I hate to steal the name of a book to start my article, but since the concept of the book gave me the idea for this article, I guess I'll give credit where credit is due.

I have been in this sport a long time, and I have been, over the years, keeping track of the friends and acquantences that I have lost to the sport. A long time ago, the count was over 30 pilots, and I occasionally wondered why I still was flying and bringing new people into the sport. In fact, I sort of dropped out, racing bicycles for several years, only maintaining my ratings and teaching a few people how to fly who searched me out and twisted my arm.

When I came back into the sport seriously, in 1987, I noticed that the yearly fatality count had subsided, and the gliders, though sometimes harder to land were generally much safer to fly. Towing, which was the way I had started flying, was also much safer. We had new methodologies which allowed us to tow over land instead of water. In the past, water had provided a sort of cushion for our inability to tow perfectly safely by providing us with a soft place to crash. Now, due to Donall Hewett, Jerry Forburger, and his West Texas gang, and the various pervayors of the payout winch, which, of course, preceeded the platform launch by a number of years, we had methods which allowed us to tow safely over land.

Further, aerotow had developed from a rather scary concept of the early eighties into a mature technology on which a number of new schools and flight parks have been based.

Then, in a matter of weeks, I lost two friends to the sport again. One in an almost incomprehensible aerotow tandem accident, and another doing aerobatics in Colorado. Another pilot was hurt badly in Texas in an unexplicable towing accident, and the years death count has been climbing to the highest level since the seventies, a large proportion of them towing accidents. I could hear a little voice in the back of my head sayng, "Wake up, it's time to get up, you've been dreaming." Yeah, but I liked that dream. I liked being able to tell my students, pompously, "Yes, hang gliding was the death sport of the seventies, but now it is much safer than general aviation."

In the hang gliding community, a lot of pilots are saying, "It can't happen here." "Or perhaps, I'm too good. It won't happen to me." or perhaps, "We're as safe as we can be. Any more safety precautions would just be a waste of time."

In the military, a series of accidents such as we have had, would engender a task force to investigate the accidents, come to conclusions, make proposals and impliment those proposals to improve safety. So what can we do to create the task force to improve safety?

cbparser BB code is on
Smilies are on
[IMG] is allowed
HTML tags are on
Profanity is not allowed