Lets be honest. As adventurous and exciting as it may look to go paragliding in San Francisco with us, there’s probably a part of you asking whether it’s safe or not. After all, you’ll be hanging under a piece of nylon by a bunch of strings. This is a reasonable concern and we’d like to explain exactly why you’re not going to fall out of the sky. In a nutshell, we use certified equipment, our tandem instructor’s meet a certain level of training and exhibit good judgement.
All of the equipment that we use to do our flights are certified. The most important of these certifications is the certification of the paraglider. After a paragliding manufacture is done designing a wing, they can send their wings into an organization in Switzerland called Para Test if they choose to. There’s a few other testing organizations, but Para Test’s EN system is the most commonly used. With very few exceptions, most manufacturers choose to have their paraglider certified.
In order for a paraglider to receive a rating, it must be collapse and load tested. Test pilots take these paragliders over the water and intentionally collapse the paraglider in various different configurations. Once the pilot has collapsed the paraglider, they let go of the controls and observe how the paraglider recovers. If a paraglider does not recover by itself, it cannot receive a rating, however it’s more complex than that. There are four different ratings issued to paragliders; EN-A, EN-B, EN-C, and EN-D. If a paraglider recovers from a collapse almost instantaneously without pilot input, it will receive an EN-A rating while paragliders that take longer to recover will receive an EN-B, EN-C, or EN-D rating. Aside from collapses, there are a handful of other maneuvers that are tested as well. As great as the flight tests are, it’s not all that must be done before a paraglider can receive a certification. A paraglider is load tested. Regardless of how well it has performed in the flight test, if it doesn’t meet the load test requirements (8 times the top of it’s weight limit for three seconds), it cannot receive a certification.
