INTERLAKEN, Switzerland — It was supposed to be the first thrill of a Swiss vacation. Instead, Florida tourist Chris Gursky spent more than two minutes dangling thousands of feet above the Alps with nothing but his grip standing between him and a fatal fall.
In October 2018, Gursky and his wife Gail were on their first day in Interlaken when they booked tandem hang-gliding flights. Gail’s launch went off without a hitch. Gursky’s did not.
The pilot ran them off a roughly 4,000-foot mountain ledge. Seconds later, Gursky realized the unthinkable: his harness had never been attached to the glider.“I just glanced down and said this is it: I am going to fall to my death,” Gursky later told Fox News. “It wasn’t my time. I was going to hold on as long as I possibly could.”
What followed was captured on GoPro and later posted by Gursky himself under the title “Swiss Mishap.” The footage shows the Florida man clutching the control bar with one hand and the pilot’s body with the other as the glider climbs on an updraft, soaring over trees, fields, and a shimmering valley far below.
For 2 minutes and 14 seconds, he hung on. The pilot, flying with one hand while trying to keep hold of his passenger with the other, hunted for the nearest emergency landing.
The arrival was brutal. Gursky’s feet hit first at about 45 mph. He was ripped away from the landing gear. The result: a shattered right wrist that required four hours of surgery, a titanium plate and seven screws, plus a torn left bicep tendon from the strain of hanging on.
“The landing was a rough one, but I lived to tell the story,” Gursky wrote.
A qualified hang-gliding pilot later told Swiss media that this kind of mistake is normally fatal. Gursky credited grit and luck. He also declined to savage the instructor, saying the man did everything he could once the error was obvious and even stayed with him at the hospital.
The video exploded online, drawing millions of views and coverage from Fox News, CNN, and outlets around the world. Some viewers years later still insist the clip looks too wild to be real. It isn’t. It’s the original 2018 recording.
Gursky, then in his mid-50s and working in the auto industry in North Port, Florida, was not finished with the sport. Less than a year later, he returned to Switzerland and completed a proper tandem flight, this time clipped in.
The footage has circulated again this week, reminding a new audience just how thin the margin can be when a pre-flight check is skipped.
Gursky’s verdict at the time was characteristically straightforward: he would go hang gliding again. He just wanted to enjoy the first flight he never actually got.
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