USHPA hang gliding membership numbered slightly less than 3,000 pilots in September 2017, and represents the majority of active pilots in the United States. hang gliding community also increases the focus on the risk. Although hang gliding fatalities average around three per year according to USHPA statistics, the especially high accident rates just a few years after the USHPA increased access to the statistics intensified the national conversation among hang glider pilots about safety, bringing even more attention to a popular topic.
In 2013, a few years before I started contemplating this question, the United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association began detailing fatality rates on its website, increasing transparency and visibility of statistics that had previously been published as accident reports in the organization’s monthly magazines. But it took nearly a decade of being a pilot-seeing friends’ injuries, my own (so far, thankfully) minor injuries and major accident, and my mom’s broken arm-before I began more seriously considering why we fly, especially after having personally experienced the risks. Around the time that I began high-altitude flights from Kagel Mountain (elevation 3,500 feet) in Sylmar, California, two pilots died flying at the site. Risk is an indisputable aspect of hang gliding, a sport which involves an individual pilot attached to an unpowered, open-air craft consisting of a metal frame, wires and cloth-essentially, a large kite. Two gliders soar above Sylmar, California. It’s hard to just say no," the 34-year-old replied. "Why do we all keep doing it?" I asked her at one point. I’d not seen a friend die in person, as she had, but I personally knew three pilots who’d had fatal accidents while hang gliding. Nearly flipping my hang glider mid-flight two years before and having to throw my parachute was the worst experience I had to share from 10 years of hang gliding. "Everything."Ībout five years after her crash, we were sharing flying-and accident-stories after I’d landed from my flight that day (see highlights from that flight in the video below). "My mom had to do everything for me while I was ," she told me. Majors broke both her arms and took a year to recover. She lifted off only briefly before unintentionally turning right and crashing into a fence about 20 feet from where she was flying. On her third towed hang gliding lesson in her home country of Guatemala in 2012, Majo Majors ran several steps, and then was pulled off the ground by a motorized tow system. The Risks and Rewards of Hang Gliding Pilots' desire to fly like birds often outweighs the dangers of the sport.
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