SAFA Skysailor Magazine

36 SKY SAILOR December-January-February | SUMMER 2025 AIRS Safety wrap-up – December 2024 by Iain Clarke – SAFA Safety Management Officer Greetings fellow pilots. Good news first. I’ve had my first flights since my accident last year in Spain. All feels good. Next, we have had a pretty serious Safety Note appear in Cross Country magazine web site, regarding Finsterwalder & Charly Paralock 3 carabiners. There have been some cases where these have opened in-flight, in one case a fatality resulted. I would ask all of you that fly with these carabiners to please read the safety note. The post from Cross Country magazine can be found here . That post points to a news item on the F&C website, which you can find here . On that page you will also find another news item pointing to a Safety Note. Just a few words on defect reports. When we become aware of defect reports, safety notices and similar information, we publish these within the document repository in the Member’s Area of the SAFA website, and we make these publicly available on the public-facing side of the website. You can view them here ; scroll down to Defect Reports . Usually, we hear about these second-hand as the manufacturers do not write to us explicitly to advise us as they issue. If you do spot something, please send me an email to let me know. We’re going to finish up the year looking at AIRS reports going back into the past, and then jumping forward to more recent events. #1606 – HG Water landing at Lorne, Vic PIC was flying their hang glider at Lorne (Vic). They were over the hospital when they decided to land, and turned back with ‘S’ turns toward the East to line up with the beach adjacent to the hospital. At this point they were looking okay for about a 30º crosswind landing on the beach/rocks with about 1/4 VG still on. As the pilot passed an outcrop of trees on their right, they were turned straight into the wind and the surf. They flared immediately and hit the water about 5m from shore. The glider rotated down, and the flight finished with the pilot laid on top of an inverted glider in about 1-2m of surf. Each wave that washed over the glider was pushing it back towards the beach. They were able to unscrew the carabiner and stand up, grab the glider nose wires and beach the glider. By this time Lorne surf rescue had arrived and helped pick