Amazing recovery. This guy gets all the way over on the bar and manhandles the glider into flying straight. No panic, just flying the glider. Simply awesome.
My favorite hang-gliding video! starting at this wind and altitude is brave already. But the save is great! (well yes, poor communication with the helpers. quite sure he will do different next time). Would have loved to fly that day.
In strong conditions like this it's absolutely imperative that at the point of launch ALL wire assistants have ZERO pressure on the flying wires! It's up to the pilot in command to ensure that all assistants understand this. In this case I put the blame squarely on the pilot. This is a cluster f*** of mistakes. Had the pilot gone in (crashed) there are spectators that could have been injured. Since there is no audio who knows what, if any, communication was going on between the pilot and ALL three wire assistants. I don't see the pilot looking left or right to see what his wire people were doing.- only looking forward...
You're probably right. I was wing man once, loudly saying, "I've got a lot of pressure on the left" several times. The pilot yelled "CLEAR", which I did. He swooped around into a tree.
