Home
Letter to a British journalist
August 9, 2014: I will spare you the inevitable, unending outrage from paraglider pilots by sending you this email rather than posting a comment. Bill Young is the 1252nd global paragliding fatality that I have verified. The actual number is surely much higher. The underlying cause of the majority of these fatalities is the collapse of the soaring parachute in turbulence. This is the "freak gust of wind" so commonly attributed to collapse incidents -- but turbulence is a normal state of the atmosphere and there is nothing unusual about it. The same thermal turbulence that a hang glider so eagerly seeks out to gain altitude can sometimes collapse a paraglider and send its occupant plunging to his death.
In the late 1970's and early 1980's, I worked with a hang gliding manufacturer in California as part of a wave of activity to certify new designs to emerging safety requirements for dive recovery and structural robustness. In only a few years, this certification process brought about the reduction of yearly fatalities from a peak of over 70 to perhaps less than a dozen worldwide. The remaining fatalities were mostly due to pilot error which can be reduced through training. We were proud of this accomplishment.
Over the past 28 years, however, the paragliding industry and your own British free-flight organization has made a mockery of such efforts, claiming vast improvements in safety in the face of no apparent change at all -- as evidenced by the 52 global paragliding deaths I have verified so far this year. The root of the problem is the screamingly-obvious lack of a rigid structure to maintain the shape of the airfoil in turbulence. This is exactly the problem we solved in hang gliding and since 1979-80, no hang gliders that failed certification have been successfully marketed.
But the national free-flight organizations around the world made a huge exception to these critically important safety efforts when they embraced soaring parachutes. This was unconscionable. Paragliding should have remained under the purview of skydiving but soon the ranks swelled with new paragliding enthusiasts and hang gliding was reduced to a minority influence worldwide. In other words, paragliding took over the existing infrastructure of all national hang gliding organizations (in much the same way a new company will acquire a shell corporation) and threw out the hard-won safety requirements because they could not be applied to soaring parachutes.
Family and paragliding associates will always say "He died doing what he loved," but I suspect that, in his last moments, Bill Young felt betrayed by the paraglider that killed him. But this may have been his saving grace because collapsed paragliders, more often than not, create enough drag to almost kill their occupants, leaving them with injuries so horrible that only the most severe tortures of the Spanish Inquisition seem comparable.
