HONG KONG — The sky was apparently not the limit for a Chinese paraglider who climbed to a near record-breaking altitude of more than 28,000 feet Wednesday.
The only problem? He hadn’t even intended to fly.
In what acrophobes — those with a fear of heights — could only imagine in their worst nightmares, 55-year-old Peng Yujian was just conducting a routine equipment test in the northern province of Gansu when a powerful updraft lifted him off the ground.
“I had just bought a secondhand paragliding harness and wanted to test it. So I was conducting ground parachute shaking,” Peng told state-run broadcaster CCTV News on Wednesday. “The wind suddenly picked up and lifted me into the air.”
“I tried to land as soon as possible, but I failed,” he added, explaining that he was then carried even higher by a wind and ended up trapped in the cloud system, ascending as high as five miles above the ground to heights usually the preserve of commercial airliners.
According to a statement from the Aero Sports Association of Gansu Province, Peng is a licensed paraglider with two years of experience that appeared to come in handy on the video captured by a camera attached to his equipment.
Released by CCTV, NBC News could not independently verify the footage which showed Peng’s face and gear coated in ice as he said: “I can’t get out now. I’m totally lost.”
Peng said he started to panic when he reached the cloud base.
“Everything ahead [was] a vast expanse of whiteness,” he told CCTV, adding that he had directional awareness without a compass.
Even with a compass, it would have been too difficult to maintain direction because of poor visibility inside the clouds, Peng said. “I thought I was flying straight, but in fact, I kept spinning around.”
Peng said the scariest moment of his ordeal was when his parachute plunged headfirst toward the earth. But he managed to right himself before emerging from the cloud system heading northeast.
“I looked around and thought: ‘Ah, I’m saved this time!” he said.
In the Aero Sports Association statement Peng, who was not wearing an oxygen mask, said he gasped for air after landing and that he might have lost consciousness for about three minutes due to hypoxia and low temperatures.
Peng’s adventure almost saw him break the world record, itself also set accidentally in 2007 when a German paraglider was encased in ice after being sucked into a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia and carried to a height greater than Mount Everest.
Along with another pilot who published the video “without permission,” Peng was initially handed a six-month flight suspension, Chinese air sports authorities said.
Under China’s national paragliding regulations, pilots are required to have a valid license issued by the Aero Sports Federation of China, and a flight plan must be approved before any activity. Individuals who violate the rules are penalized based on the seriousness of the incident.
But the ban sparked a backlash on Chinese social media.
“He barely made it out alive. It’s not like he wanted to fly that high,” one user wrote on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
While local media reported that the association withdrew the statement the same day, it is unclear whether Peng’s suspension is still in place.
Peng said the swelling in his body has “gone down a lot,” but that his hands and face still felt numb.
“My fear hasn’t completely faded,” Peng told CCTV News. “I still feel uneasy when I think about it now.”
He said he decided to “take a break” from flying for the moment.
