Story Time

In 2007, a member of the German national paragliding team became the top female paraglider in the world by competing in the 10 biggest paragliding competitions and winning six of them. She was 35-year-old Eva Vishnierska.

For more than two years, Eva had been a part of the paragliding team. She was inspired to put in extra effort so that she may win the global championship on February 24 of that year. On Australia's Mount Borah, Eva was prepping her equipment among 200 other paragliders. Eva has one more chance to train before her first significant competition.

One of the coaches approached the competitors as they prepared to launch and announced that storm clouds had been detected to the north, but the forecast was a little hazy and it wasn't certain whether the storm would pass over their training area or not. Each paraglider had to decide for himself whether to risk the terrible weather and launch that day. Despite the fact that the sky was largely grey, Eva, who was excited to take this training flight, decided she would still go ahead. In the worst situation, she would have to end it.

The rest of the team didn't want to take the risk and so they stayed grounded that day. Eva took a little bit longer to prepare her gear so by the time she was lining up on the cliff she was only one of a handful of people that remained. So strapped into her glider she took a good run forward and launched herself. The rest of the team followed her in a van.

The team kept checking on her with their radio. The first part of Eva's journey was calm. She followed the ridgeline from Mount Borah for 12 miles until it ended at that point she entered into the skies over the vast savannah. As her GPS and tracking log tracked her progress, two large thunderstorm clouds appeared in front of her.

The vast majority of the other paragliders that had launched, that day had launched ahead of Eva and so when these clouds appeared they had already passed that section. So they didn't need to contend with the storm, as for Eva and the other two people she was with, they had a decision to make. They could either immediately ground their flight to avoid the storm or they could attempt to dodge it. They chose the latter because they knew it was too dangerous to try to fly underneath these clouds. So Eva and the other two paragliders began aggressively flying around the outside of these clouds.

Then all of a sudden the storm completely changed into a big cloud, creating a 12-mile-wide cumulonimbus cloud. All three paragliders were stuck inside of an updraft.

An updraft of a cumulonimbus cloud is famously dangerous because it's extremely powerful and it lasts for over an hour. One of the gliders with Eva was able to pull down on one toggle point his feet and begin spiraling out of the grasp of the updraft. He said he turned to look at the other two and he didn't see the other man but he did see Eva. She was caught in the updraft and he watched her get pulled up into the black cloud. By the time the man hit the ground, he would say it had become the worst thunderstorm he had ever seen with huge hail balls hitting the ground all around him.

He took one more look up and he didn't see anyone. He took off running for a barn to seek shelter and when he was there he pulled out his radio, alerted the other teams of this emergency inside the cloud.

Eva was hurtling up like a rocket the storm was lifting her at a rate of 60 feet per second. There was nothing she

could do to get out of this wind tunnel. Eva knew she was getting pulled toward the storm's eye in its vicious center

because of the immense claps of thunder that just kept getting louder and louder. It also kept getting darker and

darker.

Except for the occasional flash of lightning that came very close to electrocuting her as she desperately tried to keep her glider stable. She was able to place a radio call down

to her team on the ground but all she could say was “I can't see anything” before it cut out. Eva reached the eye of the storm where it was pitch black, the temperatures were freezing, hail balls pelting her left and right and the

updraft kept pulling her higher and higher until she passed out from a lack of oxygen.

At some point, this updraft shot her up and out of the cloud, and while this meant she was out of the storm she was now in the air that was 50 degrees below zero, which meant everything her face her gloves her clothes the wings of her glider, everything completely froze.

To make matters worse, at the altitude she was, there was almost no oxygen and she did not have a breathing apparatus. So by all accounts, Eva should have been dead, but somehow she didn't die. She just kept floating around above the storm cloud for 45 minutes and then something happened.

The ice on one side of the glider broke off causing it to collapse, throwing her into a deadly free fall. She was not in control, still unconscious and she started barreling back towards the ground like gravity has been turned back on again.

Going straight through the storm all over again and so through the storm going at 90 feet per second, she clears the storm, and then right after getting out from underneath it, her glider miraculously just opens back up again and the motion of her suddenly stops her free fall, jolted her awake. As she was gradually regaining consciousness, taking stock of where she is and she was still in the storm cloud but right at the bottom of it luckily the updraft had stopped.

So she was steady and she was able to reach up and

grab her toggles. She was able to fly herself down to the ground and crash land and then she curled into a ball

grabbed her radio and called her team. When they heard her voice they could not believe she was alive because the other paraglider got sucked up by the updraft. One of the guys, from the Chinese national team, unfortunately, was struck by lightning and was killed. So they were

anticipating finding out that Eva had been struck by lightning as well. But Eva had not just survived, but they discovered that virtually nothing was wrong with her. She had some pretty bad bruises and cuts from the hail and she had a little bit of frostbite on her face but it was treatable.

The same day she was brought in they discharged her. After leaving the hospital Eva and her teammates went back to the launch site so she could collect her gear. When they got there she looked at her GPS. It had been tracking her entire flight the entire time she was up in that cloud and she showed her teammates what it said and they literally couldn't believe it the screen showed she had reached an altitude of 32, 634 feet, which put this in perspective is the same altitude you fly at inside of a commercial jet.

Imagine being outside of your plane in the middle of a flight and that's how high she was another reference point is she was approximately 4000 feet, higher than the summit of Mount Everest. No human being had ever been that highly unprotected and lived to tell the tale.