Comment by ed_mercer
18 days ago
I love gliding but had a near-miss experience and am scared to fly a glider plane ever since. Statistically it's about 40x times more dangerous than driving.
18 days ago
I love gliding but had a near-miss experience and am scared to fly a glider plane ever since. Statistically it's about 40x times more dangerous than driving.
Same here. I had lots of experience playing flight sims, but in reality I taught myself a load of bad habits... I had two scary situations where I didn't realise I was about to stall relatively low to the ground. Also, combined with all of the egos at the airfield, that was enough for me to find a safer hobby.
Avid flight simmer here and PPL holder, curious to hear what types of bad habits you’re referring to. I had a similar experience at the start of my training—looking too much at the instruments—but it was pretty easy for me to get over it
Well, I would say not looking at my instruments enough! Without realising, I would let my nose drift up when I was turning and I got extremely close to stalling. I'm extremely happy with my current flight sims and VR combo. It gives me enough of what I was after as I think I used to find solo gliding pretty stressful.
The interesting article that I am pretty sure produced the statistic about relative risk:
https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-of-dying-doing-what-we-lo...
What was the near miss?
My instructor and I were launched using a powered winch launch. As we were ascending, another glider passed over us and barely missed us. They later claimed they didn't see us, though they were later found to be at fault.