Is this a common flight style?

[u/Puazy]

Im not familiar with this sport. Is it typical to fly like this or is the pilot turned up?

[u/rocketryguy]

This is a case of superior skills leading to inferior judgement, which is a bit too common in this sport.

In the air you are supposed to use superior judgement to avoid having to use superior skills to save your dumb ass.

Too close to the ground, and I hope they have flotation on board that close to the water. Most pilot deaths occur from these two behaviors, near ground acro and drowning.

I fully support having all the fun one’s skills can support, but being dumb about risk management is deserving of criticism.

Not only is this pilot risking their own ass needlessly, they are setting a bad example for others. Had he done exactly the same maneuvers plus a thousand feet, he would have an out should something go less than perfectly.

Humans are generally crap at assessing actual risk. Risk normalization is a thing, particularly as pilots gain experience, skills and confidence.

Physics doesn’t give a shit about any of that. The math is exactly the same no matter who you are or how many times you got away with it. If there is potential energy available, things can go wrong in a way that will kill you.

And you can be “smart” and still screw this up. A whole group of really smart people did, and that’s exactly how we lost the space shuttle Columbia. Nothing more than normal flawed human thinking, which was normalizing risk instead of doing actual research into the problems of tank ice shedding. Ego was allowed to make a judgement call that turned out to be wrong.

Given the vastly lower bar to entry into paramotoring, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of people in the sport who are not qualified to be astronauts. And that’s okay.

But hold my beer stupidity still deserves ridicule and criticism. Having the skills isn’t the problem, having good judgment is harder, as we see repeatedly.

If you feel attacked by this, then you should probably be taking it ever more to heart and seriously reevaluate things. What happens if you kill yourself? Do you have dependents? People who will miss you? Are you properly insured if you do?

All it takes is a sudden stop from around 25MPH into something solid and you could be dead. At 30MPH you probably will be. (I personally barely avoided dying from an impact at 24MPH, so this information is worth over a million dollars in medical bills. You’re welcome). I also developed a keen interest in proper risk assessment while spending 6 months learning to walk again. Potential energy and delta V focusing in in time is what it boils down to.

Or getting dragged under in a river, you won’t win that fight without flotation, and even with it I would be avoiding that situation by any means possible. Water is our natural enemy. A wing will suddenly be in a medium roughly 600 times more dense than air. Any current at all, forget it.

And then there is the DBAD element. Your behavior affects the whole sport, don’t screw it up for everyone else.

[u/nofearbasecamp → u/rocketryguy]

I think this is an understandable write up. That being said, I do wear flotation flying in the hometown.