This is why check lists are important.

[kerry]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/first-time-hang-glider-hangs-130518623.html

[1964-M20E]

WOW!!!

glad he made it relatively unharmed even though a broken wrist is not good.

[steingar]

Dickshit pilot should have done his preflight a whole lot more better.  That could have ended very  very badly for both of them.

[gsxrpilot]

I'm a licensed and Hang 3 rated hang glider pilot myself. But I learned to fly in Australia where this (surprisingly common) problem has been solved. This is two instances I know of in the last five or six years where a tandem passenger has been left unclipped. The other occasion killed the passenger. But this happens every couple of years by pilots who forget to clip themselves in to their glider before launching.

Nothing against checklists and the need to follow them... but the Australian's have solved this problem with a very simple change of procedure. 

The typical situation is to first set up the glider and pre-flight it. Second, put on your harness and then do a final preflight of the glider. Then clip the harness  into the glider and do a hang check (while still on the ground, lay out prone to verify that you are indeed suspended from the glider and at the appropriate height). For pilots who fly regularly always with the same harness and same wing, the hang distance never changes and so they sometimes skip the hang check. And if they were distracted during the pre-flight process in some way, they might go off unhooked.

The Aussie method is to clip the harness into the glider as part of the glider setup procedure. So as you walk around and preflight the glider, part of that is checking that the harness is securely attached. The last step is to climb into the harness and launch. No one ever forgets to climb in the harness. And you never forget to clip in as the harness is clipped in before you put it on.

I know nobody cares about the checklist procedure for hang gliding... but the point of the story is that instead of blindly following a published check-list, there might be things that can be either reordered, or changed, or even eliminated, that will ensure the important items don't get missed.

There was recently a checklist posted on the Mooney Pilots FB page. It was a great check list but over the course of a few days, countless folks pointed out many items that should be ADDED to it. In my opinion the most effective checklists are shorter, not longer. 

In the hang gliding example, the Aussies have taken the harness clip-in OFF the check list by making it impossible to skip or miss resulting in the video above.

 

[ilovecornfields]

“I will go hand gliding again as I did not get to enjoy my first flight.” Really?!