Yes, it was, because pure luck, and nothing but luck, allowed him to still be alive at the end of the day. Either the power lines or the rock could have finished him off!
This is fun?????? Flying while knowing that the end could come suddenly at any moment from normal atmospheric air movement.
Even if the guy we saw, working on a non-collapsible paraglider, is successful it won't stop line twist, death spiral, and other malfunctions of this highly flawed aircraft.
I wonder if any aerodynamic engineers are paragliding?
I wonder if any aerodynamic engineers are paragliding?
Frank, I can't say that I've run across that. Maybe on the manufacturing side. But you'd have to have some screws loose to fly one if you really understood airfoils. I do make note of the few professions I have come across, but they are rarely mentioned in the press. Thank God, as a mechanical engineering student, I was taught to fly hang gliders by two aeronautical engineering students!
The helpless falling human who got killed yesterday was a chiropractor who, like you, also enjoyed whitewater kayaking. And like me, trying his best at a good song.
"He was going around and his parachute started to twist and it got a wee bend in it," said a witness. ''He went down, he hit the rocks and tumbled and then we saw the parachute go a bit further and then we lost sight of him."
Dave Jongsma and his daughters
Oh, misty eye of the mountain below Keep careful watch of my brothers' souls And should the sky be filled with fire and smoke Keep watching over Durin's son
If this is to end in fire Then we should all burn together Watch the flames climb high into the night Calling out for the rope, sent by and we will Watch the flames burn on and on the mountain side hey
And if we should die tonight Then we should all die together Raise a glass of wine for the last time Calling out for the rope Prepare as we will Watch the flames burn on and on the mountain side Desolation comes upon the sky
Now I see fire, inside the mountain I see fire, burning the trees And I see fire, hollowing souls And I see fire, blood in the breeze And I hope that you'll remember me
Oh, should my people fall Then surely I'll do the same Confined in mountain halls We got too close to the flame Calling out father hold fast and we will Watch the flames burn on and on the mountain side Desolation comes upon the sky
Now I see fire, inside the mountain I see fire, burning the trees And I see fire, hollowing souls And I see fire, blood in the breeze And I hope that you'll remember me
And if the night is burning I will cover my eyes For if the dark returns then My brothers will die And as the sky's falling down It crashed into this lonely town And with that shadow upon the ground I hear my people screaming out
Now I see fire, inside the mountain I see fire, burning the trees And I see fire, hollowing souls And I see fire, blood in the breeze
I see fire, oh you know I saw a city burning (fire) And I see fire, feel the heat upon my skin (fire) And I see fire (fire) And I see fire (burn on and on and mountains side)
As a father of a grown daughter (I gave up extreme sports to raise her), this brought tears to my eyes. It's not for the one who is lost, it's the pain for those left behind. The pain that lasts a lifetime.
A lot of these folks were engaged as breadwinners in raising several young, completely dependent children. You would not believe how many young children have lost their mothers or fathers to paragliding. It is greater than the fatality numbers themselves. Now society must often pick up much of the tab.
Here's a quick breakdown from the 102 paragliding deaths I know of from last year (Dec to Jan): 2017 - occupations of people killed paragliding medical doctor/farmer/water engineer/ice cream deliveryman/surgeon/housewife/professional joyrider/florist/butcher/managing director of a sporting goods company/heavy metal keyboardist/forester/electrical engineering student/RAF pilot/professional joyrider/soldier/lawyer/millionaire businessman
I consider the average gullibility level and lack of aerodynamic knowledge to be way high. A few, like the RAF pilot, have no excuse and win Darwin Awards.
This is fun??????
They're fear junkies, Frank. They love it. And yes, Dave, that's what makes it "a nice day," even with a broken leg.
-------------------------- Steven Kotler,The Playing Field, Psychology Today The Addictive Nature of Adrenaline Sports Ever wondered about the addictive nature of adrenaline sports? Posted Mar 15, 2008
...A little while back, I called Dr. Michael Davis, an Emory University neuroscientist who specializes in fear, to ask after the notion of the adrenaline junky.
“Fear is an incredibly strong emotion,” Davis told me. “If something scares us, the body immediately releases endorphins, dopamine and norepinephrine. Endorphins mitigate pain, dopamine and norepinephrine are performance enhancers. There haven’t been direct studies on so-called action sports, but the general scientific thinking is that the more fearful a certain sport makes you, the greater the release of these chemicals. The greater the release of these chemicals, the greater the addiction-like symptoms.”
It also helps to remember that cocaine—long considered the most addictive substance on earth—does nothing more than flood the brain with dopamine. Norepinephrine, on the other hand, mimics the second most addictive drug on earth: speed.
Nor are our neurochemicals one to one matches for these illicit drugs. In fact, they’re significantly more powerful. The most common endorphin produces by the body is 100 times more powerful (thus more addictive) than morphine.
Which is to say, the particular neurochemicals produced by action sports are far more potent than any drug single drug around and—since one cannot cocktail massive amounts of speed, cocaine, and heroin without ending up dead—adrenaline sports are really the only way to get this kind of taste.
The problem with action sports and adrenaline junkies is that, as Emory Universities Dr. Greg Berns figured out (for more on this check out Berns’ excellent work “Satisfaction”), you need risk to trigger reward and the body gets used to risk. In other words, just like drug addicts who need to take more and more of a substance to get back to the level of high they desire, action sports addicts need to up their danger quotient to achieve the same effect... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-playing-field/200803/the-addictive-nature-adrenaline-sports -----------------------------
I took up hang gliding so I could challenge myself to distance attempts without an engine, using an airframe so I wouldn't die. (Alright, paragliders weren't invented yet but some guys were soaring skydiving canopies at the beach.) From day one, I never considered myself an adrenaline junkie, although I did have my unexpected moments. A good flight was always a long flight. It was the greatest way to get high that I ever found. There was no question that I was addicted. I'd always fly with a quart of whole milk strapped to my keel. It would be ice-cold when I landed, hours later.. Over and over again, I'd sit under my glider in the shade from the desert sun and drink that ice-cold milk and relish the lingering high. It was a magic moment. A magic memory. What could be better? A hundred times the adrenaline? No thanks.
These days, a great thermal day on a hang glider is when paragliders are collapsing all around you. You see, hang gliders don't deliver the kind of fear and adrenaline surge you can experience with every thermal pop on a paraglider. You're not going to die. You're wing isn't going to collapse. You're going to gain altitude. No worries. To get that huge adrenaline hit on a hang glider, you have to do dangerous stunts. Stunts weren't my thing. My most extreme stunt, if you can call it that, was getting dumped out of a thermal and recovering properly. I just loved to fly hang gliders. High and far and free.
Yes, in addition to white water boating I also make song but not with my voice but with my elderberry tree branch flutes.
My sense of self preservation has always overridden any fear produced high. My most euphoric after flight moments have always been from the beauty and sense of flying and any close calls I had were very sobering and brought into question: do I want to continue to do this?
I'm sure I have written about this on this forum before but here goes:
My most euphoric hang glider flight that produced a high that lasted all through the night afterward and still comes back as I write about it was in a situation that would have collapsed a paraglider but that was not what produced the feeling of euphoria.
I was circling in a very tight thermal near the side of a steep mountain. In order to use this lift I had to "go over the falls" in part of every circle. The small core had strong vertical velocity which would more than gain back what was lost going into the more spread out sink outside the core. But i knew that each time, as I climbed in the core, that I had to go outside because the mountain was too close for me to risk centering around the core. In each circle the bottom would drop out when I hit the sink and then a big boost when I hit the core again.
OK, so now you're thinking: wait a minute, this sounds like it was an adrenaline high from this sudden repeated action that made this flight euphoric. Not in the least. The repeated bottom dropping out and sudden rapid lift was not adrenaline producing because I had no fear that I and my glider couldn't handle it normally. Thank heavens I wasn't flying a soaring parachute.
No, not adrenaline: This is what made that flight euphoric and very memorable. There was a raven circling about 100 feet below me and he/she was also going in and out of the lift zone. At that time I could do a fairly good raven call and I would call down to the raven. The raven would turn its head up to look at me and then call back to me. We continued to do this until the thermal fizzled out and we went our separate ways. The one time I spoke to the raven in english was to say: "another million years of evolution and you'll be up here where I am".
I felt like I was a fellow bird while flying and communicating with the raven. That's euphoria! No adrenaline induced additives needed.
A mother's terrible grief turns to hate She says the commercial joyriding "instructor," Ariel Salazar, who cruelly claimed her daughter had unfastened her leg straps and jumped to her death, was drunk.
"Killed by an indifferent guy, a swindler, who did what he wanted without caring about human life, drunk, without anyone controlling him, he did not secure the equipment and let her fall into the abyss like a dog ... a murderer is loose... She was going to save lives from incurable diseases with stem cells ... she worked in the most important laboratory in Germany ... and she knows that filthy rat killed me, too ..."
The take off - see the leg straps dangling...
------------ Paragliding news really sucks, doesn't it? Form a national hang gliding association. Leave paragliding behind.
May 5, 2012 Reverberations of Mythology Mythology of the Airframe Rick Masters
I have come to the conclusion that the right of individuals to practice free-flight is being threatened in a very big way by commercial tandem operators. A report comes today that a tandem operator launched with a passenger when he was not secured by his leg loops. Fortunately, he executed a quick 360 turn and safely landed at takeoff. Last week in Canada, a commercial hang glider pilot, launching from Woodside, killed his passenger when she fell from 300 meters, apparently due to not being correctly hooked in. Upon landing, no doubt distraught, he pulled the video card from his camera and swallowed it, capturing the rapt attention of the mainstream press. On April 1, both pilot and passenger were reported killed on a paraglider in the French Antilles. Little information has been released about this accident, although the pilot was the FFVL representative to the Antilles. This terrible tragedy follows on the heels of the death of another young woman in Brazil, also on a commercial tandem paraglider, who slipped from her harness and fell to her death just south of Rio de Janeiro. In this case, just like the Woodside incident, the video evidence disappeared. As if this wasn't enough, a power tandem paraglider pilot gave a ride to a skydiver in Oregon on the same day as the Woodside accident. Against FAA regulations, and during a time of intense condemnation of skydiving from tandem flights by the USHPA, the skydiver attempted a drop from a powered tandem paraglider. He was killed when he deployed too low. Incredibly, the video camera evidence also disappeared in this accident. Due to the apparently willfully-blind decisions of the free-flight segment to destroy themselves and their sport, I have pulled the Mythology of the Airframe web site from the Internet to avoid being caught up in the sad result. But I have to ask one thing. What the hell is wrong with these “professional” pilots who are killing their unwitting paying passengers in this most terrifying fashion? They should not be sanctioned, even under the widespread global ruse of "training." In my opinion, no tandem commercial operations should be sanctioned for hire, ever again.
My Facebook message to Natalia's mother: Maria, I am so sad. Nothing could possibly prepare you for this. May you draw strength from my love for you and your daughter to get you through this terrible time. God embraces her and holds her in His arms. Nothing else matters. Rick Masters
Argentine police have raided the home of Ariel Salazar, the commercial paragliding joyrider who dropped Natalia Vargas to her death on December 29, and seized his computer, two cell phones, a digital camera and two thumb drives. Also, the national hybrid free-flight organization of Argentina, the FAVL, has disowned Salazar after verifying that he did not have a tandem license or insurance for tandem flights as he had claimed. FAVL has, in fact, placed itself at the disposal of the authorities "to provide them with everything necessary to help clarify this fateful event." Like many joyriders before him who likewise lost their clients due to their professional negligence, Salazar appears to be totally screwed and on a course to prison and hard time for manslaughter, or worse, "culpable homicide." The GoPro video camera, mounted on a selfi stick that Natalie Vargas held in her hand during the take off run, has not been found. This apparatus is commonly suspended from the paraglider so it cannot be accidently dropped in flight by the client. Salazar had claimed he didn't know where it was. It was not found near the woman's body. These cameras have a long history of vanishing immediately following client fatalities. The police were no doubt hoping to find it during the raid on Salazar's home.
Natalia's parents, however, have presented a video of their daughter's take off which clearly shows the leg straps dangling at the moment she leaves the ground, followed by Natalia slipping down in her unfastened harness. At this moment the camera operator, clearly understanding what is happening, exclaims anxiously in Spanish as Salazar lets go of his left brake to try to grab Natalia. At this decisive moment, he should have flown off to the side and crashed into trees as it is well known that this is the only way to save the client's life. Instead, the paraglider is seen flying straight out, rapidly gaining altitude over the descending canyon while Salazar tries to hold Natalia, who he said was screaming and struggling in panic before she fell away. The video: https://youtu.be/3pwkKSHtRl4
Devastated: In the government building in Tucuman, where paragliding joyriding is promoted by the Office of Tourism, Natalia's mother and father appeal to the president of Argentina to recognize their plight. "My President, Please read my letter," reads the mother's sign. "Eduardo Deheza, My daughter hired the trip with you. Your silence kills her in the worst way. - Do not be an accomplice to this murder," reads the father's sign. Natalia's friend on the left had travelled from Germany with her. She can be seen in the video on the second tandem paraglider as it follows Natalia and Salazar off the mountain. She no doubt had witnessed her poor friend Natalia fall to her death, a terrible memory that she will carry with her for the rest of her life.
The story of Natalia Vargas is the most important in paragliding today. Yet it is only mentioned here at U.S. Hawks. Shame on every soaring parachutist for not discussing this. Shame on every free-flight forum for not discussing this. Shame on the USHPA and all its members for thinking they are a world unto themselves. They are not. Paragliding is a small world and you are all in it. And in some part, you are responsible, because you assume leadership and the world looks to you for direction.
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