It is so subtle, this is what HG is up against. HG is being edited out and stolen by “big money” PG media.
“So what”, you can pack a PG in a bag and hike, It’s just foo easy, that’s why so many “Lazy” people adopt this form of “gliding”. A high performance parachute is not a “Wing” or a “Hang”glider,
The practically non existing HG Media must come alive for it to survive.
CBS 8 News:
Watch this "Hang Gliding" video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHExOcI4ZB8 and at 0:05 it says, "what goes up doesn't have to come down" showing a PG taking off. Then at the end 2:52, showing PG's and saying, "oh, you can't beat the view".
A commenter noted:
blastman8888 wrote:You notice all those guys are 55-65 plus years old Hang gliding is hobby that is dyeing being replaced by paragliding and paramotoring. The one thing is hang gliders are not easy to transport have a big pole and parts wing has to be folded up. Paraglider can fold it all up into a backpack hitch a ride, or have uber pick them up.
This is what we’re fighting. It is so subtle.
Another co-opt is the word “free flying”, paragliding adopted this to include themselves with the aviation community. Free??, go add up all the money and time spent on "retrieving" these, "ozone warblers" as RM so aptly wrote, plus the funeral costs, not to mention the grief parents must feel because they must know how dangerous PG is, but said nothing when their, "child" asked to borrow thousands and thousands of dollars for a, High Performance Parachute.
How about just a “free spirited”, unafraid pilot, flying an air framed flex winged Hang Glider which was invented so long ago and still flying basically unchanged. They are that good.
KNSD-TV reports (
http://bit.ly/152DUQ9):
Authorities don’t know if Ho intentionally launched or was accidentally lifted off the ground by the wind.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been told about the paragliding business involved in the fatal accident, and has been in contact with the business.
In another "news" article:
July 16, 2014 – David Norwood David Norwood (55), co-chairman of the USHPA Accident Reporting committee, a Master (P5) pilot and USHPA member since 2007, suffered fatal injuries during a flight at Chelan, WA. He launched a familiar site and suffered a thermic induced collapse, which he was unable to recover from. Fatal injuries resulted from a collision with the ground.
FREE FLYING (with my comments in red) wrote:I've received a sharp response to my previous post regarding paragliding safety prompted by the death of David Norwood, a highly-regarded flyer who crashed to his death at Chelan Butte on Wednesday.
Like all tragedies, the incident is causing some flyers to step back and re-evaluate. The discussion can only be healthy. But my previous post, in which I simply printed the personal perspective of
Rick Masters of Owens Valley, California
(who is now also publishing on substack.com) was not well received by some paragliders.
Masters contends that when choosing to fly paragliders or hang-gliders, one is a safer choice in iffy weather because of the frame that helps prevent canopy collapse.
Masters suggests that frank discussions are hindered on chat rooms because paragliding sites often are controlled by people in the industry who don't want too much frank talk. But James Bradley of New York, the U.S. moderator on the worldwide online forum paraglidingforum.com, sharply disagrees. Here's his message:
Your acceptance of Rick Masters as an authority on paragliding, apparently without taking the time to learn anything about him, or talk to any people who are actually involved with the sport--we are all concerned about safety--is pretty disappointing.
I am one of a handful of US pilots who race on the Paragliding World Cup circuit. I am also the only US moderator on the worldwide online forum paraglidingforum.com (a volunteer position). Rick Masters was allowed to join there and post like anyone else. We learned that he is on an enduring anti-paragliding crusade. Like a religious zealot, he is not interested in facts or discussion unless they support his rigidly defined position. He behaved badly for some time on the forum and then we banned him, as we have a handful of other people over time.
Masters' disregard for facts is evident in his facile characterization of Paragliding Forum as populated mainly by people with a commercial interest in the sport. There are some of those of course but we have 30,000 registered members worldwide and an untold number who read without registering. The vast majority are simply enthusiasts in the sport. All light aircraft are dangerous. The accident and fatality statistics for hang gliding and paragliding over time are about the same. The most common accident types are different. Accidents come in clumps in all sports, probability predicts that. We are sadly in a clump of paragliding accidents in North America at the moment, (you mean since 1990?) much more than average. The last couple of years have been the other way, lighter (that's exactly why,.. PG's are just too damn light) than the average.
The USHPA's fatalities record (2013 to 2020 only recorded) is carefully edited to say "died while flying, and under investigation", but if you click on each fatality, you can go the actual news story which in most cases is uninformed and bias.
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