HI Rafal, as always there are multiple aspects of this accident: - place: you've got to a place where the wind speeds up, due to venturi effect, it's not the best idea to follow this valley too deep, when there is strong wind. If in doubts, stay in front. Being high protects you, but only so long... - direction: you chose rightly to use the speed bar, yet you took wrong direction. The wind seems to be coming from Annecy, and around where you are it enters the valley and turns up the slopes. To gain as much distance against the wind as possible you should turn almost towards the lake (at least 45 degrees more to the left). Additionally what you want to achieve is to stay on the windward side of the ridges, especially when you get lower (and you will loose altitude thanks to speed bar). Instead you fly in direction 'behind' Dents de Lanfon, into a serious leeside, and the NW wind will push you even further there. Even if your idea was to fly XC shortcut towards Parmelan, that wouldn't be the right line, you should go more to the West to account the wind and stay on the safe side. - accident prevention: none, you don't pilot actively, you hold your risers, with no feel and delaying your reaction. You also press speebar with both full straight legs and therefore don't control the pitch or let yourself release it immediately. In 4-riser configuration, that's the only way. You're left with no tools against turbulences, just faith. - accident agrevation: once the collapse enters, you: a) don't release the speed bar, at all.... until hitting the ground. That's impressive, but also terribly lowers your chances to reinflate the wing. b) you lose balance, pulling your right hand all the way down [2:41], performing a negative spin. As impressive as it looks like - straight and no twist - it's that last thing you want now. This is where potentially easy recovery has gone away. c) you keep your legs straight instead of tucking them below you -> increases twist chance... and keeps the speed bar full on... - accident recovery (partial): a) you do release the right brake finally (looking for the reserve?), which lets the wing exit the negative spin (good) b) you don't catch the wing shooting forward (not easy, but can be done if timed correctly and strong brake input) 2:49 (...) wing collapses, cravate ties up, you enter autorotation c) you pull the left brake to exit the spiral [2:51] (good), at first not enough, then too much [2:59] At this point you exited autorotation, but stalled the remaining part of the wing, got the twist and finally lost the fight. This is quite a classic scenario and getting the right balance of slowing down the wing while not stalling it (for too long) is a delicate skill that requires good feel and good understanding of the wing. It's the most important, yet complex excercise of a good SIV. That's it for the analysis. As for conclusions, that will be more bitter.Given the whole cascade I wouldn't blame myself for not recovering from the accident It could have been done, but in stress it's a serious test and you'd still have the cravate situation to fix and also now a leeside to navigate. However, you failed at too many aspects to prevent the accident to consider yourself an independent pilot: lack of planning, lack of understaning of the terrain, no active piloting, bad habits. Also indecisiveness and inconsistency [0:50-1:40]. Extremely old equipment is just a cherry on top, it doesn't help, but no gear prevents bad decisions. IMO you should not fly alone. To be honest, given your airtime, something has gone really wrong with your paragliding education. On the positive, there is a lot of schools that will be willing to help.
Tell me answers to questions for money? How would I get ahold of you to mail you some cash and a notebook full of questions? I'm a payload not a pilot. I need some advice about some questions I had so I can learn to fly.
I don't think anybody's ever been born in a flying paraglider so you always start out as a passenger you just have to try and pull on these handles and not hit the ground until you get a better idea. I thought you could just put your hands up and fly on my epsilon 9 and it would get you through the turbulence. If you just weight shift for turns, it makes them pretty giant curves but I've got lots of room. When you fly over wait or close to the weight limit u10 towards a spiral situation when you turn because the bank Force adds up on the downforce and you lose glide ratio and it just doesn't fly well. It can be difficult to climb out of that hole
Thanks for sharing this. Very educational and a good example of what can happen. So very glad you walked away from it. Well done for throwing the reserve. Thank you to all those who have provided good feedback on this video🙏
-It seems that you hold onto your risers while flight, which reduces your feel for the wing. If you don't do this but only let your hands hang onto the break toggles, you can feel many collapses before they happen and you can avoid them. When flying accelerated, break inputs are an additional collapse risk. Therefore active flying/steering via the furthest back risers (C's on a 3-liner for example) is better. You can correct overshooting, but don't risk to collapse your glider with the steering input. -At the moment of the collapse in the beginning you didn't get of the speedbar. This is very problematic, because the wing can build energy very fast after recovering the collapse, or asymetrically as the "healthy" side accelerates and the collapsed side creates lots of drag. Also if the situation escalates, as yours did, you probably stay on speedbar, because your mind is overloaded heavily. Thats why the wing overshot heaviely and formed a cravatte. In the spiral dive you still were on the accelerator. The tip would be to jump off speedbar the moment your wing collapses, because it probably would have prevented a violent reaction, and it would not have given the wing the energy to overshoot, collapse and cravatte. I hope you didn't hurt yourself and you'll be able to take off without a bad feeling soon.
As much as I can get to an informed analysis of the incident, I need to say some of my comments are guesses, not random but based on the progression of the collapse of the wing and the loss of altitude. There was a partial right side collapse (< 30%) that caused the glider to turn right (right spin twice) followed by pitch down in a pendulum swing, and more collapse (approx. 50%) and right spin. A couple of factors contributed to inducing the spin (and twist of risers): the pilot held his feet on speedbar, and continued to apply right brake. His heels were almost stuck below and behind the speedbar, and his right hand never let the brake off. At one point both his hands were pulling on brakes while his arms wrapped around the risers toward his chest. His body was thrown up and down yet he didn't adjust his brake pressure before the surge of the glider forward. Small things that need correction: holding all the risers is not recommended (discouraged); pressing the speedbar should be uniform (both feet applying same pressure, or one foot applying pressure in the centre of the bar). He seemed to be pushing more with the right foot. If it was NW 20km wind and there were thermals (a number of rocky sides facing W and very likely some venturi through these gullies and valleys) and he needed (?) a lot of speedbar to penetrate, then the conditions were demanding more sensitive adjustments of brake and body shift. I would guess (since I don't know this Paratec P44) that he had a decent chance of recovery had he let go of the right brake (no brake), let go of the speedbar totally, and shifted his body weight a bit to the left, and resisted the right spin with his legs, and only applying a bit of brake when he swung back and just before the wing surging forward (i.e. reduce the pendulum effect). We shall never know for sure what chance of recovery he had because: 1. he didn't do anything to reduce any of the stages of the stall and spin, and 2. he threw the reserve. I hope this is useful and make sense! Luckily he landed safely!
Thanks for putting this out. Potentially life saving information for other pilots. I'm a beginner ppg pilot but immediately noticed that you keep pushing the speed bar through out the whole ordeal ;)
sure thing, the pilot has no prior siv/acro training and was fully overloaded by this situation, he noticed the speedbar bully pressed only on the video :)
Just seeing you holding the risers most of the flight isn't a good sign, you cannot feel what's happening with your wing (speed bar or not) . Overall, your incident is due to pilot errors, too much input, wrong timing, etc... You either need to work on your active piloting, do an SIV or change glider for something easier (or all of it). at the end, you are lucky the cow didn't get wrapped up, I have seen a pilot being dragged like a potatoes bag by a cow, not fun .... (for the pilot)
Release the speed bar. When the collapse occurs, the pilot's weight often goes frontward. Forgetting to release the speed bar happens more often then you can imagine( it happens to me once, 20 years ago ;-) and it took me several 360 before i understand what was the problem). So in case of collapse, first thing, fold your knees.
IMO (based on 250hrs airtime and 1 SIV at Flyeo, highly recommended): you flew into leeside turbulence which caused you to lose your balance and fall to the right, and as a result you applied a lot of right brake and caused a spin. One of the first things I learned in SIV was not to use my arms to try to restore my balance in such situations. Having a very stable harness also helps with this. You should have immediately come off your speedbar and gone "hands up!" on the brakes. With hands up the wing will recover from a spin on its own - which it did - but you have to be ready to use the brakes to catch the dive with which it exits the spin. You didn't catch the dive (and both the spin and the dive were particularly violent because you were still on your speedbar) and as a result you got a cravatte. You were very wise to throw your reserve when you did. Glad you are okay and thanks for sharing your video!
Dear all, thank you for sharing your ideas! Hopefully we can all learn from those mistakes! Let me clarify that the wind was not strong at the moment of the incident: pls look at the clouds - what do you see? The speed bar has been fully pressed only because of the flight tactics: the thermals were strong and frequent and the altitude was large thus the conclusion was to fly faster to the next thermal, at the cost of larger altitude loss, while totaly ignoring the associated risk of collapse - simply a sailplane pilot adapting McReady theory in paragliding.
Don't hold the risers. After the collapse, the wing appears to be fully open. Makes me think that you pulled lots of brake in your panic and stalled the wing. Defo come off the speed bar asap after a big whack. Lots of SIV Learn how to do big, super controlled wingovers. They are the basis for having a good feeling for your wing.
Rafal oh krass hab ich jetzt erst entdeckt. Na da ging es ja gut zur Sache und erstaunlich wie schnell man da doch immer am Retter runter kommt. Sah kurz so aus als landest du zu allen übel noch auf der Kuh. Die Story musst du mir beim nächsten mal im Detail erzählen auch wie du von der Almhütte wieder ins Tal gekommen bist. 😅
This is why I prefer fixed wing. What was wrong with that tea bag? That video was like german christmas, first: "hoch vom Himmel komm ich her", then: "süßer die Glocken nie klingen..." 😆👍
Well, the reserve throw was good and in time. Glad you're ok. No one else seems to have mentioned this, you should have disabled the wing and kept it disabled all the way to the ground rather than releasing it to drift you away from the cows. If it had downplaned you would have had a much harder landing.
In general aviation, the accident rates increase strongly as the the pilots total flight hours increase from approx 100h to 500h. This can presumably be attributed to growing overconfidence of relatively inexperienced pilots, see www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/2010s/media/201503.pdf
Hi , to me you was in the wrong place , because the wind ( I think ) cause the rotor from the mountain in front of you .the the pilot were in the right place . furthermore the little valley iscise the effect
at this altitude you're pretty much above the turbulences caused by the rock, it's not uncommon to even transition further to the leeside to cross towards the ridge behind Tournette. What he has encountered is likely to be just a thermal, possibly a one coming from a leeside, but pretty much anything could cause a collapse like this and the rest of the cascade was purely pilot induced. It may be not the most gentle place, but at this altitude, you're pretty much done with the strong turbulences.
Man, haven't seen such a noob flying for a while. Zero active flying, with hands on the raisers 24/7. Flying fully accelerated all the time, even during the time everything goes wrong. WTF Not knowing how to depower the wing once reserve is out. When the paraglider without pilot is flying better than the paraglider with a pilot, I think it's time to go back to squre one.
exactly! this situation was the reason why the pilot started to learn to fly: did many sivs and basic acro training, and had some 10 frontal collapses since then and all were well handled :)
HI Rafal, as always there are multiple aspects of this accident:
- place: you've got to a place where the wind speeds up, due to venturi effect, it's not the best idea to follow this valley too deep, when there is strong wind. If in doubts, stay in front. Being high protects you, but only so long...
- direction: you chose rightly to use the speed bar, yet you took wrong direction. The wind seems to be coming from Annecy, and around where you are it enters the valley and turns up the slopes. To gain as much distance against the wind as possible you should turn almost towards the lake (at least 45 degrees more to the left). Additionally what you want to achieve is to stay on the windward side of the ridges, especially when you get lower (and you will loose altitude thanks to speed bar). Instead you fly in direction 'behind' Dents de Lanfon, into a serious leeside, and the NW wind will push you even further there. Even if your idea was to fly XC shortcut towards Parmelan, that wouldn't be the right line, you should go more to the West to account the wind and stay on the safe side.
- accident prevention: none, you don't pilot actively, you hold your risers, with no feel and delaying your reaction. You also press speebar with both full straight legs and therefore don't control the pitch or let yourself release it immediately. In 4-riser configuration, that's the only way. You're left with no tools against turbulences, just faith.
- accident agrevation: once the collapse enters, you:
a) don't release the speed bar, at all.... until hitting the ground. That's impressive, but also terribly lowers your chances to reinflate the wing.
b) you lose balance, pulling your right hand all the way down [2:41], performing a negative spin. As impressive as it looks like - straight and no twist - it's that last thing you want now. This is where potentially easy recovery has gone away.
c) you keep your legs straight instead of tucking them below you -> increases twist chance... and keeps the speed bar full on...
- accident recovery (partial):
a) you do release the right brake finally (looking for the reserve?), which lets the wing exit the negative spin (good)
b) you don't catch the wing shooting forward (not easy, but can be done if timed correctly and strong brake input) 2:49
(...) wing collapses, cravate ties up, you enter autorotation
c) you pull the left brake to exit the spiral [2:51] (good), at first not enough, then too much [2:59]
At this point you exited autorotation, but stalled the remaining part of the wing, got the twist and finally lost the fight. This is quite a classic scenario and getting the right balance of slowing down the wing while not stalling it (for too long) is a delicate skill that requires good feel and good understanding of the wing. It's the most important, yet complex excercise of a good SIV.
That's it for the analysis. As for conclusions, that will be more bitter.Given the whole cascade I wouldn't blame myself for not recovering from the accident It could have been done, but in stress it's a serious test and you'd still have the cravate situation to fix and also now a leeside to navigate. However, you failed at too many aspects to prevent the accident to consider yourself an independent pilot: lack of planning, lack of understaning of the terrain, no active piloting, bad habits. Also indecisiveness and inconsistency [0:50-1:40]. Extremely old equipment is just a cherry on top, it doesn't help, but no gear prevents bad decisions. IMO you should not fly alone. To be honest, given your airtime, something has gone really wrong with your paragliding education. On the positive, there is a lot of schools that will be willing to help.
Thank you very much for the analysis and assesment! It is very helpful!
Excellent and very punctual analysis...
nice analysis, thank you
Very good, patient and accurate advise. We all appreciate your efforts.
Tell me answers to questions for money? How would I get ahold of you to mail you some cash and a notebook full of questions? I'm a payload not a pilot. I need some advice about some questions I had so I can learn to fly.
Complete lack of active piloting. This is not a pilot, is a passenger.
I don't think anybody's ever been born in a flying paraglider so you always start out as a passenger you just have to try and pull on these handles and not hit the ground until you get a better idea. I thought you could just put your hands up and fly on my epsilon 9 and it would get you through the turbulence. If you just weight shift for turns, it makes them pretty giant curves but I've got lots of room. When you fly over wait or close to the weight limit u10 towards a spiral situation when you turn because the bank Force adds up on the downforce and you lose glide ratio and it just doesn't fly well. It can be difficult to climb out of that hole
Thanks for sharing this. Very educational and a good example of what can happen. So very glad you walked away from it. Well done for throwing the reserve. Thank you to all those who have provided good feedback on this video🙏
-It seems that you hold onto your risers while flight, which reduces your feel for the wing. If you don't do this but only let your hands hang onto the break toggles, you can feel many collapses before they happen and you can avoid them. When flying accelerated, break inputs are an additional collapse risk. Therefore active flying/steering via the furthest back risers (C's on a 3-liner for example) is better. You can correct overshooting, but don't risk to collapse your glider with the steering input.
-At the moment of the collapse in the beginning you didn't get of the speedbar. This is very problematic, because the wing can build energy very fast after recovering the collapse, or asymetrically as the "healthy" side accelerates and the collapsed side creates lots of drag.
Also if the situation escalates, as yours did, you probably stay on speedbar, because your mind is overloaded heavily. Thats why the wing overshot heaviely and formed a cravatte. In the spiral dive you still were on the accelerator.
The tip would be to jump off speedbar the moment your wing collapses, because it probably would have prevented a violent reaction, and it would not have given the wing the energy to overshoot, collapse and cravatte.
I hope you didn't hurt yourself and you'll be able to take off without a bad feeling soon.
Thank you for uploading this.
Beginners like myself could learn a lot.
@@BereczkiAkos siv is crucial before going xc
@paraglidingSafety Sure!
I can't wait for the SIV held next summer for our team😁
If he had gotten off the speedbar right away the whole cascade would not have happened!
If
As much as I can get to an informed analysis of the incident, I need to say some of my comments are guesses, not random but based on the progression of the collapse of the wing and the loss of altitude. There was a partial right side collapse (< 30%) that caused the glider to turn right (right spin twice) followed by pitch down in a pendulum swing, and more collapse (approx. 50%) and right spin. A couple of factors contributed to inducing the spin (and twist of risers): the pilot held his feet on speedbar, and continued to apply right brake. His heels were almost stuck below and behind the speedbar, and his right hand never let the brake off. At one point both his hands were pulling on brakes while his arms wrapped around the risers toward his chest. His body was thrown up and down yet he didn't adjust his brake pressure before the surge of the glider forward. Small things that need correction: holding all the risers is not recommended (discouraged); pressing the speedbar should be uniform (both feet applying same pressure, or one foot applying pressure in the centre of the bar). He seemed to be pushing more with the right foot. If it was NW 20km wind and there were thermals (a number of rocky sides facing W and very likely some venturi through these gullies and valleys) and he needed (?) a lot of speedbar to penetrate, then the conditions were demanding more sensitive adjustments of brake and body shift. I would guess (since I don't know this Paratec P44) that he had a decent chance of recovery had he let go of the right brake (no brake), let go of the speedbar totally, and shifted his body weight a bit to the left, and resisted the right spin with his legs, and only applying a bit of brake when he swung back and just before the wing surging forward (i.e. reduce the pendulum effect). We shall never know for sure what chance of recovery he had because: 1. he didn't do anything to reduce any of the stages of the stall and spin, and 2. he threw the reserve. I hope this is useful and make sense! Luckily he landed safely!
It is very helpful! Thank you very much!
@@paraglidingSafety You are very welcome!
The one thing he did very well was his reserve throw.
Thanks for putting this out. Potentially life saving information for other pilots.
I'm a beginner ppg pilot but immediately noticed that you keep pushing the speed bar through out the whole ordeal ;)
sure thing, the pilot has no prior siv/acro training and was fully overloaded by this situation, he noticed the speedbar bully pressed only on the video :)
Just seeing you holding the risers most of the flight isn't a good sign, you cannot feel what's happening with your wing (speed bar or not) . Overall, your incident is due to pilot errors, too much input, wrong timing, etc... You either need to work on your active piloting, do an SIV or change glider for something easier (or all of it). at the end, you are lucky the cow didn't get wrapped up, I have seen a pilot being dragged like a potatoes bag by a cow, not fun .... (for the pilot)
Release the speed bar. When the collapse occurs, the pilot's weight often goes frontward. Forgetting to release the speed bar happens more often then you can imagine( it happens to me once, 20 years ago ;-) and it took me several 360 before i understand what was the problem). So in case of collapse, first thing, fold your knees.
IMO (based on 250hrs airtime and 1 SIV at Flyeo, highly recommended): you flew into leeside turbulence which caused you to lose your balance and fall to the right, and as a result you applied a lot of right brake and caused a spin. One of the first things I learned in SIV was not to use my arms to try to restore my balance in such situations. Having a very stable harness also helps with this. You should have immediately come off your speedbar and gone "hands up!" on the brakes. With hands up the wing will recover from a spin on its own - which it did - but you have to be ready to use the brakes to catch the dive with which it exits the spin. You didn't catch the dive (and both the spin and the dive were particularly violent because you were still on your speedbar) and as a result you got a cravatte. You were very wise to throw your reserve when you did. Glad you are okay and thanks for sharing your video!
never rest your hands on the straps
Dear all, thank you for sharing your ideas! Hopefully we can all learn from those mistakes!
Let me clarify that the wind was not strong at the moment of the incident: pls look at the clouds - what do you see? The speed bar has been fully pressed only because of the flight tactics: the thermals were strong and frequent and the altitude was large thus the conclusion was to fly faster to the next thermal, at the cost of larger altitude loss, while totaly ignoring the associated risk of collapse - simply a sailplane pilot adapting McReady theory in paragliding.
He certainly loves being on that speedbar 😉 Glad he was okay 👍
He lost his affection to the bar after the incident :) Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Don't hold the risers.
After the collapse, the wing appears to be fully open. Makes me think that you pulled lots of brake in your panic and stalled the wing.
Defo come off the speed bar asap after a big whack.
Lots of SIV
Learn how to do big, super controlled wingovers. They are the basis for having a good feeling for your wing.
Oh yeah - get off the speed bar (you had full bar applied after the collapse!)
Lucky! Perfect parachute lucky landing 👌
Rafal oh krass hab ich jetzt erst entdeckt. Na da ging es ja gut zur Sache und erstaunlich wie schnell man da doch immer am Retter runter kommt. Sah kurz so aus als landest du zu allen übel noch auf der Kuh. Die Story musst du mir beim nächsten mal im Detail erzählen auch wie du von der Almhütte wieder ins Tal gekommen bist. 😅
ja das kann auch sehr schnell gehen. dort gibt es viele Wanderwege, auch ein kurzer ins Tal
This is why I prefer fixed wing.
What was wrong with that tea bag?
That video was like german christmas, first: "hoch vom Himmel komm ich her", then: "süßer die Glocken nie klingen..." 😆👍
the problem was the pilot lacking the skill to fly this class of wing in this fully accelerated configuration
Well, the reserve throw was good and in time. Glad you're ok.
No one else seems to have mentioned this, you should have disabled the wing and kept it disabled all the way to the ground rather than releasing it to drift you away from the cows. If it had downplaned you would have had a much harder landing.
Thank You for this lesson. Clearly was not the best day for paragliding. In that condition why not big ears, B-stall ? Any comments ?
and why would he want to increase his descent rate and sink straight into the leeside?
Celebrating that day...
Go on an SIV course
All through that you didn't come off speedbar and didn't pilot your wing
What a pretty place to crash. Cow bells, awesome
In general aviation, the accident rates increase strongly as the the pilots total flight hours increase from approx 100h to 500h. This can presumably be attributed to growing overconfidence of relatively inexperienced pilots, see www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/2010s/media/201503.pdf
That's called "Intermediate Syndrome"
Just knowing what it is, is a good step in not falling prey to it 😉😎
Bylo troche szczescia, uff
Retour sans casse ouff👍,, les vaches vont ce passer le mot,, nous aussi ont a vus un ovni😂
Hi , to me you was in the wrong place , because the wind ( I think ) cause the rotor from the mountain in front of you .the the pilot were in the right place . furthermore the little valley iscise the effect
at this altitude you're pretty much above the turbulences caused by the rock, it's not uncommon to even transition further to the leeside to cross towards the ridge behind Tournette. What he has encountered is likely to be just a thermal, possibly a one coming from a leeside, but pretty much anything could cause a collapse like this and the rest of the cascade was purely pilot induced. It may be not the most gentle place, but at this altitude, you're pretty much done with the strong turbulences.
👍💜💜💜💛💜💜💜
I see a lot of scared cows.
Poor cow.
Man, haven't seen such a noob flying for a while.
Zero active flying, with hands on the raisers 24/7.
Flying fully accelerated all the time, even during the time everything goes wrong. WTF
Not knowing how to depower the wing once reserve is out.
When the paraglider without pilot is flying better than the paraglider with a pilot, I think it's time to go back to squre one.
exactly and this is what the pilot have done
He should play Golf and not fly…… absolutely no skills
exactly! this situation was the reason why the pilot started to learn to fly: did many sivs and basic acro training, and had some 10 frontal collapses since then and all were well handled :)