This is the sounding diagram of 14 february 2007, near Manilla Australia. Where german female pilot Ewa flew towards the centre of a Cumulus Nimbus, with result known all over the world. She rocketed up to 9750 meters, was unconscious for a while, etc... etc... and survived. Another fellow pilot, Chinese pilot HE, had not that much luck. According to the autopsie he was killed in the air by lightning.
Was it insane to fly that day, was it insane to go fly under these obvious nasty clouds ?
Check yourself.

Some explanation :
As you can tell by the graphs on the sounding, the day only needed a trigger to get very powerfull ascent with a superadiabat, this with 29 degrees celsuis at surface. The climb was definetely gonna be strong, powerfull enough to break through the 'inversion' at 700 hPa. With such a heat, 29 degrees celsius enough power could/would break loose.
Further above on the sounding, you can see where the temp curve (red line) meets the saturated adiabatic (pseudoadiabats), and that at 250 hPa. There she was 9750 m high, unconscious. If you follow the temperature lines, it is easy to notice that up there it was 50 degrees below zero.
Too see what the probability was of a thunderstorms that day, you can use different formulas.
The Lifted Index (LI) which results in a -9 , meaning extreme unstable day, very high probability for thunderstorms. Or the KI (indication K), or using the formula to calculate the convective available potential energy (CAPE) And so on, and so on.
No idea, were there no weather-geeks ? I thought every paraglider had interest in weather ?
And howcome this sounding is/was never published in any debate/forum I checked on this subject.
I asked on certain forums for weather maps, or soundings, but no response, my question wasn't even published on their forum.
I don't know, but I think this is essential information.
To me, it was insane to fly.

But, WHO AM I. I can't even win a football game against my 8 year old Paco, and Ewa was the leading female paragliding champion. But I think some of those competitors lost it.

Anyway, I hope these things won't happen again. Thanks Tony for finding this sounding, couldn't find it myself. Downloaded from NOAA, hope they don't mind.

Today we didn'tfly. Some pilots went to Toix, but it was too gusty, and too west.