Reserve throw in India

razi

Nov 19, 20249 min read

The lead up

I was coming back from the tall terrain between Bir and Manali. Cloud base was >16k ft in some places, but, as typical in Bir, cloud base was lowering quickly after noon. Cooper was flying faster than me and I was trying to keep up. We passed over one of the high saddles, and continued racing along under clouds that were a few thousand feet below the top of the adjacent peaks. After he passed over the next saddle, Cooper got on the radio to say he only squeaked over it.

I figured we would cross over to the front range after this saddle, but I wanted to stay along the back range for a little while longer to keep speed up. I was happy I got the extra height, because once I started towards the saddle, I didn’t feel much higher than it.

Furthermore, there was a surprising amount of headwind (with 2/3 to full bar, I had about 20km/hr forward speed). I could see Cooper a couple km ahead, so I continued pressing bar hoping to get over the saddle quickly.

The incident

I wasn’t paying enough attention to my glider however, and when I came out of the headwind, I took a symmetric frontal collapse. I missed the initial catch. I looked up and saw an 80% collapse on the leading edge. The wing tips and trailing edge were still intact.

The shoot was asymmetric. My guess is that I tried to catch the surge too early and pulled unevenly on the right side. This caused the glider to wind up to the right.

I did a bad job of keeping my body centered and I did not tuck my legs to help stabilize. The result was my body twisting ~120deg to the left relative to the glider.

I had messed up twice in a row (I didn’t catch the collapse and I had failed to deal with the surge properly). I now had a glider that wanted to wind up into a spiral/auto and my risers were crossed. I had dealt with similar situations with ample altitude at SIVs and once in the wild, but this time I was in steep rocky terrain. According to my track I had about 1000ft above terrain. In hindsight, I think that would have been enough to sort the issue, but at the time I was already underneath the cliffs on the horizon and I was afraid if I fought for too long I would be in an autorotation into rocks.

Rather than going “all in” and trying to solve the issue, I reached forward and threw my reserve with my right hand (brake toggle still in hand) to the open air to my right. The reserve bag opened up smoothly, and I begun my reserve descent down into the cliffs below.

Recounting the story now, on one hand I feel I may have given up too soon, and didn’t put in the skills I’ve practiced over time. On the other hand, I know that hedging my bets with a reserve toss may have been the best decision at that time. In other words, I feel my previous two mistakes were in large part because I was tired and was likely still tired; and if I didn’t solve the issue quickly, an uncontrolled impact would have been catastrophic.

The reserve ride

The glider risers continued to twist. So I reeled in the right side of the glider with the brake toggle. I was not able to get the glider completely into my lap, but the glider was in a stalled configuration and was no longer pulling.

Looking down I could tell I only had a dozen seconds before impact. According to my track my descent was between 4-5m/s. I stared at some soft looking bushes and tried to will the reserve to go that way, but my drift ended up going towards some steep cliffs and ledges. I was able to rotate my body relative to the terrain and decided to land facing away from the cliff. First I touched down on my feet, then the back protector of my harness, and then my head tipped back and hit the slab.

I was wearing goggles with a magnetic lens, and as the lens popped off my vision went from a red tint to a bright white light. For a moment, I considered maybe this is what it is like to die or break my back, but then I saw the lens bounce down the cliffs and felt better.

I also continued to bounce down the cliffs until my reserve caught on rocks and a bush above me and I came to stop in a granite chute.

Everything was stable. I found a footing and did a health check. My left heel, hurt from the initial impact, my right knee and right elbow hurt as well from bouncing down the granite chute. However, fortunately, nothing felt too painful to move around, my back felt totally fine, and I didn’t have the sensation of blood anywhere. I was worried, adrenaline might be masking the extent of my foot and elbow injury, but overall I felt extremely lucky.

So I got to work.

First, I pulled out my inReach and hit the SOS. I was still 15ft up on a cliff (see images below). Furthermore, I didn’t know if the pain and extent of injuries might be masked by adrenaline, so I felt like having people know I was in an emergency could be important.

I also sent out a message to the core crew of people who normally look out for me. I was surprised when both Radha(my wife), and Dan Z replied in the middle of their night. The messages I got from Radha showed me that she was active and worried, but thankfully, not overwhelmed. I'm happy that she was kept informed, but I am torn that I ended up keeping her up all night in a position where she had very little contol. I really appreciated that Radha and Dan were able to work together to understand more about the minimal information they got thru the inReach dispatch call and 160 character inReach messages.

On a side note, I learned that inReach disables all map-share updates and location tracking while an SOS is pressed. Dan was able to point that out to me a couple hours later while I hiked. I now realize the local people still had outdated coordinates. Garmin says this is because they don’t want good samaritans getting hurt when a professional rescue is underway… I find this procedure concerning, especially since, in this case, the rescue crew were locals who now didn't have my live location.. but I won’t dive into that too much here.

My reserve had caught on a bush and rock 15ft above me. I was now in the middle of a vertical rocky trough. My reserve kept me from falling another 15 feet to a large ledge, but now I would need to get off the rock-face I was stuck on.

I considered climbing up to the reserve to free it. This would allow me to reset the reserve as an anchor for the next parts of the downclimb, but the movement looked difficult and I didn’t want to have to down climb it wearing the harness. So I decided I would leave the reserve there.

To lighten up my harness, I decided to throw down as much gear as possible to the large grassy ledge below me. My wing was hanging to the right (A testament to how steep the rock I was stuck on was). I shifted my harness off my shoulders and pulled out my large custom concertina bag. I was happy that I could use it as a sack to stuff my wing into. Then I unclipped my wing and threw it down. I also noticed my harness protector pocket had ripped open. Since this is where I kept my tent and vol biv gear, I threw those down as well.

Next, I cut all of the reserve lines except for the three most slack ones. Then I used those three lines as protection for the next 5 feet of climbing down. From there, I could inspect the last 10 ft of climbing. It looked tricky and exposed, but not impossible. I cut the last three reserve lines, then took off my harness and threw it down as well (I transferred my inReach and phone onto my body). Some bouldery moves and a traverse under a bush later, I made it to the grassy ledge.

I packed up my gear and started hiking.

The way back home

The hike started out steep and technical. The route finding in the early sections was critical, especially as some light snow and rain started. But gradually it eased up. After a few hours I made it down to a river that had signs of trails and large enough spaces to throw down a tent if I needed to.

The SOS had been sent to Suresh (the owner of Surya hotel) who had organized a 10 person ground crew. They estimated it would have taken 16+ hours to get up to where I was. I learned this after I had been hiking for a couple hours. My heel was in pain, but I was able to keep weight off of it by limping. I had all the gear necessary to spend 1-2 nights out there so I decided to call off the SOS.

I hiked until sunset and was planning to keep hiking into the dark, but as I rounded the corner, I caught the attention of the first people I had seen on the ground. A shepherd was corralling his sheep and goat into the back of the canyon to spend the night. In broken English he asked where I was going. When I told him I planned to keep hiking, he replied “Nooo, you should stay with us - there are tigers and wolves out there” I declined, but he pleaded again. Heck, I guess I would need to finish the hike tomorrow anyway.

I spent the evening at the shepherd’s campfire. We talked about religion, risk, family, and work. They fed me mutton soup, chai, rice and chapati. I showed them pictures of where I had crashed. And I promised to send a video of him making the chapatis to his son when I got back into cell service. I set up my tent amongst 400 goat and sheep and had a surprisingly good night of sleep.

When I woke up in the morning, I was offered breakfast but decided to get moving, I wanted to make the most of the day. Before hitting the road however, the shepherd expressed curiosity about my inReach. I explained what it was and he asked where he could get one. Maybe someday India will make it allowed to use Satellite messengers there. Before leaving he sent a message to his son, just “Hello”… to which I facepalmed and explained that the communication was very slow and that he should fill the message with as much information as possible so that his son could know what to expect. So he sent a second message asking about their puppy and letting him know that they would be making it down to the valley in a couple days.

I walked for another hour and found an open grassy area facing into the front range. I decided to see if I could get my gear into operating condition and save myself a day of hiking on my legs that were extremely sore from walking miles on tip-toes. My right break-line was de-sheathed, I was missing my reserve, and my harness protector pocket was torn open, but otherwise I was in good condition. I launched and flew 18km back to Bir in light thermals. I took the time to focus on wing control and it was clear how much I had been slacking off on keeping the glider stationary. Right now, this is my most recent flight - I look forward to getting back in the air.

Reflections

First and foremost, I should set myself some required rest day intervals when on paragliding trips. This happened on my 8th day straight of flying (10th day if you count airlines! and 11th day if you count the local flight before starting the journey to India).

On a similar note, I need to be better at recognizing when I am tired mid-flight. Whether it is looking up and deciding how intuitively I am controlling the wing, listening to my body, or listening to when I get frustrated.

Speaking of frustration, this accident reminds me that I should be doing a better job of minimizing frustrations. My radio microphone was picking up a ton of wind noise and I was annoyed by my squeaky pulleys. Neither of these were the cause of the incident, but I let them accumulate and they all take away from my focus.

I should also spend time working on the hard stuff (over water?). Play around with twisted risers, Fly with messed up visibility(simulate flying near clouds), and finally commit to getting an entry level acro kit and learn to make it do things fancier than stalls and wing-unders.

One thing I continue to ruminate on is how I would have felt had I successfully dealt with the twist. at least for now, I don't seem to have a large fear injury from throwing my reserve. Maybe it is because I faced one type of fear? I had never thrown my reserve and I did it in one of the more uninviting places to do so, yet things ended up alright. If, on the other hand, I had dealt with the twist and pulled out right above the rocks and continued flying - the fear of what might have happened may have haunted me even more.

References

Incident flight: https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:Razi/30.10.2024/04:24

Flight back the next day: https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:Razi/31.10.2024/04:29

My in reach map page. Note. None of the red msgs and tracepoints showed up on mapshare/flyxc