A few years ago, I sat next to Judge McWhorter during the SSA convention safety presentation, at which gliding fatalities were related to hours of exposure to risk (in flight).
Judge's career has been in coal-mining safety. Listening to the numbers, he said, "Soaring is more dangerous than coal mining."

As somebody in the mining industry in South Africa (which has worse mining safety figures than the U.S.) - I can vouch for the fact that coal mining is pretty safe when considering the statistics.

Clinton Birch