Watch this Before you Buy a Paragliding Harness | A Talk with Zsolt Ero

We are lying to both. We are lying to both lightweight pilots and heavier pilots. Current standard is testing the perfect vertical drop and there are loads of problems with this test. There have been a lot of feedback over many years about the limitations of their test and it seems like a new standard is coming out next year which is not addressing any of those limitations which people communicating to them. The weight limit, the spine protection, the horizontal component. So none of those were solved. They addressed something which was really not a critical problem and they just totally avoided answering the hard questions. We had medical researchers on the team and everyone agreed

that the human body has upper tolerable limit for GERD. Nevyuk was always sharing the NASA study about the G values acceleration, explaining we need lower G and lower G And I said, look, we are looking at the very same NASA study. The pages say the human body can tolerate this much jerk. If you go over the jerk, you break the vertebra. At the very end of this discussion, there were two reasons why we shouldn't do it. They believe that if we go for the jerk value, then the harnesses would be very large. The way it works currently in this sport, we we are in the dark ages. There are pilots on Brazil World

Championship who still hasn't recovered from vertebral compression. They have so serious injuries from just a normal landing on a coroid, which would have not been a serious issue with the previous generation harnesses. So if we know for sure that it does not work, these coroid protectors, they do not protect the pilots.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Paragliding at Us. I'm your host Aninder Singh, and if you have been liking what's coming your way all these weeks, then please do me a favour, go join our Patreon channel because we are coming out with a weekly dose of awesomeness there as well, with a brand new newsletter focused entirely on flight safety. And now for today's episode, we have none other than Jolt Arrow with us. Who is going to throw a lot of interesting light on the topic of harnesses? Yo, long time man, how's it going? Thank you very much. I'm good. How are you? Good as well. I've been following your chats

on the pilots union and the base camp and everything and it got me super excited to say the least. Because you know, your content there had a lot of meaning behind it. And I think harnesses is one of those topics which doesn't have a lot of attention that it deserves compared to the wings in our industry. So I thought you know who better than you to speak about the topic of harnesses, man. Thank you. What's what's your background, Joel? How do you know so much about harnesses and what have you been doing in flying so far? So my background is I was always interested in physics and science and did a degree in

artificial intelligence, but afterwards I went to software engineering, but I kind of always missed this physical part and competition. So it was always a big love of me which I abandoned. And then this topic of viral lighting harnesses came very actual because it's actually right now we are in a safety crisis about harnesses. So I just jumped into it because I found it like it's really good. It's really good to research and I think I can find places which no one researched before. That is so true. I love your sources and the the formatting and the structure of it. I think we we do have quite a few learned people in

paragliding but very few of them are professional or semi professional researchers and their findings and their R&D is a class apart from what any of us and enthusiasts do in this regard I believe. Thank you. I'm trying to really go deep into the independent parts and I'm, I'm trying to connect those dots together because when I started it 2 1/2 years ago, when the CIVL invited me for the working group, I was clueless. Those things which I'm aiming for like like measuring jerk, the smoothness of the deceleration was I didn't even know about. So I learned a lot in those groups. And then I started researching more and more like how can we

measure those things? Do we need a new equipment? Do we just calculate the numbers and software like so? I actually learned a lot in those 2 1/2 years since I joined that group. And I think at that point I started going one step further. I was thinking like, OK, this is not go, not good how it went. What do we need to do? So that's where I am now. Love it man, and I think the the reason for this episode is to share some of those learnings with the audiences who are tuning in to us every week. Umm, you know, harnesses is a very interesting topic for me

because ever since I started paragliding, to me, harness is like you're thrown in the sky. Because to me, the place where you're supposed to sit and make all the responsible decisions to make sure flight safety remains paramount and the fun remains as it is. You have to be sitting in a comfortable place because you're going to be making a lot of important decisions and be physically active as well. So what I'm wondering is when it comes for the newer generation of pilots who are joining the sport and they have to rely on some other information to make their decisions, can you name few factors which help in deciding what kind of harness

you want? For me, that's comfort. But according to you who has been having deep dives on this topic, few pointers that a new pilot should look for while picking up a new harness. So at first point, I agree it's comfort, but it's not just comfort, it's actually safety because at one point it it matters if you can control your wing in a turbulent air or not. If you're sliding around in a harness, then basically you lose a lot of that control. So, so it's not just quite, I would say it fit. So fit is like the number one criteria as you said. In my experience, I found out I could never really test the

harness hanging in a shop. I always have to actually try it. So sometimes I bought a harness and I had to sell it after a few flights because in the shop it was comfortable, but at flight when pushing the speed bar, I'm kind of pushed into a different place. So I think the only way to figure out is to have a test flight. It's about fitness. But but my research is about the safety. And for safety we are talking mostly about, I mean there are two parts of safety. One is the rescue position. I, I think it's very important. Some lightweight harnesses don't have the hanging points on the shoulders.

So I think it's super important to use a harness which have the shoulder hanging points because when you're coming down under a rescue, that's the most important. It puts you in the safest position. Your legs are touching the ground first and you can do this perfect fall. I'm sorry to interject here. I would like to quote one of our previous guest. I don't do not remember if it was Eric Neal or Eric from Neo fly Neo who owns the brand or or Sahari from the the Beamer 3 inventor reserve parachute. I mean he was not like he owns the company which owns Beamer 3. They said shoulder hanging

points are like a catastrophical setup in the process of down planning. So if you're down planning and if you are being pulled on, on one end, let's say this is the pilot and this is the head of the pilot and they are being pulled from here by the reserve and there is a down planning glider coming in. Then the impact that will most likely happen when the pilot touches the ground is flat on his ass and some part of back. Whereas Neil came out with a stand up harness where he says that you probably touch with your feet down 1st and hopefully PLF will absorb the remaining

part of it. So I mean those, those are improvements, but that my alternative is that you can find some harnesses where the rescue goes on the carabiners and avoid those. There's a usually I think I can fly harnesses or lightweight, but the rescue goes on the and if you are hanging on the carabiners, you're just basically hitting the ground with your spine with your back. Yeah. So those ones, those ones you should, you should avoid those ones with the carabiner mounting points. And but the one I actually researched and one I would like to talk more about is there is a bag protector. So I believe right now the

safest bag protectors are big inflatable airbags, like pre inflatable, not the ones where there was a time when it was very popular that you start with with no air in the airbag and over, I don't know, a minute of flying. You hope that it inflates itself. So I'm not I'm not saying those ones, I'm saying the ones which you inflate at this before take off using the bag or using your lung, you inflate it, you close the bag and then you're flying the whole flight with a with a closed bag. So those, but not all of them are big. Some of them are tiny, but look for one which is really nice and

big and covers your spine. Those ones are really safe. So I believe right now one of the safest harnesses on the market is how I can fly harness from Skywalk the ranging Subs 3. It's light and it has a really nice and really big and safe protector. And I did the measurements and it has some of the lowest acceleration values and lowest jerk values. So it's a, it's a really safe harness which has an airbag. And if an airbag is not an option, then I think the alternative is a good big foam protector. And at that point, basically you will have to trust your own instincts about what's a big

one. Like you see a few harnesses, some of them have a foam, just a tiny, tiny foam just under the seat plate. Then you can have other harnesses which have like a nice foam nicely protecting around your your back and choose something which is a nice foam harness. If you're going for safety. Of course these are not the most aerodynamic ones, but these are nice and safe harnesses. You know what, I'm going to just share my screen here to compare because to me, foam visually looks more safer. You know, it's, it's that it's more dense, It can, it's more rugged and it has been long trusted by humans for various uses and impact absorptions

happened to be one of them compared to airbags, which are more or less a one time use. And of course they're delicate and they have their own limitations in different ways. But what I want to do is I want to compare Skywalk X Alps range 3 versus Woody Valley XR7. My first harness was a GTO Lite one. The foam protector in the GTO Lite 1 is pretty thick, like I don't know how many centimeters, but it's a fairly thick protector which is under your ass, so it's not behind your back. So what I want to do is I want you to tell me what are the big

differences between this one and this one because I am on the official website of Woody Valley right now. XR7 seemed the most robust harness to me that our industry had seen before submarines came. This is the protector of the skywalk, so I think this is a much better image. So I think what everyone can figure out is how much it protects back on your spine because we will spend more time talking about it because a test does not require any protection on your spine. So this previous generation race harnesses, the XR7, the Exo seat and the Carniva too. They they went way over the required limit of the standard.

The standard requires very, very minimal protectors. Those harnesses were building on the trust of pilots, building on the market forces that pilots want something safe and nice and protective. So they all had huge protectors. I can show you the one in Exosite. So look at that one. It's a monster. So they went on like really building safety into their marketing and the trust of pilots that if you land on your ass with this protector, nothing happens. Back then, actually lots of pilots regularly landed on their harness because for them it was a safer option than possibly having a bad step or something bad with with your knee.

So these protectors were were super reliable and super robust. And this is you had a question about airbag versus foam. I think the difference between the two is how much of that abuse the foam protector can take. But these protectors could take years of abuse. I saw I saw Carneba harnesses with 1000 hours and it was still in one piece. And so these ones took a lot of abuse. The airbag could not take so much abuse. But we are, if we are talking about a single impact, like a single crash. So let's say you're very careful you don't ever end on your bottom unless it's a crash, then an airbag I believe is equally

good. Can you explain for our audiences a little bit of a difference between airbag and foam? Like what will help them make a more responsible choice when they're going out and looking for a protector, And then we'll switch over to origami and coir and other offerings in the market. So I wish this was the discussion today in the harness selecting market. Like do you prefer an airbag? Do you prefer a foam protector? Some harnesses can come with both, like the the Woody Valley GTO, the Kanibarres they came up with with an aftermarket protector years after the harness was on the market. Now you can you can replace the

foam protector with an airbag. So those are those are really nice choices. They have their advantages, disadvantages. The airbag is lighter and smaller. The foam can take more abuse. But both of them are really good. The problem is this is not the choice which many pilots are having now. The choice is choroid versus in competition harnesses. Right now there is no alternative. So it's choroid versus choroid versus maybe OK come as soon. So we are not even talking about these known safe solutions when it comes to aerodynamic harnesses. OK, we, we, we'll get to the aerodynamic ones and, and the Creme Creme de la Creme, I like

to call it, because they're being flown by some of the fastest racing pilots on this planet in our sport. But let's let's talk about chair harnesses. Chair versus pod except from the pendulum motion, except from the twisting part that pod can twist easily. The pendulum comes much more easily because your legs are easy, like prone to more swaying. Big major differences. Younger pilots should look out. For when they're planning to upgrade, I think more than this is in the harness geometry. And as I understand, they are so complex that if you cannot just explain them and put them in two categories. So I believe there are really

nice spots which of course a beginner should ask their their instructor. So beginner should not just take an advice from me or something online, they should ask your instructor. But once they are above, I don't know, 50 hours, whatever is the moment when they believe that they should progress and and the glide starts to matter to them then I think today there are loads of very nice safe, stable pod harnesses. So I I would recommend people to go with the pod. I don't. At this point I don't see the point of going with a chair harness too long. And and that is because it just hampers your progression because like you will just get tired of

it pretty quickly. I just I just found flying more enjoyable in port harnesses. Right. It's really nice to fly in a port harness. It's when it's cold you are not freezing. But also the whole experience like turmaling and everything. I mean I was one of the last holdouts because I had 1/4 Kamasutra too, which was which was a legendary chair. Port El Kamasutra. OK, Yeah. Yeah, extremely. It was called Kamasutra because you can modify everything on it and and it was the only one which I could find. I could perfectly set it on my body and I really loved it. But then I went with an XR7 and

I fell in love. Yeah, I mean, XR7 is like I I call it the Rolls Royce of the Sky Man. So what I recommend to your viewers is ask around, ask friends, maybe competition friends. You don't have to choose the harness they fly, but they will be able to tell you like some nice legendary harnesses. Very nice harnesses. I'm actually so surprised that Woody Valley hasn't discontinued XR7 because it's so damn heavy that the target audience is more or less racing pilots and there is not a single racing pilot on this planet that will give up submarine style for the conventional one. But I believe just because of how robust, safe and secure it

is, they're still having it in their inventory and still offering it to the customers who want like no nonsense, your safety and rugged long term oriented investment where XR7 is answering their questions. I mean. They probably only keep it because people are buying it. So I think I, I, I would, I would guess that people still buy XR Sevens, They still buy cannabis these days. It's an interesting segment because they are probably not like super final level pilots, but there is still a segment which might still buy those harnesses. Dude, I I feel like I could have bought XR7 as my very first harness. The only drawback is forward

launches in this harness are a bit of a pain in the ass. Like you know, early days, first 10 hours, 1st 20 hours when you have all the butterflies in forward launch. Like I learned in Himalayas where like in beer where the wind is almost negligible. So every launch is a forward launch and running in those Alpine conditions with like 15 kilograms on your back, you know, considering you have your food and everything else in it as well. That is the only drawback that I have. But I, I, I feel like it wouldn't have made a big difference had I gone directly to XR7 instead of having a GTO

Lite in between. But that's me. I request the listeners and viewers to make their own responsible choices. Hopefully this episode can help. And keeping in line with that, I would, I would not know about the other protectors that I've been offering. Let's talk about origami and Koryeid. To me, these are two different inventions. Nevil do not invent origami, right? What's the history of origami coming into parallel lighting, do you know? I don't know too much. I think Nevil did invent it. So I believe they have some in house modeling, some in house 3D analytical software and they designed, I mean the whole topic is called honeycomb protectors.

So honeycomb is like a geometrical structure and and I think you can call call coroate A honeycomb even though it's like parallel tubes then. So these kind of protectors are probably there you have to general name, let's call them honeycomb protectors. They are maybe 3D printed, maybe some plastic glue together with this how coroate is made, but. But the important thing is they have some kind of 3D structure, whereas a foam is just just an everyday foam with more dense than the ones we have in our beds. But I believe origami is 3D printed, which has a big advantage. They can perfectly tune those parameters that cell size, the shape, the angles.

Like they can tune everything to a perfect use case. So they can make an origami for lightweight pilots, for heavy pilots, and they can optimize it for jerk, they can optimize it for G. So it's actually looking like a promising, promising new technology from NVU. That is very interesting. I was just about to ask that these two, what do you say new kind of entrants in the market have been coming in from some of the biggest brands in the in the industry. Like, you know, the adoption which started with, I don't know if it was Jen who brought in the Courier and then it got into Neo and then Ozone brought it in the

submarine because of how compact and streamline it is. So these new protectors have challenged the status quo pretty successfully and are seeing being widely adopted by the market when in their lives we can take the measurement of hours, after how many hours do you think a pilot is ready to upgrade to these kind of protectors than the conventional protection technologies that we have? I believe at no point anyone should upgrade to coral it we have a lot of evidence in the last 4-5 years. We even had evidence before submarine came to market. So January's 4 was one of the most one of the first mainstream harnesses which use choroid. And I can show you like pilot

sharing on paragliding forum cases where the choroid protector did not work for them. So I believe there is no hours when a pilot should ever use choroid. I very much hope that in the future we have standards which do not allow the current version of Choroid to be flown. Maybe Colloid comes up with an update, you know, 4.0 or something, and then they fix those limitations of the current versions. But I think the current versions of Colloid is not not the safe material for harness back protectors. It's made for bike hammets. It's probably OK for bike hammets for parallel lighting harness back protectors. I believe Colloid should not be

used in in today's version. Yes, I am OK. Are these are any of these brands using it in the beginner like chair harnesses or intermediate level harnesses as well? Or is it just being applied in the racing circles where streamline and drag and everything is very important? I think Gin is the special one. Gin fell in love with Choroid and they started putting it all around the range. Lightweight harnesses, intermediate harnesses I think Gin has. I'm not sure but I believe Gin has Choroid all on their range. Other harnesses still prefer forms and airbags for the non competition harnesses. I'm just thinking that when this was not discovered, like the security or the safety which we

had in XO and XR7 was like much more than what was required. So there is a school of thought that says let's make it as secure as possible because there's no limitation. And then there's another school of thought which says that let's make it as efficient as possible. This brings me back to the thing that Kriegel Marr said a few weeks ago. He said that we tend to chase performance senselessly until we see something going bad. And then we change, tend to chase safety senselessly until we get bold of it. And then we go back to chasing performance, which is perfect illustration of this. I'm not sure. Maybe the audience members can

come in and let us know in the comments section what they think about this paradigm shift in the mind where the manufacturers have suddenly gone on to making it more efficient. But, you know, like from your end, who has studied these protectors? How do you rate origami? And is it a ray of light? Or, you know, how do you call it? I'm forgetting the idiom pair. So let me answer the first like you had like 3 questions. I want to answer them in disorder. So first about you said there is like a philosophy of safety versus the philosophy of efficiency. I believe there has only been one force which has been acting

all the way and is acting today is the market force O Back then when every harness was big and bulky, the market force was choose or harness because it's the safest on the market. So manufacturers were, you know, beating each other in safer and safer harnesses. Everyone was flying super safe harnesses. As I said, you could see some videos from all the competition. Half of the pilots preferred to land on their bottoms because it was so safe, so nice. You could make a controlled landing a nice flare on the bottom and there's like 0 risk of breaking your knees. And so that was that was like an age of safety.

And until Ozone figured out that the submarine can really do this generational gap in performance, at that point the market forces were like, if I want to win, I have to buy this harness. So it's always the market acting. The market acting. When you believe that the performance is similar, then you choose the safe one. When you see that the performance is very much not similar, you choose the one which allows you to win. So it was always market forces. The interesting thing is the EN test was never really strict. The EN test was a very, very minimal test for harnesses. The harnesses for years were

very, very, very better than what the test required. Test does not require spine protection. Test does not require a lot of those things which those harnesses were doing. The G limit is very higher in the test than those harnesses. So they were kind of enthusiastically beating and beating and beating their safety values 1 brand over the other one. Like people they were doing this who can get the lower G value on a harness. And people were checking on the forums and they said, wow, Exocit is great. It has, I don't know, 36G or something very low value. Even though the test required something over 45 or 50,

something extremely high. In practice, there was almost no harness on the market, which was just doing the minimal test criteria until submarine came on the market and turned everything upside down because submarine was like, OK, what's the minimum we can get away with? And maybe the philosophy was that, by the way, the test has to be updated. It's not our problem if the test is bad. We are making a harness which is just fitting, just very, very minimally passing the test. We are doing the most aerodynamic harness which is passing the test. And if there is a problem, the test should be updated. That's what I can imagine was the philosophy of the very, very

early years, the prototype years of the submarine. I don't think they ever imagined that there was, there would be a time when Sea Sea Glider and SRS compilers are buying these harnesses by the dozens. So I think it was more like an experiment by Luke, more like a prototype experiment, you know, making the next generation of paragliding. And then maybe he hoped it by the time it gets very popular, the standards would improve. So they control what can and what cannot be in the harness. But the harness, the standard did not improve. So that was your first or second one. I totally agree with malware, but we are not so unique in this.

So what I checked is every sport went through the same phases. Bike helmets were introduced. They became mandatory after high profile accidents and fatal accidents. Skis were slowed down because of fatal accidents. The surfers got like a life, a mandatory life vests, an inflatable life vest. They were upset. They were saying, come on, this is like we are not children. But it improved their safety. So every sport goes through like periods of of, of an unfortunate season. And after that unfortunate season with a lot of safety problems, the community comes together and they say let's improve and then they improve. And then, you know, maybe 10

year passes and then they realise they have to improve again. So I think it's an assurance thing in sports that that is, this is how in every sport it works. You, you, you don't over regulate it unless you see some very serious issues, which tells you now we have to regulate our sport. And I believe this is exactly what's happening in our lighting right now. OK, let's talk a little bit about who is heading this because who is heading the direction And I'll, I'll, I'll simplify it for our viewers. Now we have pilots union, which is a beautiful place to sit and talk and, you know, discuss and brainstorm and propose changes

to civil. Then of course we have civil and the Basecamp groups. Basecamp is basically like an application where you can chat. It's got a really cool name, but it's all about chatting and brainstorming that is being run by volunteers in civil, right? And on top of that, we have European Norms, which is basically a testing laboratory, which has been controlled by a work group and that work group comes under the umbrella of civil and all of this is under FAI. Is there anyone that I've missed who can decide or influence harness and the safety that comes with it? So I believe the working group is not under the umbrella of civil.

These are independent organizations. So one organization is FAI and CIVL and Total Independent. One is the CEN, which is the EN group. As I understand, it's founded by the European Union. It's very much connected to European Union. So it's very interesting for your international viewer to know that all those rules about the whole global safety of the sport is decided in a European Union group. It's a, it's a funny, interesting thing. And right now everything related to safety is controlled by this group. So CIVL does not control it. There is one exception, the CCC paragliding standard, which is like, really, it's like an exception of the whole picture

because at that point it's something which CIVL controls and those gliders which we fly on competitions, the CCC gliders actually do not have an EN test. So those ones are certified under a total different test. It's very much based on the same, same roots, but this is an open standard. And yeah, an interesting thing about the CEN group is that traditionally they were selling standards like I call hardcover books. And even in 2025, this is how it works. So you cannot just go and read a few pages of how is a harness tested. The way is like you go online and you you can put in Google

you want to get this paragliding harness standard and then it tests you. It costs €70 and we can send you a book or we can send you APDF but. It is a lowest group like a hard copy. They were only selling a hard copy, not digital downloads as. I understand this is the historical background of the CEN. For many years they were selling standards and maybe some of those working groups made money. Now in our sport, I'm 100% sure no manufacturer makes a dollar by selling those standards because who buys those standards? The manufacturers buys, but the manufacturer makes money by selling and choose their product. So it's a very strange situation

now that no one can read the harness standard because of a funny historical situation with the European funding of the CE and group which controls the paragliding safety. It's it's, it's behind a paywall basically. Like you have to pay to read what the requirement is or what the requirement says. Yes. And the big problem with this is that you cannot just ask independent, you know, medical researchers to please evaluate the safety of our mandatory safety equipment in our sport. I see everything is behind a paywall and it's going to have to be like 60-70 euros for few pages of APDF. So people cannot really look at it.

They are guessing based on, you know, small information shared in online forums. And the DHV publishes something and then you can read something from BH, but the actual standard is never published and it's copyrighted. Oh, so if you if you publish it, then you can be, you can have a strike against a copyright strike for that. Exactly. You cannot publish. What I read, which might be a little work around, is that member countries, let's say Germany, France can publish explanations. They cannot use the same drawings, but they can make a short summary document, they can make an explanatory document. So maybe we can ask some of the

member countries, please, could you make a short explanation of the standard, a short summary, and then they could actually share those values and then we can refer to those values. But the whole situation is just very much not 2025. Like why is a mandatory safety equipment standard close behind tables? Sounds weird to hear to be honest, especially in such a niche like ours, you know, where it's a handful of people looking after each other. But let's talk about standards. What does the standard say that is being so secretly guarded? So the current standard is testing a drop test, which is they take they take like a a

vertical drop machine and they lift the harness to 1 meter, 65 centimeter and they let it fall on its protector. And then they measure the acceleration value using a sensor. And there are loads of problems with this test which have been discussed for years. One of them is it's a perfect vertical drop. Now, if anyone saw a video about the paraglider crash or in real life, you saw someone actually thrashing on the protector, one thing is for sure, it's not perfectly vertical. Like, yeah, yeah, when you stole a glider, when you are in a lease side, when you something happens, when you are with the rescue parachute and the wind blows, I would say 95% of the

cases it's not a vertical drop. But this is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem, it only tests, I believe the biggest problem is actually the weight. So right now they tested the physical fixed weight of 50 kilograms. So no matter how big the pilot is, the protector has only been tested with the 50 kilogram dummy. And explain it to like 110 kilogram pilots that the protector on their back was tested on a 50 kilogram dummy. OK. I'm sorry to break a train of thought here.

EN has standards for paragliders as well. And we have weight classification in paragliders because with different weight, with different size, the canopy behaviour changes substantially. You know the opening of the outward cells on the wing tips and how the kind of cord and the camber behaves and everything could be, could, could be substantially different as we scale up the size and the whole like internal structure of the paraglider. But why are we not considering higher rate in harnesses when I think this is not rocket science. But if I just have to recall the physics class from my, you know, junior high school, it was like vate adds more inertia, more

momentum to any object in motion. And if we are having a drop test from 1.6 meters as you explained with A50 kilogram dummy coming directly vertically down versus 120 kilogram dummy coming directly out directly down, I'm pretty sure the acceleration values will be fairly different. So aren't we in a way lying to heavier pilots, but basically getting them to test reports of lighter pilots? We are lying to both pilots. We are lying to both lightweight pilots and heavier pilots. And I believe the the first step in fixing the standard would be introducing weight ranges exactly like liners. The manufacturer tests that this protector is between 80 to 100 kilogram.

Then they have to do the tests. There is like a constant factor. So an 80, let's say 100 kilogram pilot is not being tested for the leg part. So I believe the right number will be something like 80 because you are testing for your hip and up, your ties and up because you say that the legs go on the ground, you don't have to put the legs weight on the protector. But you know the we can imagine, I think a good standard which is targeting 100 kilogram pilots would test with an 80 kilogram dummy. So just just as your reference, and so let's say the upper

weight limit is 100 kilogram, the lower weight limit is 80 kilogram, then it should be tested with calculated dummy weights on both of those points. Just like with the gliders, we should do exactly the same philosophy as to the glider tests. And this should have been done by the CEN committee that has the EN tests like this is this is not air turquoises or DHVS, aerial responsibility or not even civil. This has to come from CEN which has the working group. It should have. It should have came from CEN working group. Yes, there have been a lot of feedback over many years about the limitations of their tests and they have been working on an

updated standard and it seems like a new standard is coming out next year which is not addressing any of those limitations which people communicated to them. But yes, they are the 11 owner of the standard and they should fix their standard, yes. There is a new standard coming, but deliberately ignoring what the community has been asking for is is this what you just said? I don't know deliberately or not, but at the end of the day they ended up with the standard draft, which does not address any of the criticism. It addresses some points which was not a problem, like the G limits. It was not a problem that the harnesses were already under

those G limits they proposed. So they address something which was really not a critical problem and they just totally avoided answering the hard questions, the weight limit, the spine protection, the horizontal component and the jerk test. So none of those were solved. I see. I see, before I talk to you about The Who forms working groups, I want to talk to you like, you know, you can consider this if, if this was off the record, like nobody was listening to us. And it's up to you if you want to answer this or not. But do you have any idea why such a basic fundamental need for safety is being overlooked

and solutions are which are being provided on addressing the concerns anyways? Like why would somebody do this man? It baffles my mind. Like you know, all of us want the skies to be more fun and more safe place to be. I believe most of them are volunteering and most of them in this group. I don't know what's happening in this group, but I mentioned it's also like a mailing list or something where some brands are putting more effort, some brands are putting less effort. And it's, it's maybe it's like base camp just in their version. And I can imagine that most of them are just very, you know,

they don't put too much effort in fixing the standard. There is no pressure on the group. CIBI puts 0 pressure on them. So they don't really have to. And I think at one point it's like who is more active? And I can imagine that some members of the group are very active and they push it in a direction which is not what the pilot's feedback is. So I can imagine at one point that there are reasons to push it in the direction of not having a jerk test. Because if you don't have a jerk test, you can get 7 centimeter protectors, then the solution is choroid or origami. And there is a you know, there

is a lot of reasons to push for that direction when only choroid and origami and these kind of honeycomb materials can work. I actually love the way you explained it, that you know, because we're not finger pointing here at anyone. We're just trying to bring out the information to a larger audience who has been unaware of what's going on. But I followed your e-mail trail and I'm not trying to put you in a spot field. The whole idea is to try and bring out credible information from somebody who has been in the thick of things. Your e-mail trail was fairly long and it basically said that jerk standard which you

mentioned, which we will come to more details in the in the next, you know segment. But when you said include jerk or when others had their similar kind of suggestions, what was the answer given when they were ignored out of the final draft that is coming next year like that is, it's quite frustrating. I'm trying to look at it from your point of view. You know, you invest time, energy and money voluntarily. Everyone is volunteer. So we, I think we have to stop coming up with the volunteer example because nobody is professional in these setups except from a handful of people. So everybody is at the same level.

So you yourself have put in the effort, but what is the excuse maybe is the right word given to you for not including your your suggestions in the final draft that is coming out next year? So we had the back and forth about jerk value services not and as I said before, it's interesting, it wasn't even my idea. It was Josh, another pilot in the working group who introduced me to the jerk measurement and the the fillers of the definition of jerk. And then also we had medical researchers on the team and everyone agreed that the human body has upper tolerable limit for jerk. It's a super important criteria,

just like we have an upper tolerable limit for G values for acceleration. So the the pilots, an independent part of the working group verse 100% agreeing about importance of jerk. And then the manufacturers also looked into it. And at the end there were two reasons. So for us, the we had a big, I personally always had the opposite points with Niveuk. Niveuk was always sharing the NASA study about the G values acceleration and they were sharing it, I don't know, dozens of times always explaining we need lower G and lower G and lower G And I said, look, we are looking at the very same NASA

study. We are looking at the same pages and then the pages say your human body can tolerate this much G and the human body can tolerate this much jerk. If you go over the jerk, you break the vertebrae. It's been tested. It's not a philosophical, you know, experiment. It's been actually tested in the real bird airplane pilots in the 1960s that they had this rocket ejection seats and the ones which had two high jerk, they broke the vertebrae. They had compression fractures. So it's been a very practical, real word tested hard results, hard numbers from the NASA study, and we are looking at the same study and they believe that we only look at the G and at the

very end of this discussion, there were two reasons why we shouldn't do it, Nevyuk said. They looked into it, they run their calculations and they believe that if we go for the jerk for you, then the harnesses would be very large. I mean. What if everybody flies large harnesses? Yes, that's the next yes. I think at this point everyone in the competition scene arrived at your conclusion that now we move to submarine, everyone is on submarine, We have zero advantage compared to each other, except everyone has tiny 6 centimeter protectors. So the whole sport relative to each other is still the same, except now we are all not safe because of the lack of proper

protectors. So yes, it would bring bigger protectors. So that was one reason. The second one was the measurement is not precise. Now. I looked into it, I spent a year afterwards and this autumn I again invested time and I developed the software and I asked Fred from Ozone. He was very nice and he sent me some measurement files and I can say that you can measure extremely precisely that jerk mesh is not a problem. I I don't even know which tangent to go out on Jolt. OK. I think we should sort of what I think is important and I think your question was about is that if we do not measure jerk, then

we are down to 7 centimeter protectors. If we do measure jerk, we are about 13 centimeter protectors and at the 7 centimeter range there is no alternative to choroid and or economy. OK, this is this is brand new information for me to process and also probably some of the listeners can think resonate in this guys, please let us know in the comments. What do you think about the discussion so far? I think the only way both like me, you, him and everybody else around us can collectively make this safety thing a norm is by at least speaking about it, at least talking about it. The more we talk, the better

possibilities of doing things after talking. But regardless, let's talk about G and jerk. Please feel free to share your screen if you want to. I want people to understand how G changes with jerk. OK, so I shared my screen and you can see very similar drawings this trapezoid in the NASA study back from. And so we are talking about some such as in research for decades, for more than half a century. And what you see here is 3 steps going up, then just going horizontal and going down. And let me explain this concept on something we can back to. It's a car and a look. So you're driving on a highway

with 120 kilogram kmh and you realize there is a traffic jam in front of you. So you have to brake. You do a big strong braking, but you don't make an emergency braking. So you are not like 100% brake. You have to stop in relatively short distance. So what you do first start pushing the brake pedal smoothly and then at one point you keep the brake pedal on that bane that let's say 800 or something of your possible travel without locking the the wheels. And then at the end you let the brake pedal up. So this is exactly the definition of jerk, the the point where you're pushing down

the brake pedal smoothly. This is just the change of acceleration. This is a smooth acceleration and in the harness we have smooth acceleration, but it's the same concept. So you start braking smoothly. What happens if you don't brake smoothly? You just slam on the brakes. All of your passengers would have this strong whiplash movement of their of their neck and they could feel uncomfortable and painful. So this is very important to understand what's happening in a hardness because the current test is this the current test. The G measurement is just this middle parts, G limit part in a car that would be like staying on. It turns out the human body is not so sensitive to staying on a

break. You can choose a bigger value, you can choose a lower value. It's not so big of a deal. The big deal is the change going from nicely travelling at 120 to going into this breaking. This whole change between the two get very sensitive to that. And the NASA study was showing the same and actually what's missing from the two day and test and what's the problem with choroid that they don't have a smooth deceleration like a foam or an airbag has this very nice and soft and smooth going from nothing happens to being on the ground and being pushed. They have this nice gradual connection between the two. Choroid does not has.

Choroid is like a plastic which is crumpling which is being destroyed and until it starts being destroyed it's solid or almost solid object. Got it. But you know, I do want to come back to Choroid on its importance and future of power lining harnesses. But can we visualize the jerk value versus the G value for any harness out there in the market right now that you might have seen, umm, in your research so far? I wish we would get to a point where everyone could just easily check the harness before purchase. They can check for both the G and the jerk values. In Today Ian test, you go to Barra test and you look for the

harness. That's what a lot of pilots do and you go to that page which shows the G value and you look for the G value. You can already do this for the G value. I believe jerk value is just as important and it should be equally shown on those pages. Did have you had a chance to know jerk value of any current offerings in the market which which can help us you know get an idea about how jerk varies with G? So in theory, everyone could do it. In practice, it's a very time consuming thing. But the jerk is exactly the the smoothness or the difference of

acceleration. Because the acceleration this this kind of graphs which you see on the screen. Now these are published, you can actually zoom in and you can precisely measure where the points are in time. What am I looking at? I'm I'm so confused. There's 2.22 point 4 and there's a blue line, a red line and a green line. OK. So this is this is when you look at the harness test, you go on para test, you put in the name of the harness and this is what you've, this is like this for many years now. OK. And what happens here, this is exactly the acceleration of the drop test.

You have like a first a big hit, then it goes to a maximum G value. You can see it goes up to something like 33 or I don't know, something like that. So it goes to AG value, then a smaller and a smaller one because it always bounces a bit, but we are concentrating on the first one. So so the yellow line, sorry just just go back to that one again. The yellow line is desirable. GI think I think this was mentioned in the NASA study. No the. NASA study is here, yes, so this is you can also see the trapezoid which I was doing on this visualizer website which I

was showing before. So another study is very clear. Human body has a tolerance for G and for jerk. So they have a lot of values here. They say the jerk is 115 preferable 118 preferable 500 tolerable 1000, no permanent injury. One percent 300 is the absolute, absolute tolerable upper limit over multiple studies. And they came up with these numbers. So yeah, what I wanted to say is that you can calculate those jerk. It's very difficult, but you can you can download the files, zoom in with some software and you can measure exactly how fast is the acceleration. And then this is what kind of values I came up with. I tested just a few harnesses

because it's time consuming. So right now let's let's say. Fuck bro. So oh, let's these are the jerks and you know, the NASA had this 1300 and to my biggest surprise, the previous safe previous generation race harnesses like 1/4 Carnival, also an exo seat, they were all less than 1300. They were exactly somehow manufacturers found exactly the safe value, which NASA found the safe value without I'm sure knowing about jerk or jerk measurement or NASA study just empirically like testing and testing and testing. They came up with the same numbers. So Carnival and the exo seat are both less than 1300. And then we have the choroid based ones multiple times like

submarine is 8000. That's insane man, that's a huge jump. It's a huge jump and it's way over the safe limit. Of course, I would love to get the actual measurement of these harnesses and we could see if they are precisely what you know, it might be 8000, it might be 6000, but it's very clear. It's very clear that the measurement cannot be that bad, and very clear if we are talking about multi multiples of the safe value for colorate harnesses. OK. I want you to just go back to that graph where you had put the comparison side by side. Yeah, these these two. So could you please tell our listeners what they're looking

at? So this is the test, this is the test you download from para test of every harness. Every harness is protected or they have to upload these graphs. Now I call our, I believe it was maybe the Carnival with red and the blue was the submarine. It's one of the old harnesses versus the submarine. And what you can see is the red 1, the old test of the carnival, you can see it's a smooth curve. So you can see what happens is that the harness is being dropped and then it's smoothly, smoothly starts getting compressed and it's acting like a spring. The more you compress it, the

more force it gives you various. And this gives you this this red shape which has has a nice you see a nice little angular smooth start. I would say nicer. It by no means look nice, but. Completely doesn't look nice. Yeah, but compared, just compare it to that corner. The corner is the corner is that the choroids are not being crushed. So the pressure is getting more and more and more. And they are not crushed, not crushed, not crushed. And at one point the pressure is so much that they crumple. So this is how choroid works. Choroid has this, this, this huge step in the beginning.

And the problem with that is that choroid can give you low GS. That's not a problem. The the the emoji is the top of it. But no one is talking about this corner. No one is talking about what happens, how smooth is our is our crash. OK, so wait a second. This is choroid when it is supposed to work perfectly. That is what the. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. Holy shit. So this is a choroid which actually got scrambled because as we will see there are loads of examples when choroid did not crumble and pilots broke a vertebra. So this is like the most optimum case for choroid.

So if everything goes right, you will still endure a jerk of 8000 or 6000. Exactly if everything. Goes right. Oh my God dude I'm so sorry I'm laughing. It was scary to just listen to it. And no one made a test for what happens when the color it is not compressed I. Don't want to buy a Colorado? No. The way it first. Currently in the sport, we, we are in the dark ages, we are sending WhatsApp, WhatsApp messages to our friends in hospitals and during recovery stage. They are pilots. They have been pilots on on Brazil where championship who still hasn't been started in August and they still hasn't

recovered from compression, vertebral compression. They have so serious injuries from just a normal landing on a coroid which would have not been a serious issue with the previous generation harnesses. I feel like we should have a database of harness impacts as well. Like we keep on talking about glider accidents being recorded, but nobody talks about RNS. But like, do you know, like, how many people have, like, how many people have successfully saved their assets from Korea? I don't know, but what I do know is it's very interesting. So I believe let's you imagine you have a big accident. Imagine you have a big accident and you maybe you get disabled. So what's the chance that you go

on paragliding forum and you post your most people at this point, you know, doesn't want to look at Parrot Landing anymore. They just want to give up on. So still we have a lot of pilots who publicly shared that what happened with the corrid and basically what happened is that didn't compress at all. And I want to show you some photos now. So for example here this is a photo, look at this corrid. That's that's from a normal like. That's how the projector is supposed to look like. So no, this is exactly how it's not supposed to look like. It should be compressed because this one is also, this is after

impact. This is a crash. And this was one of the earliest reports in Paragraphic Forum before submarine came out, before Genie Race 5. So this was still Genie Race 4. Maybe you've just started using corrids and it was one of the most popular racing at that point. It was only racing Carnot. We should call it. And then a pilot said look at me Sir. Said myself had a serious crash right on the choroid. I fractured 1 vertebrae in my back with paralysis in my pelvic area and legs. The choroid wasn't even deformed. Sorry but beware of this protection that is used in multiple harnesses now. So I believe there have been

hundreds of accidents where the choroid was not deformed in a choroid state intact. This whole material only works if you it's a single use material. It only works if you crash it and you destroy it and how it dissipates the energy. If it looks like this, you can for 100% say that it did not dissipate energy. I do clearly remember Eric from Flynn Neo telling me. I mean, for those of the listeners who are wondering about this episode, you know, just feel free to go down in the Index and you will find Eric from Flynn Neo in the in the catalog there. But he said that courtyard is

being scrutinised because it is visible. The damage is visible. But what you are telling me is that the damage doesn't even happen. Like the damage is not visible. So it's like very conflicting way to understand, you know, how this protector made. It So, yeah, if you are having a crash with a choroid, what you want, you want to look at the protector and say I have to throw this out. It worked. It saved my life. I crumpled it. It's destroyed. Now it's time for me to replace it. But this is not what happens. What is happening is pilots are finding their choroid protectors intact, which means they did not provide protection.

And there is a famous case of Nick, half a million views on YouTube, who got disabled, unfortunately after a paragliding accident, but he survived. And then after a while he shared his coroid and you can see that the coroid in his harness looked almost like this. Some of them were rotated, so some of them were on the sides, but none of them had this this official crashed state, which is on the coroid website. You go on the Coroid website and then they show you nice animation and beautiful things about how how a crashed coroid works. And there are so many cases where none of the protectors

actually got crashed, but the pilots got disabled or they had very serious long lasting spine injuries. So if you know for sure that it does not work, these scoroid protectors do not fit their requirement. They do not protect the pilots. Did they revise the protection protector from once it was introduced at the beginning? Like have have there been? Because I'm pretty sure this feedback has been communicated to the people in charge and there are others who must have looked at it with like the same eyes as you. Has there been any sorts of revisions in the design or like what are the efforts that have been made to address correlate problems?

I can say for sure not adequate the solutions. I mean they put version number score rate 1.22.03.0, those kind of things. But in the latest versions, in the latest June, January 5, the correlate is just as bad as it was before. So we have those pilots from World Championships and many of those who we know unofficially, because officially nothing is communicated with unofficially between each other. We are chatting. Some of them were on the latest gene harness with the latest and the greatest choroid version. It still doesn't work. OK, so to make it easier, any dissipation of energy has to be sideways and spread out. Does does that make sense?

So it doesn't matter. At the end of the world, we don't care about what happens with energy. We want something on a harness which somehow protects. It might be an airbag. You know that airbag, the pressure goes higher and it bounces back. Or if you put a valve on it and then it lets the air out, you can have a foam which acts like a spring. So at the end of the day, we don't care how it's solved. You're very open. I believe the new standard should be super open for innovation as long as those criteria of acceleration and jerk is fulfilled. So Coroid does not fulfil the jerk criteria even if.

I'm also wondering like the side impacts and the spreading out because when I was at Coroid's website, all the impacts were showing it crumpling directly at the point of contact. But let's say if we are having a side impact in parallel lining, which is fairly common, like almost, it's hypothetical to expect to fall directly down straight up. Coroid does not have side crumpling properties and at the same time. It bottoms out much lower than foam. So are these two. One of the biggest challenges that the technology has that it is covering only one directional impact and it is bottoming out fairly quicker, which eventually is resulting in higher jerk and

whatever. So there are two 2 problems that correct one. We discussed that even if it works, even if it crumples, it generates such a high jerk that it's not in the tolerable a bit of human. But the bigger problem is in most of the cases it doesn't work. And why it doesn't work, one of the reason is for example, when it has the side horizontal component or an angular hit, it turned out many of these tubes, they don't really compress if the hit is arriving like 45° or something. This is what we we know from these pilots. But in the real verge, in the real life crashes with a rescue or without a rescue, the pilot

is not coming down perfectly vertical because that's how the real life is. We have wind, we have rescue parachute, we have maybe a stalled glider. We are in all kind of let's say 45°. It's probably a much better approximation than a perfect vertical drop. So it turns out that Choroid is testing the vertical drop versus in the real world pilots are having all kind of realistic impacts from all directions and Choroid does not compress when it comes from a direction. So that's the two biggest problem. I call, right? I mean, I was, I was going to ask, do you think origami will solve this? But I think the answer to that is only time will tell.

But you'll, you know, we can keep going back and forth on this, but I hope we have given enough information to audiences on how to be more responsible. But what is the way forward from yours? Your eyes, you know. How do you see us flying with more Peace of Mind and time to come. So what we have to realize is that the EN working group is doing OK work with the lot of part of the sport. You know our gliders I believe we fly today are safe and nice and it's a good direction we are going in. But some aspect necessarily what I mean here is this life critical equipment or safety

critical gear like those equipment you're not expected to test, you're not expected to try out. You hope it works in a car. Analogue I would say is the airbag. No one knows if we don't know if the airbag works in a car. The only way you can learn if it works is either you are in an accident or your friend is in an accident and you ask them in the hospital and how was the airbag? So these are the things you're not expected to try out. And I believe we have to manage these kind of life critical gear in a totally different way than the rests how we manage the rest

of the sport. So in our sport it's hard, it's hardness back protectors. Hardness back protectors should not be just 100% trusted on the manufacturers group because they have shown and shown and shown again they do not address those problems which they got asked about and they got a lot of feedback. I believe a lot of manufacturers have a mini database about choroid accidents. Pilots contact their dealers. The dealers contact the manufacturer directly. They have information that it's not working, but they keep it silent and they are not improving it. And I looked into it and in many, many other sports, in Motorsports, in skiing, in biking, in so many sports in American football, this, this

safety critical equipment is, is handled in a totally different way. It's always independent from the manufacturers. Usually they have their, their mother organization, which is FAI or CIBI for us. It's almost always controlled on the mother organization level. So for for car drivers and motorbike drivers and bicycle races, the helmet standard is not by the manufacturers. The helmet standard is by the by the organization, independent organization. Same in the car for roll cages in the skis, the skis were slowed down not because the manufacturers wanted to slow it down, because the organization decided that for safety they have to implement new criteria. So a lot of these standards are not controlled by the

manufacturers. I believe they run the same circles we are running now. Decades ago, decades ago, they realised that manufacturers can be trusted with a lot of things but when it comes to safe, critical equipment, they should not be trusted. We have to control it ourselves. And you're talking about EN group is basically filled with the kind of mixture of people out of which some are more active than the others and they are driving it in a certain way, which is more manufacturer oriented than safety oriented. I believe, I don't know, someone will tell me, but I believe right now the EM group is 100% manufacturers. I don't believe there is a single medical researcher there,

independent pilots. So it's not an independent group. It's, it's something which consists of manufacturers. Right now, maybe in other sports with much bigger budgets, they actually have researchers and doctors and you know, people with different opposite views in the EM group. I believe in paragliding the EM group is manufacturers. So we and it's normal, the normal that the manufacturers are trying to push for the market forces. We shouldn't expect them not to. This is how everything works. What's not normal is that the CIBL trusts the safety critical gear on the EN group. Safety critical gear standard should not be on the EN group. It should be. Ideally it should be a standard

of the CIBL or something independent. And shouldn't take €70 to have access to this, for fuck's sake. Of course it should. Be an open standard and any medical researcher and any pilot can should be able to go on a website and understand what harness back protector standard means, exactly how it has those brake protectors. I don't mean everything should be opened up. I would glider testing and whatever. I'm just saying that it's very much exactly the the precisely the back protector standard should be an open and independent standard. I think that's the only way forward in our sport. You know what this is seeming like seemingly like a never ending topic, Uh, but I'm pretty

sure listeners who have stuck with us so far have gotten plausible takeaways from our talk to date. And all I can say is that, yeah, man, I hope things become more transparent and the paragliding Atlas is here to bring your voice or anybody else's voice out to the masses if it matters. So to anybody who's listening to this, feel free to reach out with your thoughts. Drop in your comments or if you feel like you can throw some more light on the topic and would like to be a guest on the show, shoot me an e-mail and hopefully keep our fingers crossed that working group goes

in the right direction after the next upcoming the region.

Thank you very much. It was wonderful to be on your show.