Chris Gursky filmed dangling from glider for more than two minutes before it could land

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A first-time hang glider has spoken of how he was left holding on for his life after his pilot failed to fasten him to the glider.

Chris Gursky was forced to cling to the glider with one hand and his pilot with the other for more than two minutes or face a probably fatal fall to earth.

The incident happened in October while Gursky and his wife Gail were on holiday in Interlaken in Switzerland, from their home in Florida, according to Cross Country Magazine.

On Monday Gursky posted the footage to YouTube under the title “Swiss Mishap”, including the warning: “Content may be disturbing to some. Including my wife!”

Gursky, a Florida-based vehicle parts manager and photographer, told his story on Facebook soon after the incident.

“Gail and her pilot took off first … looked cool as hell. Then my pilot and I lined up for take-off. We waited a bit for the updraft to pick up and then we ran till we left the side of the 4,000ft mountain edge.

“I was expecting to level out above the pilot as we went, but quickly discovered that my harness was not attached to the hang glider or anything else.”

Gursky’s grand adventure quickly turned into a terrifying fight for survival, with him grasping desperately at the instructor’s leg, shoulder and a crossbar to avoid plunging to his death.

It then turned into Gursky’s miracle flight, which ended with a 45mph “hot landing” that shattered the photographer’s wrist, has been viewed 1.5 million times in a video that has gone viral on YouTube.

The Go-Pro footage shows the pilot’s frantic efforts to keep a grip on his passenger with one hand, once he realises he is unattached, while trying to control the glider with the other and frantically looking for somewhere to land as quickly as possible.Gursky, 53, dangles beside and below him and reaches out with his own right arm for anything to grab on to.

“I remember looking down and thinking, ‘this is it’,” Gursky wrote in a Facebook post, since deleted, in which he described his 2min 14sec ordeal from a mountaintop in Interlaken.

“I was losing grip with my right hand that was holding onto a strap on the pilot’s right shoulder … my left hand was on the crossbar. As we were going down for a hot landing I was slowly losing my grip with my right hand as I was swinging in the wind with the glider.

“The pilot grabbed my hand, but like in the movies it was a slow-motion slipping of the grip until my right hand slipped off and I grabbed another strap on his left side for a bit, but this slipped off also.

“I ended up holding on to the bar with the left hand and the lower part of his leg with the right when we were nearing the ground.”

In the video, the pilot appears to have trouble bringing the glider in for a quick landing at this point, and the two end up flying over a steep wooded hillside.

“I looked down to see my feet hit first, which ripped me off at about 45 mph as it was a hot landing and I was under the landing gear.”

He said that he fractured his wrist in the incident and tore his left biceps tendon. But he told Cross Country Magazine he bore the pilot no ill will. “I am past that phase. He did all he could and more. He is a good guy.”

Gursky did not respond to requests from the Guardian for comment.

But on social media, he concluded: “Still can’t cross hang gliding off the bucket list till I finish a successful flight!” he told his Facebook followers. “Maybe Norway?”

Switzerland’s civil aviation authority said on Tuesday it will question the hang-glider pilot. Spokesman Antonello Laveglia of the Federal Office of Civil Aviation said it planned to “reconstruct the events” of the flight and would hear the pilot’s account.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.