No engine? Sounds dangerous.
Most glider accidents have nothing to do with the lack of thrust, just as powered aircraft often crash despite having a working engine (and often crash because of some problem with the engine at an unlucky moment). Gliders fly quite well without thrust- even your typical old-school trainer boasts a glide ratio of better than 20: 1. Even the faster ones can be flown pretty slowly (the fastest ones use water ballast to glide faster, and can dump it all before landing), which accounts for the much better stats for survivable off-airport landing accidents compared to powered aircraft.
Other than slightly higher frequency of midairs between gliders (thermals can get crowded sometimes), glider accident causes match up pretty evenly with powered aircraft, percentage-wise. Glider pilots fall victim to the same preventable stuff: bad weather, takeoff and landing,etc. But glider pilots don't worry too much about exhaust leaks, runway props or unbalanced camshafts, CO poisoning,or post-crash fire. :wink2:
Technically, if there's electrics on board, a glider could have smoke or fire in flight or after a crash, but I've never heard of such a thing.
Any launching method that relies on a powerplant of some kind adds a little more risk to soaring, but it's because of the engine involved, not the fact that gliders don't have engines.
If I'm not mistaken, aerotow, despite the obvious potential hazard of the tow plane losing power, is the safest method of launching a glider (statistically). If our club's towplane's fan did stop turning right after takeoff, with a glider in tow, I'd much rather be sitting in the glider than the towplane, even if release occurred immediately and the towplane had a good chance of making it into the few open areas that surround the airport. Our gliders can make a buttonhook turn at 200 AGL and safely return to the runway. Since they fly slowly, landing downwind is not a big deal (we don't fly if it's very windy anyway). If the abort occurred with some runway remaining but not quite enough to stop normally, the tow pilot would possibly have to ground-loop the tow plane, put it on its nose, or roll into the trees... the glider pilot could just pitch up to slow down, gaining some altitude easily in the process, sidestep to the grass, use spoilers and a slip to plunk it onto the turf, then use forward stick to put the weight on the nose skid if necessary. A normal landing roll is well under 200 feet; in an emergency it could be much, much shorter.
Gliders do crash, though, but I think if I had to crash in any aircraft, I'd prefer it to be a 2-33. The cockpit section is very strong, and the big wings can absorb a lot of collision energy. But in such a glider, the collision energy could potentially be very low... at minimum-sink speed (42 mph), it descends at less than 150 fpm. It also stalls at 34 mph at max gross.
). Since then Ive been flying every weekend or two with friends of mine and solo a few times. 
. Down here around 11-1 o'clock is the best but after that the seabreeze kicks in and tears the now overdeveloped clouds apart and creates afternoon showers.
