[JoeF]

Following reply was intended for posting here in this forum.
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Hi Joe,
As I mentioned in a private post, when I was making the documentary film of the 1981 XC contests in Owens Valley -- Aoli, Comet Clones & Pod People -- two Swiss recreational pilots spent the summer there flying collapsible hang gliders. These hang gliders were brought from Switzerland as airport check-in luggage. They were packed in custom backpacks about a meter long and weighed between 35 and 40 pounds. They were single surface gliders but I flew alongside them in my Seagull 10-meter copy (a Spectra Zodiac) and I could not get higher than these Swiss pilots -- flying in shorts in simple, lightweight open harnesses!!!

So this brings us to the significant issue of lost opportunity costs, which represent what could have been done if some other activity or technology had not pre-empted an otherwise destined-to-be-successful technology. It is also important to note that the superiority or inferiority of a technology has nothing to do with this displacement. In our world of hedonistic simpletons, deliberate misinformation and war-like marketing tactics, such displacement is a function of cynical marketing and manipulated consumer perceptions. The success of the inferior VHS recording system over the vastly superior Sony Beta format comes to mind. Later, pro-sumer DV made inroads but was quickly eclipsed by hard drive storage, culminating in dedicated TIVO units for the average consumer. Now TIVO is being replaced by cheap online server storage. I'm not sure where this will go next but the example tells us that nothing stays the same when there is a dynamic at work.

This progression is a corollary to the hang gliding vs. paragliding debacle, where we see hang gliding displaced globally by paragliding -- a tragically inferior form of flight. The dynamic is not the pronounced aerodynamic inferiority of paragliders but rather the negative fiscal effects of that inferiority. These grow in relevance with every accident, with every fatality. Someday soon, the press and the public will understand the significance of the airframe and the disastrous implications of not having one. Someday soon, the insurers will come to understand this as well. The catastrophe at the Paragliding World Championships in Piedrahita have accelerated this understanding like nothing before. Paragliding is a house built on a foundation of sand. It has long been a fraud foisted upon sport aviation. As I have warned since 2009, hang gliding must split away from paragliding or it will suffer as a partner the consequences of paragliding's downfall: loss of flying sites, cancelled insurance, negative press and a drying-up of participants.

If hang gliding can survive the approaching turbulence, the opportunity to replace paragliding with compact, lightweight, back-packable hang gliders will once-again return. I know you will take delight in this challenge, Joe, because we now have lightweight carbon spars, stronger than steel, that did not exist 30 years ago. Regardless, the concept was proven. I witnessed it. And it will then be up to the soon to be devastated hang glider and paraglider manufacturers to resurrect this lost and lucrative opportunity with modern technology.

Rick Masters
Mythology of the Airframehttp://www.cometclones.com/mythology2011.htm

[Rick Masters]

Hey Joe,

Thought you might be interested to know that the reference to the only global paragliding fatality list http://www.cometclones.com/mythology2011.htm was removed from Wikipedia a few hours ago. Now the nearest thing available for those looking for answers is a hyperlink to "death" under the topic In-flight Wing Deflation (Collapse).

Here it is. Wikipedia should be ashamed.

>>Death is the termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. The word refers both to the particular processes of life's cessation as well as to the condition or state of a formerly living body. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or intentional trauma resulting in terminal injury. The nature of death has been for millennia a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical enquiry, and belief in some kind of afterlife or rebirth has been a central aspect of religious faith. In modern scientific enquiry, the origin and nature of consciousness has yet to be fully understood; any such view about the existence or non-existence of consciousness after death therefore remains speculative.

The reasons can be traced back to here http://www.paraglidingforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=p265467

This is how paraglider pilots protect themselves from the most dangerous aspect of paragliding: the truth! This is the second time they've removed it. They must think it makes their precious sport look bad to have a sourced list of about 850 dead paraglider pilots in the past decade.

Hang glider pilots, parents, spouses and friends should realize how these fascist tactics affect the lives of people who are suckered into believing that safety-compromised parachutes that cannot withstand any negative G are equivalent to real aircraft with airframes. I say, "Enough!"