a total cock up, they made a balls of it.
Not weird per se, but some luck
Don’t look down: hang‑glider takes off without harness
A thrillseeker endured two minutes of terror in a slip-up at 4,000ft over the Swiss Alps
Oliver Moody, Berlin
November 27 2018, 5:00pm, The Times
Chris Gursky held on for dear life as the hang glider reached heights of 4,000 feet
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About five seconds into Chris Gursky’s first flight on a hang glider, it occurred to him that something was not quite right. As the contraption hurtled off the side of a mountain in the Swiss Alps, a lake shimmering 4,000ft below, he realised what it was: the harness was not attached to the frame.
For the next two minutes and ten seconds Mr Gursky, an American luxury car dealer, clung on to the bar of the glider — and his instructor — for dear life. Then he let go and dropped the final few feet to the valley floor. He got away with a fractured right wrist and a torn tendon on his left bicep. “It beats the alternative,” he said.
The American tourist was treated for a broken wrist and a torn tendon
Mr Gursky, 54, from North Port in Florida, was visiting Interlaken on the first day of a Swiss holiday with his wife of 26 years, Gail, in mid-October.
As the couple had never tried hang gliding before, they each took a tandem flight with an experienced instructor. “Gail and her pilot took off first,” Mr Gursky wrote on Facebook. “[It] looked cool as hell. Then my pilot and I lined up for take-off.
“We waited for the updraft to pick up and then we ran till we left the side of the 4,000ft mountain edge.
“I was expecting to level out above the pilot as we went, but quickly discovered that my harness was not attached to the hang-glider or anything else.”
Video footage of the flight has been viewed more than a million times since Mr Gursky uploaded it to YouTube on Monday. “My body weight shifted straight down and I found myself hanging on for my life,” he wrote.
“I remember looking down and thinking: this is it. I was losing grip with my right hand, [which] was holding on to a strap on the pilot’s right shoulder.”
Buffeted by gusts of air, Mr Gursky began swinging from side to side.
The instructor desperately attempted to land as Mr Gursky, starting to lose his grip, clung to his leg
The pilot tried to grab his right hand but it slipped out of his grip. “I ended up holding [the] bar with the left hand and the lower part of his leg with the right when we were nearing the ground,” he wrote.
“I looked down to see my feet hit first, which ripped me off at about 45mph as it was a hot landing and I was under the landing gear. I would guesstimate the total flight time was about five minutes. When I sat up I knew something was wrong and saw that my wrist was broken.
“For two minutes and 14 seconds I had to hang on for my life! The landing was a rough one, but I lived to tell the story.” Mr Gursky and his instructor, who had landed on a shooting range, had to make their way through two layers of electric fencing before finding help.
Mr Gursky was taken to hospital where the shattered radius in his right wrist needed four hours of surgery, a titanium plate and seven screws.
A qualified hang glider pilot said that Mr Gursky had survived simply through luck. “Normally this kind of mistake is fatal,” he told 20 Minuten , a Swiss newspaper.
The country’s civil aviation authority is investigating the incident.
Asked if he would ever brave the skies again Mr Gursky had no doubts. “I will go hang gliding again,” he said “as I did not get to enjoy my first flight.”
PRIDE AFTER A FALL
Vesna Vulovic, 1972
The 22-year-old Serbian air stewardess survived after falling 33,330ft when her Yugoslav Airlines aeroplane exploded over Czechoslovakia. A food trolley pinned her to a section of the plane that landed on snow.
Bas Wie, 1946
The “Kupang Kid” was 12 when he crept into the engine casing of a Dutch aircraft on the tarmac at an airport on the Indonesian island of Timor. He survived the three-hour flight to Darwin, Australia.
Maria Nelly Murillo, 2015
Five days after a twin-engine Cessna crashed in Colombian rainforest, Ms Murillo, 18, and her baby son were found in a ravine less than half a mile away. They lived on coconut water and rain.
Juliane Koepcke, 1971
The 17-year-old was the sole survivor after her plane was struck by lightning over Peru. She fell 10,000ft and landed with her seatbelt still fastened. She walked for 11 days, surviving on sweets, before being airlifted to safety.
You may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.
What the fuck is the paper resting on
God help us. He’s having a Tom kite.
I really hope not.
In the bath gents. Relax. Did 80k with 1k of climbing this morning frozen and wet and hungover.
There is the makings of a fine camogie team on TFK.
Could also go in the WTF is wrong with people thread.
Wtf is that?
That’s the result of the “finished mindset”
God almighty save us from that nonsense pls
They need to find the pussy wagon