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“Addictions can be very, very bad but addiction itself is not bad.
It’s a case of what you’re addicted to.
You better live each day like it’s your last, ‘cos one day you’re going to be right”.
Ray Charles.
Link tip a friend
In January, 2005, while flying 9000 feet above Mexico's Valle de Bravo, paraglider Joe Parr's helmet-cam recorded what happened next. Apart from simply being compelling footage which resulted in only minor injury, what’s impressive is his calm under significant pressure.
He entered a powerful thermal and immediately starts to ascend as can be heard from the vario and then he suddenly drops which is when the wing began to cravat and things started to go a lot worse.
There’s an interesting and very thorough analysis here of what Joe and others did wrong and basically that was pretty well everything but that’s a totally separate matter to how he handled the situation which was to have gone from 3,000’ to 0’ in about 2 minutes. (Valle is at 6,000’ to start with).
When he’s in the tree and a friend on the radio tells him to remain calm, if there ever was a guy who didn’t need to be told that, it’s Parr.
There’s a note below from him about a month after the accident, he was flying again within about 30 days but maybe he should be more grateful that he only had his wing trashed as a 50’ ground fall can absolutely be a one way ticket to no more flying and no more anything.
“Thanks for the good wishes. My broken rib has healed nicely. The bridle of the reserve caught my rib as it deployed. You can hear me complain about the pain in the air. I was most fortunate to find a soft tree but I'm not so sure that the soft landing on the ground was really worth destroying my glider ……. Joe”