bad accidents happend showing us that it is necessary.

I hope that you all keep the risk in mind. I try too, more then before after I almost lost 2 very close friends
when they had an accident (collision).

This may sound stupid but the very highly motivated people who fly comps have a level of self-belief that things will work out OK so you must NEVER penalise them for taking a safety decision.

In practice we already do that by offering a range of gliders on which to fly and then making it almost impossible to be competitive on the safest ones.

Mark H

So I’m sitting here at 2am local time but 7pm Mexico time reading the reactions to what I jotted down when I was feeling a bit low at the end of the World Champs.

I think this is what I was trying to say. (and I’m not so sure as I’m a bit of a clutz sometimes and am often prone to typing a little faster than I think)

1/ Flying is dangerous and so are comps but it is important to show the rest of the world that you are doing all you reasonably can to do better. Decent head protection, passive safety and common-sense independant safety testing and assesment of your racing machine has been embraced by the entire World including previously ‘nutter’ sports like F1 etc. We should be no exception.

2/ Trying to do better may make no difference but indifferent shoulder shrugging and denying things can ever be any better shouldn’t get in the way of at least trying.

3/ The World Champs should be a beacon to new and ambitious pilots who wish to progress. Frankly if I were the parent of a young pilot looking at the safety records of the World’s I would lock their wing away and buy them a motorbike as it looks safer. Surely we can do better?

4/ I’m neutral on wings. Serial wings ARE easier to fly but you can take more liberties with them. However the harsh truth remains that 80%+ of the field in Mexico would have no idea of how to deal with a large aggressive cravat on a high aspect comp wing. Most of us were, to put it frankly, ‘living in hope’ that it wouldn’t happen.

5/ The new wings cravat a lot. No matter how smart the arguments are the basic fact on the new generation of wings (Boom 6, Icepeak 3 etc.) is that flying with loose, very lightly loaded tips gives a big boost to glide performance and a big tendency to cravat when hitting any thermal bigger than a Marmot Fart. I have trimmed my R09 slower at the tips and added more arc to make it more sensible but I loose a lot of performance. It’s a shame to have to make this decision. Should I have performance? Or my arse heading earthwards locked out in a death-spiral? Now let me see….

6/ In my humble opinion I think Stefan would have easily dealt with the situation he was in on a serial wing or a less pushed design. Of course this doesn’t change the fact that he could have had another accident on one and I’m not in any way arguing that they are safer overall. I’m just stating that, in my opinion, this very talented pilot almost recovered his 8+ aspect glider with an agressive and grabby profile and that he would have easily contained the same situation on a 6.5 aspect glider with a softer profile and line tab positioning. In short, he’d still be here, very likely unhurt. You are free to draw your own conclusions as to whether this does, or doesn’t make one type of glider safer than the other in different circumstances.

7/ Collisions, tree landings, downwind splats and other mishaps are part of comp flying and the wing will make no difference. Violent cravats which most very good pilots have no chance of recovering, especially at low altitude, are NOT part of comp flying, they are a symtom of the type of wing being flown in the comp. If serial wings were no better than comp wings re cravat and recovery then there really wouldn’t be much point certifying them, would there?

8/ I’ve never, in 3000 hours, lost control of any glider, be it a comp wing or otherwise so I’m not writing this from a bleeding heart perspective. BUT, I’m a pussy about pushing speed in rough air and I don’t fly near hard things like cliffs if I can avoid it. This means I don’t win very much becuase I don’t consider the reserve to be an option. I feel, more and more, that my comp pilot friends, especially the quick ones, tend to think of it as somthing they’ll use quite happily to fly faster or fly a glider that’s more on the edge. I feel, somehow, that this is a dangerous and intrinsically wrong mode of thought contrary to all experience gathered in a century of aviation good practice. Reliance on what is really your ‘last chance’ (and an unreliable one at that) just seems flawed.

Finally imagine this headline. ‘A six year old girl died today in a road accident after there was no Air Rescue Service available. Police said a all available medical helicopters were rescuing pilots from trees at the Paragliding World Championships. Commander X was highly critical of the organisers and pilots when he discovered basic mandatory safety checks were not part of the rules of entry and is now asking the President to consider an outright ban of any future flying in the area…’ Etc. etc. etc.

Showing the outside world you mean business is important. Very important.

Anyway I’m going to have to try to sleep if only so I don’t have to listen to both Kat and the dog snoring in tandem next to me.

Cheers, Mark H

Thanks for your thoughts. I agree with you on your secondary points: there is no downside that I can imagine for implementing strict rules on safety gear: helmets, harnesses, reserves.

I also see little downside (only logistical headaches) in requiring inspections of that gear.

And I’d add one more item: pre-launch safety checks. Some meets I attend have launch personnel who check leg-straps of each pilot before launch. 99.9999% of the time pilots handle these checks themselves, but what is the downside in a 2nd party check? (and I write this as someone who launched Mt 7 in a meet without my straps…)

That said, I don’t see how to realistically regulate the stability of gliders, and I have a concern that mixing free-flight certifications and comp ones could be detrimental to the integrity of things the DHV and CEN ratings.

With the flexibility (subjectivity even) of some of the ratings, requiring comps to be flown on serial gliders, could well have the effect of polluting the ratings–with serial gliders eventually becoming as unstable as the wings that were flown in Valle last week.

Additionally, I think we all understand accidents to be a result of a combination of factors–with probabilities increasing as we pile on risk. Maybe a more stable glider would have saved Stefan. Not flying behind the Peñon would likely have saved him as well. Perhaps a better helmet, or a tighter helmet strap. Maybe a a few minutes different in time, where controlling his glider as long as he did would have cleared the bad air and dangerous terrain.

I don’t know. But I do know that pretty much all the pilots who flew the Worlds understand risk factors and made explicit decisions to pile them on. And many made decisions to reduce them (fly a more reasonable glider, like my relatively stable and slow Boom5, or take a longer route around places like the saddle of the Peñon).

But changing the glider won’t change that psychology. My _guess_ is that slower more stable gliders would lead people to pile on other risks to find their advantage (flying rougher air, chancing more dangerous lines etc…)

So whole hearted agreement on safety equipment and some skepticism that glider changes would make a difference…

You make some valid points. I, too, regret the tragic loss of Stefan. However, I do see one side of this that is not receiving the attention that it deserves. I have six trips to Valle as a recreational pilot. I spent anywhere from two weeks to a month there, flying everyday. On the very first trip, during the first site intro, the locals said, emphatically, do not fly behind El Penon- don’t cut the gap. There have been numerous reserve tosses and a lest one death that Iknow of, prior to Stefan, from pilots that disregarded that advice. I read all the blogs relating to the incident. It was a case of lemmings following lemmings. Some of the pilots knew that there were doing something unwise. It is remarkably similar to the Australian comp in which Ewa got sucked up into the CumNib. I forget who published the dramatic photo of that cloud. If I remember correctly, there were something like 13+ gliders underneath the thing. If we are going to address this safety thing, then we also have to come to grips with the fact that Stefan shouldn’t have been in that spot in the first place. Harsh? Uncaring? No! The other pilot that died in that area a number of years ago was on a serial wing. I suggest that we were lucky that more didn’t find themselves out of luck behind El Pinon, in the No Fly Zone.

Mark is surely right in stating that very little attention is being paid to the issue and that much, much more can be done about this without sacrificing what is good and great about comps.

Jeez, fewer people are injured and killed in whole seasons of nascar racing than in a fortnight of the Worlds!

I appreciate your effort to open the debate rather than just accepting the situation.

Risks at high speed is not the only factor, another element is mid-air colisions. Does anyone has an idea of the total number of mid-airs and how many resulted in reserve deplyment for at least one of the pilots?

Thanks.