SAFA Skysailor Magazine

36 SKY SAILOR June-July-August | WINTER 2026 Greetings fellow pilots. I’ll lead off this article with some statistics. Bear in mind when you look at these numbers, that reporting in AIRS is an obligation of all members. There are also more explicit obligations for instructors and safety officers to report accidents and incidents they see or know about. We encourage everyone to lodge a report for an event that occurs to them or that they witness. This enables all of us to learn from what has happened to others, hopefully so we won’t repeat the same from happening again. First let’s look back at the number of AIRS reports received over the past few years: Membership year 2018/ 2019 2019/ 2020 2020/ 2021 2021/ 2022 2022/ 2023 2023/ 2024 2024/ 2025 2025/ 2026 Total AIRS reports 131 148 181 137 110 111 103 92 Total accidents 79 78 75 77 62 61 48 52 Total incidents 51 42 74 52 47 50 54 40 Total injuries 69 62 76 62 60 50 58 44 I’ll add a comparison here. Recently, the US Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association (USHPA) hosted their annual Accident Review Committee webinar. For the past flying season (March to December 2025) they received 60 accident reports. That’s it. In the last annual report I have seen, for 2024, they had 8919 members; that’s nearly three-times the number of members we have. It’s encouraging to see that we have a comparatively healthy reporting culture. However, we know more events occur out there than are reported. When I gave a safety presentation to the committee of the North-East Victoria Hang Gliding Club (NEVHGC) last year, the assembled folk reckoned that the numbers of events I had for their sites did not reflect all the events they suspected had occurred. Going back to the USHPA numbers, the distribution of their reports was eight HG, 54 PG and two speedwing (USHPA do not represent PPG, PHG and WM as we do). The reports comprised 59 solo flights and six tandem flights; 25 flights reports had the pilot requiring medical attention and seven with minor injuries. We do not distinguish between minor or major injury, so our numbers include everything from minor abrasions to Are you prepared? by Iain Clarke – SAFA Safety Manager