Hang Glider Holds on for Dear Life After Major Harness Slip-Up

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D-Garck

We're always promising ourselves we'll take steps to be healthier. We'll finally bring our perforated garbage bags of clothing to Goodwill, and join local adult clubs filled with the city's friendliest socialites, and use the Bikram yoga coupon currently serving as a bookmark for a novel we aren't reading... But most of us just end up metaphorically clinging to life's hang-glider after our ambition harness detaches mid-flight.

Just kidding haha, I'm fine. But let's take a moment to appreciate this terrifying -- but legitimizing -- video of a man who was forced to use his upper body strength to survive, when his harness becomes separated from his hang-glider mid-flight.

"The flight that almost killed me," user D-Garck titled his YouTube video (shown above), which depicted a free flight of approximately five minutes. Everything in the video seems to be going according to plan until minute 2:30, when after a strong gust of wind, the harness spontaneously detaches and the pilot is forced to grab the bar and hold on for his dear life. 

"A cautionary tale for all my fellow free flight pilots out there..." the user wrote in the video's description. "Diligently pre-flighting is critical! I was very lucky to come out of this incident alive." 

In the video, the man quickly tries to haul himself up to get a better grip on the bar. He mentions that, during this time, he couldn't really see where he was headed. 

"When my head dropped below the base tube, the chin guard on my helmet was pushed up to the base tube into my vision," he writes as a caption on the video.

View obstruction aside, he was lucky that conditions allowed for a soft landing.

"It's very fortunate that the hang loop let loose while I was facing into the wind," he said. "The wind this day was consistent at about 20mph. The fact that my crash landing was going into the wind meant that my ground speed was significantly slowed." 

You see him land, and then the video cuts to photos and descriptions of the hang-glider's harness and hang loop mistake, which is tough to focus on considering how epic and terrifying the rest of the video is. I can't say that spiraling after drinking too much wine during your "me time" cooking night is as awful as holding onto a hang-glider for dear life, but it still hits. 

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Ruby Anderson is a News Writer for Thrillist.