Soaring Safety Articles

Here are two good articles I found on the Web related to soaring safety that I would like to share.  — PF

Safety in Mountain Flying by the French Soaring Center in St-Auban

This booklet is a technical illustrated supplement to the document « Objectives: safe mountain gliding » published by the French Federation of Soaring, concerning the risks and threats induced by flying in the mountains. It stresses the technical points as well as the human factors.It is not a course on mountain flying. It cannot replace a session on mountain flying with its flights in two and single seaters accompanied by briefings and debriefings, but it is complementary and a permanent reminder for the pilot. It can also serve as a backbone (or basis) for a presentation about safety in flights.

How to Survive Gliding by Bert Willing

In, 1996 Southern France claimed a death toll of 18 amongst glider pilots – three of them dying at my airfield, when the training two-seater inadvertently spun into a single seater below it. At that point, I stopped gliding for a year in order to think about my own ranking on the list. Eventually I came to the conclusion that – midairs set apart – it solely depends on me if I want to wreck a glider. I then decided to keep on gliding and bought my first glider (well, a share in a glider).