Mads Syndergaard on “What is wrong with FAI Cat1 competitions?”
While driving home from Piedrahita last week I had ample time to contemplate the whole mess of our situation following the tragic accidents during the World Championships there. I think I have come closer to an understanding, and I’d like to share it with you folks here. Some of the conclusions in it won’t make me any friends out there, but having already lost three in the last week, to graver causes, that isn’t at the top of my agenda just now.
Please note that although I’m employed in the paragliding business this text reflects my own findings and opinions, not necessarily those of my employers or even Cross Country Magazine.
Elaboration of my decision in Piedrahita
Before I continue I would like to elaborate a little on the decision I made on Wednesday last week, while still in Piedrahita; the decision to call it quits and head home in spite of no formal decision yet having been made among the meet organisers or the FAI.
I basically thought, possibly intuitively at the time, that these accidents wouldn’t be the last ones to occur, should the comp continue.
I personally didn’t feel in the least threatened or frightened for myself (self delusion?) but I did quite strongly feel that if we were to continue to fly then we would have more carnage.
I personally couldn’t bear to be part of a decision process where we could have had to sit down to more teamleader briefings in a few days’ time, to discuss if we wanted to push on or to cancel the event, following another tragic accident.
I felt that if we decided to continue the event, then perhaps stop it after the third serious accident would be to play roulette with someone’s life. I am not actually particularly concerned about the pilots, we’re all in it because we want to, but I am very concerned for the next-of-kin of pilots. I absolutely hate reading about BASE jumpers who are also family fathers (or mothers) and this influenced my own decision.
So, to summarise, I didn’t think I was next in line at all, but I didn’t think we’d be able to continue till the end without SOMEONE being next in line, and the situation for the next-of-kin should that actually happen was unacceptable to me. So I left.
Having said that I also implicitly say that I don’t consider my wing, or indeed any of the wings flown in the event, unpilotable. I think they leave a lot to be asked for in the following departments, and I have stated that before:
1) They are too hard to launch safely. This puts a lot of stress on almost everyone, as you really don’t want to be making a complete tosser of yourself in front of the 150 top pilots in the world.
2) They are actually surprisingly hard to land properly. I hadn’t thought of that until Marcus (Malmqvist, DNK) pointed it out to me, but thinking back on the around 100h I have on a 2-liner I think I can count my perfect landings on one hand. Since they don’t glide THAT much better than the last generation of comp wings it must simply be down to more energy retention, i.e. they convert any little bump/gust into altitude much more than we’re used to. I have flown Open Class wings since 1994 and have many thousands of hours on them so I am audacious enough to discount lack of experience here.
3) They don’t pack properly. I hate packing these new things. I hate packing all paragliders, but can just about deal with folding tips to the middle then rolling the rest… And
4), the one you have been waiting for: They seem to have a more unpredictable behaviour following big symmetrical (frontal) collapses. I haven’t had one myself so I’m working purely on hearsay here, but I think we can assume that if Ronny Helgesen (NOR), Pepe Malecki (GER) and Alex Hofer (SUI) can’t get theirs back after a collapse then at least sometimes there is a problem.
BUT, and there is a big but, I’m still quite happy to fly mine, it is by far the finest wing I have ever flown, and I would love to compete more on it, albeit not in an FAI Cat 1 environment. My decision in this regard is based on the fact that it feels to me that it is possible to avoid the big whacks (just like I have been avoiding big whacks on 3- and 4-liners in the past – I’m scared of big whacks!).
I don’t pilot my 2-liner on the B’s although better pilots than me suggest that this is the safer option – I’m not convinced it is, at least for me, so I fly my wing just as I have flown all the other wings I have had, i.e. controlling the pitch with the speed bar and the brakes. On the final glide of the 2. task in Piedrahita I was keeping up with/catching up with a lot of pilots through the turbulence, so my system can’t be all bad. I’ll stick with it thank you, has kept me out of trouble for 17 years.
Following this paragraph I would like to state that I would be highly surprised if the upcoming PWC in Turkey suffers any fatalities in spite of every single pilot in it being on a 2-liner. But unlike very many others I don’t attribute this statistical oddity to the PWC pilots being any better than the two friends we lost in Spain – after all, if we look back on fatal accidents in FAI events it becomes clear that the precise people suffering accidents in the CIVL meets are the ones who are normally more than capable of staying alive when they attend other meets, also PWC’s. I do however, due to the problems with the 2-liner recovery characteristics, think that there will be reserve deployments, but that is a completely different kettle of fish.
Where the fault lies…
But if it isn’t simply the gliders, and it isn’t the pilots either, where is the fault then? I have come to think of it as having to do with the very FAI/CIVL that organises the big events, because this appears to be the only common denominator for accident-riddled comps. This requires some (a lot of) explanation:
First off, comp pilots are an unruly bunch. Although most of us don’t really like to admit it we are, when it comes right down to it, adrenaline/thrill seekers. Our attention span for unthrilling things is short, and our patience with people from outside of our little tribe (at least when it comes to comp matters) is short. What happens in an FAI event is that we take this one group of people, who are by their nature anti-establishment to greater or lesser degrees, then expose them to something very much part of the establishment (long speaches, long, bureaucratic registration processes, inflexible systems etc. etc. ad nauseam.
To make matters worse, the people who stick all of this to us are NOT our peers, they are even often punters who like to be associated with the sport of paragliding but are way too sane/normal to ever contemplate flying one of our beloved machines. I personally try to fight this irrationality within myself, but deep down I have precious little time for most of the CIVL crowd, and having to queue at their whim, walk around town waving a flag that doesn’t mean an awful lot to me, or any of the many other “establishment” things that we’re expected to do at the big meets simply adds to the stress levels I experience at FAI comps.
Then comes the most decisive factor of why I, on the whole, think that FAI Cat 1 events are a bad idea: The very system that stands behind them, being as it is composed of individuals who are NOT part of the scene as such, has (hold on to your seats) an unhealthy obsession with safety! Not, from my point of view, on behalf of the participants, who are seen as mad anyway, but in order to cover their own behinds (this is too black and white – the whole thing is more grey but for arguments sake).
To drive my point home I would like to make a school hill analogy: Do you remember that lone tree in the landing paddock that your paragliding instructor told you repeatedly not to land in? And do you remember how hard it was not to get tunnel vision on that very tree, until it blocked out all other landing options and had you sitting squarely in the middle of it? That is where the FAI has taken us, the pilots, with all this uncalled-for talk of “making the sport safer”, with the absolutely disastrous new “safety-enhancing” rules that accomplished at least two safety-detrimental things in the actual event, namely:
1) Forcing EVERYBODY to buy the latest 2-liner hotship, even people who would normally have shown up on their trusted old 3-liner from last year, and
2) added greatly to the bureaucratic stress of the whole registration process.
I’d like to share a little anecdote here to illustrate point 1): At least one manufacturer had a rather nice, if somewhat uncompetitive 2-liner ready in the spring of 2011. But when it was found to be slightly below par on glide at speed the designers frantically developed a new wing, just in time for the deadlines stated by the CIVL Safety Working Group. This new wing performed better but was also more of a handful to fly, yet since the manufacturer couldn’t possibly certify both wings to the new standards, anyone in the meet wishing to fly the wings of this manufacturer had to be on the new, hotter ship. Unintentional collateral damage, yes, but isn’t that always the case when far-reaching rule changes must be rushed through due to political pressure? I am sure every person reading this can think of similar cases from their own political systems at home.
Tunnel Vision
So all the talk of safety, safety safety has in fact in my opinion become the lone tree in the paddock. We’re so obsessed by it that we can’t function properly, and anyone who has read anything vaguely scientific about the priming of minds will know how that can influence the course of events. It has been proven time and again how people who obsess about illness tend to become ill more often, and more ill, than people who are convinced they have the constitution of an ox. This is the lone tree in the paddock at work again – talk about it too much and that is where you will be hanging. We’re hanging in the tree now.
However, once that “better safety records” train had been set in motion, as soon as it was clear even to the clueless people who started the unfocused talk of “better safety” (than what?? The World Cup?) that it wasn’t working (something that was clear to me long before the event) then they really had no other choice than to do exactly as they did, i.e. cancel the 2011 Worlds. But the chain of events that led to that unfortunate finale started long before, and could have been steered in a sensible direction long before, if it hadn’t been such a political argument.
Hands tied behind backs…
I would like to make it quite clear here that I don’t lay the blame at the feet of the CIVL Working Group headed by Martin Scheel (SUI). Once the things got to that state they were in reality operating with their hands tied behind their backs, having to simply “do something” in order to appease the politicians, and they tried to do it so it would have the least possible negative impact on our sport (which, in case you have forgotten, is about racing paragliders around the skies – the pilots have voted with their feet FOR this format of competitions, and Martin Scheel and his working group tried hard to keep it the way the pilots like it). Their proposal was maddeningly flawed, but as with many hastily dreamt-up ideas many of the flaws only became apparent as time went by.
All in all, for me personally, what comes out of this whole mess isn’t actually very important as I have flown my last FAI-run event. I refuse to take part in anything as potentially dangerous as paragliding race events when they aren’t specifically made FOR me and my peers, BY my peers. FAI is apparently very unclear about what or whom Cat 1 events are actually for, but from participating in 12 Cat 1 events since 1994 I can say one thing for sure – they aren’t for the pilots, we’re just the supernumeraries making up the numbers. When that is the case there is just too much that can go wrong.
Soul searching
I wouldn’t mind seeing a great deal of soul-searching within the whole of the bureaucratic free-flying superstructure taking place in the following months – although securing a place as your country’s chairman, CIVL representative or suchlike is generally as hard as failing to take one step back when all the others in the lineup do, are you really the most suited for the job? One of the things that have made me shun these institutions like the bubonic plague since day one was the people I had to deal with “in there” – if the institutions were populated by more of our own kind it wouldn’t be quite so daunting.
As noted above it doesn’t matter so much for me personally since I’m perfectly happy to only fly comps where the whole CIVL circus is but an atmospheric disturbance on the horizon (PWC’s, Cat 2 events) but especially the latter is tricky to run completely separately from the CIVL, and even the former is obviously influenced by all the poor decision-making taking place within the CIVL, if only for making it commercially viable to keep producing Open Class wings.
No to CIVL
I think we, the pilots, should take a stance here and say NO to the CIVL. You have no place in our lives, we don’t want to fly in your Cat 1 events no matter how many clever safety rules you devise – we want to fly comps where the emphasis is on our fun, our learning, our friendships, our enjoyment, NOT on queues, speeches, flag-waving or Schnitzel-führering, and since we’re generally footing the bill* I think this isn’t such an audacious demand to make.
*) I should mention that as a Danish participant we do actually get good support from our federation to participate in the big FAI events. For those nations where this is the case the pressure on the pilots is in fact probably even bigger.