My first accident was on the south east face of Horcum, I was turning after my first beat along the ridge and I stalled the glider. It dived into the heather, the nose digging in about eight inches. I had a broken left wrist and a sprained right ankle. I blamed the ankle injury on my not having the correct footwear. I had left my boots at home so I bought some trainers from a shop in Pickering. I now never fly in trainers only boots.

In the early days I was still not running fast enough when taking off and this caused me problems one day at Horcum. There was more wind than I had flown in before, about 16 miles per hour but plenty of people were taking off from the south face. I got to the edge with my glider and realised it was blowing more than I was used to but still tried to take off. I did a walk to the edge and lifted the nose of the glider into the air, I went up but not forward. I pulled the bar to my waist to increase my forward speed but just drifted to the right and backwards. Behind me other gliders were rigged ready to fly and I was heading straight towards them. All I could do was to drift to the right and further back where I caught my right wing tip in the heather and turned upside down. In hang-gliding terms, a ground loop. I was now hanging over the frame of the glider four feet off the ground, not able to do anything. Jude had to stand on some ones back to unclip me. Luckily I was not hurt just shaken up. This put me back in my flying as I wouldn’t take off in any wind that was stronger than twelve miles an hour for quite a while after that.

The next one was at Filey on my Skyhook Sunspot. The wind had dropped down in strength but people who had taken of earlier were staying above the top. I took off and flew over the gully towards the cobble landing, loosing height as I crossed the gully. Realising that I was getting lower I slowed the glider down so that, I thought, the glider would go up but, when I turned before the cobble landing it stalled and dived into a wooden chalet. I hit the corner of the roof of the chalet with my right knee then dropped to the floor between the chalet and the cliff.  None of the hang-glider pilots had seen me crash so I was stuck there until a women, who’d seen me crash told them. I was driven to the hospital by Tony Waites where, eventually, it was decided that I’d broken my knee cap.( Patella)

I spend the next two weeks in Scarborough Hospital having had my knee cap removed. The first week in hospital my intention was to give up flying but then in the second week I decided that if I was my knee recovered sufficiently I’d have another go. The glider had a broken keel and leading edge. This was in February 1979 the 17th and I remember that there was snow on the ground.

Another time I was flying at Cayton Bay, on the lower cliffs, and I got too close to the cliff side and caught a wing tip on the cliff. I had a bruised back from this mishap.

The most annoying accident I have had was not from flying but on route to Sutton Bank. I had driven to another pilot’s house at West Ayton and I was fastening my glider onto his car, the plan was to car share to Sutton bank. I was using elastic straps with hooks on the end to hold the glider onto the roof rack when my fingers slipped of the strap and it shot back and hit me under my left eye. The eye quickly filled up with blood from the impact. Brian who was the pilot that I was going to go to Sutton Bank with thought that my girlfriend ,who I’d arrived with but couldn’t drive should take me to the hospital and he could carry on to Sutton to fly. His wife who was a nurse thought different and he had, reluctantly to drive me to the hospital where I had to stay in for a week for it to heal and observation. The eye muscles had been damaged and even now the eye does not dilate properly in bright light.

I was supposed to be on holiday the week that I was in hospital but pay clerk at the company I worked for wouldn’t allow me to cancel the holiday so the next week I signed on as sick and went hang-gliding.

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