And to be very honest, a similar video could be made of hang gliding accidents. If both were shown to potential students, I wonder which video would scare the most people away from the specific aerial activity?
Actually, among an equal number of participants, paragliding has a very much higher rate of accidents. This is due to the paraglider being harder to control than a hang glider, being much more inherently dangerous in design, lacking in protection in crashes, having poor penetration which results in an astronomically higher number of out-landings, a dead mans curve below 350 feet and from being flown by people who seem to me to be more like stuntmen or daredevils than real pilots. If you look for the total numbers of hang gliding vs paragliding accident videos, discarding everything prior to 1986 (before paragliding), the ratio seem to be around 1 to 10 or more in favor of paragliding accidents.
So If you make two "similar" accident videos of hang gliding vs. paragliding, you must necessarily include ten times the number of hang gliding accidents over a given period of run time. This is a skewed result that ends up with paraglider operators saying, "See, hang gliders have accidents, too!" And they will believe the two sports are equivalent. Or even worse, because when a hang glider goes "Whack!" harmlessly releasing kinetic energy that on a paraglider would have been carried entirely by the operator, it makes them pee their pants. I guess this is because on a paraglider they know it would be them going "Whack!"
Furthermore, the majority of paragliding accidents are due to the paraglider suddenly behaving like laundry whereas in hang gliding most accidents are actually attributable to genuine pilot error. The paragliding crowd likes to tell themselves that their accidents are also due to pilot error, and are therefore correctable, but this is a lie they keep going to bring in fresh blood and, particularly, dollars. If it were true the number of accidents would have decreased as it did in hang gliding, by improved wing response, safety and pilot training. But as far as I can tell from my extensive accident research, paragliding accidents and fatalities go up the better conditions get for hang gliding. That's it. That's the only connection I can find over 30 years of incessant, meaningless rationalizations to the contrary from the paragliding community. We've had 99 global footlaunch paragliding fatalities so far this year that I know of. There will be more. There were around 108 in 2009. Does that sound like an improvement? It's the status quo.
They shouldn't start bragging just yet.
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