[Rick Masters]

No. It is a fantasy number. It will never be ascertained.
The absolute numbers are just that. Absolute. They are the best we have and speak volumes about the safety of the sports.
We CAN analyze individual accidents and determine one thing.
Hang gliding fatalities are overwhelmingly pilot error.
Paraglider fatalities are overwhelmingly results of collapse.
That is the message.

[wingspan33]

Rather than absolute numbers what would be useful would be accidents as a percentage of the number of people flying or hours flown per unit time. This is important because people can always brush off the paraglider statistics by saying; "well there are a lot more paragliders in the air, than there are hang gliders, so of course the accident numbers will be higher".

Does anybody have any idea what the accident per flight or per hour flight ratios are?

FC

If "We" were held to the same standards (by the FAA, let's say) then we (or some national org) would probably know or be able to derive those kinds of stats. But I'm afraid, as things currently stand, that kind of information is unknown.

[AirNut]

I think I remember a statement somewhere by the USHPA itself that member numbers for HG/PG were about equal. Beyond that, e.g. numbers of flights, or hours in the air, I don't think that has ever been measured or collated.

Therefore, about the best we can do is to measure accident statistics per participant and trust (i.e. hope) that all of the other variables average out (e.g. the average amount of flying done by each individual). This approach is borne out by the hang gliding statistical studies that have been done over the years, such as they have been (e.g. a fairly major one done in the UK). All of these seem to show a hang gliding fatality rate of about 1 in 1,000 participants per year. This seems to (roughly) line up with anecdotal experience (think about how many HG pilots fly in your local area and how many have been killed over the years).

Interestingly, this number also seems to roughly line up with other mature risk sports, e.g. sky-diving, scuba diving, general aviation and sail plane flying. Interestingly, here in Oz, sailplane flying has been running at a worse rate than HG over the last 5 years (about 1 in 250 participants per year).

IMO, this rough equality of participant fatalities across various risk sports comes down to Rick's point above, that in the sports mentioned, it all comes down to pilot/participant error. Imagine 1,000 risk-sport participants lined up in a row. Human nature being what it is, it's reasonable to expect that one of these 1,000 participants is likely to be stupid/daring/heroic enough to kill themselves in the course of a year almost regardless of which sport they are actually indulging in.

If we accept that HG/PG numbers are roughly equal in the U.S. then the stats quoted above for PG show a fatality rate per-participant-per-year roughly ten times higher than that of HG. I think that this ratio of ten is also roughly in line with the overall size of the PG fatality list stretching back over the years. I think that the reason for this disparity is as Rick said: overwhelmingly, PG pilots can get killed almost at random if they are flying in thermic conditions (and even in smooth air on the coast if they fly into rotor). Witness the number of experienced PG pilots that have been killed by collapses.

Or, to say it yet another way, unlike HG, sky-diving, sailplane flying, GA, scuba diving or whatever, the PG fatality rate is dominated not by human nature, but by the sport's seriously flawed equipment.

All of this makes PG and HG completely different in overall character. One is aviation, the other is dare-devil dice throwing. In HG you can kill yourself by bad judgement (and it has to be REALLY bad). In PG you can get killed by the whim of the air and the silent killer that you carry with you every time that you fly: the inherent design flaw of the paraglider. "You pays your money, you takes your choice".

The sad thing is that many of the people entering the sport of paragliding aren't even aware that they're making the choice.

[Rick Masters]

Another very significant factor is that nearly all paragliding is learned and practiced in either laminar air or mild conditions (compared to hang gliding). This kind of flying has historically represented the major accumulation of hours flying in the sport. However, the vast majority of people killed die in collapse-related incidents while flying inland. These are soaring parachutists with advanced skills who believe they can survive the kind of turbulence that XC hang glider pilots prefer. The so-called "statistics" take the turbulent flying and mix it with the relatively harmless flying in gentle conditions to get a skewed, rosy and flawed safety picture that is not ethical for any organization to promote.

Flying paragliders in turbulent conditions does not result in one death per 1000 participants. The larger the sample, the more relevant the result, so let's take a look at the Mt. Blanc fiasco on July 2, 2015. Hang glider pilots would say the conditions were fantastic with valley temperatures approaching 100 F. Fifty to one hundred hundred paragliders were estimated to have been in the air.

Two paragliding instructors died on Mt. Blanc that day in separate collapse accidents: Helene Menoni and Christophe Richard. This represents one death per 50-100 participants in one day or, alternatively, one death per 50-100 flights from Mt. Blanc on turbulent days. On July 4, Joel Russier died in a paraglider collapse on the crest of Mont Blanc. Fifty paragliders were estimated to have been in the air. This represents one death per 50 participants in one day.

If we choose to increase the accuracy of the attrition rate by accumulating larger samples from years past, a look at my research is damning of the sport of paragliding when practiced in turbulence. Unlike hang gliding, the risk factor for paragliding goes up much, much faster as turbulence increases. The only intelligent choice for flying in turbulent conditions is a hang glider or other air-framed aircraft.

[AirNut]

Pretty sobering stuff.

There's an old saying in aviation: "averages only apply to average pilots". Many pilots take that to mean that by being "smarter" they can improve the odds in their favor. I think that is actually the case, certainly in HG, where the accident rate is dominated by human nature/pilot error. But in PG, no matter how "cleverly" you fly, you can still be done in by random turbulence. Of course, the PG dogma is that you can handle this by the proper degree of "active" flying. That this is delusional thinking is demonstrated by the number of "expert" PG pilots killed by collapses in turbulence.

And on Rick's point above, my suspicion is (only a suspicion, I've no proof) that if you take a similar circumstance in HG, say a competition held in extreme conditions (e.g. a strong day in the Owens Valley), the fatality rate will still be proportionally a lot less than in the circumstances at Mt Blanc. And if you look closely at the design features of HGs and PGs, the difference is completely understandable.

I think there's a parallel to the sport of PG, at least as far as risk management is concerned, and that's climbing Mount Everest. The track record of fatalities on Mount Everest has shown that no matter how good you are, you can be killed by random factors. The two most pernicious are pulmonary/cerebral oedema and the dreaded Khumbu Icefall. The first one can hit anyone at any time, regardless of physical conditioning (as is shown by the number of experienced and acclimatized climbers that are struck down). The second one involves walking beneath huge seracs (ice cliffs) that can break away at any random moment (13 sherpas were killed recently when a serac fell on them). At least with Mount Everest, the probabilities are well-known to all and no-one tries to cover them up or rationalize them away. Anyone who looks at it for more than 5 minutes knows that climbing Mount Everest is an exercise in rolling the dice.

I would even hesitate to call climbing Mount Everest a sport, it's more like being a bigger risk-taker and dare-devil than the next guy.

Sound familiar?

[Bob Kuczewski]

This is about the best discussion on this topic that I've ever read.

Thanks to Rick and Airnut for some very thoughtful analysis.

[Frank Colver]

Off the top of my head I can recall two hang glider flights where i encountered extreme turbulence at low enough AGL that I would have died (no maybe about it) many years ago, if I had been flying a paraglider instead of a hang glider. I'm sure other HG pilots can say the same.

Because I had a ridged airframe then, I can enjoy Dockweiler Beach flying now at age 80.

Frank Colver

[AirNut]

As you say, Frank!

We all certainly have such stories because we're all humans and sometimes make poor risk-management decisions. When (not if) we do so, we want the margins to be in our favor as much as possible.

One time I let myself fall into the clutches of a pretty ugly rotor. The general conditions were smooth-ish 25 knots ridge lift, but about 20 or 30 degrees off. I didn't keep my eye sufficiently on the terrain and got into the lee of a projecting spur. I got a few heavy jolts then suddenly got rolled 90 degrees to the right within about a half a second, and then fell off to the side. I head quite a loud bang and the glider jolted. But I was able to roll out and beat a (very) hasty retreat. After landing (and a quick change of underwear) I inspected the glider and found a 30 degree bend in the right-hand dive strut (this was a single surface glider).

The bang that I heard was probably the airflow going negative over the right wing tip and blowing the tip down onto the strut. It's pretty sobering how much force was involved, enough to bend a pretty thick aluminium tube. Had that strut not been there, the outcome may have been a lot worse. A paraglider would have had no chance, no matter how much "active" flying the pilot might have been doing.

This is something to think about, particularly for those PG pilots who (sensibly) minimize their risk by flying only in laminar air, e.g. at the coast. Even then, it's still possible to get into a situation where the design of your aircraft will let you down. Of course, that's also possible with an HG (or any aircraft), but you have to try a lot harder with a hang glider and the margins are considerably wider.

[JoeF]

Confusion Coming TIME TO HAVE FOCUS ON HG IN THE WORLD BEFORE ALL YOUTH ARE TOTALLY CONFUSED!

ConfusionComing.JPG (81.49 KiB) Viewed 6630 times

[Frank Colver]

This is something to think about, particularly for those PG pilots who (sensibly) minimize their risk by flying only in laminar air, e.g. at the coast. Even then, it's still possible to get into a situation where the design of your aircraft will let you down. Of course, that's also possible with an HG (or any aircraft), but you have to try a lot harder with a hang glider and the margins are considerably wider.

One of the two flights I was thinking of, in my posting, and certainly the most sever turbulence I ever hit, was at a coastal site. When I finally got on the beach, after desperately trying to get down, from about 3 or 4 hundred feet, for about 8 minutes, I was right at the ocean water's edge. I had hit a rotor caused by the meeting of the offshore morning flow and the strong incoming afternoon marine air flow. A local HG pilot had warned me that it was going to get rough and he wasn't flying. Rough? That gets my vote for biggest understatement of that day. I ended up with bruises on my arms from slamming into my control bar numerous times. You mention a bang sound in the flight you describe. All these years later I can still recall my sail making loud bangs every time it went slack (maybe even negative) and then popped back up. Fortunately these were quick reversals so the glider didn't nose over into a dive. I was flying a Wills SST (it was Bob Wills' original prototype SST).

BTW - I had failed to think about why the sea gulls, that had been in the air a little earlier, were no longer anywhere around just before I launched. How often do we not see these little signs of danger?

FC