Safety Notice of buckles in paraglider and hang glider harnesses

[JF Paradis]

I have not seen this posted on the forum. My apologies if this is a dupe.

"Click-Lock and T-Lock buckles installed in paraglider chest straps are under permanent load and subject to frequent diagonal load changes. They are, however, not optimally designed for this kind of stress and the effects of wearout play a role"


"In the past three months, there have been two incidents involving older paraglider harnesses equipped with CLICK-LOCK buckles (HSi10) in the chest strap. The buckles had opened unintentionally during flight while they were under load. In one of the cases this happened during a SAT maneuver (spreading of the chest strap due to the pilot resting on the riser), in the other case the reason was presumably the load applied by the body weight of the pilot who was hanging only in the leg straps."


"Finsterwalder calls on all owners of harnesses equipped with CLICK-LOCKs (HSi10) or T-LOCKs in the chest strap to determine their buckles' previous usage time by checking the routine test date on the sample inspection label. If this date indicates a usage time of more than 4 years, the harness is not airworthy for now and may not be used for flying anymore. Affected owners should contact their harness manufacturer."

"Affected harnesses include models by Advance, Aerochute, Aeroman, Aeros, Airbulle, Air Heart, Akyüz, AVA Sport, APCO, Carona, Ellipse, Easy Fly, Finsterwalder & Charly, Flight Design, Fly Castellucio, Fresh Breeze, Gin, Independence-Skyman-Flymarket, Ochmann, Onda Enterprises, Sky Paragliders, Fly Products, Karpo Fly, Lookout Mountain, Madreiter, Moyes, Nenerotor, Cwudzinski, PXP, SE-Wing, Sigma, Sitec, Skylotec, SKY Paragliders, SkyTrekking, Supair, Paravis, SOL, Vonblon, Wallend-Air, Wills Wing, Woody Valley, Yamamoto and other manufacturers."

Bottom-line: if you fly an older harness, contact your manufacturer.

Here is the notice from Charly Finsterwalder:
https://finsterwalder-charly.de/en/home ... -lock.html

Here is the notice from DHV:
http://www.dhv.de/web/newsdetails/artic ... nd-t-lock/

Here is the workaround suggested by Advance:
http://www.advance.ch/fileadmin/user_up ... OCK_EN.pdf