Summary
- 01
Section 7(7) of Germany's LuftVO requires accidents and incidents involving air-sport equipment to be reported without delay, in writing or electronically, to the delegated body.
- 02
DHV lists serious injury, death, major damage or destruction of the aircraft, and defined near misses; its serious-injury guidance includes hospital treatment lasting more than 48 hours.
- 03
DHV's 2024 paragliding statistics draw on 385 reports, including 180 domestic and 205 overseas events; a FIDA report does not replace a separate insurance claim notification.
A safety appeal backed by a reporting duty
DHV issued a fresh reminder on 29 July asking pilots and witnesses to submit accidents, near misses and other safety-relevant events through FIDA. For German air-sport pilots, this is not simply a voluntary data drive. Section 7(7) of the German Air Traffic Regulations, the LuftVO, requires accidents and incidents during the operation of air-sport equipment to be reported without delay, in writing or electronically, to the body delegated under aviation law.
DHV says Germany's transport ministry has delegated the receipt of these reports to the association and interprets the duty as covering events both in Germany and abroad. FIDA is the online route it currently provides. An important boundary remains: the regulation establishes the duty to notify the delegated body, while DHV's current guidance supplies the practical categories, form and handling information used by paraglider and hang-glider pilots.
The events DHV places inside the mandatory scope
DHV's current reporting page identifies serious injury to a pilot or passenger, death, major damage to or destruction of the aircraft, and near misses in which abnormal aircraft behaviour caused or could have caused an accident. Its explanation of serious injury includes a hospital stay of more than 48 hours, along with specified fractures, severe bleeding, nerve, muscle or ligament injury, internal injury, and second- or third-degree burns.
That list should not be read backwards as meaning that anything outside it is useless to report. DHV also invites pilots to submit accidents and safety-relevant events they experienced or witnessed, because a broader pool can reveal recurring hazards. A witness's voluntary contribution and a pilot's legal duty are not identical, however. When the classification is uncertain, the current DHV reporting page and its safety office remain the controlling operational guidance.
How individual reports become safety evidence
The reporting chain already produces measurable public evidence. DHV's 2024 paragliding review records 385 accidents and incidents reported by German pilots: 180 occurred in Germany and 205 abroad. Reports can feed annual statistics, fully anonymised short case summaries and detailed investigations of selected fatal accidents. Those outputs provide a factual base for training, equipment work and the study of human factors across the sport.
The figures describe events that were reported and entered DHV's system; they are not an unbiased census of everything that occurred. The available material does not quantify under-reporting, so 385 cannot be converted directly into an overall accident rate or used for simple risk comparisons between countries or pilot groups. The practical purpose of the new reminder is to narrow that blind spot and expose repeat patterns before every warning arrives as a severe accident.
Confidentiality promises and the remaining boundaries
DHV says personal data is treated in absolute confidence and is not passed to authorities or insurers; the short incident reports it publishes are fully anonymised. Its page also lets a reporter state that even an anonymous publication is not wanted. These are public commitments about DHV's own process. They should not be expanded into a universal promise about other organisations, procedures in other countries or the legal consequences of every individual case.
A FIDA safety report and an insurance notification are separate acts. DHV explicitly directs liability, passenger-liability and accident-insurance claims to the relevant insurance forms, so submitting to FIDA does not complete that step. The next useful evidence will be DHV's full 2025 statistics, any refinement of the reporting categories and whether more near-miss submissions produce verifiable trends rather than leaving the record concentrated around serious outcomes.