[JoeF]

Would paragliding's fatality and injury rate give USPA second or third or fourth pause?
https://skydiveuspa.wordpress.com/2012/ ... at-a-time/

[Rick Masters]

Another soaring parachutist goes cross-country.

Would paragliding's fatality and injury rate give USPA second or third or fourth pause?

I doubt it. They've been telling the public how safe skydiving is for years. Once you drink the koolaid, another glass doesn't bother you.

[wingspan33]

Rick,

I am truly ignorant of skydiving safety, but it seems, in many ways, to be the "hang gliding" of parachute use.

Skydivers don't try to soar in turbulent air and are, in general, using a parachute for the purpose for which it was designed - to safely egress from an airplane without (typically) falling to your death.

Now, obviously, the "skydiving" part became what seems to me to be an undeniable "thrill sport". But is it as dangerous as collapsible canopies being used as thermal soaring gliders?

I would expect that "BASE jumpers" give legitimate "skydivers" a bad name. And I'm sure that there are other sorts of fringe parachuting activities that involve greater risks as well. But are established (FAA part 105 compliant) parachutists/skydivers really "drinking the cool-aide" ? It seems they have a good focus on safety in their main line activities.

( Fringe parachutists = BASE Jumpers, Wing Suite fliers, Sky (snow board) Surfers . . . etc. ? )

[wingspan33]

Would paragliding's fatality and injury rate give USPA second or third or fourth pause?
https://skydiveuspa.wordpress.com/2012/ ... at-a-time/

It might, Joe. But since PGs are not part of their organization's "group" I doubt they are very concerned with the death toll among collapsible canopy users.

It seems that the public somehow identifies CCs as being more "hang" gliders than parachutes. I wonder how that link was formed?

Got it! The u$hPa has somehow been involved!

[Rick Masters]

Skydivers don't try to soar in turbulent air

Right. They are sometimes caught in turbulence, regardless, and their canopies sometimes collapse when that happens, although it is rare.

The USPA provides these numbers for U.S. fatalities on their web site.
2014 – 24
2013 – 24
2012 – 19
2011 – 25
2010 – 21
2009 – 16
2008 – 30
2007 – 18
2006 – 21
2005 – 27
2004 – 21
2003 – 25
2002 – 33
2001 – 35
2000 – 32
1999 – 27
1998 – 44
I have not attempted to analyze these numbers, although worldwide it looks a lot to me like hang gliding did in the middle 1970s.
I do know that USPA rationalizes parachuting safety in terms of the number of jumps.

In 2014, USPA recorded 24 fatal skydiving accidents in the U.S. out of roughly 3.2 million jumps.

As a soaring pilot, I tend to analyze safety in terms of airtime. If you take an hour of airtime for HG or PG, it's not particularly complicated. Takeoff once. Fly around once. Land once. But an hour of airtime parachuting is chock full of jumpings, openings and landings that need to be done right every time - and usually are.

2014 had 0.65 fatalities per thousand USPA members

I've been extremely critical of paragliding "statistics" because they don't really tell the story. Paragliders are pretty safe in laminar coastal air. Inland they become a lot more dangerous because they can collapse in thermal turbulence and kill their operators. PG aerobats are definitely on my short list. But combining the three together makes inland paragliding and aerobatic paragliding seem a lot safer than they really are.

Safety in parachuting has dramatically improved with the gradual introduction and improvement of automatic deployment devices.

in the 1960s, there was an average of 3.65 fatalities per thousand USPA members.

But an outsized proportion of skydivers are still killed landing at high speed in turns. So if you are a hotdogger - just like in HG or PG - your personal risk is higher.

Because of high horizontal energy retention, hang gliding, like other fixed-wing aircraft, has no Dead Man's Curve. Both paragliders and skydiving parachutes do have a DMC. The USPA recommends deployment minimum at 2000 feet AGL. The seemingly high number is an acknowledgement of 2 factors: The high vertical speed just before freefall deployment of the main canopy, plus an allowance for the time to cut away a malfunctioning main and deploy the reserve. The altitude left to deploy the reserve would define the limit of the skydiving DMC.



The skydiving DMC altitude limit would be similar to what is shown on the right side of the PDMC chart, which assumes terminal velocity minus the drag of a fully-collapsed paragliding canopy. At 120 mph, this provides about 4 seconds for deployment at about 700 feet.

There is a great advantage to an emergency reserve deployment that paragliders do not share with skydivers. This is the likliehood of entanglement with the main canopy. Skydivers cut away the main before reserve deployment. Paraglider operators can not do this and assume a greater risk of entanglement.
Also, skydivers are almost always falling faster than paragliders when they throw their reserve. This helps it snap open faster. We've all seen the YouTube videos of a paraglider operator in trouble watching his partly-opened reserve lazily float around his collapsed main because he's not falling fast enough for it to deploy properly. Skydivers rarely have this problem.

So If I were going to rate the safety of the various sports for a conservative enthusiast, it would be, with no doubt in my mind:
Hang gliding - safest.
Skydiving - less safe.
Paragliding - least safe.

[Rick Masters]

Paragliding death #1309
Siegfried C. Muhlhauserhad, of Murrieta, California
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?sid=344728 ... n-critical
http://www.eagleparagliding.com/?q=node/98

SIV is French for "Your paraglider wants to kill you."

Hang gliders don't have SIV Clinics.



You won't find the truth about paragliding on YouTube. Righteous paragliding nannies patrol YouTube and have Google remove anything that shows a real serious paraglider crash. I mean, think about it. You've got at least 1309 fatalities but not a single serious injury or death can be found on YouTube. What you get is an endless chain of operators emerging "unscathed" from completely out-of-control situations where survival is a total crap-shoot. One has to go to Vimeo or Dailymotion or foreign newspaper videos to get the truth. This helps keep newbies buying new paragliders (or the "nearly new, hardly used" specials on eBay ).

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx73s7 ... some_sport

"The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed by the YouTube Team against our Community Guidelines. Upon review, we have determined that the following video(s) contain content in violation of these guidelines, and have been disabled: Jody's Thermal - September 22, 2002."

This was the high-resolution video I assembled at the request of the organizers of the 2002 U.S. Paragliding Nationals showing Jody Lucas' launch accident - first at true speed, then zoomed in in black and white to show his line arrangement, then a color zoom to show his actions at takeoff and in flight.

I held off publishing the high-resolution version for almost nine years, finally deciding a few weeks ago [August 2011] that both current and potential paraglider pilots had a right to see how vulnerable a highly-experienced instructor and competitor could be to a thermal at launch, and to decide for themselves if inland thermal sites were the best place to practice paragliding.

Also, I was getting tired of hearing the cynical myth that paraglider pilots were spreading around: that it was Jody's fault, that it was his pilot error that caused the accident. (They eat their own.)

The individual responsible for the complaint to YouTube sent me this venomous note: "Wow, just wow, imagine being such a low life piece of s*** that you would use the death of a pilot to try to make your airframe look better!!"

This is just one of the many pseudo-fascists in the sport who set aside any democratic principles that might interfere with their “fun” in efforts to "protect" novice and potential pilots, and even each other, from the truth about the dangers of paragliding, actively denying them the information needed to think for themselves.

IF YOU ARE A NEW PILOT OR ONE CONSIDERING PARAGLIDING, BE AWARE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE SPORT WHO ARE ACTIVELY CONCEALING FROM YOU REPORTS OF THE DEATHS AND HORRIBLE INJURIES THAT ARE OCCURRING ON AN ALMOST DAILY BASIS.

[Rick Masters]

This seemed odd to me:

Witnesses say he was conducting "drills" to simulate responding to in-flight emergencies, according to the Utah County Sheriff's Office.

"The man was under water for several minutes before witnesses got him into a boat," the release adds.
http://www.sltrib.com/home/2466664-155/ ... -into-utah

I thought a big part of that $1,000 fee for an SIV clinic was to have the boat ready to pull you out of the water...

I wouldn't be surprised to find there's some USHPA liability in there somewhere.

Here's an example of how experienced paragliders guided in newbies, 455 dead paraglider pilots ago:

Plaikind, Paragliding Forum, September, 2011
        Much has been written in this forum about Rick Masters and his Mythology of the Airframe website.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110926073 ... lones.com/
        I quickly looked over much of what has been written – there is too much to read it all – and the responses seem pretty consistent. Generally the opinion is that he is a bit of a crackpot on a rant with a poor understanding of the current state of the sport. However, what I haven't seen (or missed) is any comment on his statistics. Is it accurate that there have been 850 paraglider fatalities in the last 8 years? Given the relatively small number of pilots and assuming the number of injuries is likely a multiple of the number of fatalities that seems like a pretty concerning statistic if true.
        I feel I am learning the risks and I note that many of the accidents I read about are pilot error. For instance I have noted a surprising number of fatalities because a pilot neglected to strap in! Those risks don't concern me because I have control over that. I also see accidents where you have mid-air collisions. Again, while I may not have full control over that I can understand that risk and take care to avoid it. The accidents I am struggling with are the ones where an experienced pilot, not pushing the envelope in a competition, flying in relatively benign conditions suffers a collapse, spiral or other mishap that leads to injury or death. That strikes me as uncontrollable risk. ...I am taking steps to minimize the risk of PG. I am focused on getting good training, I don't fly if I am at all concerned about the conditions, I purchased an appropriate wing and I will be going to an SIV Clinic in a couple of weeks. Still it seems like paragliding may have more uncontrollable risk than I am used to. I am not trying to talk myself out of the sport but I have a six year old at home so I do need to think about this. Of course, one could argue that I should stop all my risky activities and perhaps that is the case. However, when people ask me if I am not afraid of dying I usually reply that it concerns me but I am more afraid of not living.

Ikarus, Paragliding Forum
What you have identified is the uninformed, and frankly malicious scaremongering of a certain sector of the flying community. Their motives baffle me, I have to say. We have learned that there is little point in trying to engage with them.
        Sure, there are some things that you simply cannot plan for, but the more you fly, the more you come to understand that these are few and far between (like the famous "down draughts"). While the witnesses to a PG accident may say "he just fell out of the sky," most experienced PG pilots fully understand that there's a lot more to it.
        Rick's core issue is that a PG has no frame, and if you get a collapse lower than the height required for recovery, PG can be fatal. What he won't acknowledge is that all aircraft have this tendency – if you stall a flex wing within the recovery height, you will pound in. Similarly, he is unlikely to acknowledge that, unlike HG, PG has considerably more control over many of these issues. For example:
        - PG is one of the only aircraft that is auto stable - if you let the controls go, a PG will fly straight and level in still air.
        - a collapse on a PG is actually a safety feature, as it means that the angle of attack has gone negative relative to the cord line of the aerofoil. This stops the glider from surging uncontrollably below the horizon, like topless HGs were prone to do in the early days.
        - in competent hands, most PGs (and all certified PGs) will be able to maintain a safe course at a moderate descent rate following a collapse without dropping into an auto-rotating deep spiral, with correct pilot input. An SIV course will teach you this.
        So, from a learning perspective, provided you fly with equipment appropriate to your level under instruction at sites and in weather conditions which are also appropriate, the baseline risk for PG is lower than you might expect. I'm not saying it's safe, but the concerns about not being able to control risk is over stated.

red frogs, Paragliding Forum
        Rick is clearly a crackpot, and a list out of context of participation rates has nothing to say as to safety. ...It's the relative to participation numbers which help people understand how inherently dangerous something is.
        In Rick's case, there is an assertion that not having an airframe is crazy dangerous, backed up with an internet search based list of fatalities. The premise being that we should all fly a hangglider instead. This is not research, ...looking for hangy fatalities turns up a similar if not larger list, and i'm going out on a completely subjective limb to say hangy participation rates are 1/10th PG rates, so an actual proper study could indeed surmise that having an airframe in a weightshift glider is crazy dangerous.

I admit I have more than 10x more difficulty finding hang gliding accidents.

[JoeF]

[Rick Masters]

Joe, that begs the question: If you are a fool to fly one of those things when things go wrong, are you still a fool when things don't go wrong?

[JoeF]

Double malfunction