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'NO TIME TO DIE!': Paraglider Kevin Philipp avoids death by 'one second' after parachute gets tangled

The daredevil posted the video on both Instagram and YouTube, noting that 'strong turbulence went wrong' and his brake line got stuck

Paraglider Kevin Philipp nearly fell to his death when he attempted to perform an acro-paragliding trick in Spain and his parachute lines got tangled. The daredevil posted the video on both Instagram and YouTube, noting that “strong turbulence went wrong” and his brake line got stuck. The Swiss daredevil got into trouble when he appeared to crash into his canopy while pulling off the trick, causing him to get tangled in the cables.

The tangled parachute sent him plummeting towards the rapidly approaching ground. Rise Paragliding states that acro-paragliding is already considered the “most extreme form of paragliding” as it is essentially performing fancy acrobatic tricks, like flips, in the air. Philipp captured the entire incident on a 360-degree camera on his helmet. 

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A separate video, shot from the ground, also showed just how quickly he was plummeting out of the sky - and his frantic scramble to save himself. While Philipp said that he can “can safely train [for] this kind of sport” with the help of “2 to 3 rescue parachutes and a lot of height”, this trick in the sky above Organyà, Spain, did not go as planned. In the description of the YouTube video, he wrote that his problems began when he encountered 'strong turbulence' while attempting an Acro paragliding trick. 

"Acro paragliding trick in strong turbulence went wrong. Break line got stuck. Falling into the lines and wing made the rescue parachute throw quite hard," Philipp said.

Footage from his helmet camera showed that as he was performing a trick, Philipp lost control and crashed into his glider's canopy. As he did so, the cables attaching him to the paraglider became tangled around him and the canopy, causing the wing to crumple and trail behind him like a windsock - as he began to accelerate towards the arid ground below.

Reacting to the danger, Philipp deployed his rescue parachute to begin his descent. However, the footage shows that his parachute failed to unfurl, instead just trailing above alongside the tangled wing.

With the ground getting closer and closer, the paraglider had to think fast. Despite the flailing cables, he was able to reach for his backup parachute.

The footage shows him pulling the orange parachute away from his body and ripping it open, releasing it in the nick of time, just moments before crashing into the ground. The footage shows him landing at speed, but safely in a bush. 

"The falling speed increased a lot due to the twisting wing," Philipp wrote. "Very last chance was to manually open the rescue package. Estimated time left about 1 second. This was not the day to die! Thanks!"

At the end of his YouTube video, Philipp is shown holding his tangled glider, showing how the lines had completely incapacitated the wing.

The video currently has more than 93K views on YouTube and over 2,500 Instagram comments, with many viewers equating his survival chances to winning the lottery and were shocked that he lived to tell the tale.