The day after, Sunday, I went out to Mang Shan to fly for the first time since I got back from the States. The day was clear once again, the sun was heating up which meant there would be good thermal activity. Once at the site, to my surprise, the owner of the club, Flying Man (the bar pictures are mine), built a huge facility in order to attract more people. I'll have to put up some pictures, but it's quite amazing how it went from being a desert to a sort of Disney World in less than 4 months. A bunch of people had come out to fly on that day, at one point when I was flying, I counted at least 20 other gliders thermaling around me. A group of Taiwanese pilots had flown from Taiwan in an tour that took them to different flying sites around China. Their first one, that Sunday, was Beijing.
I was 4th to take off. I'm usually pretty reluctant to taking off first, I like to observe others and see how they're doing before I actually jump into the air. This time the conditions were great and Alex told me to go ahead and take off. So I did. So far so good, a few thermals here and there, I managed to stay up without a problem. About 40 minutes into my flight, Alex comes over on a tandem and I made my first 'kiss', meaning you fly next to another glider and have both wing-tips touch one another. Anyhow, after that, Alex and I made it to the landing area, landed, and I was just in time for some 'jiaozi's' (dumplings), the old lady serves on her bicycle.
While I was in the air I had seen a few of the Taiwanese, who did not know the site at all, crash during take-off. They were used to thermo-dynamic type of soaring, with a constant ocean breeze that kept them up for hours and hardly gave them any trouble. Conditions here are much more aggressive. You are flying with uneven terrain, trees, rocks, thermals, etc. If not used to these conditions, flying there for the first time can become a rough experience, which is what happened to three people last Sunday.
Three accidents took place. One of the Taiwanese was trying to soar by the take-off area and somehow lost control and ended up falling on top of some trees. Nothing happened to him. Another one was flying high, way above take-off altitude and suddenly got a collapse which forced him to throw his rescue. He fell in a golf course, he escaped harmless as well fortunately. The third man and second Taiwanese, had a similar problem to the previous person but did not react very well to it. When the wind passes over a mountain, the side that is opposite to the direction of where the wind is coming from, is full of rotor. This means the air is turbulent, unstable. Paragliders, being non-rigid wings, can fold easily in these conditions and create collapses. Collapses are no good, but they can be solved in different ways.
This third person got into a rotor, at an altitude of about 100 meters (300ft), his wing collapsed and he failed to:
1) pull the brake on the opposite side of the collapse which would have avoided him entering into a spiral movement.
2) pull out his rescue parachute.
Result: he entered into a spiral, rotating at speeds exceeding 100km/h with forces of 4-5G's and hit the ground. He passed away instantaneously in front of all of us, his pilot friends, and his wife.
That being said, it was an accident, and like many accidents, it could have been avoided with certain precautions he did not take. I feel sorry for his family though.
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