On Thursday, 13 September 2018 07:43:57 UTC+10, Retting wrote:
sorry bub, you get rejected at the cream machine and get fed to the fish.
R

"No pleasures in life are worth foregoing for another 5 years in the geriatric ward" - Horace Rumpole from the British TV series "Rumpole of the Bailey"

The socialists here can go hang. The chance of hurting anyone else on the ground in a glider are minimal. The first responders will have attended hundreds, if not thousands of automobile accidents for every glider pilot accident. Not even a statistical blip.

In the last twelve months 7 Australian glider pilots died in aviation accidents (one in a homebuilt RV-6). I knew quite well all but two of them. All but two were over 70. Sad but not tragic in all but one case. Nobody on the ground was hurt and zero property damage.

The tragic case was a 62 year old instructor with a 60 year old student who suddenly dived in to the ground from 50 feet on a normal approach, witnesses by the instructor's wife who had just launched the flight. Weather was fine, glider had nothing wrong with it. The instructor was known to me and was IMO one of the most thoughtful, flight safety conscious, people I knew.

This sport is DANGEROUS, more so than general aviation as a whole. New entrants should be carefully briefed on this and if they decide it is not for them, so be it. As Bruno Gantenbrink said 25 years ago, you should think carefully about the risks and decide if the risks are worth the rewards. It is a PERSONAL decision and risk.

I have noted elsewhere that the Australian government doesn't deny passports to people who want to go to Nepal to climb Mt Everest, where you have an excellent chnace of killing yourself. They don't even bother to bring abck the bodies, the mountain is littered with frozen corpsicles.