https://chessintheair.com/does-soaring-have-to-be-so-dangerous/

My last post titled “The
Risk of Dying Doing What We Love” presented the results of a statistical
analysis where I compared the risk of flying sailplanes to other things we love
to do such as cycling, horse back riding, paragliding, etc.

I showed that the risk of dying in a soaring accident is approx. 1 per 50,000
flight hours, which makes soaring per activity hour about 2x as dangerous as
riding a motorcycle, 25x as dangerous as cycling, 40x as dangerous as driving a
car, and almost 200x as dangerous as traveling on a commercial airline flight.

Does soaring have to be so dangerous?

To answer these question I read, interpreted, and analyzed about 250 glider
accident reports.  My main sources were Germany’s
Bundesstelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung (154 reports since 1998) and the
United States’
National Transportation and Safety Board (93 reports for the past five
years).  I chose the US because that’s where I do most of my soaring and also
because it’s a very large country with varied soaring conditions including
flatland, ridge, mountain, desert, and wave soaring. Germany was a logical
choice because it accounts for about one third of all soaring activities
worldwide, and also because the quality of its accident reports is particularly
high. In addition, I also reviewed the equally detailed
soaring accident reports for Austria since 2010 (25 reports) and read the
2019 EASA Safety Report.