Chinese paraglider reaches near-record heights, over 8,500m, by accident

BEIJING – A paraglider in China who intended to simply test some equipment instead ended up reaching barely survivable heights last week.

Mr Peng Yujiang, a 55-year-old paraglider in Gansu province, early on May 24 flew nearly 8,600m above sea level in the Qilian mountain range of north-west China’s Qinghai and Gansu provinces, according to state media.

The episode was captured on a camera attached to his equipment and showed the harrowing conditions he experienced.

Mr Peng rose to a level almost on a par with Mount Everest’s summit and aviation flight paths. His face and body are covered in frost and ice in the video, which was originally posted to social media and later shared by Chinese state media.

“I felt the lack of oxygen. My hands were frozen outside. I kept trying to talk on the radio,” Mr Peng said in a video recorded after the incident, according to Sixth Tone, an English-language, Chinese state-owned outlet.

According to local news media, Mr Peng was testing equipment as part of “ground-handling training” – a step that paragliders say is critical to managing safe launches – at an altitude of 3,000m above sea level.

But a strong wind suddenly lifted him into the sky. He could not control the glider or land as the draft grew stronger, and he was pulled up above the clouds.

Mr Peng was apparently the victim of a potentially dangerous phenomenon that paragliders call “cloud suck”, in which a pilot is rapidly drawn upwards into a cloud.

At extreme altitudes, people risk hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, because of the thin air. Severe hypoxia can cause organ damage or death.

Still, Mr Peng managed to land about 32km away from where he took off. In stable health and recovering from his surprise flight, he has since said: “Thinking about it still makes me quite scared,” China Daily reported on May 29.

The local sporting authority in Gansu province said on May 28 that Mr Peng, who is a licensed paraglider, would be barred from the sport for six months.

It also noted that flying activities at sites in the area would be suspended for an unspecified period, local news media reported.

But the association deemed Mr Peng’s incident an accident, based on his statement that he did not have a flight planned and was doing ground-handling training, which does not require participants to register plans in advance, the reports said.

A second pilot was also banned from flying for six months because he released footage of the incident without permission, the authority’s report said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Mr Peng was not the first paraglider to accidentally reach such extreme heights.

In 2007, Ms Ewa Wisnierska, a champion Polish paraglider who competed on the German national team, reached around 10,000m, accidentally breaking the paragliding height record on a practice flight in Australia, just days before the World Paragliding Championships.

Her ascent was treacherous, and she passed out in the air, eventually landing more than 80km away from where she took off, on a farm.

Another paraglider who was caught in cloud suck that day did not survive.

“Today, I still fly – but just for pleasure and to give courses to the people who come to my paragliding school. Competing no longer makes any sense to me,” Ms Wisnierska told People magazine in 2024.

“This definitely changed a lot of priorities and made me realise that there are much more important things in life than championship cups and medals. I often ask myself why was it that I survived and this other pilot did not?” NYTIMES