According to psychologists, people who experience loss pass through a grief process that has several stages:

Denial
Anger
Depression
Acceptance

Recently, many of us experienced the loss of a good friend through paragliding. It is not my intention to discuss that loss here. We each have to deal with it in our own way. Instead I would like to discuss a different kind of loss--the loss of our flying innocence. Though we may not realize it, this loss requires us to go through stages much like the classic grief process. Perhaps you will recognize yourself or your friends in this description.

Denial

This is the most common stage. Many pilots never get beyond denial. We know conceptually that flying is dangerous but we convince ourselves that the pilots who have been hurt or killed made mistakes that we would never make. We convince ourselves that we are better flyers or that our gliders are more docile and safe.

Often it takes a bad scare or an accident to shake a pilot out of denial. The lucky ones learn from the mishaps of others. Eventually, we realize that we're not as good a flyer as we think we are. No matter how many advanced flying clinics we complete, we discover that we're really not in control up there, the air is. We are no more immune from mistakes than the pilots we read about in the accident reports.

Anger

For some pilots, the loss of flying innocence leads to anger. When we first learn to fly, it all seems idyllic--the gentle slopes, the protective care of our instructor. Paragliding is so easy to learn and so forgiving. After all, you've already got a parachute over your head--what could go wrong? The sky literally seems to be the limit.

But then someone we know crashes, and it shatters illusions as well as bones. We become angry--angry at the instructor who never quite told us how dangerous the sport could be, angry at the magazines and manufacturers who claim that anyone can learn to fly while glossing over the dark side, angry at the pilot culture that continues to reward risk taking and bravado, angry at fellow pilots who still are in denial.

Depression

It is natural after a fall from innocence that some pilots should drop out of the sport. It may not seem worth it anymore. We may find that other things can be just as rewarding as flying with far less danger. We may take a hiatus for a few months, to reconsider how and whether flying fits into our lives.

Acceptance

Those who work through the process and keep flying are not the same pilots they were before. Most of us accept that reining in our ambitions is the only way to maintain a reasonable safety margin. The few who still aim for the clouds realize that high achievement demands a high price. It takes a big commitment to gain the skills and knowledge needed for safe cross country flying. You can't be an off-the-couch flyer and push the envelope for very long. It also takes humility, as even the top pilots have a clear sense of their limitations.

Most of us come to realize that the reason paragliding captivated us in the first place was not big air or big thrills, but simple pleasures--a sunny day, a green hillside, the breeze in your face, the laughter of friends. We still experience these things even when we decide not to launch. And when we do fly, we do so with the knowledge that, like life itself, flying is a rare gift that should never be taken for granted.