MY FRIEND FIRST OF ALL , YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT WE NEVER FLY WEARING SHORTS, AS IF YOU WERE GOING TO THE BEACH . THAT ALONE SHOWS YOUR IGNORANCE ABOUT PARAGLIDING AND EXPLAINS YOUR MISTAKE LIKE THIS ONE '' Paragliding mistake at Ager Spain '' AND I SAY THAT BECAUSE YOU SCRATCHED YOUR KNEE . ALSO , WHEN THE WIND IS VERY STRONG DONT PUSH THE BRAKES SO MUCH. JUST LET THE PARAGLIDE FLY . I THINK YOU NEED GROUND HANDLING .
Never spend time close behind the ridge!!! When you realize you are stuck, turn and get away!!! Land down on the flats as far from the ridge as possible! Never linger in the rotor, or worse: try to land there!! Lucky guy you!
OMG Very poor airmanship, (you could have been seriously injured or worse) please concentrate on flying its a serious matter, & get proper training, you had plenty of opportunity to escape the rotor by flying directly downwind immediately but you did the worst possible by flying directly behind to the cliff edge where the rotor is maximum so training / understanding is very poor
Glad you’re ok. Bet you don’t do that again :). So can’t you just pull the a and b risers and it work like a speed bar? I’m not a pilot… was in the early 90s. Dixon white was my instructor. He was cool :)
This was pretty awful to watch. Based on your situation I was really sure you were going to have a very nasty fall because of rotor. Looks like you didn’t make any decisions in you flight at all - you didn’t decide to fly the ridge, you ended up drifting back over it. Once you were over the ridge you didn’t decide to fly away from the ridge and get out of Venturi and avoid inevitable rotor. Once your indecision had committed to you landing had plenty of time to turn into wind so you had a gentle top landing. Thanks for sharing, really glad to see it was a lot less dramatic than it could of been. Safe flying
your biggest mistake was to stay near the cliff at all costs..... the moment you knwo that you are not going to make it you need to turn 180° into the lee side and go fully accelerated in the direction of the lee and leave it behind..... happened also to me already... and if you fly ore often in this area maybe a fatser glider could be a solution to prevent futher problems.... stay safe bro
Looked like at 2.40 amd 2.50 you were close to making it, butbtehn you crabbed to the right, losing your forward gains. Hard to judge on a wide angle lens tho. And once commited, turn and run as far as you can
Gliding is constant life and death decision making. We should always have contingency plans and know what we are going to do in case those contingencies arise. This is a good learning incident for you and others, thanks for posting.
Hi I did a Volbiv from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean last summer and came by Ager for a week because some friends were flying there. I will comment a couple of things: 1. Know your glider. On your EN-A its just difficult to correct such mistakes. I've been flying 2liners for some years now and you just have a massive safety margin in terms of speed and control during accelerated flight. (Not saying you should step up on a 2 liner) 2. Know the area (wind systems) and generally always know where the wind is coming from. Thermals are always better on their luv side. The lee side of a thermal is often very strong sink plus the wind that you now need to penetrate to get back into lift. 3. Learn how you fly active on speed bar. Start that high above the terrain. Best in not super aggressive conditions. At some point you can fly the whole ridge of Ager on speed bar using rear risers. (This is quiet advanced but you have to be able to push your speed bar in such a situation. You should have been able to get over the edge. 4. Commit: You basically had two and a half options here. Option 1: Speed bar over the ridge. Would be my first choice until I realize I won't make it. Then option 2: Turn around and fly downwind. If in sink, push some speed bar. Behind Ager I did fly some nice flat land thermals until I reconnected with the higher mountain ridges. To just stay there and top land is rather risky as you realized and not really a smart option. 5. Flying should be intuitive but in a way you should always have a plan B. Anyway, glad you're safe and nice greetings from Switzerland 🙂
Quel dommage, on met souvant trop l'accent sur le parachute de secour alors que l'accelerateur est aussi vitale, un accelerteur a fond t'aurait sauvé. Finalement la plus dangereuse des erreurs que je peux pointer, c'est d'avoir decider de te poser dans les rouleaux de la montagne surtout avec des vents si forts. Si tu te rend compte que tu te fais assipirer, il faut accepter sont sort et ce laisser emporter par le vents pour t'éloigner le plus loins possible de la montagne et atterir dans la valé suivante fuyant ainsi les rouleaux potentiellement mortel de la montagne. Ce faire aspirer comme ca est tres fréquent quand tu vole principalement en vent dynamique et Il ne faut pas se laisser tromper par sa vitesse au sol, par exemple un vent dynamique de 35 km/h frappant les falaises est dévié et passe d'une direction parlelle au sol a diagonale au sol, Sa vitesse au sol parait moindre (ex:25km/h) car les autres 10km/h sont convertie en ascendance ce qui te donne un faut sentiment de sécurité, seulement une fois derriere la montagne(ou trop loin devant) tu perd l'ascendance et tu retrouve a nouveau avec un vent parallele au sol a 35 km/h. Merci d'avoir Partagé :) ! (désolé pour l'orthographe)
Can you give us your decision process? You wrote that you were freaking out after the collapse, which is kinda normal :) But wondering why you kept doing the same thing until the landing. You wanted to go back to the other side, no matter what? Else? My assumption : you had plan A and never considered a plan B, C or D. Thanks for sharing in any case, it's never easy to show our mistakes but it's there that you and us can learn the most :) Cheers and glad you are fine!
Like I said before, my thoughts were; 1. Try to get in front of the cliff 2. Fly the glider as long as I can control it. It was the first time I was flying in rotors so I was overwhelmed and I didn't consider flying into the wind to a safer location.
It would be much clearer and more understandable if the video had no music, also if there was no speeding up of the video. A very unpleasant situation, it all ended well.
Thank you for posting this it's interesting to see how high in the air you realized your mistake. I always try to watch these videos because I'm learning to be a pilot and I'm flying an epsilon 9. I'm heavy on the wing. Does the height of the cliff effect how deep the Ventura effect goes? How far away do you see this landing place or did you just guess that something would appear?
I think higher is the cliff and stronger will be the venturi effect. It was an emergency landing so I didn't really choose a location, I actually did my best to smooth the landing to stay in one piece.
Depending on the height of the cliff and the wind speed, it can be as long as 8 times the height of the cliff to escape turbulence. When you are in such a situation (behind the ridge) and you feel you will not be able to come back upwind, the safest solution is to flee away tailwind with accelerator and then you find a nice spot to land. Nothing serious happened. A good lesson 😊
Glad you ended up safe. As a Hang glider pilot; Ager was my first foreign, mountain flying holiday. I survived the week unscathed. But a paraglider pilot, with us at the event, did not! I had just landed at the ‘Campsite’, after a 40minute ‘Top to Bottom’, was packing away my glider; looked up saw a hang glider & paraglider, close together, approaching to land. The paraglider applied (too much) brake, to let the hang glider get ahead and land first. Next thing I saw was the paraglider collapse the left side of his wing. The chute span rapidly, tangling his lines and he proceeded to fall some 300ft onto the rock hard ground in the campsite. A colleague was just exiting the shower block and was shocked to see this poor guy hit the ground 10ft in front of him. Says he saw him bounce about 6ft. He was smashed up. There was no ambulance available! We struggled, initially, to stop the locals from moving him but, to no avail. After a while they decided to just pick him up, plonk him in the back of a landrover and drove him off somewhere. Never heard about him again. Hope he survived? It was a lesson well learned; Just how quickly things can go tragically wrong. I’m sure, seconds before the guys wing collapsed, he thought he was doing the right thing and had no idea what was about to happen! Ager is not for the faint hearted. The air can be extremely turbulent (even without getting behind the ridge!) and the weather can change rapidly. On a couple of days there, at the end of the day, I witnessed clear skies morph into large Thunder clouds in around 20 mins!!! Ager has a wonderful pair of high ridges which can provide for some great flying but, the place can be ruthless on those who are ignorant or disrespectful of the conditions. If you’re a ‘low air time’ pilot or new to Ager, I can only recommend you spend your first day there talking to other, more experienced, pilots. Watch what they do, observe conditions throughout that day, see how the more experienced handle them before taking ‘the leap’ yourself.
Wow, good to see you are save. I also fly the Symphonia and for me it's nice to see how the glider react in this situation. A perfect mix of savety and performance. But, yout don't want these collapses on (full) speedbar. I'm right back from SIV and can tell, in this situation on full bar the symphonia react's pretty agressive. So, for me the right choise were to turn around and land save in the next valley.
Thanks for sharing, this will help beginners a lot. It's good to see what happens when you are on the wrong side of the mountain. Glad that you didn't hurt yourself (besides a few scratches). Wondering, were you not able to fly away from the ridge to see if you could get some lift to create enough clearance and try to fly back over the ridge? Seems that the weather was very active.
good lessons learned... most of the time we need do make a quick decision and the first thing is to keep our 180-degree view around... you've got a good ending for this time... thanks for sharing
So glad you're ok and thank you for sharing this for the community. It's interesting to see how we respond to situations that we "know" the technique for, when we've made a mistake and get scared. I imagine that when you realized you were further behind the ridge than you wanted to be, you may have thought "oh, I'm in a bad place" and that story kept you from persisting on the speedbar. You knew where you needed to be, but you didn't persist in doing the things that you 'knew' you needed to do to get there. These are emotional lessons. The technical lessons - how to use the speedbar in active air, with confidence and persistence - can only come with time and only once the emotional lessons are integrated. The lesson might sound like "When I get scared, I lose confidence in my decision making and my technical abilities. So, when I recognize my fear, I fly immediately to a safe landing, and try again on my next flight." You really shouldn't be pushing through huge fear responses while paragliding. If you are, you're in over your head. A guide/instructor can help you in these moments. I make a lot of decisions for my students on XC Clinics that allow them to relax and do what they know. Here's a video about high wind, that also has a lot of lessons about using your speedbar in active air. Hope it helps. Again, thanks for sharing and safe flights!!! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lVuWWxcbka4.htmlsi=hh1HoGIzbtWr0o0g
Would an instructor suggest to not persist flying in the lee? It was only after he spent unnecessary amount of time in the lee and flying crosswind in it that he got the collapse. Surely the best option after fuckup number 1 would be to fly straight downwind, out of the turbulence of the lee asap and onto the next into-wind hillside. Land there or down in the valley, not crash land on the leeside!
@@WuTangChillaBee Not exactly sure your point here, but I will say that he wasn't in the lee for quite some time after his title "mistake 1". There was plenty of time to remedy the situation with heading control and accelerated flight before finding himself in the lee. With that said, once in the proper lee, I agree, he should have headed downwind as far as possible instead of staying in the lee to land.
@@WuTangChillaBee Your question can't be answered with a yes or a no. In general lee sides are not the place to be. But then if you're a experienced pilot they can also be great for thermals if the wind is not way to hot. In this very scenario it doesn't make sense to fly into the lee side. To understand that better you must understand, that there are two lee sides here. The lee side of the thermal and the lee side you're talking about. The rotor of the mountain. The winds in ager are mix of local thermal valley winds and bigger scale thermal winds (sea breeze). So the wind almost always comes south east in Ager. They easily go over 20 km/h plus Venturi. In general but specially in such strong winds thermals just fly best on their luv side. The lee side of a thermal is often just a bunch of sink. Once you get into the actual rotor of the mountain with a 20 km/h wind you're kind of in a shit zone. The huge south side cliffs most likely made a proper thermal wall. Meaning that it blocked the wind a bit. If you go downwind you should go with the thermal. In the end he could have left the situation going full speed into the wind. But I understand, that such a situation can be very uncomfortable. So option two is definitely go away from that ground. Nice greetings from Switzerland Johnny
I made exactly the same mistake at the same location but in the lower ridge (I uploaded the gopro video to my channel just to share the mistake as well). I was very scared, can't imagine what you felt up there! Glad you are ok man!
Major 3rd mistake: trying get in front for a long time even if it's already too late. You end up in the nastiest aerological place and have to improvise a dangeous landing. You're very lucky to only had a simple collapse without change in direction, rotation or cascade after. When you can't go were you want : don't force it. ESCAPE ! fly away from the cliff, on the right side in your case. With that height you could go far away in a safe place.
Throwing your reserve on top of the cliff would’ve been a huge mistake in my opinion. Very strong winds, no control of landing, I don’t think it would’ve ended well. I would say if you have a flying wing over your head you should not throw the reserve.
No no no, many people do NOT make these mistakes (plural). You learn this from reading a theory book at the start of school. You are very lucky. But please choose a different sport.
There is a gap between the theory in books and the real world. That's why we have the driving test on top of the written exam to get a car driving license.
@@loakustls So do paragliding tests need to be clearer on why we dont fly in the lee of a windy hill? Or talk through the next steps if you do get caught there... which would be: fly straight downwind, away from the lee side asap, land in the valley or onto the next hill which is into wind 👍 Do NOT persist in the lee side, or make a crash landing there and hope for the best! 🙈😱
Oh man, there's more than one lesson to be learned here. Do yourself a favor and come back to this video in a year or two. There were two moments where it looked like you could come back, even without speedbar, but you kept flying along the ridge. Glad you're ok, happy landings!
