Tourist’s Hang Glider Flight Just Misses Disaster [VIDEO]
A Florida man who thought a hang glider ride down a Swiss mountain would be the highlight of his European vacation certainly got a flight he'll never forget after the pilot neglected to strap Chris Gursky to the winged craft, making for two-plus minutes of sheer terror.
A little more info from washingtonpost.com:
The pilot asked Gursky whether he was ready and then gave the command.
“Three, two, one, go!” the pilot shouted, “Run, run, run, run, run, run!”
The video shows the two men then soar into the air. But it was at that instant that Gursky realized something was wrong — his harness had not been attached to the aircraft. Soon, they were about 4,000 feet in the air and Gursky was hanging free, he later said.
“At one point I looked down and I saw the scenery down
there, it was all the treetops changing colors and the little farm houses and I actually thought to myself, ‘That is beautiful. I am going to fall to my death there,’” Gursky, of North Port, Fla., told the station. “I probably had five seconds left in me because my hand was starting to slip off that bar."
But, Gursky also said he tried not to dwell on the grim situation. “I just thought, ‘I’m just going to hang on as hard as I can for as long as I can."