A few years back, first solo hang-gliding flight on a Skyhook Gypsy, I had done a few beats of the hill when the connector on my earpiece broke and I suddenly found myself in blissful silence. I was just beginning to enjoy myself when for no reason I could discern the glider turned 90 degrees directly towards the steep slope. I did full weight shift to the right, but nothing happened. I waited, but still nothing happened. I was flying at about 25mph with about a 20mph tailwind.
I could think of two things to do - either to turn to the left on the grounds that the glider obviously preferred this direction (but for which I knew I would be soundly berated) or to pull on more speed in the hope that the glider would become more responsive. I did the wrong thing and pulled on speed. All of a sudden the glider unstuck and I turned right, scraping the hillside.
Feeling very much alive and rather pleased with myself, I did another beat of the hill, then the wind dropped and it was time to land. As I got lower, my radio crackled back into life. My instructor, wrongly thinking I was high, told me to do some S-turns. As I was just a few metres above the ground, the wind suddenly stopped, my left wing stalled and hit the ground and a fraction of a second later I'd written off just about every piece of aluminium in the glider, bending the base bar across my chest. I think I was saved by a hefty parachute chest-mounted parachute, and cowpats.
My poor instructor paid for his shoddy soldering in that my radio had stopped working again, but I was so entangled in the wreckage that I couldn't get out. It took him about 5 minutes to get to the bottom of the hill and find out that I was essentially unhurt.
Aside from learning about wind-gradient, the most interesting thing about the episode was that my flying buddies had decided unanimously that I had become confused and turned left deliberately - one of the cardinal rules of slope-soaring is to turn away from the hill. Had I killed myself this is undoubtedly what my accident report would have said. In the end, we decided it was a thermal coming through under my right wing. And next time I'll try pulling speed and turning to the left.
A year or two later I landed on an unknown beach, or rather about 5-10 feet above one (in a good hang-gliding landing you aim to flare to a standstill like a bird landing on a twig). My stream of consciousness went something like
"Yes! Perfect landing!"
"Hmm... I was expecting to be standing on solid ground by now"
"Um, still falling"
"Falling faster"
"I thought that was a gravel beach. Maybe it's a pebble beach?"
"Or could it be boulders? What's all that about scale invariance and fractal landscapes?"
"Maybe I should pull the nose down and try flying again?"
"Ooph! Phew!"
Perhaps this shouldn't count as it was a heavy landing with no damage done. I have good eyesight, but my eyes were watery from the wind.