Colin likes hospital food
Benet with some of his scrap metal collection.
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Is it dangerous?
Yes of course it is - relatively.
So is driving a car or crossing the street or or even
boiling an egg.
Life is full of dangerous stuff. Face it! If you want to
be completely safe, stay in bed. And don't turn your electric
blanket on - it could be dangerous.
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BUT...
Actually to be serious for a minute, it's really only as dangerous
as you make it. So as long as you don't do something really stupid
then it's quite a safe sport. I've seen a few accidents but all
of them could have been avoided. Most, if not all accidents are
pilot induced. They are usually a result of non-use-of-brain by
the pilot. The same way as car accidents are usually driver induced.
The thing you have to realise is that things don't just happen to
you out of the blue. You are normally to blame for your own accident.
Take note all you ambulance chasing lawyers
out there. In hang gliding you have to learn to take responsibility
for your own actions and make your own decisions about the conditions
that you fly in.
Hindsite is a great thing but foresight is an even greater thing.
Looking ahead to what might happen is often the best way to avoid
an accident.
Colin on the top left learned with hindsight, that foresight
is a wonderful thing, and as a result spent a few days studying
the ceiling in a French hospital. Colin is used to that though,
he's a rugby player and if there's a bone there you can be sure
that he's broken it.
So to be slightly more serious for a minute,
hang gliding can be a potentialy hazardous sport but, if you take
good tuition and treat it with the respect that it deserves, then
in my opinion it's no more dangerous than driving a car.
Hang gliding suffers from a reputation of being dangerous because
when it first started, people were building their own gliders from
household materials with little or no knowledge of aerodynamics
or flight theory. Naturally, some of them came to grief. This perception
still persists in the mind of Joe Public. Today's hang gliders are
incredible machines made to exact tolerances and with great strength
and amazing performance.
Footnote:
Accidents tend to happen to the guy who has
been flying for about a year or so. He's had some nice flights and
he thinks he knows all there is to know. He's a hot-shot pilot now
and what he doesn't know isn't worth knowing. Just watch him and
learn from his crash.
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