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Every year, thousands of people all over the world go hang gliding.
Some people are experienced and pretty serious about the sport, and they own their own gliders and other equipment. And there are others who are just kind of curious about what it feels like to soar through the air silently, with the only sound being the wind in your face.
Chris was in that second category. He and his wife Gail live here in Florida, and they were vacationing in Switzerland recently, and they booked a hang gliding adventure. And since neither of them had ever done any hang gliding, they would each have their own pilot who would be handling the glider. So two hang gliders – Gail and her pilot in one, and Chris with his pilot in the other one.
They climb to the top of a big hill, and Christ gets his harness on just as instructed. When the wind is just right, he and his pilot go running down the hill and within seconds they are airborne and gaining altitude quickly.
Only one problem – Chris was not attached in any way to the hang glider. The pilot had somehow forgotten that critical part of the process. So Chris is literally hanging by his hands while they’re thousands of feet in the air, as the pilot tries desperately to land as quickly as he can. Makes you want to go hang gliding, right?
Chris had his GoPro camera attached to the back of the glider so you can see the whole thing as it happens, in this video:
In our conversation for the podcast, Chris told me the whole story. He’s really lucky to be alive. And he answered my big question – does he want to hang gliding again?
Episode transcript (download transcript PDF)
Every year, thousands of people all over the world go hang gliding. Some people are experienced and pretty serious about the sport, and they own their own gliders and other equipment. And there are others who are just kind of curious about what it feels like to soar through the air silently, with the only sound being the wind in your face.
Chris was in that second category. He and his wife Gail live here in Florida, and they were vacationing in Switzerland recently, and they booked a hang gliding adventure. And since neither of them had ever done any hang gliding, they would each have their own pilot who would be handling the glider. So two hang gliders – Gail and her pilot in one, and Chris with his pilot in the other one.
They climb to the top of a big hill, and Christ gets his harness on just as instructed. When the wind is just right, he and his pilot go running down the hill and within seconds they are airborne and gaining altitude quickly.
Only one problem – Chris was not attached in any way to the hang glider. The pilot had somehow forgotten that critical part of the process. So Chris is literally hanging by his hands while they’re thousands of feet in the air, as the pilot tries desperately to land as quickly as he can. Makes you want to go hang gliding, right?
And the fun thing is, the whole flight is on video. Chris had his GoPro camera attached to the back of the glider so you can see the whole thing as it happens. The video is in the show notes for this episode, at WhatWasThatLike.com/14. And a little warning, it might not be something that everyone would want to watch.
So let’s find out what that was like, from Chris –
Scott
Before this happened, did you ever have any kind of close brush with death before?
Chris
No, never. That was my first time experiencing anything as crazy as that.
Scott
And hopefully the last, right?
Chris
Yeah, yeah.
Scott
You live here in Florida, which is actually not too far from me. I’m just up in the Tampa Bay area. So, yeah, we’re not too far. But this happened in Switzerland, right?
Chris
Yes.
Scott
Okay, so you were, like, on vacation. In fact, I think this was the first day of your vacation.
Chris
Yeah, my wife and I like to travel to different places, and coming to Switzerland was on our bucket list. We usually do something that’s interesting on vacation. Normally, it would be zip lining. We’ve zip-lined in 4 or 5 different countries – it’s something that we’ve always done. We’ve been on a hot air balloon before – she got me a skydiving trip for my 40th birthday. So, we’ve gone to the air a few times. This time, she was looking into hang gliding and said, “Do you want to do that?” And I’m like, “Sounds cool!” Let’s do it!”
Scott
It sounds like you both are, kind of, adventure seekers.
Chris
Nothing crazy. Ziplining is pretty safe. Hot air balloon was awesome – I love that. Floating up effortlessly was cool. Hang gliding was just another part of something like that. So, that’s the only thing we actually set ahead of time when we went to Switzerland. The rest of the trip would just be exploring.
Scott
The common theme among all those things is heights. So obviously, neither of you has a fear of heights. I actually bungee jumped once.
Chris
I haven’t done that yet.
Scott
You gotta try that – it’s pretty cool. What I found interesting was that adrenaline doesn’t leave your body very quickly. I had a hard time sleeping then. she got to Switzerland. I assumed you had probably booked this hang gliding trip ahead of time, right? You had a reservation?
Chris
Yeah, the hang gliding reservation was the only thing we did ahead of time. My wife found and picked it out. Everything was cool on the website. The safety rating was good. Like, we always check out safety ratings and all the reviews were great. So, we looked at them.
Scott
Does the service that you use have several pilots? Or is this, like, a one-man operation? How is it set up?
Chris
There are several pilots. I think it’s just a matter of luck of who you would get that day. The owner wasn’t actually at the facility – I think he was on vacation – so, we got 2 of the other pilots and they were great. They picked us up at the hotel. They had another couple of guys that just finished up their flight and were raving about it. The guy in front of me said that this was the coolest thing he’s ever done – he’s done a lot of things. So, we’re all psyched up. Once we drop them off, we started heading to the place to go get the gliders and the other pilot.
Scott
So you and your wife were going to be hang gliding?
Chris
We both did. We had 2 pilots go up in 2 hang gliders.
Scott
Okay, all right. I didn’t realize that.
Chris
She had a beautiful flight.
Scott
Okay, do you have any idea how experienced your pilot was?
Chris
They both talked about it. There was one guy – my pilot said he was doing it for, like, 10-12 years. So, I was just going by what they say.
Scott
Well, and there’s some kind of license involved too, right?
Chris
Oh, yeah. I think somebody said, at one point, that my pilot did some time training or worked at other places in Orlando that does this.
Scott
Oh, okay. There’s a hang gliding place in Orlando?
Chris
There are several in Florida. There are no hills to jump off in Florida.
Scott
That’s what I was thinking – there are no hills.
Chris
Yeah. There are little airplanes that pull you up and then you release the cable.
Scott
Okay. So before you got on this flight, did either you or your wife have any kind of hesitation or bad feeling about this at all?
Chris
No, not really. Before we left on the trip, I thought it was odd that I started getting really sharp pains in my right hand. I don’t know if that has to do with anything. Before we left for the trip, I was talking to her and I was like, “Oh, my God, what is wrong with my hand? It’s just shooting pain all of a sudden.” It happened, like, twice and I didn’t think anything of it.
Scott
Was that the wrist you broke?
Chris
Yeah, yeah. That was kind of weird.
Scott
Foreshadowing.
Chris
Coincidence.
Scott
Okay, so you’re getting ready to go. What kind of orientation did they give you before you took off?
Chris
On the way up the hill, they were driving up, joking around, showing us videos of previous flights and other people that were doing it, and making fun of the whole thing. It was pretty cool because they were cool guys. They were laughing and joking. We went past the graveyard and he jokingly pointed out, “These are all our former clients.” So, it was a lot of fun and good humor.
Scott
I wonder if they still make those jokes.
Chris
I don’t know about that last one.
Scott
Alright. Take us through what happened that day from whatever kind of training they do through how everything played out.
Chris
We parked at a certain spot and then we still had to walk up several hundreds of feet to get to the launch zone. We were helping them carry the bags and stuff up there. Once we got up there, we split up. My wife was with one pilot and I was with the other pilot. They were setting up the wing, they had us help stick the support rods in, and they were behind us checking it all out. Then, the time came to put the safety harness on. So, he opened it up, puts it in front of me, and said ‘Okay, put your foot here’, pulled it up, then he grabbed to the top part of it, said ‘Okay, put your head and hands through here’, and he stitched it all up. Then, there’s a bar that hangs from my harness that I can put my feet on when we’re airborne and it levels me out.
Scott
So you’re in, kind of, a Superman position.
Chris
Yeah, He had to get that to just the height of my feet. So, he set everything up on my safety harness perfectly. Then, we practiced running. I had to grab a handle on his right shoulder and there was a handgrip on his left side also. So, we practiced the run probably 3 or 4 times so that we would be in sync and got things going fast enough to get off the hill. After that, we walked underneath the glider which was set up and ready to go. He was doing a little checking behind him that which– this is my first time hang gliding so I’m not sure what’s going on, what we’re doing, or anything – I didn’t do any research on it. My wife set this up. So, I assumed that everything was good and we were ready to roll. So, we walked up to the edge of the hill there and we waited for, probably, 2-3 minutes – because they had little flags on sticks – for the wind to blow up the hill. There’s a big lake in the distance and it’s a perfect launch place because as soon as you go off, it starts pulling you up. There’s such a breeze coming up. So, when the flag started going pretty good, he said, “Let’s go! 1, 2, 3, run!” Then, we ran and you’re supposed to run until your feet leave the ground. As soon as my feet left the ground, I was in a precarious situation – I didn’t know if I did something wrong. I was supposed to drop the bar that I’m supposed to stand on. I had no clue what was going on. People were asking, “How come you didn’t just jump right off?” In the video, it looks like I could but actually, I couldn’t because it was way too high. The video was deceiving in that area.
Scott
You got some altitude pretty quickly.
Chris
Oh, yeah. By the time I was trying to grab on, look up, and see what was going on, I was already over a farmhouse and gaining altitude.
Scott
Obviously, the pilot must have immediately realized something was wrong.
Chris
Oh, yeah. I was supposed to be floating above him but I was actually hanging below him.
Scott
Did he say anything to you at that point?
Chris
It was a struggle. At first, we were both trying to– I didn’t know what was going on. I was grabbing and trying to get a handhold. He looked like he was trying to figure out what just happened and I think he realized it pretty quick. So, he was trying to grab and pull me up a little bit, but he couldn’t pull my weight up, and I couldn’t pull my weight up. I think that’s what caused us to veer off to the right immediately. In the video, we veer off to the right. There were houses and some open fields next to those houses, but I don’t think he could land there because the wind was coming up the hill so hard that I don’t think we could have even landed anywhere there.
Scott
When he first realized that near the beginning of the flight, I think he tried to land pretty quickly, right?
Chris
It looked that way but I don’t think there was a spot. I’m not an expert at hang gliding by any means, but there’s the triangular brace in the middle that they hang on to, turn, and do all their maneuvers. To get the tip of the hang glider back down, they have to pull themselves in between that and move the weight distribution up front to get the glider to go back down. Well, he was stuck in the back and I was hanging on the landing gear. So, there was no way to get the tip of that glider down.
Scott
You guys were, sort of, in a permanent ‘gain altitude’ position.
Chris
Yeah, we’re just kind of plowing through the air down the hill because there was no way to angle its nose down.
Scott
What do you think your altitude was at that point?
Chris
I don’t even know. Everybody said that we gained altitude – well, we didn’t gain altitude, the hill just fell away from us. So based on the size of the little cars that look like ants below me – I don’t know – I would say 1,000 plus feet. The elevation of that hill was 4,000 feet, so I’m not exactly sure how high we were from the ground.
Scott
Far enough down that if you fell down, you’re not gonna make it. When I saw the video on YouTube– did you edit the video yourself?
Chris
Yeah.
Scott
Okay. Obviously, the little annotations and graphics that you put on it add some level of humor to it. When you look back at it, you can laugh, but you had to have been scared to death though.
Chris
I don’t know if I was scared. I just tried to stay calm the whole way down. At one point when I looked down, I envisioned myself falling – I kind of saw myself falling through the air in my mind – and that’s when I just decided to hang on as hard as I can.
Scott
And you were only hanging on with your hands, right? I mean, it’s not like you could get that bar under your arm to get better leverage or anything.
Chris
Yeah. My right hand was just searching for something to grab on to most of the time and it ended up hanging on to the fabric of his pants which wouldn’t have done anything if I lost my grip with my left hand. If I had grabbed that bar with both hands, I would have pulled myself up, and put my elbow around it or something, that would probably be a little bit easier.
Scott
I guess you’ll know that for next time.
Chris
Yeah. Next time, I would bring extra bungee cords with me so I don’t have to worry about that.
Scott
Right. Yeah. I understand that you tore a muscle in your bicep.
Chris
The biceps have two muscles – one’s a thicker muscle which is the bigger part of it and one’s a thinner one that holds on to your shoulder via tendon. That one kind of split because I was holding on for too long.
Scott
And that was on your left arm that was on the bar the whole time?
Chris
Yeah.
Scott
Okay. Can you tell exactly when that happened?
Chris
No. After I got out of the hospital, I realized that. When you work out, do a little too much, and kind of pull your muscle out a little bit, my bicep felt like that and it wasn’t going away. I think I was in the hotel room and moving something when my tricep muscle popped. Then, I was like, “There’s something wrong with my arm here.”
Scott
But that must have happened in flight?
Chris
Oh, I’m sure it did. I read a quote by someone, saying, “A normal person uses 40% of their strength.” He says that if I tore a tendon and one of my muscles, I use over 100%.
Scott
So, even after that muscle was torn, you still kept hanging on?
Chris
I had no choice.
Scott
You weren’t necessarily using that muscle so much to hang though – it was more, like, your hands – right? was that where you felt the weakness – in your hand?
Chris
I don’t know if it was a weakness. I didn’t really feel anything. Holding on was the only thing on my mind. I wasn’t, like, ‘This is hurting’ or anything. I just locked on and that’s pretty much what I did. It could have happened when my feet hit the ground and I got my grip got pulled off. I don’t know.
Scott
What’s interesting is the total time that you were hanging was, I believe, 2 minutes and 14 seconds.
Chris
Yes. Yeah.
Scott
Just hearing that number doesn’t seem like a very long time. For somebody who doesn’t know how that felt, go find a chin-up bar or something and just hang there for a couple of minutes. Especially when you’re in a situation like that where you’re thousands of feet above the ground–
Chris
I thought it took forever. Because my wife took off before I did and I landed before she did – she was up in the air for, like, 15 minutes – I thought it was, like, 5 minutes. But when I got the video back, I looked at it, I’m like, “Alright, only 2 minutes and 14 seconds.”
Scott
And when did she realize that you guys were having a problem?
Chris
She didn’t know the actual true story until we are in the ER. The pilot went with us in the ER and he sat with us the whole time. He got up to go get his car keys or go to the bathroom or something. And she’s like ‘Did you just land hard?’ because she never knew what happened. She said, “Did you land bad? Did your hand come down or something?” I’m like, “I was never attached.” And that’s when her mouth hit the floor. She’s like, “Are you kidding me?!”
Scott
Wow. Well, it’s kind of better that she didn’t know what was happening. Let’s talk about the landing. How did that happen? I mean, how far off the ground were you when you dropped?
Chris
My feet actually touched the ground. There was a GoPro that was filming it – it’s got the fisheye so it looks like we’re actually higher than we were. We were coming in, I saw the ground coming up, and I was very glad to see it because I had about another 5 seconds left in my left-hand grip. I mean, my hand was opening and I didn’t have much left in me. I looked down and pointed my toes a little bit. Because we were coming in at about 45 miles an hour, as soon as my toes hit the ground, it just kind of pulled my grip off and I just hit the ground pretty hard and did a couple of flips or rolls. I sat up and compose myself. I hit the ground – it did knock the wind out of me. I sat up and I was, like, “Wow, what just happened?” Then, I was, like, “Something’s not right.” I looked at my wrist and it was all bulged out. When I looked down, I saw that my wrist is broken.
Scott
I mean, if you fell out of a car at 45 miles an hour, it could have been a lot worse.
Chris
Yeah. Fortunately, I had a helmet on because I did hit my face and my glasses got pushed in a little bit. I got a scrape on my forehead. My left bicep was just ripped to pieces – like, I dragged it on the street after falling out of a car.
Scott
So, the pilot kind of dropped you off, then he continued and landed. How far away was he when he stopped?
Chris
I think it was about 100 feet or so. He flew over a fence post and ended up landing in a gun range. I don’t know why they have a gun range just above their landing strip, but there’s a gun range there. So, he landed in the gun range.
Scott
That could have been a whole other level of complexity to this story.
Chris
Oh, yeah. So, he got himself unbuckled pretty quick. In the portion of the video which I didn’t post, he was breathing so heavily because it took everything he had to get that thing down. So, he was just gasping for air. He unhooked himself, came up to me, and said, “Don’t get up. Just stay still.” He was expecting that I would get shocked out or something. I just said, “My wrist is broken. I don’t know how I stayed calm through the whole thing. For some reason, I said, “My wrist is broken. We need to go get this taken care of.” He was, like, “Just stay still.” And I’m like, “I’m fine. I can get up.”
Scott
Sometimes, people in shock think they’re fine.
Chris
Yeah, I kind of knew it. I just knew that my wrist was broken and that’s the only thing I felt that was off.
Scott
Just as a side note, what kind of work do you do? I mean, were you exposed to emergency situations at all?
Chris
No. Up until this week, I was a parts manager at a Porsche Volkswagen dealership.
Scott
Okay. It’s not like you’re an EMT or something that we see in emergencies.
Chris
I got 4 brothers and a sister. So I’ve seen enough of broken arms, blood, and gore.
Scott
It’s good to know how you’ll react in a situation like that, though – most people don’t know because they’ve never been exposed to that.
Chris
I think that’s the whole thing – just remaining calm and thinking things through instead of freaking out. I mean, I’ve had so many people say, “How were you not screaming your brains out and freaking out?” If I did that, I wouldn’t hold on because I use more energy doing that.
Scott
That’s right. Panic is never good. So how did you get to the hospital? Did you land near a road where an ambulance could get to you? What happened then?
Chris
The field that I landed on was, I think, pretty much a cow pasture. After that was the gun range. Then, a few more fields up is the actual landing site – the road was behind that. So, once we stood up and started walking, he said, “We need to get to the road so our van can pick you up.” So, we started getting over there. I had to climb underneath 2 electric fences with a broken wrist. He’s like, “Duck down lower.” So, we climbed through 2 electric fences, got to the road, walked down the road a little bit, then his partner with the van came pulling up and they’re like, “We’re taking you to the hospital. It’s right over here. It’s real quick. Come on, get in.” I’m like, “I’m not getting into anything until my wife sits here with me.”
Scott
And how far away was she?
Chris
She was at the regular landing site. She was waiting for me to land. She asked her pilot, she has her pilot. She’s like, “When’s my husband coming in? Which way is he coming in?” And he, kind of, saw us on the way down because she has a video of her flight and it’s beautiful. As they’re coming to land, I see him looking down to our area and he’s like, “I think he’s down already. There might have been an issue.” So, we pulled the van around to the actual hang gliding place and my wife was standing there, looking around, having a beer, and waiting for me to show up. I’m like, “Come here. We gotta go to the hospital.” That’s when we all got in and went to the emergency room. It took a while. We did some X-rays, went back, and did some more X-rays. They told us, “We need to have surgery to repair it.” So I was given the option of doing it now or when I get back home. We just got there, so we had 7-8 more days left. So, we just decided, “Let’s just do it now.” The pilot stayed with us the entire time. I mean, his flight insurance covered everything so we didn’t have to do anything there. He stayed with us until it was, like, 11 PM. I didn’t get surgery yet because Switzerland has a lot of mountains. The helicopter brought 3 other people in – while I was in there – who were in worse shape than I was. So, I got pushed back on the surgery table. I was scheduled to go in at [11:30] PM. At 11 o’clock, I told my wife, like, “You can’t do anything for me here. I mean, I’m going to be whacked out in surgery.” He was gonna drive her back to the hotel, and I said, “Just go back to the hotel, bring me some clean clothes, and come back tomorrow.” She wasn’t too happy about that but she did. I went into surgery at 11.30 PM and I didn’t get out till [3:30] AM. It was interesting – waking up out of anesthesia in a strange hospital where everybody was speaking German.
Scott
And so how long were you in the hospital?
Chris
I got out of the hospital at, like, 3 PM the next day. Our flight was before noon, so it had only been a day or so – a little over a day.
Scott
And you continued your vacation from there?
Chris
Yeah, we went sightseeing and stuff. I took it easy for a day at the hotel. We had to go get more bandages and treatments and stuff. I had a brace and a sling on. So, I had to keep taking that off every day and putting new bandages on. We didn’t get to do what we wanted to do. We wanted to go golfing and go hiking, but we didn’t get to do that. We hopped on the train, went to Lucerne, saw the Lion Monument that’s carved into the wall in Lucerne, went around, and checked out different places, restaurants, shops, and views.
Scott
Yeah, you’re already there. Why not? Do you have any idea as to why did this go wrong? Was it just simple forgetfulness? Did you talk to the pilot about it?
Chris
Well, we questioned him when we got to the hospital. My wife was questioning him a lot. After that happened, my wife and I spoke about it, and I asked her how her pilot went through the whole process. Her pilot verbally announced everything he was doing as he was doing it. My pilot– once we got the harness on, we got underneath there, I think he must have gotten distracted and just skipped a few steps because he didn’t verbalize any of that.
Scott
Right. He just had his mental checklist that he’s probably done hundreds of times. When it’s something that’s ingrained and done for so long, how can you forget such a critical step? That just seems really odd, but everyone’s a human, right?
Chris
That’s how I look at it. I mean, I’m alive to tell the story. I got 2 surgeries coming up. Still, I’m going to have to have the plates removed from my wrist next month and, then, my shoulder scoped out the month after that. So, he’s human. He did all he could in the video. You can see that he was flying with one hand holding on to my safety harness. He was trying to make a beeline landing and getting us down quickly. So it’s human here. I really can’t point fingers – I’m not that kind of person.
Scott
And throughout this flight, as scared as you were, he must have been just as terrified himself.
Chris
Oh, yeah. Like I said, when he got to the ground, he was gasping for air. I mean, it took all he had to get us down and do that.
Scott
I read that the incident is being investigated by flight authorities in Switzerland. Do you know what’s happening there?
Chris
I’ve heard that too. He actually went and reported himself. He went to these Swiss handling authorities, reported himself, and told them the whole incident. The guy was devastated. He’s never gonna forget this for the rest of his life. I mean, he felt absolutely horrible about it because he couldn’t explain what had happened. He said, “I don’t know. It’s just who human error. I don’t know what happened.” He reported himself and I don’t think there’s really an investigation. I think they might just update their safety standards a little bit. I’ve received calls from hang gliding places that want to give me a free ride now.
Scott
Free hang gliding for life!
Chris
They all talk about doing a hang check – a lot of people talk about doing a hand check. That’s when the glider is on the ground, you hook yourself in, and then you just hang from the wires holding you up. Then, you get up just to verify that you’re locked in.
Scott
When I’m watching the video, it looks like we’re watching from behind. But it looks like there’s another camera out front swinging back and forth. Is there another video facing you guys?
Chris
That was their camera. My GoPro was taped to the back tail of that thing pointing down. So, my camera was attached to the back. His camera may or may have not even been on because it was flopping back and forth. I mean, he wasn’t touching it. He was just worried about getting me down. If there was any footage on there, I’m sure it has been deleted. By the time I got my camera back, when I was in the ER, the camera footage was deleted also.
Scott
Say that again? What was deleted?
Chris
The footage of my camera was deleted.
Scott
How did you still have the video then?
Chris
A place called salvagedata.com. They undeleted the video. They dug down into all the sectors, pulled the video out, and rebuilt it. They do hard drives when hard drives crash and they retrieve information – that’s what they specialize in. So, I’ve sent that off to them and they pulled the whole video back.
Scott
That is interesting because my primary business is computer repair and I do data recovery myself. So yeah, a lot of times, people think they can just format a drive and all the stuff will be gone, but it’s not really gone, obviously. It’s amazing that they were able to get that back. What did the hang gliding place say about why that was deleted?
Chris
If it was my company, I don’t know if I would have done the same thing – just trying to do damage control – because the last thing I want to do is put someone out of business and hurt a whole community of people that do this for a living. I mean, I’ve been reached out to by hang gliding associations to know if I’d be willing to help them in their safety procedures. I was told that I brought a lot of attention to hang gliding again.
Scott
Is it good attention, though?
Chris
It brought attention to it. I think that if they do the safety checks like everybody says they should be doing, that’s the way it should be done. But it wasn’t my intention to put this video on to hurt that or to make it look bad. I pretty much have a YouTube page just to throw stupid videos in to show my family and friends. When we go on trips, I’ll add my video and share it with my family and friends. I had no idea that that video was going to do what it did.
Scott
Yeah, it’s kind of going viral a little bit. If I were in their shoes, I would be thinking, “Man, this guy’s an American. Americans sue everybody. What do we have to do to protect ourselves?”
Chris
Well, we did actually talk to a lawyer in Switzerland not really to sue the pants off of somebody, but to know what our legal rights were. Switzerland’s an entirely different country than here. It doesn’t have ambulance chasers. They put a cap on things over there. So if we did do a lawsuit or anything, we could only get back any funds that we’ve lost because this happened. So, we went and bought bandages. We took all our dirty clothes, stuck them into my wife’s suitcase, went to the post office, and mailed that back to our house so that we didn’t have to carry 2 big suitcases. I had a 70-pound camera backpack that I wasn’t going to be able to handle – my wife probably wasn’t either – so we bought another case for that. My watch got ripped off my arm – I don’t know where that is. So, it’s whatever you’ve lost.
Scott
So, just reimbursing what you expect your expenses were?
Chris
Yeah, yeah.
Scott
Here’s the big question – would you try it again?
Chris
Definitely. My wife wants to do it again. She had a fabulous trip. I mean, she’s apprehensive to share her video or any of her pictures because of what happened to me, but I saw the pictures and I saw her video and it was absolutely beautiful. I mean, you can see the background when I took off. She was even higher. She said, “I was, like, flying effortlessly, just soaring through the sky.” So, I do want to try it again. I think it’s something I should do to get over this.
Scott
Well, yeah. And thinking from a statistical standpoint, hang gliding is like skydiving. From the numbers, it’s a very safe sport and what happened to you is just such a small chance. I mean, if you go again, the chances of it happening a second time got to be astronomical.
Chris
That’s just me – it’s my bad luck. It’s like a one in a million kind of thing. I mean, you don’t hear of this happening much at all. I did a little research on Google to see if there was anybody else that had the same thing happen. I didn’t find many that live to tell the story – one that came up was a girl in Canada. She was unhooked and the pilot had her wrapped in her legs underneath her and she fell to her death. I think, at that instance, the pilot actually took the SD card out of the camera and swallowed it.
Scott
Yeah. You know what, though? Even that doesn’t destroy it.
Chris
No, no. They got it back and he was charged with criminal neglect or something like that. So, I’m not looking to put anybody in a bad spot. I think the guy feels horrible about the whole situation and he probably will for the rest of his life.
Scott
Yep. He’ll never forget it and you’ll never forget it. Well, Chris, that’s a wild story. Is there anything – any aspect of it – that we didn’t talk about that you want to talk about?
Chris
When people asked me if I’d do it again, I’d say “Yeah”, and they’re like, “You’re crazy!” We go on trips – every third year or something like that – to different countries. We try something different. I’m 54 years old now. I’m still young enough to get around and go do this stuff. I’m gonna live my life. I’m not going to be scared to go somewhere or do something that might look scary because I can die driving to work in my car. So, I’d rather do that while I’m doing something fun.
Scott
I agree. That’s the way to look at it. Well, I appreciate you coming on here. I love this story. And good luck on your next hang gliding trip!
Chris
Thank you.
Scott
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