Accident Review Committee

ACCIDENT REVIEW COMMITTEE > John Hovey, feat. Misha Banks

Speedflying With Discipline : A Case Study

:“Who is that?” I asked, approaching the small group of pilots and students milling around in the Nelson’s Butte LZ. It was a gray evening in Jackson, Wyoming, with switchy winds and no possibility of soaring. But someone had ignored the ample cues that flying might not be advisable and hiked up the Butte anyway. I couldn’t tell who, but clearly, someone was up there laying out a wing in preparation to fly.

On most summer nights, the whole gang, myself included, would plod the 600 feet up our west-facing, sagebrush-covered slope just to bag one more sled ride for the day. Jackson doesn’t have much of a “ground suck” problem, so it seemed wrong for just one pilot to be on launch when everyone else thought it prudent to wait a while. I frowned at the Tyvek streamer wagging in a gentle downslope breeze and hoped it wasn’t one of my students or some visiting P2 trying to learn about the hazards of Rocky Mountain flying the hard way. “I think it’s The Colonel*,” someone said. Oh, great. The Colonel. Of course, it’s him.

Migratory thrill-seeker, skydiver, carnival producer, and self-exiled social outcast, The Colonel was that archetypical anti-authority guy. That guy who takes on fun, adventure, and free flight as his life’s missions and cannot understand anyone else’s point of view. His real

Misha Banks and another pilot take to the skies. Photo by John Quinn.

*The Colonel is not this pilot’s real name. “I SAW HIM MOW DOWN A SAGE BUSH WITH HIS LEGS AND SORT OF BOUNCE BACK INTO FLIGHT, AND I FELT AN URGE TO VOMIT.”

name was not The Colonel, of course, military precision being precisely not what he was all about, but he introduced himself as ‘The Colonel’ and spoke of himself that way, in the third person.

Enthusiasm and endless stoke were his strengths. Patience and attention to detail were weaknesses. He grudgingly earned a pilot rating in order to gain site access, but he still struggled to launch his EN-B glider gracefully, even in ideal conditions. The Colonel believed that his alleged thousands of (unlogged) skydives fasttracked him to elite status in paragliding, whatever that means.

From my few conversations with The Colonel, I knew that even if he gave the impression that he was listening to you, his mind was always miles away, focused on the next jump, the next flight, the next big ride. The hardest thing in the world for him was to just sit still. The Colonel was always on the move, always stoked, and he would do exactly what he wanted to do.

Suddenly, The Colonel was launching. Everyone looked up to watch. The Colonel began running down the scraggly summit ridge, and there was the unmistakable snapping up of no more than nine square meters of fabric behind him.

Oh, man, who gave that guy a speedwing? Well, The Colonel was airborne now, and less than a second after his feet left earth, he yarded on one toggle and flipped upside-down into a barrel roll to the right. I gasped. He’d only been about ten feet in the air, flying maybe 20 miles per hour, still accelerating to trim speed. He plummeted, losing altitude just as quickly as the hill dropped away from him, and as his body completed its arc, swinging back under the tiny canopy, he continued to dive.

I saw him mow down a sage bush with his legs and sort of bounce back into flight, and I felt an urge to vomit. Another split second passed, and he flew out from the hill ten more feet and barrel rolled again, this time to the left, again grazing the terrain. Ten seconds later, he swooped and landed and let out an ecstatic whoop of celebration.

I breathed deep and tried to bring my heart rate back into the double digits while the pilot group erupted into chatter and gossip. We began a predictable scene of worship mixed with horror, which I have seen enough times now at enough different flying sites around the world that I guess it is pretty much commonplace everywhere.

“Awesome!” someone said.

“Oh, man, that was so sick!”

“Dude, two barrel rolls off of Nelbo’s? The Colonel knows how to throw down!”

“I don’t know … that looked kind of dangerous to me.”

“What’s your problem, bro? That was effing awesome!”

And there it was. Just another evening at a small hikeand-fly site in North America and, because The Colonel got away with it and didn’t hurt himself, no accident reports were written, and the lessons learned were that everyone’s pre-established biases got strengthened.

The Colonel may have concluded that he was an even more skilled pilot than he previously thought. His admirers probably adjusted their estimations of what was “sick” (and even what was possible) on a speedwing a little bit further towards the extreme, and his detractors probably assured themselves that speedfliers were even more reckless than they had assumed. But, who is right? And who’s to say? Is speedflying super sick or super dangerous? Or neither? Or both?

:Over the past two years, USHPA’s Accident Review Committee has noted an increase in the number of speedwing accidents involving barrel rolls into terrain and barrel rolls resulting in uncontrollable spins. Our

USHPA community has been saddened by several fatal barrel rolls and accidents that left pilots suffering severe and permanent disabilities. Some of these injuries involved, tragically, pilots who had little experience with the maneuver, and some were even attempting a barrel roll for the first time.

I sat down with USHPA Advanced Paragliding Instructor and speedwing pilot Misha Banks of Red Tail Paragliding in Boulder, Colorado, to learn more about the barrel roll issue. We hope our conversation will help you make your speedwing flights and your speedflying community a little safer.

Hovey: Let’s talk barrel rolls.

Banks: Yeah, I definitely have a lot of thoughts about this. The barrel roll is the one maneuver that many pilots strive towards in speedflying and it seems to be a regular source of trouble. There is a lot of knowledge out there that should be more accessible for people learning it. There are quality speedwing instructors out there, so if you want to do it right, instruction is accessible.

Hovey: Maybe YouTube is a problem? I mean, some of those lines are so cool, and a speedwing video that doesn’t have multiple barrel rolls just wouldn’t be cool enough to post.

Banks: That’s part of it—we don’t see the work that goes into it. Of course, you don’t just huck yourself into a slot canyon and get away with it over and over again. You have to follow the progression. The problem is that speedflying is not like paragliding. In paragliding, usually, it’s a chain of bad decisions that leads to an actual accident or incident. All it can take is one good decision to break the chain of poor decisions and avert danger. However, almost the inverse is true with speedflying. In speedflying, we need to understand that we’re doing something that has a higher risk than paragliding. A series of sound decisions can be deemed irrelevant by a single bad decision that might pass in the blink of an eye.

Hovey: Chris Santacroce is on the USHPA Accident Review Committee, and he says that a pattern he sees is spur-of-the-moment, “Oh, I’m just gonna try this,” decisions leading to accidents. Things that weren’t part of the pilot’s plan and just seemed like a good idea at the time. And then it results in something bad.

Banks: The big thing I’ve seen with speedflying is a lack of emphasis on discipline in progression and falling back on impulsive decision-making. I’ve fallen into this trap myself and I’ve seen several of my peers do the same. Speedflying is incredibly engaging in the way that it forces you to be present, creative, and responsive throughout an entire flight. Obeying your intuition from moment to moment is essential and filtering out half-baked impulses is critical. For me, that means trying to fly for myself and no one else—ignoring any impulses to try to impress. Being too self-conscious takes me out of the flow I need to tap into to make sound decisions.

Hovey: You wrote about your own barrel roll accident in Boulder, Colorado last year. Can you talk about that?

Banks: I had a specific flight plan in mind, one that I had already done, that included two rolls. (Two rolls in Boulder is tough; it’s pretty close to terrain, and you don’t have much altitude, so you have to be diligent.) The wind was a bit cross to the north on launch when I got up there—when it’s north in Boulder, it’s usually a bit sinky out front. Anticipating finding sink, I called off the rolls in my mind. The day was starting to turn on, so I decided just to fly straight out to the LZ and go get my big wing.

It turned out that the air wasn’t as sinky as expected so I recommitted to the original flight plan. And then I just went into it—impulsively. I did the first roll, and it went fine, then hesitated recognizing I was quite low, then pulled the second roll anyways. That was all it took—one bad decision, one impulse.

This was my first accident on any wing. I had made bad piloting decisions in my career up until that point but this was the only one of consequence. All the naive and uninformed decision-making of my early paragliding career had led only to scratches and scuffs. The first time I pull a total blank on a speedwing, and I’m suddenly rocking a back brace for a couple of months. Reflecting

on the accident, it became apparent that my inability to filter out the impulse to pull the low roll was fed by a need to get some attention, as well as a lack of focus after making an impulsive decision to change the flight plan.

Hovey: I’ve only done probably five barrel rolls in my life. I had the thought each time afterward that I had no idea how much height that just took. It seems like it doesn’t necessarily take a lot. But some barrel rolls are almost like carving into a dive to get into the canyon and then finishing the roll. I mean, it’s super technical flying. How do you learn that?

Banks: For learning barrel rolls, the best thing you can do is to give yourself excessively wide margins. Laminar air, tons of terrain clearance behind and below, and a front mount reserve would all be sensible. Professional instruction and a strong understanding of the progression towards barrel rolls are also a must. It’s important that pilots take into consideration their wing loading and the roll stability of their gliders. This is where an instructor or mentor should step in to make sure the pilot is set up for success.

Hovey: What do you think about back protection?

Banks: I opt for an airbag most of the time. I’m not aware of any performance loss from having an airbag on a split leg harness. I figure, might as well have the extra bit of protection. Just don’t let it fool you into thinking it’ll save you. It’ll certainly dampen any blows but don’t fly extra aggressively because you feel like you’re safer. I think reserves make sense if you’re practicing maneuvers or you’re flying high over terrain.

Hovey: Well, thank you for your thoughts today and for helping to be a voice for safety.

Banks: Speedflying is a pretty incredible experience. The sensation and creativity it brings out are tough to find elsewhere. I’d encourage those seriously interested in learning to go for it, but to seek quality instruction, respect the progression, and only push it as far as it offers genuine value to your life.