Every maneuver we train, in order, with what's required before you fly it. This is the same manual we go through together, page by page, during your course — browse it any time.
SIV comes from the French Simulation d'Incidents en Vol — simulating incidents in flight. Year by year SIV has changed its shape and its meaning, because our gliders have changed too.
Let's look at it more closely, and explain what we go through together.
Like every other course, SIV has two parts: theoretical and practical.
At the first stage, SIV covers emergency maneuvers and rapid descent maneuvers. When we talk about emergency maneuvers, what we are really talking about is a piloting reaction the pilot has to acquire: the collapse has already happened, and now the pilot has to fly correctly.
The reality of paragliding today is that gliders have become very safe — and what makes flying less safe is the pilot. A glider is not a solid profile. It can collapse. So we need to know what to do and how to do it, and that takes both knowledge and skill.
Collapses. Even if the pilot makes no mistake, turbulence or another cause can collapse the wing. What we train is the correct reaction.
Big ears and spiral — and wingovers in special cases.
Modern SIV puts a lot of work into improving active piloting, and above all into the common mistakes pilots make, so those mistakes can be avoided in real flying.
For example, before a pilot can fly a good spiral he needs pitch motion, roll, and 360s at different speeds — the same skills that make him a better pilot and a better thermal flyer.
Pilots do not learn the spin in order to perform a great spin. They learn it so that they do not spin in real life. A spin comes from over-piloting, and when it happens through a pilot's mistake, the pilot has to recognise which stage he is in: can he go hands up directly, or does he need to take the wing into a stall and correct it from there?
There is no "safe" one to try on your own. All of these are flown over water, with an instructor on the radio, a safety boat below, and a reserve you can throw.
This manual exists to spread knowledge for better safety, not to put yourself in danger. Pilots practise SIV to improve their safety — not to put themselves into danger.
The theory side of the course, and the safety briefing we go through before anyone launches. Read this before your first flight day.
These are the subjects assessed on the APPI SIV Pilot form. We cover all of them on the ground before we cover them in the air.
| Safety briefing |
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|---|---|
| Equipment |
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| Mechanics of flight |
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| Piloting |
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| Reserve deployment |
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On the flight machine we look at how the centre of pressure reacts on three profiles: the neutral profile, the unstable profile and the stable profile.
On a neutral profile the centre of pressure stays at about one third of the profile. If the pilot takes no action on the shoot, then past a certain angle the glider will collapse.
By taking around 20% of brake, two things happen:
Together these two reactions make the profile more solid — which means the probability of a big shoot increases.
A glider on full speed goes into a small, stable profile. Good examples are a PPG wing or a parakite.
Paragliding has three axes: pitch, roll and yaw. The biggest thing happening for the pilot is pitch motion — almost 90% of our piloting. It matters on takeoff, in thermal flying, and coming out of maneuvers, and in all of them it is very important that the pilot makes the correct reaction.
On an aircraft the pilot and the wing do not have different speeds — they are one rigid body. A paraglider is not like that. You hang below the wing, around 7–8 metres under it, and that changes everything: in the pendulum the pilot can be slower or faster than the glider. That difference is what pitch is.
In the climbing phase the glider is slower and the pilot is faster. The relative wind has not changed and the angle of attack has increased.
Here the pilot must not brake. Braking would make the glider slower still — and at that point there is a danger of stall. The slower the wing gets, the more it has to shoot afterwards to build speed, create lift, and keep you flying.
As the glider comes back above the pilot's head, compared to the horizon, the pilot needs to brake — minimum, to the carabiner — because we want to avoid the unstable profile and the over-shoot.
He brakes until the glider stops shooting. He keeps looking at the leading edge, and as soon as it stops, the pilot immediately goes hands up.
Active piloting is the continuous process of communicating with your glider through the brakes and body weight.
This is one of the main topics a pilot needs to know very well. When to take action — brake or body. How much piloting. And how long to hold it.
It is also how I will give you feedback in the air. There are three ways a brake input goes wrong:
Applying too much brake input, or holding the brakes down for too long — basically doing more than enough, either with the brake or with weight shift.
Applying brake input at the correct moment, but not using enough brake, or releasing it too quickly.
Applying brake input at the wrong phase of the glider's movement — such as braking during the climbing phase. The right physical action at the wrong moment, which actually disrupts the wing's stability.
On a smooth exit from a spiral the pilot swings under the wing and needs to brake again to make the turn, coming out of the spiral with the same speed for pilot and glider — without pitch.
Fear, happiness, tiredness, stress — every one of these has a direct effect on our piloting. The important point is that the pilot is aware of what he is feeling.
What it comes down to is self-analysis: knowing what you actually feel, right now, before you launch.
Takeoff and landing. Excitement is exactly what makes a pilot stop paying attention to the wind.
Stress has a big influence on our actions. We have to understand how to deal with stressful conditions, and be able to resist and control them.
Stress has biological, sociological and physical effects, and it has two faces — positive and negative.
After SIV we must fly exactly as we did before. The only difference is the new skills — and those exist to give you better safety and help you avoid an incident, not to justify flying in conditions you would have avoided last week.
Never try anything by yourself. Avoid any misunderstanding — give me feedback on every task, so I know you have heard it and understood it.
With the reserve out you do not get to choose your direction. Open the chest strap, take a deep breath, and follow the same procedure.
There are two kinds of decision: immediate, and in progress.
Five situations where the decision must be immediate:
In progress is the slower kind. For example: you fly in cloud, the glider gets wet, and some time later you find yourself in a deep stall. Or a cascade — collapse, correction, collapse again. Anything that does not demand an instant decision, but is not getting better either.
Look at the handle. If you cannot look — practise this in normal flight — grab the carabiner and follow the direction from the carabiner down to the handle.
Under G load you may not be able to reach it. Grab the carabiner with your other hand and pull yourself up.
Normally it comes straight out. If it does not — because of the G load, or a broken seat board — change the direction of your pull. Most pilots pull up; pull out instead.
In 99% of cases, throwing above the horizon works. Beyond that, every situation falls into one of three groups.
PTL.
All you need to know about SIV maneuvers. For each one you need to understand the know-how, the risks, and the prerequisites — skills, theory and experience.
Nobody flies every maneuver on this page, and nobody has to. What we work through depends on you — your level, your goals, how the first flights go — and just as much on your glider.
Wings have changed. Many modern gliders will not give a proper B-line stall any more, and the way a wing recovers from a collapse is different between a simple EN A and a high aspect-ratio wing. A maneuver that made sense on the gliders of ten years ago may be pointless, or simply not possible, on yours.
So read this as a reference for what each maneuver is and why we would fly it — not as a list to complete. We decide together, on the day, with your wing.
Each exercise below gives you the same three things: what you need to know and be able to do before it, how it is flown, and the risks that come with it.
Pitch is the fore-and-aft swing of the pendulum that you and your wing make together. Pitch control is reading that swing and answering it with the brake at the right moment — damping the motion instead of fighting it.
None. This is the first exercise of the course — no prior collapse or stall experience needed.
I need to see that you can identify the moment of brake, and the moment of release.
Roll is the side-to-side axis. Here you roll the wing using weight shift only, and then damp the roll you created.
Be able to roll the wing with weight shift, and damp it.
Pulling the outer A-lines folds each wingtip in, giving a fast, stable descent with the canopy still fully pressurized. Flown both with the speed bar and without it.
Used for top landings, and to manage drift in a valley — during soaring, where controlling sink rate against terrain or wind matters.
With speed bar, and without speed bar.
One side's A-lines are pulled and a single wingtip folds. The open side keeps flying while the folded side drags, so the glider turns toward the collapse.
An asymmetric fold from turbulence is the most common real-world incident you will ever meet, which is why most clinics treat this as the core skill of an SIV course.
Fly straight; and a side collapse with a turn to the open side. Pass criterion: your instructor must see the top surface reinflate.
A firm, even pull on both A-risers folds the leading edge in across its full span. The wing falls behind you, then shoots forward to rebuild airspeed.
Both A- and B-risers are pulled to tuck the leading edge under along its span. It is trained on the speed bar, because that is where it comes from in real flying — off a cliff launch, or leaving a thermal on bar.
Front collapse, full.
Linked 360s flown at different speeds, with a dive between them — learning to get back into the turn without carrying pitch into it.
Be able to get back into the 360 without pitch.
A spiral dive in paragliding is a rapid descent maneuver where the glider banks steeply into a fast, high-G 360-degree turn.
Like all other maneuvers there are many different purposes for practising it, and we can learn a lot from it.
You need to know all of these topics before you practise it:
These need to be mastered before the spiral — not just tried once.
Be able to have a smooth exit without pitch, and to slow the glider down with the outside brake.
Both B-risers are pulled down together. This deforms the profile and breaks the airflow over the trailing section — the canopy stays spread above you but stops flying, and you descend almost vertically.
The spiral taken well past its controlled version. Altitude loss becomes rapid, and the g-load becomes the limiting factor — not on the wing, on you.
Exit spiral dive, dynamic and progressive.
A sustained rotation that the glider keeps going on its own. It is not a spiral, and the recovery is not the same.
Exit from autorotation.
Both brakes held below your seat and kept there takes the wing past its stall point completely. It stops flying, collapses in behind you, and hangs there with no forward speed at all.
Every collapse and rapid-descent exercise before it. The stall comes before the spin exercises, not after them — a spin is a stall, so you need the stalled wing first.
Be able to stay in a stable stall (back fly), hands up, and see the shoot.
One half of the wing is stalled and the other half is still flying. The flying tip travels forward, the stalled tip travels backward, and the glider rotates around a pivot between them. It is not a turn — it is two halves of the same wing doing opposite things.
Pilots do not learn the spin in order to perform a great spin. They learn it so that they do not spin in real life.
Slow spin to back fly. Spin stop at 90° — be able to make 90 degrees, and quick hands up to let it fly.
The same rotation as the negative spin, entered from a completely different place. There the wing is already stalled and slow before one side is held back; here you snap one side into a stall straight out of normal flight, while the wing still has all its trim-speed energy.
Roll and pitch coupled together in a rhythm. Each reversal puts energy into the swing at the right moment, so each pass banks a little higher than the last — the pendulum from the first exercise, driven sideways instead of damped.
A wingtip that has become trapped in its own lines during a collapse and will not re-inflate. Unlike every other collapse in this manual, it does not clear itself.
It is not something you practise on command — it is a complication the instructor deliberately provokes during a side collapse, once every earlier recovery is solid, so that you have seen one and can recognise it later in real flying.
The SIV Manual is what we work through together, in the air, during your SIV course.