What Your Gear Can And Cannot Do

Urs Haari has designed reserves for decades and has close to 400 openings, most of them above ground. His first rule is size. The current standard allows a certified reserve to glide at up to 1:1, so a canopy sinking at 5.5 metres a second may also be moving forward at 5.5, around 18 km/h. Small, light designs only reach the sink rate by gliding, and gliding is harmless right up until the moment a paraglider is connected to it. Then forward speed becomes a downplane, and in safety clinics he now sees more downplanes than ever. Testing a certified reserve over water with a tandem passenger in front of him, his instrument read 50 km/h over the ground.

So his advice is to buy surface, not the lightest thing in the magazine: whatever the paraglider does, the reserve must dominate it, and at 20 square metres for an 80 kg pilot it will not. If you fly a hot wing and want a small reserve, carry two, because a reserve that ends up in the rotating paraglider's lines is game over if you are not high enough for a plan B. Round, square or Rogallo, his one-word answer to which is safest is all of them: there are good and bad designs of each, and the difference is whether it has been tested hundreds of times or only advertised.

Do not ground-handle your reserve. Haari watches acro pilots dry Rogallos on the grass at Garda and says light fabric can be destroyed in two or three moves on a freshly cut slope; the damage is invisible until the canopy is hung under strong light. To air it before a repack, pull it in a simulator to check it comes out, avoid every sharp edge, and hang it on its lines indoors for 48 hours in normal humidity. Pack it the way the manufacturer says: trash packing works for acro pilots with a second reserve, but a careful pack opens cleaner and with fewer twists. Skydivers will not board a plane with a reserve packed more than four months ago. Paragliding has no such rule.

Carabiners fail the same silent way. A 20 kN rating is a static number; the loads that matter are the cyclic ones, every launch and every reopening, which grow microscopic cracks in aluminium long before anything is visible. Finsterwalder and Charly's guidance is five years for aluminium, sooner for acro, rinsed after salt air and stored dry. And lines: Brett Janaway trims competition wings for a living, and the World Cup now checks three wings a day. A new wing inflates 10 to 15 mm fast, settles toward zero over its first hours as the cascade knots bed in, then drifts slow; on the British team he found one pilot 18 mm slow who had never trimmed in a year. The limit for competition trim came down from 20 mm fast to 10 because pilots were using the tolerance as a speed setting. His own rule for everyone else: if it flies nicely, leave it alone.

Christian Ciech competed at the top of hang gliding and now runs ICARO 2000, so he has both flown at the limit and built what protects you at it. EN 966 is the standard: a 1.5 metre drop with the head form registering under 250 G, a penetration test with a pointed weight that must stop at least 5 mm from the head, a chin strap that keeps the helmet on, and all of it repeated after conditioning at minus 20, plus 50, in UV and in water. A good new helmet passes at 170 to 180 G, and the softer, thicker liner that achieves that will dent under your fingertip. That is a feature.

A motorcycle helmet protects more but fails the flying test in two ways: it is too heavy for hours under a wing, and its visor and vents protrude beyond the 5 mm the standard allows, so a line can catch. Vented bike and climbing helmets fail the penetration test outright. Full-face is more protective; open-face gives more vision. Neither is wrong, and he flies open-face himself. Replace after any crash of substance, and treat the five-year rule as a recommendation for helmets that get dropped and forgotten, not a law for one that has been looked after. Camera mounts are untested territory, and a line around one is the obvious way they go wrong.