Story
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Story of the Site
As long as I can remember, I had always been looking at birds flying… In 1973-1974, when I first heard about hang gliding, my school fellows were joking because I was talking about that all the time! It was still early (age 12-13).
Later on, after two false starts seing hang gliders directly in 1979 and 1982, I booked a week in 1984 in the school near Grasse. Wow… Just what I had been dreaming of! A few years later, my teacher was killed when his worn out sail got torn right after launch. I had always been more on the cautious side, but this tough lesson staid engraved.
When I began competing in 1992, I had developed an infallible hook-in method: 1st check before moving the set-up wing, 2nd check before launching. I forgot once anyway in 1997, but someone touched my shoulder during that British championship in Laragne, just before I launched, and the game went on. I could not even trust myself!
During an aerobatics training in 2004, I used a lighter open face helmet instead of the usual full face, a weird feeling while towing. Stopped on the back amidst a poor wing-over, I held onto the bar but a strong yaw stroke sent me in the upright. Next I was hanging under the parachute. Fooled by a new speed feeling, I had become too slow, and understood too late.
In 2005, the FFVL technical director took me on as hang gliding technical adviser and I became national team trainer after he passed away in 2007. Safety was already a deep interest, so I compiled paragliding and hang gliding accidents statistics. Then I left the FFVL in 2012 and was proposed by the CIVL Secretary to become Safety Officer.
Without academic knowledge, I had to learn fast. The litterature found gave the Safety Pages‘ structure, but coherence was still missing, a logic, a policy. In 2015, I noticed the Dutch Air Sports Federation was using a Safety Management System: that was it! The CIVL adopted it in 2016, the countries had only to implement it…
That did not happen. More generally, the safety topic talks to everyone, but is so painful that one does not stand and keep striving, applying a policy until improvements are achieved. It felt like all those friends and fellows lost to flying accidents died another time when nothing changed in design nor in organization.
Whole branches have achieved concrete results today, why not go their way? Something was still missing. So this site is a summary to get quickly the big picture without having to swallow tons of studies, but it aims also at convincing that accidents happen to all including us, and that a safety management system is THE ultimate path.
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Special Thanks
- Christian Rudolf (F) – hang gliding instruction – 1984
- Bart Doets (NL) – forgotten hook-in rescue – 1997
- Angelo Crapanzano (I) – tumbling, parachute rescue – 2004
- Michel Darras (F) – appointment to the FFVL staff – 2005
- Louise Joselyn (GB) – appointment to the CIVL staff – 2011
- David O’Hare (NZ) – safety design paper – 2012
- Andre Bizot (NL) – mention of the Dutch SMS – 2015