Ed Ewing at St Hilaire du Touvet
Thursday October 6, 2005
Published in the Guardian
THE NOISE the hang-glider made when it hit the paraglider was surprisingly loud, like a car crash. Then deathly silence as the hang-glider sailed upwards into the air, hung for a second and then spiralled like a spinning sycamore seed into the mountainside.
Pierre Gonthier, the 28-year-old Swiss pilot, would have known what was to come but been powerless to stop it. Too low to throw an emergency parachute, he and his flying machine crumpled into the ground seconds later.
Hundreds of spectators gasped audibly, then ran to the edge of the take-off area to look down at the broken glider in the trees, searching for a sign of life. A long minute followed as those pilots in the air unaware of the accident continued to execute loops, rolls and spins for the assembled crowd of thousands. The paraglider pilot that had been hit landed safely and unhurt.
Then the wailing sound of an airhorn drifted out across the Isere valley, in the Alps near Grenoble, and the sky was closed on the 32nd Coupe Icare as the emergency services rolled into action.
The Coupe Icare, or Icarus Cup, is named after the Greek myth of the boy who flew too close to the sun and is the largest free-flight festival in the world. It's typically French - it could never happen in the UK, or the USA, where insurance lawyers would eat it alive - and attracts over 75,000 spectators every year, most of whom don't fly.
They come to the small Alpine village of St Hilaire du Touvet to watch 8,000 pilots - hang-gliders, balloonists, paragliders, Redbull men in flying suits and everything in between - fly their socks off over four days. It's a festival to mark the end of the European summer flying season, and the atmosphere is friendly, sunny and fun.
Dreadlocked students from Grenoble smoke pot all day and juggle firesticks by night. Children make paper planes while their parents go flying and there are tall, earnest-looking men who stand conversing, their hands contorting into tales of flying derring-do.
And everywhere there are pilots in various states of fancy dress. There goes a dragged-up nun in a habit, there's Spongebob Squarepants, and look, over there is a Citroen 2CV, and it's flying.
The big pull of the Coupe Icare is the masquerade. Tens of thousands of spectators gather on the Saturday and Sunday of the festival to watch over 100 pilots throw themselves off the honey-coloured cliffs of St Hilaire down towards Lumbin, 1,000 metres below in the green Alpine valley bottom.
They do it for fun, because it's a festival, and because they can. Some, like Francis Heilmann, take it very seriously, constructing ever more elaborate costumes each year: A 66m long dragonfly, a giant squid, and this year a "Poisson Volant!", or flying fish, with a 30m long tail. Others, like the flying Wheel ch-Air group, do it to prove a point - even wheelchair users can fly a paraglider and laugh at themselves when they do it.
But most do it in the spirit of the founders, a small group of local hang-glider pilots who 32 years ago developed their found-it-in-the-pub idea into a small weekend party and went flying in fancy dress: one in a bin, another in a dress.
Three decades on and the festival is four days long, attracts live national TV coverage in France, is featured in all the press and has air-related arts events and a mammoth trade show to boot.
This year, the Brazilian artist Tura created 1,000 tissue-paper balloons which he released - with the help of willing spectators - at midnight on Friday. We watched, enthralled, as they rose into the sky and drifted high across the moonlit Alps before snuffing out as they seemed to reach the stars.
And this year, alongside the carnival and masquerade, the organisers invited 20 or so of the world's best acrobatic pilots to give a demonstration. This dangerous activity has ballooned in popularity, especially among those under 25, and is spectacular to watch.
The crowd that assembled for the show on Saturday was thousands strong. They watched in awe as the fearless flung their gliders around the sky with gut-wrenching G-force. Fearlessness isn't all it takes - these pilots are masters of their art.
The brothers Raul and Felix Rodrigues are world-renowned. So in tune are they with each other that they fly tricks together, tumbling and spinning from hundreds of feet up sometimes only inches apart. A wrong move on either part and they will collide, with the inevitable result. It hasn't happened yet.
But it happened to Pierre Gonthier. He was attempting to execute a full 360 degree loop - going upside down - directly in front of launch. Instead he looped his glider and at about 80kmph hit a paraglider which was tumbling down from above. The result was catastrophic.
In that sickening way you knew Ayrton Senna was dead, even from the comfort of an armchair, those of us on launch knew we were watching a dead man fall. His wing broken, he fell gracelessly from the sky, dropped below our eye level and hit the ground out of sight.
The crowd surged forward, but many hung back. A girl lying under a tree watching what had been aerial ballet picked herself up and, calling to her dog, walked up the road and away. She didn't want to know. Many others did the same. Some sat and waited. The siren wailed and the ambulances arrived.
The sky was closed, the Poisson Volant didn't take off and instead lay deflated on the launch area. The hushed crowd sat in the sun as the music was cut and the programme changed. A falconry display kept it occupied for an hour as Gonthier's body was recovered and stretchered up the hill to the ambulance.
Later the organisers said only that the organisation had done nothing wrong and inferred that the pilot had erred by performing a loop too close to the mountainside. Until this year the Coupe Icare hadn't seen a death in all its 32 years they said, and the show must go on - but there would be a police inquiry into Gonthier's death.
That evening pilots held a wake on take-off - like surfers mourning a drowned colleague out at sea - to salute Gonthier, a man who believed in pursuing his passion to the edge, but who in the end flew too close. And the evening party, the big night of the year for so many, went off with a bang.
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