Discipline
Paragliding XC
What went wrong ?
Safety issues or accidents happen in paragliding competitions, from minor to serious. Currently, there is no formal public communication about these, even serious, accidents. Pilots, teams, and the wider community remain uninformed, which affects safety awareness and trust in the organization.
What would you propose ?
1. Any serious accident should be publicly and officially communicated by the organizer within 1–2 days.
2. Communications should include:
- Announcement of an investigation into the incident, providing context. A detailed report should follow and be publicly available. Based on it, recommendations will be proposed to prevent such situations in the future.
- Monitoring the pilot’s condition, if applicable, until hospital discharge.
3. In severe cases, the organizer and overseeing organization must notify the community via official channels.
4. Consider having a separate institution handle investigations and pilot condition monitoring to ensure impartiality.
5. Respect pilots’ safety and comfort by anonymizing personal data if they wish.
6. Define clearly:
- Which incidents require individual investigation and public communication.
- Which incidents should be recorded in a safety database, described only by involved pilots, and summarized later in a CAT1 event safety report or annual safety report.
- Provide a convenient, pilot-friendly way to report safety incidents during competitions.
Comments
This is a real issue. I’ve noticed that the culture of level (LVL) reporting has gotten worse and worse over the past few years. One reason is probably the submarine-style harnesses, which make it more difficult than ever to report LVL while dealing with issues in the air.
Another problem is the new Flymaster trackers. They were supposed to make LVL reporting easier, but in reality, they’ve made the situation worse — because now, other pilots no longer receive LVL reports from fellow pilots. That means they don’t get warned and can’t relay this information further. The report now goes only to the ground organization.
We need to restore a culture of LVL reporting. One possible solution could be a mandatory PTT (push-to-talk) button for all pilots. This would make communication easy and allow reports even in difficult situations (e.g., during LVL 3). Additionally, it should be standard practice to explain the reporting system in the opening briefing, to encourage pilots to use it — or even to introduce penalties when unsafe conditions are not reported.
That is / should be the main issue. How and WHEN the task are stopped or even they should never begin!!
I believe, that we/all pilots should have some self-reflect about this. We should always bear in mind, that task stopped too soon is WAY better and ALWAYS BETTER than task stopped too late!!
This should somehow need to change in pilots minds, and not be angry at MD, SD, pilots, that report L3, etc.. that task was stopped because of them and/or too early.
Therefore, there should be some (more) strict rules to follow.
1st. if the lunch site is not OK (back wind, too strong wind, etc.. then the task should be stopped/cancelled. And we should stick to the rule no matter what. Even if there are "perfect" conditions in the air.
2nd. If the conditions in the air got worsen, the task should be stop immediately. Not waiting till last moment or waiting for .. 10-20 L3 calls. (.. and as we saw, even this did not helped!!)
3rd ... etc..
The bottom line is, that there should be more strict end defined "preventive measures" which would make/force the "decision" automatically and not waiting for the "human error".
The "defined" and "automatic" are the two key words in here...
The Task setter are usually the organizers themselves, or local pilots, so their friends, and have a vested interest into keeping people happy.
"People happy" means the venue is advertised for future events, and "people happy" means only one thing, flying tasks every day if possible.
So, there is an asymmetry in the "taskable days thing. We want it, they want it, nobody does not want it, so it has a huge bias of "happening" and the organizer feels that and makes it happen.
I agree that we need some simple numeric, uncontested benchmarks that would tell the organizer "forget about it" and keep the pilots at bay from attacking him / her for "canceling" or "stopping" a day.
The easiest of these would have been a limit on the "average forecasted wind during the task hours" but it can be many things.
We need to give them to the organizers, as tools to get the pressure of the competitors (that almost always want to fly) out of their shoulders...