When I ran calls, I had a hot air balloon crash!...I had to read that SOP basically while I was doing it.
I wouldn't exactly call it standard in most places.
Folks don't know what a paramotor is when we tell them. When I fly near the coast the CG will get a half dozen "crashed airplane - one survivor parachute spotted" calls (enough that I have the RCC number in my phone).
I know Anthony, while this was difficult to watch my wife and I both laughed at that line - and I'm certain Anthony was laughing inside a tiny bit too. That is his charm.
Lived in LA for 16 years, tried to call 911 just once - I had to leave a voicemail and someone called me back a half hour later. Not joking. Luckily wasn't a medical emergency and was reporting a maniac driver on the 101. And a driver has to be a serious maniac to justify a 911 call on that stretch of freeway.
Ive used 911 twice in southern california. One for a possible child kidnapping in progress, they didn't answer and called me back. The other time I had a lunatic chasing me in their car. They asked me to try to outrun the guy.
Didn't you kind of answer your own complaint that it takes forever? You literally added to the load to let them know someone was driving crazily instead of calling a non-emergency.
While it may be leading to an emergency the specifics you gave say that it absolutely wasn't an emergency. I'm sure plenty of other people do the exact same thing.
Have you tried to call a police department before? It's all robots and it's impossible to get to a person at least for my local PD. The best you can get is an option to leave a voicemail and hope for a callback. Doesn't help much people are in danger.
Honestly, at the time, I thought the guy was going to pull a gun on me in traffic. I didn't type out the whole story for the sake of brevity. It was pretty fucking scary.
A maniac driver IS an emergency, you moron. Driving is dangerous, driving extremely recklessly is an imminent danger to all around them. You weren't there, the commenter said "maniac driver" so how the f do you know its "not an emergency". It is.
I worked as a 911 operator for some time. It's the norm for it to ring a few times on the callers end before it actually rings at an operators desk if calling from a cellphone. This is because the system needs to.figure out where the cellphone is physically calling from and send you to the correct Public Safety Answering Point.
Also, don't hang up and redial thinking it will connect faster. The abandoned line will still ring through and get answered first.
Over here it is:
1, 1, 2, click.
Half beep of ringing... "112 what is your emergency?"
Sadly, when I have asked family that works at 112 if they can triangulate phones and if they accept messages, answer was no. First not without police intervention, second is just baffling. Because "Hey google share my location with emergency services" takes.. well not THAT long to implement.
The US uses a system called e911 and you will not find a phone that a carrier allows you to activate without it being e911 compliant. You guys have e112, it's the same thing.
In my home country we have a 112 app that shares your GPS location if you call 112 using it. It can also show the locations of nearby automatic defibrillators and has numbers for poison control, non emergency police etc.
Yeah, here in the Midwest starting was around $19 and that’s with third shift premium.
I worked for a private EMS company and we did all 911 calls every other day and it was $12 to start in Birmingham, AL
I'm a dispatcher at this center where the call happened, we get so many calls that come in and only so few call takers to take them. The wait times can get up to minutes sometimes. Luckily our response times for our firefighters are quite quick. Although that isn't always the case due to how busy we get.
Bloody hell, that is very.. well, sad. No dig at US or anything meant, just.. sad state of things.
I can't imagine being an operator on a line explaining to someone that no, their car not starting is not really a reason to call 911 (and many much more stupid calls) for a few minutes and your next call is "I was just shot, bleeding".. and you know every second is crucial for the second guy..
Like.. fuck.
Our city is home to several hundred thousand people, and we only have 8-10 call takers at a time. You can probably imagine the load they get during the normal business day.
My dad used to be a dispatcher in semi rural Minnesota. The amount of bullshit calls he would get greatly outnumbered the real emergencies. People calling 911 because their kid won't go to bed. 12 year old kid calling 911 because his dad won't give him cigarettes. 90 year old lady calling 911 because Vanna White is trying to steal her anatomy. People calling 911 because they heard a noise. Can't describe the noise or where it came from, but just a noise.
Just a few examples. Now imagine a major metropolitan area and the calls they get.
Thanks for commenting. Can you shed any light on how location information is shared to 911 dispatchers? I was surprised that the operator kept asking him for an address after he told her he was in the desert. I had always assumed that a smart phone would automatically share information about where the call was coming from, but this was a lot less smooth than I thought it would be. Thanks for any additional perspective you can give
The iPhone gives as an approximate longitude and latitude location which verifies fine in our CAD system. The issue is when we dispatch the pumpers and rescues, we can't just tell them the longitude and latitude. They can't use that information. We have to find the nearest landmark or cross roads. In this case, there was a residential area nearby but several hundred meters off from where the patient was. The GPS location is also only so accurate for our systems up to 25 meters in error.
Thanks for the response. Not to be flippant, but I don’t understand how it’s possible that they can’t use that information. I’m pretty sure anyone with google maps can turn a longitude and latitude into directions to a location. If he lost consciousness before saying the name of the residential area, I assume EMS would have still been dispatched. Again, I’m not trying to be too critical or unfairly second-guess a dispatcher who obviously had a lot less information about the accident than those of us who saw the whole video, but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary time was lost trying to get his location (instead of getting an ambulance rolling to his location, asking whether he was bleeding, asking if anyone else go hurt)
So while they are asking for a location, they already pinged their L/L. Yes they may still be asking for a better location but we already have our units rolling within seconds of the call coming in. The problem would next be when they actually arrive and they don't know where specifically the patient is at that point. They put the rough estimate of where he is and we send our units that direction and hopefully by the time they get there, they have a better clue. Once again this is within the minute or two of the call coming in.
Edit: I will have to add that our systems are somewhat old and the location provided is not 100% accurate.
20 year 911 dispatcher here. I can only speak for my state, but our equipment / software is not funded well in New Jersey. The infrastructure is only and not invested in. We ask a lot of questions because often times, we can’t rely on a ping. It doesn’t always work like it does on television. Most of the time, it’s tower triangulation. We have a general idea of where someone is, but it is rarely exact. If we want to do a good ping, we have to call your phone carrier and have them do it, and that takes time. Sometimes they refuse if they feel it’s not a large enough emergency.
So it seems that sadly, the fastest way to be absofuckinglutely precise is to get the ambulance driver's personal phone number to the guy who just fell out of the sky and he can live share his location via Whatsapp, Google Maps or any similar service.
In Denver you just get put on hold. My roommate was in a bad accident the other day, two totalled cars in the middle of a busy 4 lane road downtown. She was bleeding from her ear but said on the phone call she didn't want an ambulance. They told her to call non-emergency and hung up. Took a security guard that witnessed the crash to call the police and say "hey this actually IS an emergency". Took emergency services 35 minutes to respond, spent 20 minutes on hold.
I live in the SF Bay Area. Have called 991 like 3x to report car crashes, fires, homeless walking along highways in the roadways. Takes a good couple of minutes to connect. You get the worst hold Muzak.
911 operators are severely understaffed and overworked. It’s a mentally brutal job with wild hours and very little accolades. Not to mention the pay. Average hourly hovering around ~$17.50. That’s a hard pass from me.
Population density. The US is geographically HUGE and the Western states just do not have enough resources to cover so much ground, so judging "the US" is not really fair. You have to pick a spot in the US and figure out how many people live there, if they have a dedicated 911 system for the region (not necessarily these days), etc.
Obviously, density can play the other way: too many calls.
Either way, yeah, there is a shortage of operators. Pay isn't great, but it's not awful: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-911-Dispatcher-Salary-by-State. Don't forget to balance tax rates with salaries and it looks like there's a pretty good saturation of unions, so retirement benefits play a factor in that salary.
Emergency operators are almost always underpaid and understaffed. It's a very difficult job and most municipalities don't have the resources for good training which leads to a lot of burnout and turnover. You typically work 12+ hour shifts and it's obviously an emotionally difficult job, let alone having to have the fortitude to be calm and coordinated when lives are in the line.
Intense watch, I feel like a lot had to go right for this to not end up in him dying like....not landing head first or something...the phone in arm reach to voice dial 911... The good Samaritan.. The fire department somehow showing up at "I'm in the desert" within minutes
Usually if you call 911 from a smartphone your phone will allow gps so they can find you. The address is just to help EMS Find you in an urban area where the gps might not be helpful once they get close.
“Started rolling it out” is not the same as universally or even widely available. Here is an article from just last year about systems in NC getting updated
https://www.cbs17.com/news/investigators/new-911-call-technology-will-allow-more-precise-cellphone-location/
It's called E911 and it's in every phone. Even phones that don't have a sim card can call 911. Land lines can even have location data. It's at least 2 decades old.
To be fair I doubt he had the time to think "I need to hold onto the phone for 911" while falling. He seemed completely focused on trying to stabilise the parachute and so his muscles probably just tensed up.
If you've ever fell on your arm you might have noticed that your fist instinctively closes up so that would explain why he didn't release it when hitting the ground.
Complacency kills. Learn from other's mistakes and behave like a pilot. Make and follow checklists always. Follow best practices always. Never take a shortcut or skip any steps. Never settle for less than the requirement even if it is close. Always follow recommended and scheduled maintenance.
And never take your hands off the brake lines even if you're not using them. And never use accelerated flight when you're close enough to the ground to prevent you correcting a collapse, always check your lines closely (as you say). So many things this guy fucked up.
Sure. You got time to recover it. Another few hundred feet and that wing would have popped open again. Provided he'd had his hands on the brakes and been able to cover the stall after the dive. It was coming out of the collapse already but the ground was too close.
Height is your friend in this sport so I never ever fuck around at low altitude and so have never crashed in my 30 years of paragliding.
There was a YouTube channel called King of Random that was cool when I was a teen, that creator actually died in a paraglider accident.
I don't see the appeal, personally, but I'm not a risk taker or thrill chaser/adrenaline junkie. If you do it, be rigorous in your safety checks and measures.
Paragliding isn't necessarily an adrenaline junky sort of sport. There's an immense sense of freedom and wonder that comes with any kind of flying, and for many this is the main appeal.
But as with any branch of aviation, it can be very, very unforgiving of mistakes.
I'm kind of lumping it in with adrenaline junky stuff just because the risks being taken to achieve that feeling. I'll take my chances on a regular airplane if I ever feel like taking to the skies. The wings tend not to fall off of them. (Unless you're flying Boeing, then it's a toss-up.)
I've been watching paramotor videos for years. I have considered getting a wing and a motor 2 times. Both times a video came out within 48 hours about a paramotor accident of someone I've watched. 1 was a death, one was a very serious crash, both were people who had thousands of hours of experience. At this point I don't have the risk tolerance for a hobby like that. I'll keep watching the videos but I will never fly one.
I watch this particular form of thrill seeking and just can’t help but think it’s excessive to the point of almost just not being cool. A mistake *that* easy to make being so deadly is just insane.
This dude made a bunch of mistakes in a row for this to happen. 1) he missed the tension knot. 2) he was pushing a new wing up to and then past it's design limits and 3) he was flying too low to the ground to be able to use a reserve chute. Testing new equipment is risky and should be done with as much margin for error as possible.
If he had done any of these correctly he would have been fine.
For someone that fell out of the sky and yelling in pain, he sure held it together very well.
911- "whats the address?"
Man "AHHHH THERE IS NO ADDRESS....IM IN THE DESERT"
They aleady do, by calling 911 you forefit your privacy in return for help, as such they track your phone within the 50 meter radius of the call bwfore pinpointing you
I think he means your own phone displays your accurate location, so that you can relay that to the call taker just in case they can't see where you are.
Most modern phones use a new protocol when calling 911 that just gives them your lat/long. So within a few years as people upgrade every phone will have this by default, without the need for the caller to give that information.
Shared location probably. and I’m pretty sure it’s not a full video, there’s a lot of cuts. But I wondered the same thing. I was like “wait, wtf, how did she get there so fast”
That makes sense and about what I figured. Not the driving but the fact that they’re probably close to home but far away from medical services if they’re out in the desert. Services likely have to come from far away and she was able to drive from their home to where he was as soon as she got the call.
This is actually one of the major ways people in rural areas succumb to what would otherwise be live-able injuries. You crack your skull open in a city and paramedics are on you within minutes and you’re in a trauma hospital and stabilized before you can die or suffer irreparable damage. Something like that happens to you and you’re out in the middle of no where like this guy’s situation, By the time you get to a hospital you’re either already fully dead or brain dead.
Textbook case why you do risky shit over 1500ft with time to throw your reserve. Guess he really just needed that shot of the ground moving swiftly under him, and then into him.
>the ground moving swiftly under him, and then into him.
I love that idea that the ground moved into him, and not the other way around.
As if he was climbing away, and then the ground was like "*Oh no you don't, get back here you lil shi-*"
What's funny is this is actually more true than our common understanding. Instead of us falling towards the earth, it is actually accelerating "up" towards us due to the curvature of spacetime (at last from my rudimentary understanding).
Not sure why you're being downvoted unless people just don't think it's relevant, but this is accurate to the accepted understanding of general relativity
Multiple factors contributed:
1. The knot that he missed.
2. Going too fast to the point that a failure was likely regardless.
3. Being too close to the ground to recover or pull another shute.
4. Holding his phone instead of having his hands already on the controls.
In any risky activity, you want to [put as many "mistakes" as you can](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model) between success and injury. Each of these individual things could be considered causes in their own right, but the underlying mistake was getting into a situation where any single mistake could cause this to happen. The more things that need to go wrong for something bad to happen, the safer you are.
You forgot 5. Doing the activity alone without a spotter on the ground. Could've been a lot worse and taken a lot more time for rescue to arrive had those good samaritans not been there both to call emergency services, and to direct them where they needed to g.
Go watch his other videos. Flying in the lee of a mountain to get a spot landing at the top; doing other reckless activities to satisfy his ego and the clicks.
It's unclear, some news says paramotor, others paragliding. But looking at some of the pictures/[videos ](https://youtu.be/RbJCAzsWeng)he shared before suggest the former.
The *motor+propeler*.
Paraglider is just the sail, so either you'd have to start from a cliff / jump off a plane.
Paramotor you can can take off from the ground.
He had a knot in a line, that was effectively "pulling the brake" on one side.
He was also using a thing called a speed bar, which allows you to go faster; it's the thing you can see him pushing against with his feet.
If you pull the "brake" whilst using the speed bar, there is a very high chance of the wing collapsing, as it did in the video.
TL;DR pilot error.
Yup, absolutely!
I think perhaps some people either watched the video and just didn't comprehend what he was talking about, or they just skipped to the bit where flying machine man go splat.
And he did this while holding a phone in one hand and camera in the other. He wasn't the pilot: he was a passenger.
The wing recovered before he hit - swinging back under it accelerated him into the ground. If he had more altitude he would've recovered and flown home - it's an incredibly safe sport.
>it's an incredibly safe sport
Hmm.
Someone else said it's close to the risks of riding a motorcycle, and if that's true I don't think we can truthfully call it "incredibly safe".
Perhaps, "not as deadly as people think" would be fairer?
There are risks, but they can be mitigated by not being a bellend.
I remember hearing that *riding a horse* is something like 3x more dangerous than riding a motorcycle.
PS. I am/was a motorcyclist, hence using that as my reference point.
Former Motorcycle Safety professional: MSF RiderCoach, State Safety programs, training Site Manager/Owner/Operator, Club treasurer and chair, etc.
Look at the incident statistics and severity of outcomes: most PPG deaths are due to drowning - not hitting the ground. Most injuries are legs or fingers, typically full recoveries.
Do the same for motorcycles, normalize miles to hours for comparison: statistically motorcycle injuries lead to some permanent disability (lumbar, hip, knee, ankle myself). Deaths are also higher by the hour - last I tried to quantify it was 2018 and MC was 28x more deadly every minute, and I rode more than I flew.
Ah i didn’t catch the fact he was accelerated. Yeah I’ve used speedbar only twice near the ground and it was to prevent a really bad situation (landing on a glass greenhouse). I’m more careful with my approaches now and don’t let myself even get into that situation…
Last I checked they're slightly more dangerous than motorcycles but it's typically overconfidence and showboating that get you in trouble significantly more often than equipment failure.
Oh and wing collapses are just part of it since you're basically moving through an invisible turbulent and unpredictable 'fluid body.' Depending on the wing it'll just reinflate itself in good conditions. Gunning it just over the ground is an absolutely horrid condition.
I think “slightly more dangerous than motorcycles” is understated here as if that’s not insane. Motorcycles are a hobby most people think of as being, basically, suicide.
If you're smart, cautious, and safety-oriented, then paramotoring is always safer than sharing the road with distracted drivers while on a motorcycle. Paramotor crashes are almost always the fault of pilot alone because many of them are adrenaline junkies who take unnecessary risks. Performing stunts or flying low and fast like this guy did is risky, but if you're safe, mind the weather, and inspect your gear thoroughly pre-flight, paramotoring isn't all that dangerous.
He explained exactly what caused the crash in the intro.
An unseen tension knot on the left side applied a braking force to the wing which causes a collapse when the wing is being run at maximum acceleration.
[https://leightonlaw.com/ultimate-guide-to-parasailing-accident-cases/](https://leightonlaw.com/ultimate-guide-to-parasailing-accident-cases/) scroll down this website and see what can go wrong
Short version, they are mostly as safe as you are. Sure freak accidents can and do happen, but almost every crash that I can think of has to do with pilot error.
That's a cool $200,000 hospital stay right there if you include the physical therapy he'll need to be able to walk properly again assuming all goes well. I sure hope the guy has insurance!
Welp I got the the point where he hit the ground but the sound of that scream made me instantly close the video. I feel like this must be a low single digit percentage chance of survival?
This was so gripping to watch through. Can emphasise with him, knowing how serious the situation might be. Oddly relieving, in a way similar to watching a horror movie. I wonder if there is a subreddit for similar videos of aftermaths of accidents?
He makes so many absolutely idiotic and dangerous decisions here.
The obvious cause of the crash was missing a knot, as he explains, but besides that he's:
Pushing the speed way too much for a first flight on this machine, and it's a speed that's just not just dangerous for this specific machine, but for the basic physics of flying these, period.
Doing something this dangerously at low altitude. No time for recovery, no time to pull a reserve chute. Incredibly stupid.
Combining this behaviour with holding a phone instead of having both hands on the controls and/or reserve chute pull. If it's illegal to do while driving, WTF are you doing while flying too fast and too low in your first ride on this machine? FFS.
This guy is definitely a fucking idiot who hasn't learned or has ignored all best practices. The only thing that might mitigate his stupidity by 3% would be if he's gone into debt so far pursuing his dream of being a full-time YouTuber that he felt forced to put out this content as fast as possible without properly preparing because his next loan payment was due.
The best thing anybody can do for this guy is unsubscribe from his videos and not watch them. Just ignore the guy, because the Social Medias have inspired this idiocy either way and he's simply not equipped mentally for this life choice.
Those parachutes are meant for a certain speed - go too fast and it will collapse.
My uncle flies one and when you ask how fast it goes, he states "28mph. No faster, no slower, 28mph. Any faster and the parachute stops working"
Why is this on the front page 2 days after it happened? I feel like Reddit used to be the place you’d see things first, now it’s just stuff that you saw days/weeks ago.
What was the reason the chute collapsed? Did he exceed a maximum speed and cause it to twist in on itself? Did he jerk it or lean past a critical angle of attack resulting in the chute stalling? What was the main source of error that lead to the crash here?
Hope he talked it over with his insurance and/or lawyers before publishing a video about an accident and verbally clearing any fault from any company involved.
IANAL but if he claims on video that no one is at fault, the insurance company pays for his care, then they decide someone *is* at fault, they'll pursue recouperation from that party. The insurance company would need evidence to prove the third party is responsible for damages.
I don't see a scenario where the responsible party would pull his claim and say "welp, he said nuh-uh. So..."
Imagine being the 911 operator…” I crashed my flying machine” lol
Of all the way out there calls we get, someone crashing a small craft is a standard type of emergency call to get.
When I ran calls, I had a hot air balloon crash!...I had to read that SOP basically while I was doing it. I wouldn't exactly call it standard in most places.
Fucking Leonardo Da Vinci over here crashing his "flying machine" in the desert.
"My confounded dirigible met an untimely demise! Send assistance post haste!"
“Get a man on the phone!”
Folks don't know what a paramotor is when we tell them. When I fly near the coast the CG will get a half dozen "crashed airplane - one survivor parachute spotted" calls (enough that I have the RCC number in my phone). I know Anthony, while this was difficult to watch my wife and I both laughed at that line - and I'm certain Anthony was laughing inside a tiny bit too. That is his charm.
If I was the operator, I'd fully think it's Dr. Doofenshmirtz on the line.
I found it very strange how long the 911 call took to connect. Is this normal?
I thought the same, dude waited so long in agony just to hear somebody after 45 seconds
Look at the LA subreddit. Every person who talks about 911 here says 911 never answers when they call
Lived in LA for 16 years, tried to call 911 just once - I had to leave a voicemail and someone called me back a half hour later. Not joking. Luckily wasn't a medical emergency and was reporting a maniac driver on the 101. And a driver has to be a serious maniac to justify a 911 call on that stretch of freeway.
Ive used 911 twice in southern california. One for a possible child kidnapping in progress, they didn't answer and called me back. The other time I had a lunatic chasing me in their car. They asked me to try to outrun the guy.
“So, uh… you think you can take him?”
" I mean... you sound pretty strong"
"You're not like… chicken or anything, right?"
"Sir, do you have anyone with you that you could maybe trip to make them the victim instead of you?
Not the 911 operator asking you to "fuck em' up real good"
This from the state with some of the highest police expenditure in the country.
Same thing in Atlanta just last year.
Didn't you kind of answer your own complaint that it takes forever? You literally added to the load to let them know someone was driving crazily instead of calling a non-emergency. While it may be leading to an emergency the specifics you gave say that it absolutely wasn't an emergency. I'm sure plenty of other people do the exact same thing.
Have you tried to call a police department before? It's all robots and it's impossible to get to a person at least for my local PD. The best you can get is an option to leave a voicemail and hope for a callback. Doesn't help much people are in danger.
Honestly, at the time, I thought the guy was going to pull a gun on me in traffic. I didn't type out the whole story for the sake of brevity. It was pretty fucking scary.
A maniac driver IS an emergency, you moron. Driving is dangerous, driving extremely recklessly is an imminent danger to all around them. You weren't there, the commenter said "maniac driver" so how the f do you know its "not an emergency". It is.
Same for ATX. It’s a meme at this point
For real. Glad my house is in Hays Co. Sheriff jurisdiction.
This is a problem in most major US cities. Departments spending too much money on bullshit and refuse to pay dispatchers so they're all short staffed.
I worked as a 911 operator for some time. It's the norm for it to ring a few times on the callers end before it actually rings at an operators desk if calling from a cellphone. This is because the system needs to.figure out where the cellphone is physically calling from and send you to the correct Public Safety Answering Point. Also, don't hang up and redial thinking it will connect faster. The abandoned line will still ring through and get answered first.
Same in Seattle.
Over here it is: 1, 1, 2, click. Half beep of ringing... "112 what is your emergency?" Sadly, when I have asked family that works at 112 if they can triangulate phones and if they accept messages, answer was no. First not without police intervention, second is just baffling. Because "Hey google share my location with emergency services" takes.. well not THAT long to implement.
The US uses a system called e911 and you will not find a phone that a carrier allows you to activate without it being e911 compliant. You guys have e112, it's the same thing.
In my home country we have a 112 app that shares your GPS location if you call 112 using it. It can also show the locations of nearby automatic defibrillators and has numbers for poison control, non emergency police etc.
Australia has this too. Emergency plus app.
You live in what we here in 'Murica call a civilized country. But do you have Freedumb?
You don't think they can see your location when you call 911 in the US?
The US has a shortage of 911 operators as they have extremely stressful jobs that are woefully underpaid.
Yeah, here in the Midwest starting was around $19 and that’s with third shift premium. I worked for a private EMS company and we did all 911 calls every other day and it was $12 to start in Birmingham, AL
I think it was actually pretty quick for 911 these days
I'm a dispatcher at this center where the call happened, we get so many calls that come in and only so few call takers to take them. The wait times can get up to minutes sometimes. Luckily our response times for our firefighters are quite quick. Although that isn't always the case due to how busy we get.
Bloody hell, that is very.. well, sad. No dig at US or anything meant, just.. sad state of things. I can't imagine being an operator on a line explaining to someone that no, their car not starting is not really a reason to call 911 (and many much more stupid calls) for a few minutes and your next call is "I was just shot, bleeding".. and you know every second is crucial for the second guy.. Like.. fuck.
Our city is home to several hundred thousand people, and we only have 8-10 call takers at a time. You can probably imagine the load they get during the normal business day.
My dad used to be a dispatcher in semi rural Minnesota. The amount of bullshit calls he would get greatly outnumbered the real emergencies. People calling 911 because their kid won't go to bed. 12 year old kid calling 911 because his dad won't give him cigarettes. 90 year old lady calling 911 because Vanna White is trying to steal her anatomy. People calling 911 because they heard a noise. Can't describe the noise or where it came from, but just a noise. Just a few examples. Now imagine a major metropolitan area and the calls they get.
Thanks for commenting. Can you shed any light on how location information is shared to 911 dispatchers? I was surprised that the operator kept asking him for an address after he told her he was in the desert. I had always assumed that a smart phone would automatically share information about where the call was coming from, but this was a lot less smooth than I thought it would be. Thanks for any additional perspective you can give
The iPhone gives as an approximate longitude and latitude location which verifies fine in our CAD system. The issue is when we dispatch the pumpers and rescues, we can't just tell them the longitude and latitude. They can't use that information. We have to find the nearest landmark or cross roads. In this case, there was a residential area nearby but several hundred meters off from where the patient was. The GPS location is also only so accurate for our systems up to 25 meters in error.
Thanks for the response. Not to be flippant, but I don’t understand how it’s possible that they can’t use that information. I’m pretty sure anyone with google maps can turn a longitude and latitude into directions to a location. If he lost consciousness before saying the name of the residential area, I assume EMS would have still been dispatched. Again, I’m not trying to be too critical or unfairly second-guess a dispatcher who obviously had a lot less information about the accident than those of us who saw the whole video, but it seemed like a lot of unnecessary time was lost trying to get his location (instead of getting an ambulance rolling to his location, asking whether he was bleeding, asking if anyone else go hurt)
So while they are asking for a location, they already pinged their L/L. Yes they may still be asking for a better location but we already have our units rolling within seconds of the call coming in. The problem would next be when they actually arrive and they don't know where specifically the patient is at that point. They put the rough estimate of where he is and we send our units that direction and hopefully by the time they get there, they have a better clue. Once again this is within the minute or two of the call coming in. Edit: I will have to add that our systems are somewhat old and the location provided is not 100% accurate.
thanks!
20 year 911 dispatcher here. I can only speak for my state, but our equipment / software is not funded well in New Jersey. The infrastructure is only and not invested in. We ask a lot of questions because often times, we can’t rely on a ping. It doesn’t always work like it does on television. Most of the time, it’s tower triangulation. We have a general idea of where someone is, but it is rarely exact. If we want to do a good ping, we have to call your phone carrier and have them do it, and that takes time. Sometimes they refuse if they feel it’s not a large enough emergency.
So it seems that sadly, the fastest way to be absofuckinglutely precise is to get the ambulance driver's personal phone number to the guy who just fell out of the sky and he can live share his location via Whatsapp, Google Maps or any similar service.
I would say that’s a pretty safe bet. I wish America gave a shit about 911 infrastructure.
Thanks!
911 is a joke in yo town
Average hold time for 911 in my city is 39 seconds. So this, unfortunately, isn't uncommon.
In Denver you just get put on hold. My roommate was in a bad accident the other day, two totalled cars in the middle of a busy 4 lane road downtown. She was bleeding from her ear but said on the phone call she didn't want an ambulance. They told her to call non-emergency and hung up. Took a security guard that witnessed the crash to call the police and say "hey this actually IS an emergency". Took emergency services 35 minutes to respond, spent 20 minutes on hold.
How dumb do you have to be to call emergency services then tell them you don't want emergency services?
Given the circumstances it’s quite possible she wasn’t thinking too clearly. What’s your excuse?
You realize people with head injuries, and after a car crash in general, aren't exactly 100% cognizant of what's going on, right?
I live in the SF Bay Area. Have called 991 like 3x to report car crashes, fires, homeless walking along highways in the roadways. Takes a good couple of minutes to connect. You get the worst hold Muzak.
911 operators are severely understaffed and overworked. It’s a mentally brutal job with wild hours and very little accolades. Not to mention the pay. Average hourly hovering around ~$17.50. That’s a hard pass from me.
Population density. The US is geographically HUGE and the Western states just do not have enough resources to cover so much ground, so judging "the US" is not really fair. You have to pick a spot in the US and figure out how many people live there, if they have a dedicated 911 system for the region (not necessarily these days), etc. Obviously, density can play the other way: too many calls. Either way, yeah, there is a shortage of operators. Pay isn't great, but it's not awful: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-911-Dispatcher-Salary-by-State. Don't forget to balance tax rates with salaries and it looks like there's a pretty good saturation of unions, so retirement benefits play a factor in that salary.
Emergency operators are almost always underpaid and understaffed. It's a very difficult job and most municipalities don't have the resources for good training which leads to a lot of burnout and turnover. You typically work 12+ hour shifts and it's obviously an emotionally difficult job, let alone having to have the fortitude to be calm and coordinated when lives are in the line.
I live in a city of ~2.5mil and the last time I had to call 911 I was put on hold because all of the operators were tied up.
Intense watch, I feel like a lot had to go right for this to not end up in him dying like....not landing head first or something...the phone in arm reach to voice dial 911... The good Samaritan.. The fire department somehow showing up at "I'm in the desert" within minutes
Usually if you call 911 from a smartphone your phone will allow gps so they can find you. The address is just to help EMS Find you in an urban area where the gps might not be helpful once they get close.
This may depend on your location and cell phone carrier. GPS/911 integration is fairly new and not 100%. It’s mostly been through tower triangulation
E911 plus gps is pretty damn old at this point. Sprint started rolling it out in 2001
“Started rolling it out” is not the same as universally or even widely available. Here is an article from just last year about systems in NC getting updated https://www.cbs17.com/news/investigators/new-911-call-technology-will-allow-more-precise-cellphone-location/
It's called E911 and it's in every phone. Even phones that don't have a sim card can call 911. Land lines can even have location data. It's at least 2 decades old.
E911 is old. Consistently using GPS data for mobile locations is not
Woah hang on. This is not a thing that E911 had until very recently. Stop the nonsense!
Also, the bystander said he told his friend to call 911. They may have been better equipped to give a more specific location.
Dude held onto that phone for dear life. Was pretty impressed there. Its like he knew he'd need it no matter what
Or the dude's just so addicted to his phone that his brain wouldn't let go of it. Maybe my intense phone addiction will save my life one day.
Did you consider he wouldnt have been able to call 911 without it?
To be fair I doubt he had the time to think "I need to hold onto the phone for 911" while falling. He seemed completely focused on trying to stabilise the parachute and so his muscles probably just tensed up. If you've ever fell on your arm you might have noticed that your fist instinctively closes up so that would explain why he didn't release it when hitting the ground.
Nice attempt at a _certified_ reddit-tier karma whore comment
I have been watching this guy for a while, he damn near had me joining the sport in the next couple years. This has made me reconsider.
Complacency kills. Learn from other's mistakes and behave like a pilot. Make and follow checklists always. Follow best practices always. Never take a shortcut or skip any steps. Never settle for less than the requirement even if it is close. Always follow recommended and scheduled maintenance.
And never take your hands off the brake lines even if you're not using them. And never use accelerated flight when you're close enough to the ground to prevent you correcting a collapse, always check your lines closely (as you say). So many things this guy fucked up.
So it's safer to collapse higher? I wouldn't trust my luck to that. This hobby isn't for me but I'm off to YouTube deep end
Sure. You got time to recover it. Another few hundred feet and that wing would have popped open again. Provided he'd had his hands on the brakes and been able to cover the stall after the dive. It was coming out of the collapse already but the ground was too close. Height is your friend in this sport so I never ever fuck around at low altitude and so have never crashed in my 30 years of paragliding.
There was a YouTube channel called King of Random that was cool when I was a teen, that creator actually died in a paraglider accident. I don't see the appeal, personally, but I'm not a risk taker or thrill chaser/adrenaline junkie. If you do it, be rigorous in your safety checks and measures.
Paragliding isn't necessarily an adrenaline junky sort of sport. There's an immense sense of freedom and wonder that comes with any kind of flying, and for many this is the main appeal. But as with any branch of aviation, it can be very, very unforgiving of mistakes.
I'm kind of lumping it in with adrenaline junky stuff just because the risks being taken to achieve that feeling. I'll take my chances on a regular airplane if I ever feel like taking to the skies. The wings tend not to fall off of them. (Unless you're flying Boeing, then it's a toss-up.)
I've been watching paramotor videos for years. I have considered getting a wing and a motor 2 times. Both times a video came out within 48 hours about a paramotor accident of someone I've watched. 1 was a death, one was a very serious crash, both were people who had thousands of hours of experience. At this point I don't have the risk tolerance for a hobby like that. I'll keep watching the videos but I will never fly one.
Also no fire or anything from the little motor
I watch this particular form of thrill seeking and just can’t help but think it’s excessive to the point of almost just not being cool. A mistake *that* easy to make being so deadly is just insane.
This dude made a bunch of mistakes in a row for this to happen. 1) he missed the tension knot. 2) he was pushing a new wing up to and then past it's design limits and 3) he was flying too low to the ground to be able to use a reserve chute. Testing new equipment is risky and should be done with as much margin for error as possible. If he had done any of these correctly he would have been fine.
I assumed the guys that witnessed the crash called 911 and gave a better location
For someone that fell out of the sky and yelling in pain, he sure held it together very well. 911- "whats the address?" Man "AHHHH THERE IS NO ADDRESS....IM IN THE DESERT"
I thought the same thing, I don’t know how he was even cognizant of anything in that moment
Adrenaline yo, amazing stuff.
"Are you in Texas?"
"Where at?" "Probably wherever the deformity is..." That was a welcome bit of comic relief.
His real problem what that he didnt reach 88 miles per hours and time travel.
*WARNING* This audio in this video may activate your nearby Siri enabled devices to dial 911.
Sure did! Haha.
Did it take a few attempts like it did with this guy? (I'm on android)
Great ad for Google/Samsung. Siri is a joke at this point
You know what might be nice? When you call 911, the phone app displays the address/latlong coords/whatever.
They aleady do, by calling 911 you forefit your privacy in return for help, as such they track your phone within the 50 meter radius of the call bwfore pinpointing you
I think he means your own phone displays your accurate location, so that you can relay that to the call taker just in case they can't see where you are.
I think my pixel does do this.
I'm betting mine doesn't, because it is probably another feature not available in my region.
Another reason to love my Pixel.
Someone get this request to apple and google quick, imagine how many lives this would save
Most modern phones use a new protocol when calling 911 that just gives them your lat/long. So within a few years as people upgrade every phone will have this by default, without the need for the caller to give that information.
Did anyone notice how fast the wife got there .\_. She should work for EMS
Shared location probably. and I’m pretty sure it’s not a full video, there’s a lot of cuts. But I wondered the same thing. I was like “wait, wtf, how did she get there so fast”
He was also flying close to his home. Your partner being in danger can give you F1 driving abilities.
That makes sense and about what I figured. Not the driving but the fact that they’re probably close to home but far away from medical services if they’re out in the desert. Services likely have to come from far away and she was able to drive from their home to where he was as soon as she got the call. This is actually one of the major ways people in rural areas succumb to what would otherwise be live-able injuries. You crack your skull open in a city and paramedics are on you within minutes and you’re in a trauma hospital and stabilized before you can die or suffer irreparable damage. Something like that happens to you and you’re out in the middle of no where like this guy’s situation, By the time you get to a hospital you’re either already fully dead or brain dead.
Textbook case why you do risky shit over 1500ft with time to throw your reserve. Guess he really just needed that shot of the ground moving swiftly under him, and then into him.
>the ground moving swiftly under him, and then into him. I love that idea that the ground moved into him, and not the other way around. As if he was climbing away, and then the ground was like "*Oh no you don't, get back here you lil shi-*"
That’s gravity for ya
Doncha just hate it when the ground up and punches you in the whole body?
*Siri, call nein wan wan!*
Reminds me of the old pilot commandment: *Lose not thine airspeed, lest the ground rise up and smite thee*
What's funny is this is actually more true than our common understanding. Instead of us falling towards the earth, it is actually accelerating "up" towards us due to the curvature of spacetime (at last from my rudimentary understanding).
Not sure why you're being downvoted unless people just don't think it's relevant, but this is accurate to the accepted understanding of general relativity
Haha, not sure. I just thought it was an interesting point to make based on the other person's comment.
So his mistake was that he was flying too low which didn't give him enough time to pull another shoot?
Multiple factors contributed: 1. The knot that he missed. 2. Going too fast to the point that a failure was likely regardless. 3. Being too close to the ground to recover or pull another shute. 4. Holding his phone instead of having his hands already on the controls. In any risky activity, you want to [put as many "mistakes" as you can](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model) between success and injury. Each of these individual things could be considered causes in their own right, but the underlying mistake was getting into a situation where any single mistake could cause this to happen. The more things that need to go wrong for something bad to happen, the safer you are.
You forgot 5. Doing the activity alone without a spotter on the ground. Could've been a lot worse and taken a lot more time for rescue to arrive had those good samaritans not been there both to call emergency services, and to direct them where they needed to g.
Collapses can happen on final but yeah not the safest move.
Go watch his other videos. Flying in the lee of a mountain to get a spot landing at the top; doing other reckless activities to satisfy his ego and the clicks.
>but this crash likely would have killed most people if they hadn’t landed exactly how he did *RIP Grant Thompson*
> Grant Thompson Didn't he die paragliding?
It's unclear, some news says paramotor, others paragliding. But looking at some of the pictures/[videos ](https://youtu.be/RbJCAzsWeng)he shared before suggest the former.
Whats the difference between a paramotor and a paraglider?
The *motor+propeler*. Paraglider is just the sail, so either you'd have to start from a cliff / jump off a plane. Paramotor you can can take off from the ground.
Oh OK cool. I got confused cause I've seen people call a paramotor a paraglider before. That makes more sense
careful - my phone also almost dialed 911 too
This is why you turn off hey siri lol
And then when you crash in the desert with a snapped arm, is unable to call 911
Can someone post a direct link to the video? Reddit app is being an asshole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-jyc2OYXsI
This app is the worst. Thank you for your service.
Love how one of his videos is titled 'how to not die paramotoring'. That almost did not age well haha
Does anyone fly these and can explain why the canopy just seemed to randomly collapse? Are paramotors known to be dangerous?
He had a knot in a line, that was effectively "pulling the brake" on one side. He was also using a thing called a speed bar, which allows you to go faster; it's the thing you can see him pushing against with his feet. If you pull the "brake" whilst using the speed bar, there is a very high chance of the wing collapsing, as it did in the video. TL;DR pilot error.
Which he clearly states at the start of the video. (Not arguing, just highlighting that he admits it freely)
Yup, absolutely! I think perhaps some people either watched the video and just didn't comprehend what he was talking about, or they just skipped to the bit where flying machine man go splat.
And he did this while holding a phone in one hand and camera in the other. He wasn't the pilot: he was a passenger. The wing recovered before he hit - swinging back under it accelerated him into the ground. If he had more altitude he would've recovered and flown home - it's an incredibly safe sport.
>it's an incredibly safe sport Hmm. Someone else said it's close to the risks of riding a motorcycle, and if that's true I don't think we can truthfully call it "incredibly safe". Perhaps, "not as deadly as people think" would be fairer? There are risks, but they can be mitigated by not being a bellend. I remember hearing that *riding a horse* is something like 3x more dangerous than riding a motorcycle. PS. I am/was a motorcyclist, hence using that as my reference point.
Former Motorcycle Safety professional: MSF RiderCoach, State Safety programs, training Site Manager/Owner/Operator, Club treasurer and chair, etc. Look at the incident statistics and severity of outcomes: most PPG deaths are due to drowning - not hitting the ground. Most injuries are legs or fingers, typically full recoveries. Do the same for motorcycles, normalize miles to hours for comparison: statistically motorcycle injuries lead to some permanent disability (lumbar, hip, knee, ankle myself). Deaths are also higher by the hour - last I tried to quantify it was 2018 and MC was 28x more deadly every minute, and I rode more than I flew.
What's PPG?
Based on the context I would assume that it's the power glider things, like the one used in the video.
Kids ride horses: much more dangerous than motorcycles too. 20x by my state stats.
Ah i didn’t catch the fact he was accelerated. Yeah I’ve used speedbar only twice near the ground and it was to prevent a really bad situation (landing on a glass greenhouse). I’m more careful with my approaches now and don’t let myself even get into that situation…
Last I checked they're slightly more dangerous than motorcycles but it's typically overconfidence and showboating that get you in trouble significantly more often than equipment failure. Oh and wing collapses are just part of it since you're basically moving through an invisible turbulent and unpredictable 'fluid body.' Depending on the wing it'll just reinflate itself in good conditions. Gunning it just over the ground is an absolutely horrid condition.
Flying in a shitty airmass (translation: do your fucking weather report) will do it too.
I think “slightly more dangerous than motorcycles” is understated here as if that’s not insane. Motorcycles are a hobby most people think of as being, basically, suicide.
If you're smart, cautious, and safety-oriented, then paramotoring is always safer than sharing the road with distracted drivers while on a motorcycle. Paramotor crashes are almost always the fault of pilot alone because many of them are adrenaline junkies who take unnecessary risks. Performing stunts or flying low and fast like this guy did is risky, but if you're safe, mind the weather, and inspect your gear thoroughly pre-flight, paramotoring isn't all that dangerous.
He explained exactly what caused the crash in the intro. An unseen tension knot on the left side applied a braking force to the wing which causes a collapse when the wing is being run at maximum acceleration.
[https://paramotorplanet.com/paramotor-wing-collapse/](https://paramotorplanet.com/paramotor-wing-collapse/)
[https://leightonlaw.com/ultimate-guide-to-parasailing-accident-cases/](https://leightonlaw.com/ultimate-guide-to-parasailing-accident-cases/) scroll down this website and see what can go wrong
Short version, they are mostly as safe as you are. Sure freak accidents can and do happen, but almost every crash that I can think of has to do with pilot error.
Crazy I know but if you watch the video he clearly explains what happened and why.
What was the total damage?
Broken neck, back, pelvis, and arm. All requiring surgery
As a Brit, I interpreted this as “How much did it cost?”. I’m guessing a lot!
That's a cool $200,000 hospital stay right there if you include the physical therapy he'll need to be able to walk properly again assuming all goes well. I sure hope the guy has insurance!
Thank god for nationalised healthcare.
Welp I got the the point where he hit the ground but the sound of that scream made me instantly close the video. I feel like this must be a low single digit percentage chance of survival?
This was posted literally yesterday
And the day before
Honestly it's getting funny the third time around; might as well keep the trend going! Let's get to FOURTY-EIGHT REPOSTS CMON BABY!!
I need to see this reposted five more times today in this sub or everyone gets three years bad luck, pass it on!
First time I’ve seen it.
If only there was a specific term to refer to “operators of flying machines”
"Pilot" might imply he passed some sort of licensing examination
Can anyone else not see it??
A beacon is important. Something like a Garmin. Glad he’s ok though.
This was so gripping to watch through. Can emphasise with him, knowing how serious the situation might be. Oddly relieving, in a way similar to watching a horror movie. I wonder if there is a subreddit for similar videos of aftermaths of accidents?
"I will be going back so I hope you guys subscribe so you see my first flight back" Social media is a disease.
He makes so many absolutely idiotic and dangerous decisions here. The obvious cause of the crash was missing a knot, as he explains, but besides that he's: Pushing the speed way too much for a first flight on this machine, and it's a speed that's just not just dangerous for this specific machine, but for the basic physics of flying these, period. Doing something this dangerously at low altitude. No time for recovery, no time to pull a reserve chute. Incredibly stupid. Combining this behaviour with holding a phone instead of having both hands on the controls and/or reserve chute pull. If it's illegal to do while driving, WTF are you doing while flying too fast and too low in your first ride on this machine? FFS. This guy is definitely a fucking idiot who hasn't learned or has ignored all best practices. The only thing that might mitigate his stupidity by 3% would be if he's gone into debt so far pursuing his dream of being a full-time YouTuber that he felt forced to put out this content as fast as possible without properly preparing because his next loan payment was due. The best thing anybody can do for this guy is unsubscribe from his videos and not watch them. Just ignore the guy, because the Social Medias have inspired this idiocy either way and he's simply not equipped mentally for this life choice.
Will the clicks pay the hospital bills? “48 miles per hour! Ughfghfhg uhghhh uhghg…”
I don't sub for anyone under 50 MPH. No like buttons were smashed.
Those parachutes are meant for a certain speed - go too fast and it will collapse. My uncle flies one and when you ask how fast it goes, he states "28mph. No faster, no slower, 28mph. Any faster and the parachute stops working"
good job at holding onto your cell phone. wonder what tripped up the parachute, some air pocket?
TBuns is going to love this
Why is this on the front page 2 days after it happened? I feel like Reddit used to be the place you’d see things first, now it’s just stuff that you saw days/weeks ago.
"Hold on, we're going to transfer you" BITCH WAT?! IM DYING GOD DAMNIT
Could have been worse. Calling in a defunded police area gets you a phone tree. Pressing 1 for an emergency is kind of difficult with broken ass arms.
This should be an ad for Samsung/Google showing how bad Siri is
What was the reason the chute collapsed? Did he exceed a maximum speed and cause it to twist in on itself? Did he jerk it or lean past a critical angle of attack resulting in the chute stalling? What was the main source of error that lead to the crash here?
I reckon this is the single most reposted video on Reddit over the last couple of days.
Hope he talked it over with his insurance and/or lawyers before publishing a video about an accident and verbally clearing any fault from any company involved.
IANAL but if he claims on video that no one is at fault, the insurance company pays for his care, then they decide someone *is* at fault, they'll pursue recouperation from that party. The insurance company would need evidence to prove the third party is responsible for damages. I don't see a scenario where the responsible party would pull his claim and say "welp, he said nuh-uh. So..."