Sometimes, survival requires giving in to forces greater than oneself.

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In February 2007, a German paraglider named Ewa Wiśnierska traveled to New South Wales, Australia, to train for the World Championships.

Near Manilla, a small town in the state's north, a group of pilots launched one afternoon into rising thermal currents.  The weather service had already flagged thunderstorms for the area that day. Most of the other competitors saw the sky darkening and landed early.  But Ewa kept going.


What happened next took only minutes.  A storm cell built up around her almost instantly, and wind began dragging her glider upward; over seventy kilometers per hour at points.  She pulled her control lines into a spiral, trying to force the wing back down.  Still, the updraft prevailed. It carried her straight into the dark center of the storm.  She was close to 10,000 meters above sea level by the fifteen-minute mark, the same altitude at which passenger jets cruise. 

The temperature inside the cloud had dropped to about minus fifty degrees Celsius. Hail had fallen from the rain. Lightning flashed somewhere close to her canopy.  Her body shut down as the air was too thin to breathe properly. She went dark.

For the next forty minutes or so, she hung there unconscious, drifting through the storm with no memory of any of it.  When the storm's pull faded, her glider, left completely alone, remained inflated on its own and gradually lost altitude. When she regained consciousness, she was under two thousand meters with ice covering parts of her body and her ears already frostbitten.

 Somehow, bruised and barely conscious, she brought the parachute wing down into a farm field without further injury.

 The doctors who examined her afterward gave a simple explanation that fainting had probably kept her alive.  A slower heart rate meant less oxygen demand, right when oxygen was scarcest. Not everyone caught in that storm was so lucky; a Chinese pilot, He Zhongpin, forty-two, went through the same system and didn't survive.

 Ewa's case is still cited today as one of the most extreme high-altitude survival stories in the history of unpowered flight.



  Writer: Binod Kumar Simkhada 
binodkumarsimkhada315@gmail.com

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