Plummeting Painfully While Paragliding in Panchgani

March 12th, 2011

This morning I felt that I could attempt to paraglide. An Indian pilot from Pune, Dilip, arrived late last night and he and I were the only ones to accept Andre’s offer to go to one of the takeoffs to check out the flying conditions. Unfortunately the wind was quite strong from the east. We parawaited for about an hour and English Dave showed up on his motorbike but then we all headed back to camp to wait for the air to mellow out.

Late in the afternoon Andre came by again and asked who wanted to fly and again only Dilip and I jumped at the offer. We went to the same launch that we used a couple of days ago that faces west and there was next to no wind there. We waited for about twenty minutes as we watched some large birds thermalling but Dilip said that they are always there due to the garbage dump nearby. I thought it was time to launch but Dilip didn’t seem quite as convinced and he was also dealing with some business issues on his cell phone. We could see the west wind starting to make its way across the lake and I wanted to get in the air before it arrived and began to distort the thermals so I set up and launched. At first I found some weak thermals but stayed above the ridge but soon ended up a bit below the landing zone so now it was either find lift or end up in the valley below with a long bus ride(s) to get back up to Panchgani.

I soon found a consistent thermal below launch and climbed steadily at 1-2 meters per second. Once I was three to four hundred meters above the ridge this increased to a smooth 3-4 meters per second and I continued to climb. I saw Dilip finally take off but he never managed to climb out while I ended up topping out at 1900 meters above the launch (about 3100 meters above sea level)! I was beginning to become level with the top of the inversion layer with the rusty brown air on the bottom and clearer, blue sky on top. I contemplated where to head on a cross country route. I wasn’t planning on going too far but I had to go somewhere with all of this height. To the east I could see some smoke indicating that the predominant wind was east. I decided to go north, crossing over the lake created by the dam off to the southwest. There was a ridge on the other side that ran east west and I thought I could fly along that heading west a bit and then back to the east towards the town called Wai (pronounced “why”) which is the place to catch a bus to get back up to Panchgani.

The foot's in there for perspective!

See the nasty coloured inversion layer behind me?

The glide over the lake was gorgeous and peaceful and I felt like the king of the sky with no other paragliders around and having picked the perfect time to launch. Dilip was still fighting way below back by the ridge and all of the other pilots opted to stay at camp...their loss. Unfortunately my high def camera’s battery had run out just before I taken off so I carefully pulled out my point and shoot camera from the zipper pocket of my flight deck, cautious of the fact that valuable items like my wallet and keys were also in there, but I needed to capture some of the moment.

What views...even if it is a bit hazy:

Flying high above the lake below Panchgani:


I began to hit strong and constant sink as I reached the other side of the lake and flew towards the ridge. I noticed some smoke from a fire near the top of the north face and also some flags of a little temple and they both indicated that the predominant wind here was not from the east but now the north. This meant that I was flying into the lee side of the mountain, a potentially dangerous situation as the wind would billow over the ridge and possibly be turbulent.

Unfortunately I realized as I approached the ridge that I was a mere 50-100 meters too low to be on top of the ridge in the “safe zone”. I had lost all the height that I had gained over Panchgani in the 10 kilometre glide as I was continually hammered with -2 to -3 meters/second sink before I had left the lake. Not to worry, I’ll cruise a little closer and head west...there must be a thermal on this south facing ridge which will pop me up that hundred meters and it’ll all be good. Well, I never found the lift. It wasn’t too turbulent but the air felt funny and the wing was sluggish so I must be in some downward moving air.

This is the ridge that the wind was coming over towards me and I had hoped to be high enough to get on top of to stay out of danger...but I was 50-100 meters too low :(

Okay, safety first. I turned south, away from the ridge to scan for a place to land in the kilometre wide stretch of land by the lake. Now, I had read an article a month and a half ago in the news about a Russian pilot who landed in a farmer’s field and wrecked some crops and an altercation and police involvement ensued...I better select a fallow field. Alright, another consideration is “Where is the road that leads to Wai?” It runs parallel to the ridge, half way out on the flat land to the lake. I spotted an unused field that was fairly long but a bit narrow, close to the road, “Let’s go for that one.”

Although the wind up above was from the north, I decided to determine the wind direction down here in the valley. The field ran from north to south so I beat a leg south and then one north, noting my ground speed on my GPS. They seemed to be fairly equal and I couldn’t see the leaves moving on the trees so it seems like it’s going to be a no wind landing. I began my figure eight approach from over a hundred feet up coming in from the north and it took quite a while to lose my height. Every time I dropped some I would climb back up a little.

When I was about treetop height, 50 feet above the deck, I had to pull a rather aggressive turn thanks to the trees on the east side of the field, realizing that this was quite a narrow field. A turn like that will induce energy into the wing so as I exited it I popped up but then strangely, and scarily, my wing stalled, folded up and I began to plunge towards the ground!

The next 3-5 seconds are all a bit of a blur and I have to admit that I don’t recall exactly the sequence of events. It’s like being in a car accident...in some ways everything happens so slowly yet in other ways it flashes by and only certain snapshots are imprinted in your mind. One that is permanently etched in my brain is looking straight down at the dirt field with bits of hay stubs poking out here and there, feeling as though I was not suspended by my wing at all. My life didn’t flash before my eyes but pretty damn close...

I also recall that I swung around 180 degrees, continuing to fall but the wing then re-inflated and I spun back in the other direction before smacking into the ground, landing directly on my butt. Why I didn’t use my legs to absorb most of the shock, I don’t know. It’s kind of a tough skill to practice because when the shit really hits the fan, the brain doesn’t always do what you expect it to do. Thankfully I do fly with a harness that has some back protection and so it dispersed a lot of the energy but I knew immediately I had damaged myself.

The wind was knocked from my lungs so while lying on my left side I just focussed on trying to relax and let the oxygen get back in. The tight, seized up feeling in my lower back was familiar to me as I had a paragliding accident five years ago at home in Victoria, Canada, on a small ridge by the ocean side where I slammed into some rocks and fractured my L4 and L5 vertebrae (the bottom two in your back). Sadly in that case I was captured on film by some member of the public and appeared in the city’s newspaper the following day with the caption “Paraglider Plucked from Peril”...which was a bit of an exaggeration but the editor must have been proud of himself.

From that experience I knew to remain motionless to assess the situation. Almost immediately local villagers began to crowd around me. After about five minutes I removed my helmet as I silently cursed to myself “Damn it, not again.” Some of the curious locals attempted to help me up but I judiciously declined their offer although someone was kind enough to bring a big cup of water from their home which I sipped occasionally (later realizing that might not have been terribly wise...getting diarrhea with a back injury would not be pleasant!). I pulled out my cell phone and called Andre. He was in Panchgani so it was going to take some time before he could reach me...so I better get a bit more comfortable as I was lying on a bit of an angle. I slowly, gingerly slid out of my harness so I could lie flat on the ground and used my helmet to prop my head up a bit.

By this time there were between 30-40 Indians of all ages standing around staring at me. I smiled, said “Namaste” and tried to be slightly entertaining. The circle of people closed in around me so I could nothing but the sky and curious faces. One of the older ladies started to yell in the local language of Maharathi and had everyone back up a bit which was nice of her.

Crowd around me (they literally did!):


The post crash scene:


After about an hour and a half, with the sun having just set, Andre appeared with Dilip (who had landed down in the valley below Panchgani, having not been able to climb out), English Dave and two of the non-paraglider campers, Natalie from the Netherlands and American Dave who actually had been suffering from Delhi Belly so hats off to him for coming!

This kind of incident has happened to others staying at Andre’s before so he is in fact the owner of a rudimentary stretcher. The others folded up my wing and it was placed on the stretcher (as a very expensive pillow). A team of four or five of them slowly rolled me onto it, strapped me in and carried me to the jeep. I waved to the twenty or so locals left even though I couldn’t see them as I was loaded into the back. We began a slow and sometimes bumpy ride to hospital in the nearby town of Wai (ironically pronounced “why”) which has a population of about 30,000. Natalie and American Dave rode in the back with me keeping me company.

Finally at the hospital, I was first taken to an examination room and shortly after X-rayed. It was not easy getting off of Andre’s stretcher onto the X-ray table and then back onto another rudimentary, slightly curved stainless steel stretcher that the hospital had. My paraglider was left in the X-ray room (never thought I’d take it there) as I was then instructed that a CT scan was next. A CT scan! Awesome, I didn’t think that they’d have one here. Sadly, to get to the CT scan, they actually had to wheel me out of the hospital, down a bumpy ramp and into a diagnostic clinic which is in fact part of the same building...seems a bit inefficient but hey, this is India.

Again it was a bit of a pain for me to get from the stretcher on to the CT scanner’s table. There were some definitely painful moments as it didn’t seem like this was everyone’s specialty as one of the three people moving me was a security guard! Once on, my shirt was pulled up and my pants removed. The technicians exited the room and I began to be pulled through the big expensive white doughnut (albeit an old one). The first pass was quick and I thought that would be it but then a painful 20 minutes ensued where I was slowly pulled centimetre by centimetre back through the machine with a scan taken every 30 seconds or so. I had to remain motionless with my arms above my head and the combination of this discomfort with the pain (I still hadn’t received any medication yet) and the chilliness of the air conditioned room put me in a bad place. I kept trying to mentally think of something positive but the weight of my injury and the fact that this time I was on the other side of the world from home was difficult to overcome.

Finally the scanning was complete and they wheeled me back into the hospital and into a room where I was going to stay the night. My new friends from the Eco Camp joined me soon after and then we found out from the doctor that I thankfully hadn’t broken anything but I had compressed the disc between the L1 and T12 vertebrae. My treatment: remain lying flat for the next two weeks and take it easy for the next few months...super, that should be fun!
Not pleased to be here:

It's humbling to have to be spoon fed at 39...

Natalie offered to stay in the room with me overnight which was super nice of her. The others headed back to Panchgani and Natalie and I stayed up for a bit chatting a bit about our families and any other topics that could distract me from my new, not so cool situation. However, I kept trying to remind myself that as bad as it seemed, it could have been much worse...I’m alive, and my legs still work...I will Wanderglide again...