This was published 17 years ago
After flying to the heavens, world's luckiest woman thanks the angels
By Linton Besser
In the eye of the storm, spinning out of control about five kilometres above the ground, Ewa Wisnierska closed her eyes.
"I just wanted to come down and survive," she recalls. "And I didn't care where."
Wisnierska, 35, a German paraglider pilot, was about to be rocketed to the cruising altitude of a Boeing 747.
She has been hailed as the luckiest woman in the world after surviving a storm cell that sucked her higher than Mount Everest during a flight over northern New South Wales.
Ms Wisnierska spent 40 minutes unconscious while being carried to 9946 metres. She was pounded by hail the size of melons, narrowly avoided lightning, endured temperatures as low as minus 50 and was covered in ice.
A Chinese paraglider sucked into the same storm cell on Wednesday, He Zhongpin, was found dead on Thursday. The pair were among 200 paragliders taking part in training flights before next week's Paragliding World Championships in Manila, NSW.
Just before 1pm, Ms Wisnierska had jogged off the lip of Mount Borah, about 50 kilometres north of Tamworth, and taken to the air. For a good hour or so, the flying was beautiful. But by 2.30pm, Wisnierska knew she was in trouble. In front of her was a roiling mass of cloud, a storm cell sucking up everything in its path.
"I wanted to fly around the clouds but I got sucked up at 20 metres per second into it," she recalls. "And I started to spiral."
As she was drawn up, in darkness, it began to rain and hail. She managed to call her team leader on her radio before passing out. Propelled skyward, she was about to smash the world altitude survival record.
Wisnierska's track log, a flight trajectory downloaded from her GPS handset and altimeter, recorded her top altitude at 9946 metres.
"After about 40 minutes, I woke up," she says. "Everything was frozen. . . I scratched the GPS and I was at 6900 metres and I was still flying."
"It was very hard. I wanted to see how high I was, but when I saw I closed my eyes again.
"But then after another 15 minutes I realised I was … sinking. I thought, OK, try to spiral down again. After a while I saw the earth, and I thought, wow, I probably will survive."
Found covered in ice, with frostbite, she had landed 60 kilometres from Mount Borah.
Godfrey Wenness, the organiser of the world championships, said: "Not even 747s fly through storm cells … This is like winning Lotto 10 times in a row, that's how lucky this woman is."
Wisnierska said yesterday: "I don't know who to thank. I thanked the angels, but I don't believe in God."
She still hopes to compete in the championships. "Flying is too fantastic to stop because of an accident," she says.
With AAP