Skermgrepe from Sabrina se video on Instagram (Video: sab_thi / Instagram)
A woman miraculously walked away with only bruises after a collision between her paraglider and a small plane high above the Austrian Alps.
The incident took place on 23 May 2026 in the Piesendorf area in Salzburg when the 44-year-old woman was paragliding.
According to Salzburg police, a 28-year-old pilot was on a sightseeing flight in the area when his Cessna hit the woman’s glider. The man told authorities he could not avoid the collision.
The plane’s propeller seriously damaged the paraglider, after which the experienced glider had to deploy her emergency parachute. She was able to perform an emergency landing and was later taken from the scene by a police helicopter. The woman and the pilot both escaped serious injury.
The woman’s name has not been officially released by authorities, but a woman named Sabrina later shared footage of the incident on Instagram. In her original video, she floats calmly along a mountain range before the rumble of an approaching plane can be heard.
Moments later, a small white plane suddenly appears in the frame and tears through the glider’s parachute canopy, just above her head. She then begins to spin and quickly loses altitude, but manages to calmly reach for the handle of her emergency parachute.
The emergency parachute deployed without difficulty and slowed her fall. In the footage, the torn remains of her paraglider can be seen trailing in two pieces behind her, still attached to her harness.
As she quickly sinks to the ground, she manages to free her feet from the harness. She narrowly avoids a bush before landing on a grassy area. The video ends where she takes off her gear and catches her breath after the narrow escape.
“I actually still can’t believe I’m sitting here typing these words,” she captioned the video. She added that she came away with little more than bruises.
In a follow-up post on Instagram, Sabrina also responded to criticism and speculation about the incident. She says she was not in a no-fly zone, and that she was circling in thermal air currents when the collision occurred. According to her, a paraglider cannot swerve for a small plane, while a motorized plane is the one that has to swerve.
She also confirmed that the pilot of the plane landed safely and that the case will now follow the formal legal process.
“This is a flying area where paragliders, gliders and motor planes all do their rounds. There are rules, but accidents still happen,” she wrote. She hopes the incident will lead to everyone flying “a little more carefully” again.
