What do ya think?
I like the idea of a man attaching a lightweight wing to his back and running off a hill into the sky on his feet. The idea of landing the same way also appeals to me. I think of it as the most fundamental form of flight. Simple. Elegant. Austere. I love it.
In fact, unlike most or all here, I have never flown a hang glider with wheels. My mindset has always been to avoid a situation where I would ever require wheels, a parachute, a miracle, an ambulance or a helicopter. I have had several crashes. All involved ground loops from tip strikes in ground turbulence. Thinking back, not one would have been improved by wheels. I chose to grab a downtube instead. But I have always encouraged pilots to use wheels, the bigger the better - and bigger is better - if it would make them feel more confident about flying. I have even seen pilots with little skill use wheels to their advantage, but it left me thinking that if they didn't have the wheels to rely on, they might have been forced to be better pilots and develop greater landing skill without them.
...what if they die trying to look cool?
You are referring to wheels and implying that not wanting the weight or drag or hassle of wheels has to do with narcissism. That has never occurred to me. Are you sure it's not the pilots with wheels who are trying to look cool? To me it is all about efficiency. But if you want to use fatalities to bolster your argument, I would suggest you adjust your priorities based on how freeflyers actually die.
First, by far, most freeflyers who die are flying paragliders. They die with an impact vector that is too steep for a wheel to help. They usually get into trouble within the Paragliding Dead Man's Curve, where they do not have enough time to deploy their reserve.
Even if they have enough time, they are often in an out-of-control situation where deploying the reserve effectively is difficult or impossible, such as in a high-g spiral or partial collapse with insufficient vertical speed for the reserve to deploy. Impact with the reserve often results in serious injuries, anyway.
The most common incident trigger is encountering ground turbulence without an air frame during landing approach. Following the collapse of the paraglider's fabric airfoil, the drop is sudden, often closely approximating the acceleration of gravity and, again, resulting in a vector to impact too steep for wheels to help.
From July 4 of last year to the July 4th of this week, 104 soaring parachutists that I presently have records for were killed by their paragliders. I do not accept the excuse of "pilot error" for those killed on such poorly conceived, critically balanced and dangerously inadequate parachutes, which can go out of control at the drop of a pin. Wheels would not have helped any of them. The only thing that would have helped them is a ballistic emergency reserve. A ballistic parachute, properly deployed, would have saved the lives of the majority of the 104 who perished and I regard a ballistic reserve as a necessity for any stuntman attempting to fly an aircraft without an air frame in turbulence. But those who fell for the marketing hype and uncritically chose to fly paragliders were, sadly, too stupid to understand this simple fact - thus the continual attrition.
They take this as an insult but, really, it's just an observation. When you disregard the vital importance of an air frame to keep the shape of your airfoil intact when launching into or flying in perfectly normal atmospheric turbulence, or landing in perfectly normal ground turbulence, what do you have left? The impact of stupidity. That's it.
Hang gliding, of course, is what we are talking about here on Safe Splat. In the same time period, I have incomplete records for 7 fatalities on hang gliders, representing only 6.3-percent of free-flying fatalities in the past year. All had violent, steep-vector or cliff face impacts where wheels would not have helped, except for one guy in Japan who crashed in a rice paddy, where wheels would not have helped. There may be some injury incidents where wheels would have helped. I don't know. I don't care. It's the pilot's option to put wheels on his hang glider. Or not. Hang gliding is dangerous. The more complicated you make your hang glider, the more dangerous it can become. We all do what we think is best. Some of us are wrong. Some of us are lucky. Some of us are just better pilots. Some of us should be riding bicycles instead.
Every time you add complexity to a system, you invite disaster. For every broken neck or arm or lip you think you save with wheels, the same wheels also cause injury and death. The Jean Lake incident is a case in point. The tow line wrapped around the wheel axle. Two died because of wheels. This did not reflect well on our sport.
Safe-splat provides no magic bullet. Wheels can be good. Wheels can be bad. But if we hold the USHPA negligent for not requiring wheels on every hang glider, the result of a successful court action would be essentially the creation of a USHPA police force to inspect and hold every hang glider pilot accountable for wheels.
Like I said, don't go there. Outlaws like me are free and always will be. But don't make it worse than it is for everybody else.
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