On Mar 21, 4:51*pm, toad wrote:
On Mar 21, 11:26*am, bildan wrote:

On Mar 21, 6:45*am, "
wrote:

Anything that dangerous must be fun *On the other hand sailplanes
have a terrible safety record, training and experience doesn't seem to
help either.

I would rephrase...

Pilots who think training and experience doesn't matter tend to have
terrible safety records.

Just to make the counter argument, that the original article is
making.
"There are risks that training do not seem to be able to mitigate."

If your wing spar has an X % of breaking on every flight, no amount of
pilot training will reduce that percentage. *You can not mitigate that
risk with pilot training, you must re-design the spar. *The same is
with paragliders, there are inherent risks of collapse in the design.

Giving that there are way more paraglider pilots than glider pilots
worldwide, a quick look at the worldwide statistic at the above link
shows that paragliding is much safer than gliding. Same goes for hang
gliding. Of course their injury rate is much higher, but fatality rate
is much lower. Reason is simple: sailplanes are much less forgiving
for any mishap due to the energy involved. There is much less chance
to survive a glider accident than a HG/PG accident. You can walk (or
at least crawl) away from most HG/PG accidents, wish this was true for
gliding as well.

Ramy