Home
The video that You Tube removed from my account was the Jody Lucas launch accident video that I made at the request of the organizers of the 2002 U.S. Paragliding Nationals immediately after the accident so that they could analyze it. They were grateful that I provided it. They were anxiously looking for pilot error and were disturbed that they could identify none from the high resolution video. I've had the low resolution version up on http://www.cometclones.com/mythology2002.htm for a couple of years but the one that was taken down was the high resolution version. I posted it so that anyone, hang glider or paraglider pilot, novice or expert or newbe, could view it and make their own decision about flying inland thermal sites with paragliders. The video shows the launch three times, first full frame in color, then zoomed in greyscale to highlight the rigging, then zoomed in color to highlight the pilot's response. It does not actually show the pilot hitting the ground but you get a pretty good idea of how hard he hits and how little he could do to prevent it. The crash was particularly poignant to me as I have launched many types of hang gliders from exactly the same spot, Gunter South Launch.
Hang glider pilots like to think that they get along just fine with paraglider pilots but this is not the case. There is a war going on against hang gliding and against the presentation of anything that casts a negative light on paragliding. The video was my gift to all pilots to use as a tool toward their personal survival. It is the highest quality video ever made of the effects of a thermal on a paraglider at launch. I am convinced that seeing it could save lives. However a complaint was successfully lodged with YouTube by a paraglider pilot that the video was excessively violent and it was removed. You are denied any right you may have thought you had to see this video because a paraglider pilot doesn't want you to see how dangerous paragliding can be.
I received this email from YouTube: OMG4975 has made a comment on Jody's Thermal - September 22, 2002:
"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!!"
Paraglider pilots also remove the hyperlinks to the global paragliding fatality list on Wikipedia whenever it is posted, all in an effort to present paragliding as much safer than it actually is.
Why?
Walter Kepplinger, Publisher of Austria's Free-Flyer Magazine (Freiflieger-Magazin http://www.fetzenundstanglfliegerforum.at/?p=6 ) accuses the German hang gliding and paragliding organization (DHV) of "duplicity" by inviting new pilots into paragliding with exaltations of the inherent safety of paragliders, but then, once they have been sold paragliding equipment and are advancing in flight school, they are warned of many specific dangers and sold additional "costly training and tests, labels, more safety training, supervised flight training, and check flights, which have been mainly used to rip off pilots."
So it is easy to see that there is a lot of money riding on preventing information on the dangers of paragliding from being dispersed because it threatens to cause a fall-off of new pilots. The most effective technique is to control the language itself -- even to the point of defining paragliding as free-flight and therefore drawing the inference that without paragliding there is no free-flight at all.
Hang glider pilots should pay attention. There is a reason that their sport is dwindling and their superb aircraft are being replaced by defective parachutes. There is more to it than meets the eye.
