A paraglider who flew into the ropes of the Hochfelln-Bahn triggered a large-scale operation by the mountain rescue service in Chiemgau. The 26-year-old dangled more than 80 meters above the ground for around eleven hours before the mountain rescuers were able to free him from his position around two o’clock on Friday night. The man from the district of Altötting was lucky that his paraglider had wrapped itself around the ropes of the runway so that he didn’t fall to his death, but remained completely unharmed at a dizzy height.
The fact that the mountain rescue service alone had to mobilize around 70 mountain rescuers from nine different standby services and dozens of rescue services, police and fire brigade workers were also on duty for many hours was due to the fact that the mountain railway also came to a standstill during the accident. One of the drivers stopped them immediately when he saw the paraglider hanging from the ropes. According to the Bergen Mountain Rescue Service, the two gondolas with a total of 20 passengers on the almost five-kilometer-long railway were traveling a good distance from the mountain and valley stations on the open route at the time – the lower one around 20 meters above the ground, the upper one about 20 meters above the ground 30
In order to free passengers from such situations, mountain railways always have rescue gondolas that can be lowered down the carrying cable to the passenger gondolas. Exactly this turned out to be impossible because of the paraglider hanging in the ropes. For this reason, teams of mountain rescuers had to climb the ropes to the gondolas in order to gradually lower the passengers down to solid ground. In addition, around 50 people were still waiting at the mountain station on the 1,674 meter high Hochfelln for the descent, including, according to the mountain rescue service, some elderly people, infants and a pregnant woman who would hardly have made the descent on foot on their own. A total of four police and army helicopters brought them and the passengers who had been roped out of the cabins down into the valley.
The rescue of the paraglider took much longer. From the point of view of the mountain rescue service, it proved impossible to free him from his position by helicopter, which is why mountain rescuers had to fight their way to him on the ropes of the cable car – several hundred meters and also over cable car supports and so-called rope riders. When they had successfully roped him down around 1.45 a.m., the rescue service took the man to a clinic for monitoring.
It is very rare for paragliders to get caught in cable cars – even on excursion mountains such as the Hochfelln, which is a popular starting point for paragliders and hang-gliders precisely because of its cable car. According to the mountain rescue service, the last similar accident in Bavaria occurred in August 2011 on the Tegelbergbahn near Schwangau in the Ammergau Alps.