Ewa Wiśnierska: How to Survive in the Stratosphere

On 14 February 2007, 36-year-old German paraglider Ewa Wiśnierska took to the skies above New South Wales, Australia. She was participating in a warm-up for the World Paragliding Championship—a dream that took her 20 years to realise. It was an open-air tournament; pilots competed to cover the greatest distance possible. Rumours of an incoming storm swept through the competitors, but no one was overly worried. In fact, inclement weather was part of the reason they raced here—it was all part of the challenge.

Paragliding is an extreme sport that is not without dangers. The pilot is always just a technical failure away from disaster. If their parachute collapses mid-flight, it becomes nothing more than a useless piece of canvas.

In fact, just six months prior, Ewa had been involved in an accident that left her with a fractured hip.

Just before midday, Ewa had taken off from Mount Borah. Unlike skydivers, paragliders don't need a plane to get into the air. Instead, to begin lift-off, they look for rising columns of hot air, also known as thermals. The view below Ewa was stunning - dark green meadows and rugged outcrops. But as the afternoon wore on, the skies darkened. Soon, slate-grey clouds started to block Ewa's way, reducing visibility. Ewa wasn't too concerned. She was confident she had the skills to cope with the weather, whatever it might throw at her. Not everyone shared Ewa's confidence. While the early pilots had been able to pass through the clouds unharmed, dozens of competitors around her decided to cut their losses and return to Earth. Ewa pressed on.

But a new cloud formation began taking shape around her: a towering, anvil-shaped cloud called cumulonimbus. The narrow path that Ewa was trying to navigate between two separate cloud systems was fast disappearing in front of her. As they merged, the cold air from both systems mixed with hot air coming up from the ground, causing a massive thermal uplift.

Suddenly, I got a strong lift. It started to take me up—three or four metres per second. My climb pressure started to grow, and it was five metres per second, and it was faster and faster, and I thought, “Wow, I have to do something…”

Ewa Wiśnierska

And then, the utterly horrifying realization—clear and unavoidable—she was being sucked right into the clouds. Gigantic hailstones began smacking into Ewa's face. Trying not to panic, she initiated an emergency descent manoeuvre called "spiralling". The G-force exerted on a pilot during a spiral puts them under incredible stress. But sometimes, it's the only way to descend rapidly—a last resort.

Ewa banked sharply to one side and shifted her weight in the same direction, pointing the glider to the ground. This should have allowed her parachute to lock into a tight rotation. It should have delivered her downwards at speeds of 20 metres per second.

But the storm kept pulling her upwards at over 30 metres per second. Still spinning wildly, she was hoovered up into the darkness above. Sudden flashes of lightning - blinding and deafening - erupted around her. Electric bolts of 30,000-degree white heat leapt from cloud to cloud, briefly illuminating the maelstrom and revealing a blizzard of driving rain and hail.

I was thinking about my parents, and I knew I had to come down. And I started to pray. If there is a God, I just said, “Please help me. I have to come down safe.”

Ewa Wiśnierska

Seven thousand metres, then eight thousand. Ewa was still rising. Soon, she was higher than the summit of Mount Everest and well beyond what climbers call 'the death zone'. She was approaching the cruising altitude of a jumbo jet, where cabins are pressurised and pumped with oxygen to keep humans alive. At this altitude, the air is thin and hard to breathe. Her temperature gauge read minus 40 degrees Celsius. Ewa was living on borrowed time...

Find out how Ewa survived this incredible ordeal by listening to "Paragliding Disaster: Sucked Towards the Stratosphere" on Real Survival Stories.