[Rick Masters]

Paragliding

He died doing what he loved. Really? So f****ing what? It's living your only life that's important. Not getting a Darwin button on your tombstone.
PDMC=1
Soaring parachutist = 0

[Rick Masters]

PARAGLIDING
Ski resorts and cableways across Europe are raising fees for soaring parachutists.
At Austria's Hutterer Höss, the summer pass has been increased by 190 Euros to 255.
That's from $73 to $286. A HUGE increase!
Sounds punitive to me.
Maybe the cableway operators are fed up with stopping operation to pull paragliders off the cables.

[Rick Masters]

PARAGLIDING

PG fatality #1,565
"I do know what went wrong but I do not want to say," said Peggy Williams, chairman of the Avon Hang Gliding and Paragliding Club.

[JoeF]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... omach.html
Peggy has some background regarding incidents.

[Rick Masters]

They must still be trying to come up with a way to say it was the poor guy's fault - all the details about what he did wrong.
After all, when they checked the paraglider, it looked 100% okay.
Perfect, in fact.

"Today the accidents that occur are the fault of the pilot,
because [paragliders] are perfect aircraft."
– Roberto Villena, President of the Free Flight Club of Malaga, Spain

This is a mythology.
A mythology of the airframe.

[Rick Masters]

PARAGLIDING        June 11, 2017
VIDEO    https://interactive.tegna-media.com/video/embed/embed.html?id=1293002628795&site=293&station=wa-spokane-KREM-B3354&playerid=6918249996581&autoplay=true&secure=yes

[Rick Masters]

PARAGLIDING June 12, 2017

PG fatality #1569 (incomplete)
A video camera was found on the body.
It showed "part of the canopy of the paraglider collapsing, creating a loss of lift.
Following this, the victim and his paraglider went into a spin before hitting the ground a few seconds later."
______________
    Now the soaring parachutists will tell everybody to shut up and not "speculate" and wait for the paragliding association to conduct an investigation.
    Police will examine the paraglider and find it in "perfect" condition.
    A year later, when the press has forgotten, the paragliding association will find that the pilot wiggled his finger left instead of right and deserved to die for his ineptitude.

    One more thing: the thermals that soaring parachutists fall out of and die from are just fun for hang glider pilots.
    Collapses only happen to people who choose to fly paragliders.*
    This is why they all have a Darwin Award waiting at the end of their last flight.

* see Universal Paraglider Design Flaw (UPDF)
http://ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=2586&hilit=UPDF&sid=63905e022458c28e1ac78454bff5140f

[JoeF]

A recent PG fatality news note:
"The investigation of the paraglider's death is reportedly under way, but the Slovenian police have already ruled out a criminal act."

Not so fast investigators! Might it not be criminal to encourage people to fly a PDMC canopy? Class action suits may be brewing against orgs that fail to pedestal the PDMC realities.

=============
RM, has this one been tallied?

[Rick Masters]

has this one been tallied?

Not yet.

"The investigation of the paraglider's death is reportedly under way, but the Slovenian police have already ruled out a criminal act."

The paraglider was in "perfect" condition so it must have been the pilot's fault.
Perhaps it is not a crime to murder yourself in Slovenia.

Might it not be criminal to encourage people to fly a PDMC canopy?

I'm sure the USHPA and the paragliding schools explain very carefully the PDMC (Paraglider Dead Man's Curve)* and UPDF (Universal Paraglider Design Flaw)* to each member and student as they talk them out of hang gliding, otherwise they would open themselves to huge liability.

*It is instructive to do Internet searches for these terms.

[Rick Masters]

PARAGLIDING

PG Fatality #1569
(The previous #1569 has been bumped up to #1570.)