I am not a glider pilot but I have flown passenger jets into many airports across Europe and, in particular, into Germany, including Frankfurt-Hahn, Memmingen and many others.
There is no doubt that, but for the size of the 737 and its use of bright landing lights which made it visible to the glider pilot, this incident was a hair's breadth from becoming a disaster similar on the scale of the Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Flight 182 crash in 1978.
Reading through the opinions of glider pilots who are understandably keen to maintain their freedom of the skies and considering the corresponding lack of political will to effect a change in airspace legislation, I regret that it is inevitable that lives will be lost.
RAT5 is absolutely spot on in his/her analysis of the root of the problem - being the huge growth of commercial jet transport into airspace and airports which used to be the preserve of General Aviation.
It's no good people harping on about historic rights and freedoms or telling busy jet pilots to rely solely on their eyeballs to spot a hard-to-see light aircraft while on the final phase of a commercial flight, when lives are quite clearly at risk.
