Paraglider Adventures

I had a friend who once got into trouble while hang gliding off Sandia Crest just east of Albuquerque, NM. As I recall, he was caught in an updraft, taken to 14,000 feet (high enough to suffer tunnel vision and a headache) and travelled for hours and many miles, before deliberately heading down and landing on a remote airstrip near Maxwell, NM, more than 140 miles away, shortly before sunset. Another friend of his had a similar experience, and eventually landed, after travelling much further, and after nightfall, in the middle of a brightly-lit Little League baseball game in the panhandle of Texas.

Different kind of glider, but even more dramatic stories:

A German paraglider was encased in ice and blacked out after being sucked into a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia and carried to a height greater than Mount Everest. She survived.

... The 2005 World Cup winner was lifted 32,612 feet (9,940 meters) above sea level by the storm near Manilla in New South Wales state while preparing for the tenth FAI World Paragliding Championships next week.

A 42-year-old Chinese paraglider, He Zhongpin, was killed by the same weather system, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold, the organizers said. His body was found on Thursday 47 miles from his launch site. [UPDATE: The coroner says He Zhongpin was killed by lightning.]

... Wisnerska, a member of the German team, had been carried to a height greater than the 29,035-foot Mount Everest — an area known to mountaineers as the death zone for its extreme cold — in just 10 minutes and was rendered unconscious for almost an hour.

She encountered hailstones the size of oranges, and the temperature plummeted to minus 58 Fahrenheit.

“There’s no oxygen. She could have suffered brain damage. But she came to again at a height of 6,900 meters with ice all over her body and slowly descended herself,” said Godfrey Wenness, one of Australia’s most experienced paraglider pilots.

Wisnerska was admitted to hospital with severe frostbite and blistering to her face and ears, but has since been released.

... Wisnerska, whose flight was tracked by her personal GPS and computer, landed 40 miles from her launch site.

A British team member earlier this month survived an attack by two wild eagles which sent her canopy plummeting while flying in the same area ahead of the championships.