Originally Posted by Bruce Hoult

On Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at 12:57:58 PM UTC+13, Martin Gregorie wrote:
By the time I joined a gliding club and started learning to fly in 2000,
almost exactly a year after that lightning strike, nobody flew or was
flown at my club without a parachute, a discipline that we still follow.
I've always heard that is a direct result of the accident.

If you assume it takes 2 minutes to put on and take off parachutes, and that each of the pilots gained 50 years of life as a result, then parachutes are worth it if needed once in every 26 million flights.

How many glider flights are there in the world in a year? I'd wild-ass-guess 15000 in NZ with about 1000 pilots. Is it 80k pilots in Europe and maybe 10k in USA? Let's say 100k world-wide. So maybe 1.5 million glider flights a year world wide.

Is there such a lightning strike every 16 years? No. It's the only one ever.

Of course that's not the only risk parachutes protect against. The main other one is mid-air collision. How often do those happen with students/rides?

The only mid-airs I've heard of either involved cross country and contest pilots, or were at low level in the airfield vicinity where a chute is not going to help.