How safe is the sport of soaring today

Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
glider4 wrote:
Shirley,
I agree with JJ. A total of 500 hours is pretty low time to be soaring
in strong weather conditions at a high density altitude airport with
few reasonably safe landable areas near the home field.

As a relatively low-time pilot planning to attent Air Sailing's XC camp
in a few weeks, that's pretty discourging. I'd rather believe that
training and attention to safety are equally as important as having 500+
hours of flying experience.


You are right. Most of the accidents i know involved pilots with high
number of hours 1000. Main factor: age. Moreover many of these pilots
take bad habits which get more and more entranched, such as ridge flying
at slow speed and so on. One day or the other they get bitten.
Another factor of course is competition, notably among young pilots,
which take way too much risks to pass ahead of their pals. It's this way
the son of my colleague died. From what i have seen, young pilots which
are serious and don't want to enter ****ing contests learn to fly XC
in plastic gliders in far, far less than 500 hours, and are as good
pilots as multi thousand hours guys. World champions are an entirely
different category, and nobody needs to feel obliged to perform the same
exploits as they do.


--

Michel TALON