So your chance of dying in a glider is only 0.2% (or 0.02, or 0.002%).Â*
That doesn't mean that it won't happen on the very next flight.Â* It does
not mean that you can make 5,000 more flights and then stop just before
you kill yourself.Â* Statistics...Â* Fly! Enjoy!

On 10/31/2019 10:10 AM, jfitch wrote:
On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 5:49:22 PM UTC-7, wrote:
For those who haven’t seen it....

https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-o...-what-we-love/
There are many ways of looking at this, risk per hour is one. Another might be risk per year of participation. By the information in the post, my risk of dying in a glider is 2% in the next 1000 hours of participation. If I fly 100 hours in a year which might be a typical average, my chance of dying next year in a glider is 0.2%. The raw death rate in the US for my age group (55-64, also typical of glider pilots) is about 1500/100000 or 1.5% according to the latest CDC data. In other words, I am about 8 times as likely to die of something else, than in a glider.

You are also somewhat in control of that 0.2%. The majority of accidents in gliders are preventable, merely by allowing for more margin of error which will decrease your enjoyment of the sport but little. Nevertheless, sometimes pilots are "swatted out of the sky by the hand of fate", as two of my very good friends were two years ago.

--
Dan, 5J