Image via The Local.
Last week a German paraglider crashed into the cables of a Bavarian gondola. The incident trapped 20 people in the gondola for 17 hours overnight.
There were no injuries or fatalities and all parties were rescued via helicopter.
Does this mean gondolas are unsafe? No. It means accidents happen. For example:
- During the Christmas season of 2010 400 New Yorkers were stranded overnight in a subway for 11 hours.
- Last month 1 person was killed and 28 were injured due to a “subway escalator accident” in Beijing, China.
- In December 2010 a Toronto streetcar collided with a Greyhound bus sending 17 people including 4 children to hospital.
Take 5 minutes to google various combinations of words like; metro, accident, stranded, subway, etc. and you’ll see that accidents with various public transportation technologies aren’t anything special – indeed, they’re common.
Much more common, in fact, than accidents involving cable cars and gondolas.