What Can Pilots Learn From Other Pilots' Close Calls?

Eddie Colfox, born in 1969, fell for flying watching hang gliding on television in the 1970s. His first paraglider flight, around 1991 or 1992, came when a friend and early paraglider pilot, Ross Somerville, walked him up a hill with a strange nylon bag, let him be dragged through cowpats ground handling for ten or fifteen minutes, and then launched him; he flew in a straight line for a long time and landed. He learned properly as the first student of Andrew Pierce's new school, Flying Frenzy, in West Dorset, and was picked out of many bushes and small trees. In those years most pilots were content to soar their ridge, cross-country was for a handful, and UK flights were 20 to 50 kilometres. His first logbook is full of one-minute flights, and anyone with more than 100 hours was a rock star. On competition wings you expected massive collapses, and you headed for the thermal where someone's wing had just folded, because that was where the lift was.

Today, he says, at least half of British club pilots expect to fly cross-country, keen pilots fly 100 kilometres in their first couple of years, and in the right country you can log 150 hours in your first year; the equipment is vastly better and safer. Marko Milutinovic describes the other side of modern racing: championships with around 140 pilots, and in the Alps at the 2023 World Championship in France, racing in straight lines over ridges where nine tenths of the time you followed the first group and one small mistake finished your day. The newest pod harnesses, which pilots call submarines, have smaller reserve pockets, so fitting two reserves means buying expensive ultralight ones, and his good steerable reserve now sits at home. Still, he thinks the rules are heading towards safety, as in Formula One: a pilot's worst results are now partly discarded, so throwing a reserve on a bad day no longer has to cost the competition.

In his first two or three years Eddie Colfox was winning the national league and, by his own account, arrogant. After a wild, unstable day inland he drove to the coast to soar and dry his wet wing, hardly assessed the weather, and ignored an older hang glider pilot who told him it was too windy. As he turned to launch, a gust front was crossing the water; he was lifted, took a big collapse on launch and stalled the wing onto the slope, compressing some vertebrae and spending a day or two in hospital. It was entirely his fault, he says. There is usually one bad decision that puts you in danger and then two or three more before you get hurt, and skill is useless if your psychology is bad. He still learns from experienced pilots and from beginners, and he has become less bold: he flies away from a top landing or a cloud when he is scared. A good pilot works out a risk management strategy and flies within it; if you step outside it and it pays off, you were lucky, not good.

He applied that on a big flight in Hunza in 2001, he thinks, a 200 kilometre out-and-return, often above 6,000 metres and at times above 7,000. On the way out he always kept a Jeep track roughly in sight, so he had a way out; he had taught many pilots to know theirs. On the way back, milking the last of the day, he was in bright sunlight so high up that he realised late, perhaps a little hypoxic, that the valleys below were falling into shadow: it was getting dark down there. He raced for a known landing, a beach by the river, did not quite make it, and had to put the wing down on a four-metre-wide strip above a gully, grabbing a stone wall as the wing fell behind him. He calls it one of the most dangerous landings of his life.