Could you land a hang glider in this field? Of course! What could be better? But the soaring parachutist being loaded into the helicopter broke both legs and suffered internal injuries trying to land there. What eventually happens to inland soaring parachutists is, during the last phase of a landing approach, the paraglider encounters turbulence generated by local ground heating and collapses, dumping the "commander" to the ground hard enough to break something. Usually, it's one leg, but often it is two. Not only are both legs broken, but due to the force generated by falling several meters, the femurs - the strongest bones in the body - snap like toothpicks. The back and pelvis are commonly damaged as well. The result is the famous "paraglider's limp," worn like a badge of honor by soaring parachutists as if to say, "Look at me, I was skillful enough to avoid getting killed!" when it was really nothing but dumb luck. A crap shoot survivor to make noise while many others lay silent.
http://g1.globo.com/goias/noticia/2015/ ... goias.htmlParagliding - the closest thing to flying like a cement block.*
* helicopter required.
I do think it's important to present statistics in both raw numbers and normalized by participation
When I started producing a
list of paragliding injuries and fatalities around 2008, I realized immediately that there were far too many single leg fractures to document, so I listed only accidents involving both broken legs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120104172 ... gy2011.htmThe important thing to take away is that these are not "crash landings" in the manner of a bad hang glider landing. Rather, these are what happens when your "aircraft" vanishes and drops you vertically out of the sky. This represents gambling with your body on a level never seen before the advent of paragliding. It adds an additional level of (unacceptable) risk to that accepted by freeflight participants using (energy-retentive and protective) airframes. To me, it is no longer pure aviation, but a deadly mania incorporating a very high level of denial.
In terms of statistics, it is important to understand what participation means. If you average out all the beach flying and one-time novice registrations and public joy-riders with inland mountain thermal flying, what does that mean? Lots of people and organizations generate "statistics" by inflating participation numbers and present them to the public to make the case that "paragliding is safe." There were over 70,000 joyrides given in Fethiye last year. Each joyrider increases global participation under the guise of "instruction." This dilution of participation numbers is part of the statistics scam. It prevents the truth about paragliding from coming to light.
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