Robert Ehrlich wrote:
Mark James Boyd wrote:
...
I think REQUIRING parachutes for ALL glider operations is absurd.
...

This is what the french regulations requires. Although I can admit that
our regulations have many absurd points, I would not count this one among
them. It is the same thing for seat belts in cars: if the regulation don't
make installing and using them mandatory, the statistics prove that cases
where they should be used and are not are way over the cases where they are
used and this causes some inconvenience.

Show me a single-seat car which has a miniscule chance of
injuring another person. Show me the safety statistics for
this...and perhaps you have a parallel to certain glider operations.

I liked Rod Machado's quote from Feb 2004 AOPA pilot:

"So the next time you hear the word always, only or never
used in an aviation sentence, think about asking the
question: So what?"

"Sorry, but no cigar today."