"tango4" wrote in message ...
Not news! Soaring IS dangerous. The bad news is that it seems to be becoming
more so as time passes. If you believe anything else you need your head
read. I understand that there have been 5 fatalities in the Alps in the past
two months alone.

Ian

Here I go again starting **** or opening a can of worms (for
discussion)? Your choice, is soaring dangerous ? Are guns dangerous
? Depends who's shooting them and what they are shooting at. Same
with cars, trucks, boats, ect guess it depends who's operating them
and how. If a person buys a glider and flies it 250 hrs in 5 years
equals 50 hours a year and averages say 6.5 hours per flight on cross
country flights out of Crystal or any other gliderport how many
flights is that per year 7-8? Is the sport dangerous or is the
indivual dangerous to himself and others. Yes a good judgement call
would be maybe I shouldn't be doing this cause I'm not going to be
very proficiant making only 7-8 flightd per year.

In the past 12 months I counted over 30 accidents involving RV's of
all types resulting in 11 fatalities in the USA. In the same period I
counted 23 accidents in gliders resulting in 7 fatalities in the USA.
NTSB accident web page was my source. I'm guessing there were more
total hours in glider operations than all RV operations in the same
period of time.