US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

I just saw this on the paragliding forum (since the Oz Report is now locked down):

tetszen wrote:Just heard USHPA's insurance policy was renewed until March of next year...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27085&start=50

You'll be pleased to know that the policy is being renewed through March 2013, at a higher premium than what we've paid in the past, but the same basic terms. The insurers were favorably impressed by our efforts on the risk management front, and if we can keep the claims rate down we should be in good shape. We may even be able to ratchet the premium back down after a couple of years of good experience.

We certainly didn't *want* to drop the insurance, but continuation requires having an insurer willing to back the risk. We still have that, and we will so long as we don't have a long run of bad claims. We need to remain diligent, and we all need to keep in mind that just because somebody else is willing to 'take a chance', doesn't mean it won't have consequences for all of us. Don't be shy about speaking up when you see something sketchy happen. It's natural to not want to be the guy who raises a stink when somebody's doing something risky and marginal, but consider what can happen if it goes wrong. We're all in this together, and we need to watch out for each other and the rest of the public to protect our sites and our sport.

MGF

The part that is particularly funny is Mark telling people not to "be shy about speaking up when you see something sketchy happen". I was a USHPA Regional Director when I saw lots of "sketchy" things happening at Torrey Pines (like paragliding students on radio crashing into parked hang gliders on the ground or other paragliding students in the air). Mark Forbes and USHPA did NOTHING.

Mark, we're NOT all in this together. You and your cronies are in this for yourselves. So don't pretend to be "Mr. Safety" when you've been looking the other way for years at all the atrocities committed at Torrey. Shame on you!!

By the way, anyone is welcome to post this response to the Oz Report. You don't have to agree with me to post it, and you're welcome to just say that you saw it posted on US Hawks and are curious about Mark's reply. It would be helpful to post a link to this topic with your post. Thanks.

It's natural to not want to be the guy who raises a stink when somebody's doing something risky and marginal, but consider what can happen if it goes wrong. We're all in this together, and we need to watch out for each other and the rest of the public to protect our sites and our sport. -- MGF

Oh goody! That means it's okay for me to speak out?

If we're going to persuade our bag-wing brethren to embrace the true faith of aluminum and Dacron, we need to lay off the pointless trolling and stop acting like a bunch of a-holes. Over and over, I've heard comments from PG pilots who are interested in HG as a crossover possibility, but put off by the attitude and posturing of some in the HG community. Such as Rick Masters and Rodger Hoyt.
Sneering and derision doesn't win friends. It just alienates and divides, at a time when we all need to work together. Hang gliding participation is down, though starting to recover a bit. Paragliding is about flat. We *all* need to be pulling in the same direction, and this sort of divisive crap is the LAST thing we need. If ever there was an example of how to contribute to the decline of hang gliding, this would be it. Knock it off!
Mark G. Forbes, Regional Director, U$HPA

Guess not...
In fact, it looks like the decline in hang gliding is all my fault.
Still waiting on Forbes or anyone from the USPGA to comment on the 909 paraglider corpses I found since 2002.
Maybe they can't count that high.
Here's a picture
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It's natural to not want to be the guy who raises a stink when somebody's doing something risky and marginal, but consider what can happen if it goes wrong. -- MGF

Uh, Mark. It went wrong.
Big time...

0=< has a name, set of friends, a tree of family members, and a terminated potential.
Looking a little closer at just one of our lost brothers or sisters:

JoeF wrote:0=<

I was curious about the meaning of "0=<", so I wrote to Rick and he informed me that they were a visual representation of the 909 paragliding deaths (bodies) that he's been tallying.

That does tend to drive the point home.

What really drives the point home is to struggle daily, as I do, to put a number, name and face on each poor sap who gets killed on a deadly paraglider. That last plummeting moment of life must have been quite a shock for them after being spoon fed unlimited bullcrap from their instructors and professional tandem pilots like that self-serving piece of work Jim Rooney. At least for some pilots, it didn't last very long. And you don't see them posting, do you, that they're pissed off at their so-called friends because they were lied to -- after losing everything life ever promised just to avoid having to carry some lightweight aluminum tubes up a hill? Or carry a hang glider the few steps from their car to the launch site? No. They have no voice. They're dead. They are f**king dead, killed by collapse, and their spouse is wondering how they are going to make it and the kids are cast to the unknown and the parents are cursing the sport of free flight and all are damning the day paragliding came to their door.

909.

There are people out there who cannot imagine such a large number as 909. To them, there is no difference between a few dozen deaths and nearly a thousand deaths. None! The idiot Tony from PG Forum, the proselytizer with five fused vertebrae, in 2008 dared me to prove that there were more than a handful of deaths a year in paragliding. No one on the forum gave me any credence whatsoever. But then when I showed 123 deaths for that year, nothing changed. The numbers were too big for their tiny brains. Way more than the fingers these nitwits could count on. But nothing changed. To them, Rick Masters was still the problem. Not PG collapse.

Why don't these cretins have any idea of how many people are getting killed in their own sport?

And where do all those hundreds of bloodstained pilotless paragliders go?

From: http://forum.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=35980

Mark Forbes wrote:I understand your concern about [hang gliding] being marginalized. Can you point to specific decisions made by the USHPA board which negatively affect hang glider pilots, compared to paraglider pilots?

How about these, Mark Forbes:

1. The board of a hang gliding association would have never allowed Dave Beardslee (one of the greatest HG tandem pilots) to be banned from Torrey Pines (for life) by David Jebb in 2007.

2. The board of a hang gliding association would have never allowed Bob Kuczewski to be banned from Torrey Pines (for a year) by David Jebb in 2008.

3. The board of a hang gliding association would never have denied site insurance to the Torrey Hawks who applied for it and paid for it in 2009.

4. The board of a hang gliding association would have carried out its 2010 vote of the Board to add more hang gliding representatives to the Torrey Pines Soaring Council back in 2010.

5. The board of a hang gliding association would have never voted to expel Bob Kuczewski in 2015 for testifying in a paragiding case at Torrey in 2014.

6. The board of a hang gliding association would never have refused to renew the chapter status of the Torrey Hawks Hang Gliding club in 2016.

Yet Mark Forbes can spread his lies unchallenged on hanggliding.org because those who know the truth are banned from answering him there.

Rick Masters said it best:

    "Hang gliding isn't dying, it's being murdered".

Rick Masters said it best:
"Hang gliding isn't dying, it's being murdered".

Yeah. And unlike some, we at the US Hawks even know where the bullets are coming from.
Fixing the situation is simple.
Walk away.
Start a national hang gliding association.
We have none, and we can't get anywhere without one.

HG pilot membership in the USHPA is killing our sport.

By the way, I have documented around 1,684 global paragliding deaths from 1986 to April 25, 2018.
Associating hang gliding with this slaughter does not help sell hang gliding.
Time to change.
Separate the sports.

Rick,

After opening up this thread I thought about your 900+ "body count image" from almost 6 years ago. I did some calculating of my own with the approximate current PG body count.

Well, if you laid the bodies head to foot the line would stretch to about 1 and 4/5 miles long!

As to Bob's comments about this -

Mark Forbes wrote:I understand your concern about [hang gliding] being marginalized. Can you point to specific decisions made by the USHPA board which negatively affect hang glider pilots, compared to paraglider pilots?

There are many more examples to cite. What about deciding to bring collapsible canopies into the USHGA back around 1990? If the USHGA wanted new members (and/or their $) they could have invested in a few good promotional ideas and boosted membership that way. We didn't need PG membership to "save" the USHGA. Then what about changing the name of the Association and magazine? Do you think those decisions helped with the morale of the nation's hang glider pilots? The answer is "NO!". I know one pilot (the president of a local USHGA Chapter) who quit the USHGA because they started requiring members to sign that "waiver" on the membership form.

What about deciding to bring collapsible canopies into the USHGA back around 1990?
...We didn't need PG membership to "save" the USHGA.

To do that, the USHGA had to throw out all their rationalizations in making hang gliders safer. They had to accept something vastly inferior as equal, something much more dangerous, something that flies until it encounters turbulence, then falls out of the sky because it cannot withstand negative g, and say to pilots and newbies and the public that it was okay to fly it. Paragliders had no place in our hang gliding organization. They were totally unacceptable. But most USHGA hang glider pilots let it happen. It was the death knell of hang gliding.

After all the USHGA had accomplished FOR US with safety in hang gliding, management threw it away to whore with parachutes for more money!

It was absolutely shameful. It was political correctness. We need to fix it.
We need to bring the USHGA back to life.
Let USHPA be a paragliding organization.
There is nothing to keep the two organizations from working together when it is in their mutual interest.

Posted in Jack's forum:

By joefaust - Sat May 12, 2018 3:15 pm

MGF wrote:
Can you point to specific decisions made by the USHPA board which negatively affect hang glider pilots, compared to paraglider pilots?

Example: Yes:
1. Keeping PG in org. while PDMC is fact. Cure: Drop PG.
2. Unfairly tossing out good HG pilots. Cure: Revoke the tosses.