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Ed Guardia has been considered at the first person to have died in a paraglider hang glider[1] of the single-tether sort where he could control flight by manipulating the wing's airframe in the modern renaissance of foot-laucnh free-flight gliding. He launched from the Sylmar, California area mountains, entered a luffing-sail dive and died from the severe impact. The final flight was on film and studied by Lloyd Licher, still living, a former employee of Soaring Society of America, and others. The Ed Guardia incident helped to spur the fixing of reflex in the wings used by other paragliders in the early 1970s. The magazine Low & Slow recorded the fact of his fatal flight.