Heartache Of Radical Low Altitude Flight, Powered and Regular Paragliding

[ricki]

This is from kiteforum.

I have seen instructors take newbies from ground handing to solo flight operations down here apparently without benefit of actual paragliding time. They do some basic ground handing without the paramotor for a while, filling the canopy, collapsing it, etc.. We do lack for ready cliff launch areas and permissible ridge soaring areas that I know about are a few hours to the north. At the same time, students are up and running apparently without any of the hands on paragliding experience that has been described by others on here. Add to that hovering over people and other possible FAR violations, historical noise complaints less serious with new motors and it leaves a lot to be desired. In short, pick your instructors well.

Regarding the relative risk of paragliding. When I was last doing some risk analysis of kiteboarding compared to other sports, I found a published statistic of 88 fatalities per 100,000 for paragliders around 2005. Apparently, things had spiked due to ill advised low altitude aerobatics. No distance to recover and you hit earth hard. This compared to driving at around 15 per 100 k, SCUBA diving at around 5 per 100k and skiing/snowboarding at 0.2 per 100 k in the USA.

I found an extreme example of some low altitude aerobatics in a video I saw over in Grindelwald, "Play Gravity." I got it for the Eiger footage but was astonished by the dune soaring around 1.45 in the clip. It looks like it was done in the photolab but somehow I suspect it was not. This guy is very skillful but such low altitude moves will likely catchup with him someday sad to say. Lesser pilots would likely pile in sooner.




My apologies, I just did a search after posting this. The remarkable pilot dune soaring in the clip, Mathias Roten of Switzerland was lost a few months back in a flying accident. Mathias was also a kiteboarder. My sincere regrets go out to his family and friends. More at: http://www.speed-flying.com/mathias-roten I see his hometown is Thun, CH, may have seen him flying near Lauterbrunnen early last January from his distinctive aerobatic style.

Mathias was also remembered on kiteforum:
http://www.kiteforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2346648