How to choose an SIV school | Pure Paragliding

Everything should be filmed

It is very important that an SIV school films everything. If something happens and you do not understand why, particularly if it ends in a reserve deployment, it is very easy to develop a fear injury around something you cannot explain.

Your brain may decide that because you do not understand what happened, it could simply happen again on the next flight. When you truly understand the situation, it can help keep fear injuries at bay.

Our first-person perspective under stress is unreliable. You may believe one thing happened while having significant blanks in your memory. If you had completely understood and retained everything that happened, you probably would not have lost control and deployed your reserve. Video allows the incident to be reconstructed.

It also makes a detailed debrief possible. An instructor cannot realistically remember every small detail from every student's flight without reviewing the footage. There is an enormous amount of useful information available in a video, and I would steer clear of a school that does not film its students' flights.

A debrief should involve the student

A useful debrief should be much more detailed than, "You did not put your hands up at the right time." It should be closer to, "At this exact moment, when you were experiencing this feeling, this is when your hands needed to come up."

Video also allows comparison. Here is one attempt performed well. Here is one performed out of time. Here are the visible differences in the wing. That is where a lot of the learning sits.

A good debrief should also include many questions for the student. There is a difference between coaching and instructing. When I introduce a new manoeuvre, I need to explain the manoeuvre, what happens when it goes correctly, what can happen when it goes wrong, the visual clues, and the feelings and sensations. There are things I need to tell you directly.

But I can then ask: what do you think will happen if this occurs? What do you think will happen if you change that input? What did you feel? What could you have done differently? What do you think you did well? In a good debrief, the student should be talking a lot.

Look for logical progression

The school should have a logical progression. Most SIV schools remain manoeuvre-focused rather than pilot-focused. I believe a pilot-focused approach is more beneficial, but even within a traditional manoeuvre-based syllabus, you should be able to see whether the exercises are arranged logically.

Pilots should understand rotation before autorotation. Cravat clearing should be established before stalls because an imperfect stall recovery may create a cravat. Rotation should be understood before spins, stalls, parachutal states or other stalled elements because an error may result in rotation.

These are basic instructional relationships that should be visible in the programme. They are part of what separates a structured SIV and wing-control course from a list of manoeuvres.

Check the rescue system

The school should have a rescue boat ready in the water, not merely access to a boat somewhere nearby. It should have a clear, practised rescue procedure. Appropriate first-aid provision and qualified personnel should be present.

Pilots should be provided with at least a 270N life jacket. SIV is highly specialised because it requires two overlapping areas of safety competence: normal paragliding incident and rescue procedures, and water-rescue and lifeguarding competence.

A credible SIV operation should be prepared for both flight incidents and immediate water recovery. You can read more about my background and teaching approach on the About page.

Be careful with recommendations

Every person who has attended only one SIV course will often say it was great or that it was the best SIV course. But if you have only ever driven one car and someone asks you which car is best, you can only talk about the one car you have driven. You have no other point of reference.

SIV is exciting. It involves exposure, dynamic movements and something that can feel like a roller-coaster ride. Students are exposed to a great deal and naturally feel as though they have learned a lot. But they do not know what they do not know.

They cannot know whether they could have learned more in the same time, whether the progression was genuinely logical, whether important details were missed, how much danger they may have been exposed to, or whether the debrief could have been more useful. Ignorance can be bliss.

It is only after attending two or three different SIV schools that a pilot begins to develop enough comparison to judge what was genuinely good and what was not. If someone recommends an SIV school, one of the first questions should be: "How many different SIV schools have you attended?"