Storm whips paraglider to heights of 32,000 ft...and she lives!!

[file83]

Absolutely amazing story here...

Storm whips paraglider to heights of 32,000 ft

A champion paraglider described today her terror at being flung to a height greater than Mount Everest by a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia.

Ewa Wisnerska, 35, was sucked so high that she blacked out and became encased in ice.

“You can’t imagine the power. You feel like nothing, like a leaf from a tree going up,” she told Australian radio.
read more...Telegraph.co.uk

"I was shaking all the time. The last thing I remember it was dark, I could hear lightning all around me."

(...)

"But she came to again at a height of 6,900 metres with ice all over her body and slowly descended herself."
read more...News.Sky.com

[qnr]

1. Remind me never to go paragliding in Manila, NSW. That storm killed a guy, and

some other guy was attacked in the area recently by two eagles. I wonder how she controlled herself after awakening, if her body was encased in ce?

[Downtown Hound]

2. Now that is like TOTALLY EXTREME!

No seriously, wow, what an ordeal to live through. Amazing that she survived, let alone without any serious damage from all that ice.

[Deep13]

3. How do we know it was 32,000 feet?

He would have passed out long before she got that highand killed at around 25,000 feet. Everest climbers train for weeks to become acclimatized and even then most depend on bottled oxygen over 27,000. A person going from sea level right to base camp at 17,000 feet would black-out. All that ice can happen as low as 10,000 feet.

[Bucky]

4. I believe that angels guided her home.

They navigate in the upper stratosphere by listening to the cowbells.

[pokerfan]

6. Not necessarily

There are fast climb records being set almost every year on Everest. Simply get up and back down (to 12K) before the altitude can kill you. Most recently a Sherpa broke the record by doing it in little more than 20 hours.

You either do Everest slow or fast. Anything in between will kill you.

So, I think that it's plausible that this woman made it briefly to 32K. And survived.

To know for sure we need to put the Mythbusters on it.

[file83]

7. Her GPS recorded the entire event - She passed out for what she believes was

in the neighborhood of 30 minutes - she woke up completely covered in ice - frost bitten ears and parts of her face.

She very well could have died had she stayed up much longer - the only reason she woke up was after she had descended to 22,000 feet.

[Vidar]

5. Wow.