“I ended up holding on to the bar with the left hand and the lower part of his leg with the right when we were nearing the ground.” “The pilot grabbed my hand, but like in the movies it was a slow-motion slipping of the grip until my right hand slipped off and I grabbed another strap on his left side for a bit, but this slipped off also.
As we were going down for a hot landing I was slowly losing my grip with my right hand as I was swinging in the wind with the glider. “I was losing grip with my right hand that was holding onto a strap on the pilot’s right shoulder … my left hand was on the crossbar. “I remember looking down and thinking, ‘this is it’,” Gursky wrote in a Facebook post, since deleted, in which he described his 2min 14sec ordeal from a mountaintop in Interlaken. The Go-Pro footage shows the pilot’s frantic efforts to keep a grip on his passenger with one hand, once he realises he is unattached, while trying to control the glider with the other and frantically looking for somewhere to land as quickly as possible.Gursky, 53, dangles beside and below him and reaches out with his own right arm for anything to grab on to. It then turned into Gursky’s miracle flight, which ended with a 45mph “hot landing” that shattered the photographer’s wrist, has been viewed 1.5 million times in a video that has gone viral on YouTube. Gursky’s grand adventure quickly turned into a terrifying fight for survival, with him grasping desperately at the instructor’s leg, shoulder and a crossbar to avoid plunging to his death. “I was expecting to level out above the pilot as we went, but quickly discovered that my harness was not attached to the hang glider or anything else.” We waited a bit for the updraft to pick up and then we ran till we left the side of the 4,000ft mountain edge. Then my pilot and I lined up for take-off. “Gail and her pilot took off first … looked cool as hell.
Gursky, a Florida-based vehicle parts manager and photographer, told his story on Facebook soon after the incident. On Monday Gursky posted the footage to YouTube under the title “Swiss Mishap”, including the warning: “Content may be disturbing to some. The incident happened in October while Gursky and his wife Gail were on holiday in Interlaken in Switzerland, from their home in Florida, according to Cross Country Magazine.
0 kommentar(er)
