Equipment fails rarely; decisions fail regularly. This module is about how your own mistakes are built: why experience sometimes works against you, how personal limits blur without your noticing, and what happens to attention under load. The aim is not to frighten you but to give you tools you will actually use at the launch site and in the air.
⏱ 80 min📖 20 sections✓ 50 questions
Experience as a risk factor: where prepared pilots get hurt
In the basic module we looked at which phases of flight produce most injuries. Now let us look along a different axis — the pilot’s own experience.
In mainstream aviation there is a concept called “the killing zone”. Paul Craig went through forty years of accident data and saw something unpleasant. The risk is highest not for beginners but for pilots with between 50 and 350 hours. For those who already fly with confidence.
The picture in the mountains is similar. Ian McCammon went through 598 avalanche accidents in the USA between 1972 and 2001. 69 per cent of them happened on well-known slopes. And, most importantly: people with advanced avalanche training turned out to be more vulnerable than the rest to the trap of familiar terrain. Their training did not protect them; in that particular respect it worked against them.
Experience does not reduce the number of mistakes. It changes their kind.
Stage of growth
The typical mistake
What produces it
First flights
Technical: launch, landing
The skill is not yet automatic
Just after the course
Flying beyond the conditions
The hands can do it; the eye cannot yet read the weather
A confident pilot
A decision: flew when he should not have
Skill drowns out the warning signals
A pilot with a name
Did not cancel a flight in front of people
The role presses harder than the wind
A beginner makes mistakes with his hands, and everyone can see them. An experienced pilot makes them with his head, ten minutes before launch, and cannot see them himself.
A fine point for pros. Skill works like an insurance reserve, which means it can be spent. Every time you have pulled yourself out of an unpleasant situation, what you received was not confirmation of your skill but a message that some of the reserve has gone. Count such episodes as expenditure, not as victories. If you have collected more than two or three in a season, it is not your luck that has changed — it is your normal flying regime.
Case study. A pilot with four hundred flights arrives at his own slope on a day he calls workable. The wind is a little stronger than usual, but he knows the launch down to the last stone. He does not look at the instrument: he looks at the slope and tells himself “I know everything here”. A collapse coming out from behind the crest catches him twenty metres above the rocks. Where the chain breaks: familiar terrain replaced the check. Experience gave him confidence in the place, not in today’s wind. What would have helped: one sentence out loud — “what are today’s numbers” — and a look at the anemometer.
The Swiss cheese, deeper: active failures and latent conditions
In the basic module we covered the “Swiss cheese” model: slices of defence, each with holes in it, and an accident when the holes line up. Now it matters to understand where those holes come from.
James Reason divided the causes into two groups.
Active failures — what a person does or fails to do right now. Did not pull the leg loop, did not look up before turning. They are visible immediately and they almost always make it into the debrief.
Latent conditions — decisions taken long ago, and often by other people. They sit in the system for months and spoil nothing, until they coincide with an active failure.
Reason argued for looking not at the person but at the conditions the person works in. The “find the culprit” approach stops at the last link in the chain. The systems approach goes further.
Active failure
Latent condition
Who created it
The pilot, now
Someone, earlier
When it becomes visible
Immediately
Usually only after an accident
Example
Did not check the reserve before launch
The reserves lie in a common heap with no tags
Example
Cut the briefing short
The schedule allows 15 minutes for preparation
How to fix it
Attention, a checklist, a second person
Change the procedure, not the people
The practical conclusion is this. If, after an accident, you have found the culprit, the debrief is not finished. The culprit is the first stop, not the last.
A fine point for pros. Your own latent conditions are almost impossible to see from inside: they look like “the way we do things here”. One technique works — an outsider. Invite a pilot from another club to spend an ordinary flying day with you and name three things that surprised him. You will hear what you stopped noticing five years ago. And do not argue with him at the site: write it down, and argue in the evening.
Case study. At a club the reserves are kept in a communal box, with no tags and no repack log. Everyone knows whose is whose. A pilot takes his and flies; the parachute has not been repacked for two seasons. Where the chain breaks: there is an active failure — he did not check the date. But the hole appeared earlier and not through his fault: the box with no log had been standing there for a year. What to do: fix the box, not the pilot. A log, a dated tag on every container, a person responsible, and a reminder in the calendar.
Risk homeostasis: why equipment does not always reduce the accident rate
In 1982 Gerald Wilde proposed the theory of risk homeostasis. The idea is this: a person has a habitual level of risk that he is prepared to tolerate. When external conditions become safer, he takes on risk somewhere else — and the overall level returns to where it was.
Transport Canada — the Canadian transport authority — gives easily understood examples. Drivers with anti-lock brakes drive faster. Introducing motorcycle helmets in Ohio did not reduce the number of deaths: speeds rose. A pilot with a good weather station in his phone prepares for a flight in advance less often.
In paragliding it looks quite ordinary. You bought a calmer class of wing — and started flying on days you would not have flown before. You fitted a new reserve — and started flying closer to the slope. You bought an instrument with tracking — and went further from the road.
Equipment does not make you safer. It moves the boundary at which trouble starts. What you do with the margin you have gained is up to you.
A new wing — the first five to ten flights in the calmest conditions you can find.
A new reserve — what you have gained is not “one parachute” but a few seconds and a little height.
Back protection in the harness — it softens the impact; it does not cancel it.
A tracker — it helps people find you; it does not stop you falling.
A fine point for pros. Risk homeostasis is a theory, and it has its critics. But one part of it is useful without reservation. After any purchase, answer yourself honestly: what are you going to do with the margin you have gained. The answer “nothing, it will just be calmer” is the right one. The answer “now I can finally fly over there” means the margin is already spent, and you have not even taken off yet.
Case study. A pilot moves from a training wing to a livelier one. The very first weekend is a strong thermic day — after all, “the new wing is made for exactly this”. Three hours in, he takes an asymmetric collapse and throws his reserve over the forest. What he feels: not fear but excitement. The wing really does hold better than the old one. Where the chain breaks: the whole gain from the new wing was spent on the first day. The right way: calm flights at a familiar site first, thermals later.
Personal minimums: how to write them so that they work
In the basic module we covered what personal minimums are and gave an example for a student. Here it is about writing your own, and about making sure they do not stay a pretty list.
The FAA — the US Federal Aviation Administration — describes personal minimums as limits stricter than the official ones. They are set in advance, in a calm setting, and checked against when preparing for a flight.
There is one hard rule: minimums are not revised on the day of the flight. The FAA lists the reasons why they must not be lowered: haste, an unfamiliar place, fatigue, stress. All four of those come to meet you at the launch site.
Write your minimums in four groups.
Weather. Wind at launch and in the valley, gusts, the difference between the gust and the background, cloud, visibility, the latest launch time.
Place. Which launches and landings are open to you, which only with someone alongside, which are not.
You. How many days since your last flight, how much you have slept, how your mood and health are.
The task. What you are doing today and what you are not: a route, a top landing, flying in a group, filming.
Experience
Wind at launch
Gust minus background
Place
Task for the day
Up to 30 flights
up to 4 metres per second
up to 2
the familiar launch only
a straight flight down
30–100 flights
up to 5
up to 3
a familiar area
weak thermals before midday
100–300 flights
up to 6
up to 3
a new site only with a local pilot
a short route along the ridge
More than 300 flights
within the regulations
up to 4
a new site after a detailed briefing
a route with designated bail-out points
This is a sample, not a standard. You set your own numbers. Set them below the ones at which you were once genuinely uncomfortable.
The wording has to be checkable by a number or by a yes-or-no answer. “I fly if I feel all right” is not a minimum. “I fly if I have slept at least six hours” is.
A fine point for pros. Add a second line to every item: what you will do if the condition is not met. Without it a minimum turns into a prohibition, and a prohibition is easy to argue away at the launch site. With it you do not have a refusal but a plan. “Wind over five — I go and look at the lower launch.” “Slept badly — one flight, no route, before eleven.” Carrying out a plan is psychologically easier than giving up a flight.
What follows is for our students
The full module text, the practice sessions and the exams are open to those who train with us. Access is included in the course fee: it runs for the whole course and for three months after it ends.
If you are training with us now, or have trained with us before, sign in with your access code. If you are a pilot from another school, access can be bought separately.
Language: the sections above are in English. Behind the code the full module text and the question bank are currently in Russian — the English versions are being prepared.
The material prepares you for the theory exam of the national paragliding federation, but it does not replace practice with an instructor. The pilot licence is issued by the federation after its own exams. Book a course.
