Impressive Safety Record at Sylmar Marred by Death Plunge

The safety record the Sylmar Hang Gliding Assn. worked to establish as part of its public relations campaign was marred earlier this month by the death of a Redondo Beach man, which club members said was caused by the victim’s breaking their rules.

John Preston, 26, fell from his glider Jan. 3 as it sailed about 200 feet over May Canyon.

He was the first hang-glider fatality in the Sylmar area since 1979, said Joe Greblo, a hang-gliding instructor and a founder of the Sylmar Hang Gliding Assn.

“He said he had experience that he didn’t really have” to persuade a club member to give him a ride to the Kagel Mountain launch site, Greblo said.

“That site is rated for intermediate pilots only, which he said he was, when actually he had 100 flights and only a novice rating.

“If he had followed the rules, he would have gone to another launch site, where the experienced people look after the youngsters. At a more advanced site, it was presumed that he knew what he was doing. Once he was up there, he apparently grew nervous because he realized he didn’t belong there, and he forgot to hook up” the safety line that attaches the hang glider to the harness that holds the pilot, Greblo said.

At a less advanced site, someone would have checked the attachment, he said.

When Preston pushed off from the cliff, instead of lying safely cradled in the harness, he was left dangling by his hands from the control bar until his strength gave out. In that position, he could not control the glider.

Also, Greblo said, the Kagel Mountain launch site is at the lip of a steep cliff, unlike the novice pilots’ site, where the land slopes away gradually enough that Preston might have survived a short fall if he released the glider as soon as he realized that his line was unconnected.

“He used poor judgment, and he paid a costly price for it,” he said.

The accident concerns hang gliders partly because they fear it will become part of a complicated bureaucratic dispute over hang gliding on Dockweiler State Beach near Venice, where modern hang gliding was born in the late 1960s.

Since then, beginners have trained on the sloping bluffs, dropping a short distance to a soft landing on the sandy beach.

However, the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors in October notified hang-glider clubs and schools that hang gliding would no longer be permitted at Dockweiler.

“Although Dockweiler is a state beach, the authority to maintain it was given to the City of Los Angeles,” explained William Gomberg, an aide to City Councilman Ernani Bernardi. “The city in turn has a joint-powers agreement with the county to operate the beach, which requires the county to enforce any city laws.”

A series of news stories about hang gliding at Dockweiler “alerted county officials that they were not obeying the law because the beach wasn’t an officially designated hang-gliding location. It was just a de facto practice that had been going on for 20 years,” Gomberg said.

Under a regulation of the city Recreation and Parks Department, hang gliding is allowed in city parks or on other city-owned land only at designated locations. No designated locations exist.

Hang-gliding clubs and schools are attempting to round up enough City Council support to return to the beach, which is “the safest possible place around here for beginners to learn,” Greblo said.

However, he said, parks department officials “have all these memories of the bad old days” in the 1970s, when hang gliding was riskier and not as well organized, and point to hang-glider fatalities as justification for keeping the sport off city land.

City and county parks officials were not available for comment.