Found these.
Well, it's a thankless task but the Big Picture is important to me, personally. It gives me a slot to place my life in perspective and really understand what I was doing and what my level of risk was in the years I was flying (1978 - 1987). Of course, that was before the truly awesome slaughter of paragliding arrived - but what a comparison! Especially in light of the U$HPGA mantra that they are the about same thing. They are not. One is parachuting. The other is flying aircraft.
I appreciate the effort you and unnamed others (PM) took and it's easy to check these against my database in case I missed one. Neither of the injuries you mentioned have been entered because I don't know enough yet. I realized in forming the list that I had to draw a line on reporting injuries. Ankle, wrist, upper and lower arm and lower leg fractures and dislocations are common to both paragliding and hang gliding but these don't make it to the list unless they are multiple and serious. Thigh fractures do. Do you realize how much force it takes to fracture the femur? It's brutal - but rarely seen in hang gliding. Back injuries always make the list. Likewise head and neck, pelvic and internal. Multiple rib fractures, punctured lungs, etc. Unfortunately, details are often not reported so we end up with an underestimate.
Throughout my flying career, I was terrified of breaking my back and ending up in a wheelchair. Hang gliding was the most dangerous sport. There was very little else to compare it to. But when we crashed our hang gliders, the structure (the airframe) absorbed much of the blow. We were always wrecking our gliders and fixing them. We were always hitting the ground at an angle - rarely falling straight down. Our gliders were never slinging us like a dope on a rope into the ground, for God's sake. We were always centered. For us, angular momentum seemed to play a very small role in hang glider crashes. But the opposite is true with paragliders. In a lot of them, you are falling straight down and slam into the ground with enough force to almost kill you, but not quite - due to the drag of the collapsed parachute. Or when the paraglider goes crazy, you can be pendulumed into the ground. The injuries are truly horrible and more often terminal than in hang gliding.
For perspective, you must understand that my background was exclusively cross county in the stretch of years where hang gliding went from 35 miles to over 200. (I flew Torrey once on a "good" day and got really bored.) XC hang glider pilots, with their boots and survival gear, seem to me to be akin with professional NASCAR drivers compared with the ridiculous, uninspiring and vastly less prepared yahoos who seem to represent the majority of paraglider pilots. Because of the Paraglider Dead Man's Curve, for a paraglider pilot to rise to the same standard of survivability and competence as an XC hang glider pilot, he would have to equip himself with a ballistic chute (for the PDMC) plus all the other gear. You don't see this at all. Instead, you see aerobatic paraglider pilots occasionally with two or even three chutes while many others "brave" the PDMC in Spandex. They seem to have no concept of the risk. It's a bravado thing. And when the inevitable happens, normal atmospheric turbulence becomes "a freak gust of wind."
Parapeople, get out of the sky. You don't belong there.
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by Rick Masters » Fri Aug 22, 2014 11:53 pm 
