Paragliding is a personal risk assessment but we also carry reserve parachutes. We do as much as possible to alleviate that risk and I’ve been trying to find a small drone which would give me a sounding of the air above take off. It will happen one day.
as to refusing an aircraft;
in the early days of BA I was flying with one of the first hamsters on the Trident..new on the fleet. It was in the days that the skipper often had to spend 5 mins reading through the tech log where we had pages of carry forwards. The aircraft was unserviceable and he refused it. The big engineering guns wearing lots of stripes descended upon the cockpit and in spite of the bullying he still refused. Then came GG the duty flight manager who tried the same tactic; at that time BEA management were ex WW2 and national service..apparently the worse we’re ex Shackletons although Hunters weren’t far behind. We were then sent to serve our duty time out on standby without a serviceable aircraft in Heathrow.
Had another ex Athens where the captains artificial horizon was US. The small standby was by his left knee and virtually invisible to me. Captain accepted the aircraft but had my AI switched to his position and left a gaping hole in the panel for me to look at for 5 hours. I would have liked to protest but one didn’t in those days.
Late 80s whilst we were waiting for delivery of the first MD11and had new pilots replacing the FEs on the DC10 I had one with a management pilot probably ZRH - ATL where we should have had a double crew in the winter but management fiddled the flight times. Taxying out after I had selected take off flaps we had an amber caution but didn’t know why, the panel operator wasn’t any use technically but the captain said we are going. After explaining the systems to him and not getting him to return to the gate I told him that I would stand on the brakes as I wasn’t going.
We returned twice to the gate; which involved refuelling and lots of engineers crawling over the aircraft to eventually find a loose contact behind one of the circuit breaker panels.
A few years later we lost an aircraft due to an electrical fire, I had two lots of cockpit electrical smoke caused by the landing light switch arcing and a friend burnt his hand after the emergency bus bar panel decided to burn.
Fortunately our maintenance was nearly perfect although I did refuse and ground a F100.
The aircraft had the air conditioning compressors under the cockpit and suffered occasionally from Icing. Madrid in summer and accelerating the engines had a massive vibration. Aborted and guessing the problem I turned the bleeds off..they shut off automatically above a throttle angle or rpm on take off then turned on after take off subject to certain conditions. Took off and after selecting the bleeds back on had a TVI engine 2 warning which was caused by one of the air conditioning compressors which I deselected. We re filed at 290 and continued to GVA. The engineers didn’t want to inspect the compressor and turned up in the flight planning room to bully me into accepting the aircraft (in front of all and sundry). In the end - the argument was in French to humiliate me- I said I would write in the tech log this aircraft is grounded until a competent engineer is found.
I must admit in persuading a skipper to accept an aircraft with a couple of engine gauges US - after a night stop and heavy rain in Scandinavia - water in the gauge lines; cleared in the climb and would have only been a problem if we lost an engine on take off wrt setting MCT.