Last year I crashed a paraglider directly below launch in São Conrado, Rio de Janeiro. I walked away with scratches, a wrecked ego, and video footage of the whole thing.
I did what I believe a responsible pilot should do. I shared the video with community instructors for an honest post-mortem. I've spent more than a decade studying accident breakdowns across all air sports, and that culture of open, unflinching analysis is one of the things that keeps these sports survivable. I wanted my mistake on the operating table, so I could become a better pilot and maybe help others avoid the same thing.
I follow a lot of YouTube channels focused on paragliding and skydiving, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my footage with Ari DeLashmutt ("Ari in the Air," ariintheair). What I got back instead was a video titled "Arrogant Pilot Crashes Paraglider."
Here is the video he posted, and what the fuss is about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3OWxDFLlY
First, the part where I was wrong
Let me be clear, because this piece is not a deflection. The crash was my fault. Entirely.
My right brake line was wrapped around the riser, a preflight failure. My inputs were far too aggressive. Ten years of skydiving trained reflexes into my hands that are wrong for a paraglider, and I'd never done an SIV course to untrain them. Real instructors identified the root cause quickly and without theatrics: I swung the wing into wingover-like oscillations without keeping it loaded and without checking the outside tip on each reversal, close to the ground, where there's no altitude to absorb the consequence. An unloaded, unsupported tip is an invitation for a massive collapse, and the wing accepted it. I initially wondered about rotor, but it definitely wasn't rotor. It was me.
Hours don't equal proficiency. You can drive a bus on the same route for twenty years and still be a mediocre driver. I had a thousand hours in the air and about ten on that spot, but I also had gaps in my foundation that a well-taught second-year pilot probably wouldn't. I own that, and I'm closing that gap.
If Ari's video had said all of the above, I'd have nothing to write. Several commenters did say exactly that, sharp and brutal and technical, and I'm grateful for every word.
Then, the part where it stopped being about flying
From a few seconds of footage, mainly the fact that I laughed after hitting the ground, he concluded I was arrogant, performing for a crowd, a "low-level thinker," and he speculated about the childhood deficits that must have produced me.
Here's what actually happened. I tumbled through trees, ran a fast systems-check of my body, and found I was intact. The laugh was adrenaline leaving my body, nothing more strategic than that. There was no face to save. Nobody could hear me at that distance, and the camera was an Insta360 quietly doing its job, not something I was performing into. I've walked away from a fair few incidents in my life, some of them requiring an ambulance, and I always laughed. Everyone who knows me knows my laugh.
You cannot read a stranger's childhood in four seconds of action-cam footage. You can't even reliably read their afternoon. And since my childhood was put on trial without me in the room, let me testify: it was a blessed one. Supportive family, close friends, a strong community, and a career I'm proud of. I have a great deal to lose, which is exactly why I take post-mortems seriously. The paragliding community, to its credit, saw through the diagnosis. The top comments under his video are experienced pilots pushing back on remote psychoanalysis dressed up as safety content.
The pattern I can no longer ignore
I would have let this go. One overreaching video is just the internet.
But my crash has now been reposted by Ari dozens of times, and each repost drives traffic toward his paid redpill men's coaching group, a program that promises to fix the inner deficiencies of pilots. From where I stand, my worst four seconds have become recurring promotional material for a product that uses an invented version of my psychology as its case study.
And here's the irony that stings. The video accused me of crashing because I craved an audience. But I wasn't performing for anyone. I was flying a site I'd flown for three weeks, badly, for reasons that are boringly technical.
On Instagram alone, at ariintheair, my incident has generated him over 150K views. The video was posted nearly 20 times as shorts across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, generating clout for his manosphere coaching and more than 300K views in total. My incident is, technically, his biggest drama and shock generator, and a funnel straight into his coaching course.
Why this matters beyond my bruised feelings
Incident reporting only works if pilots keep submitting incidents. All of aviation safety culture, from NASA's confidential reporting system down to a YouTube comment section, rests on one fragile agreement: bring us your failure, and we'll analyze the failure, not sentence the person. Break that, and pilots stop sharing. The footage doesn't disappear. It just stays on hard drives, and the lessons die there.
Psychology absolutely belongs in flying. Fear, ego, currency, and decision-making under stress are all real and under-discussed. But there's a difference between a pilot examining his own inner landscape and a content creator assigning inner landscapes to strangers, with certainty, on camera, right next to a checkout page. The first is wisdom. The second is astrology with a variometer.
What a newer pilot should take from this
Not the drama. This:
Do your preflight like your life depends on it, because mine did, and my wrapped brake line was visible to anyone who looked. Never swing a wing into big oscillations low over terrain, and never leave the outside tip unloaded through a reversal. Errors that are recoverable at altitude are unforgiving at treetop height. Respect negative transfer, because experience in a similar sport installs confident, wrong reflexes. Do the SIV course before you need it. And when you crash, because if you fly long enough something will go wrong, share it anyway, with instructors who will dissect the flying and leave your childhood alone. Mine found the cause in minutes without needing to invent a personality for me.
I still believe in public post-mortems. I'd share my footage again tomorrow.
And to Ari, sincerely: your early work, the honest, technical breakdowns, is what made pilots like me trust you with our worst footage in the first place. I understand the pressure, and you've been open about it yourself. You wrote publicly, about buying your house, that your wife "actually put more money down than I did." Making a living from views, attention, and course sign-ups is a hard business, and clickbait pays faster than craft. So here's an alternative: go back to the honest post-mortems you were genuinely good at, open a GoFundMe or a tip jar, and let the community fund the work directly. It would be no problem to tip you, buddy. I suspect I wouldn't be the only one.
Love and lift, Miglen
