What Happens Behind The Scenes Of Paragliding?

The venue first, says Pal Takats: he now enters a competition because he wants to fly that place, since the site sets much of the risk. Marko Milutinovic weighs the size of the field, and sees more room to fly your own lines at events of around 70 pilots than in 140-pilot championships. Stan Radzikowski adds that pilots are entitled to know where the money goes.

Lower than most pilots imagine, in Eric Roussel's experience: often 100 to 150 metres above the ground and sometimes 50, too low to recover the wing, which is why Neo designed its reserve system around low throws. Marko Milutinovic, hit more than 1,000 metres up with a shredded wing, had time to wait while it turned slowly, and threw at 400 to 600 metres.

A love of flying. Eric Roussel's rule for anyone who wants to make gear is to fly and love flying, or it is not a business. Gin Seok Song let results do the talking: pilots on his first competition wings were asked not to say who designed them. Later his company paid a Korean mill to develop a fabric, tested it for years and had it to itself for two.

Because that is how other pilots learn. Julien Garcia's central demand is that a competition organiser always says what happened, whatever the liability. Bill Hughes adds the other half: check the facts before repeating a story. And Eddie Colfox tells his own accident plainly, to show how one bad decision is usually followed by two or three more before someone gets hurt.

The pilots, in the view of Goran Dimiskovski of the PWCA: pilot quality is the safety system, which is why World Cup places are given on results alone. Stan Radzikowski expects a championship's official landing fields to be proven at earlier events, not checked on the morning of the task. And Bill Belcourt saw pilots who made their own decisions come through a hard event better than a managed field.