Is New Paragliding Technology Making Wings Safer?

Frantisek Pavlousek has designed wings at UP for three decades and draws a clear line between safety according to certification and safety in real flight. They are linked but not the same: a low B can be as safe in the air as an A and miss the A on a single manoeuvre. The test is deliberately artificial. In the big asymmetric collapse the lab folds 50 percent of the trailing edge, plus or minus 2.5, along a line at 45 degrees to the open side, marked with stickers on the bottom surface, and the pilot releases the brake and does nothing. That is not what a trained pilot does, and the designer's easiest way to turn a C grade on that manoeuvre into a B is a slower trim speed.

Stephan Stiegler of AirDesign describes the same tension from the other side: a norm has to be identical every time, so the collapse must land in the marked field even when the wing would rather fold flatter or steeper. Pavlousek explains that this is what folding lines are for; on a two-liner the correct fold is often hard or impossible to pull from the risers. Stiegler's conclusion is that the manufacturer carries the duty to make a wing actually fly like its class, and that counting the Bs on two reports tells a buyer little. Read the designer's description of who the wing is for. Michael Nesler goes further: some companies treat the test as a marketing hurdle to be passed with tricks.

Veselin Ovcharov flies acro and builds harnesses, and his view is blunt: the sport has been flying rucksacks for decades. Certification is mostly about strength, webbing and stitching, plus a drop of a few metres onto the protector, and he says 12 centimetres of ordinary bed foam would pass it. He also points at the reserve: a skydiving rig routes the cable around the back so it pulls straight, while in a paraglider harness it runs under the seat and gets heavy under G. On Koroyd-type crumple protectors his advice is practical rather than technical: they suit good pilots who want protection for the rare hard crash; a beginner is better served by a classic protector that covers more scenarios.

Niviuk's Guillem Batlle and Adrià Grau explain why a protector can pass and still fail a pilot: the test drop is vertical, and if a real impact is not, pieces can rotate or slip out of place. They drop-tested their Origami protector at different orientations and angles, designed it to stay locked in its foam, and ran it through six consecutive high-energy drops across the EN and LTF sequences; a foam giving the same protection would need to be more than 60 percent thicker. Drag is the other axis. Supair's Roman Barthelemy measures a chair at about 23 newtons, a faired pod at about 12 and a submarine at about 8; in real flying the submarine gains about half a point of glide over a good pod.

Beni Kälin runs a speed flying school in Switzerland and started flying race kites on the dunes, hooked to a paragliding harness, before taking them to the mountains. His 11 metre kite flew like a paraglider with the speed of a 6 or 7 metre speed wing, but it was still a kite: if it collapsed it might not reopen, so it was only safe as low as you were willing to fall. That experience fed the Moustache, built from a closed-cell prototype that had never been put on the market. On a ridge you choose your height with the toggles and can dive and convert the speed back into lift. It is more collapse-stable on full bar than any paraglider, he says, but it is marketed away from thermals, because it makes strong wind easy, and 50 km/h of wind carries four times the energy of 25.

Its SIV behaviour shows the trade. Collapses are hard to pull and the reaction is gentle, but a wing that folds while fully accelerated has little internal pressure, so hands-up it reopens slowly; a pump on the collapsed side brings it back. Closed cells and air valves were tried on paragliders long ago and abandoned as too dangerous, and Kälin thinks it is good that a paraglider can collapse. Niviuk's engineers add that an aerospace idea has to be redesigned before it helps a wing, and that ideas leave the market and return when the technology catches up. At AirDesign, Stiegler's Rise 4 stayed in production almost five years because prototype after prototype failed to beat it.