Canadian pilot Dr Ben Lewis was swept to 7,374m in a storm cloud in Bir in India on 17 October and lived – although it was close. In a remarkable report posted alongside his tracklog on XContest he told how he was at the end of a five-hour flight when he flew too close to a cumulonimbus and ended up fighting with his twisting glider, freezing and being battered by hail as he spiralled uncontrollably upwards at 16m/s.
After blacking out he woke “surprised” to find himself hanging in a tree, feet from the ground and still attached to his paraglider, an Ozone Alpina 4 (EN C). His tracklog shows he came down to earth with a max sink rate of 19m/s.
Injuries included frostbitten hands, retinal bleeding, a frozen cornea, ruptured eardrum, a badly bitten tongue and rib fractures. (He was later also diagnosed with C4 and C5 fractures, vertebrae in the mid-neck, and had to wear a hard collar for eight weeks.) He endured a long self-rescue before being met by a local family who took him into their home before he was retrieved by friends.
Two weeks after the incident we spoke to Ben at his home in the Yukon,...
