In the 1970’s, 7 people from my gliding club went on a parachute course for a weekend, which culminated in one real jump each (I believe with static lines to ensure that they did not forget to pull the D-ring).
One was injured (ankles, came back on crutches), one had a bad exit and started falling on his back so the ‘chute deployed under his armpit until he found out how to roll over, one went through a barn roof (I was told – but only bruising resulted), and two others had non-standard events, so only 2 out of 7 had normal uneventful jumps, IIRC.
I expect that is an atypically high rate of untoward incidents in jump training, but many of us then decided that we would take the remote chance of having to use a parachute in anger with only our normal oral briefing – which happily has worked for almost all the small number of real emergency glider pilot bale-outs. No one from my club has ever had to jump from a glider for real. I don’t have accurate numbers for total UK gliding, but it is less than one a year on average, in over 200,000 flights p.a..
I would like to thank Guppy for the very informative postings.
Chris N.