Paragliding: a sport or a risk?

The last few days have been really dark for the paragliding community.  During the World Paragliding Championship, two (very experienced) pilots crashed and did not survive.  On top of that, in the same weak, Xavier Murillo (one of the important people behind the organization of the paragliding world cups) was missing in Peru and after a search and rescue operation was found dead in the mountains at 4800m altitude.

Today, I heard about a fatal accident of a Belgian pilot that I knew personally.  He is leaving a wife and two young children...  Especially this last fact makes me very sad about the whole situation.  Being a young father myself, I am more and more wondering whether I should continue with this 'sport' or not.  No matter how safe we try to fly, no matter how good we are, no matter how careful we plan our take-off and landings, no matter how good we study the weather forecast, accidents do always happen.

On the one side, there is the joy of flying, the wonderful delight that we experience while thermaling, while being at cloud base, while making a transition.  When I'm up there in a nice flight, I often think of my father who passed away more then 14 years ago.  Somehow, I feel connected with him when I'm up there all alone.  But when I'm grounded, reading about all these fatalities, i cannot get it out of my head that some day, i might be next.  Is that really what I want?  Do I really want to leave Tine and Jenne alone on this planet.  No I don't!

But I also want to live!  And paragliding is part of that!  People who do not fly, probably cannot understand why it is so hard to quit our sport, even if we hear about fatal accidents, even if we know there is a risk.  It is a strange battle inside, and I guess the adventurer in us wins...

Paragliding is not something that I do for the adrenaline rush.  My personal motivation is twofold: first of all, i feel connected with my father when flying.  Secondly, having experienced his battle against cancer from very close at the age of 18, i now know that I should squeeze as much out of life as I can.  Paragliding is part of that.  I hope Tine and Jenne can understand... and I hope they can forgive me if I make a mistake here...

Perfect sky

People sometimes ask me what the best weather conditions are for paragliding.  Whell... today, I think we got pretty close:

The gray building you see is where I work.  The picture was taken at 17h43.  Observe the nice, little, white and fluffy clouds.  At the bottom they are flat (that's cloudbase).  At the top they have more irregular shapes.  These kind of clouds are perfect indicators of rising air: they show us where the thermals end.  All we paragliding pilots have to do, is circle around underneath them and hope that we will go up :-)

The other nice thing about the cloud-formation in the above picture, is that the clouds are quite close together, forming nice cloud streets.  Paragliding pilots try to hop from the bottom of one cloud to the other, thereby trying to fly as far a distance as possible.