Brazilian flying priest

Technology can't always save you

Aderli de Carli, 41 years old, is missing since April 20th. He departed from Paranaguá city, but disappeared near the beach a few miles away, after 4 hours of flight. The bad weather turned him to the sea. Since he was carrying a parachute, he could have ejected himself somewhere in the middle of the path he flew. But a handful of his balloons were found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, near Săo Francisco do Sul, in Santa Catarina's state coast, which led to the idea that he might have fallen into the sea. Since then, thousands of U.S. dollars have been spent in the search of the priest


By GABRIELA ZAGO
From Pelotas, BRAZIL


Brazil is known elsewhere as an exotic country, full of dances, parties and rythms. And, to sum up with it, strange news coming from the country sometimes emerges from international headlines.

One of these weird facts, which you can say that "it only could have happened in a distant country like Brazil", occurred last month. It was spread to the world the news that a Roman catholic priest had disappeared in Brazil after trying to break the record of staying more than 19 hours in the air flying strapped to one thousand large party balloons (!) filled with helium. The priest was and experienced skydiver, and had planned the trip, including carrying food and water supplies, in order to stay in the air for about 20 hours. He was wearing a helmet, and an aluminum thermal flight suit. Among the equipment that he carried away with him, there was also a GPS device and a satellite phone. But the priest had not counted with the fact that climate wouldn't collaborate with his all planned journey - nor he bothered to learn how to control the GPS he took with him before taking off. As a result, he has been missing for three weeks now. Only the balloons were found in the Ocean. And, although there's a lot of reasons to make fun of the situation, the case also illustrates the fact that we still have a lot to learn in order to deal with technology.

Aderli de Carli, 41 years old, is missing since April 20th. He departed from Paranaguá city, but disappeared near the beach a few miles away, after 4 hours of flight. The bad weather turned him to the sea. Since he was carrying a parachute, he could have ejected himself somewhere in the middle of the path he flew. But a handful of his balloons were found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, near Săo Francisco do Sul, in Santa Catarina's state coast, which led to the idea that he might have fallen into the sea.

Since then, thousands of U.S. dollars have been spent in the search of the priest. But it is the duty of the government to perform searches for disappeared people, regardless how futile their disappearance was. On Sunday, May 3rd, two teenagers found another balloon of the priest on the coast of Santa Catarina. That led the search for the priest to be resumed.

Although he had skydive before, and even had already flown with party balloons in another situation, Aderli de Carli never finished his free flying training course, started in the city of Curitiba, around three years ago. He was dismissed from the course for "not behaving well". But he had taken courses on survival, diving, and other outdoors techniques, which could help him survive in case of any problem.

Despite the insanity of the act, the priest had an interesting purpose. His idea of breaking the world record flying with balloons was in order to raise funds for creating a sanctuary for truck drivers in Paranaguá, a portuary city in which truck drivers usually have to spend many days in order to unload goods, specially during soy season. It was a noble reason. But, instead of flying for charity, he might have ended up flying away to find God.

His first attempt of flying with balloons happened in January 13th. In that occasion, he stayed in the air for 4 hours and 15 minutes, flying for 68 miles. But the second flight ended up becoming an international joke - after he took off with a GPS without knowing how to use that. Most of the jokes about the priest can be found over the Internet (Global Voices Online has an interesting report on that - read here).

In his mind, the GPS equipment would save him if anything went wrong. But the plan didn't work out. As Gizmodo reports, a few time after taking off, he contacted people in the land, through the satellite phone he had taken with him:

"I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am."

A GPS device can help facilitate our lives, and point the way (many times new, unexplored, unknown, begging to be discovered) we should go, but it doesn't substitute the necessity of understanding how things work, and how to make sense of the data showed in it (in the case of the priest, all he had to do was to turn on the device, and, by doing that, he would be able to be found, even if he didn't know how to understand what the device was displaying). Machines can help men, but they can't replace them. Machines can show indications of the path to follow. We can even trust those indications, or believe that the machine might be able to help us out. But trusting too much on the machine can be misleading.

Technology is not inherently good or bad. Everything depends on the use that is made of that. What we can learn from this very unlucky situation is that men can fail. Machines, created by men, can fail too. We just have to learn how to conceal both things - something like learning how to use technology to improve our lives, but not always counting on them, since they can simply not work when we really need it. Or, in other words, flying away strapped to party balloons with a bad weather is not a very good idea, even if you're carrying a GPS and a cellphone.


(Published: 10.05.2008.)

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