Why don’t they use this fact in marketing? T Shirts that brag, “I jumped from an airplane at The Lodi Parachute Center AND SURVIVED”?
I’ve never jumped with a static line, but if it is unhooked, does it mean that your parachute simply fails to open? or what happens?
By contrast there are 300 deaths per year in the U.S. from falling off ladders.
True, there are a lot more people climbing ladders than skydiving, but they’re also a lot closer to the ground.
Those are odds, I would take. Something that always stood out with me, is my flight instructor back in the nineties telling me he also was a skydiver. He said they always carry two chutes. I asked him how many jumps he had, and he replied about 500. I asked him has there ever been a time, when the first chute didn’t open. He said, yes, twice. I thought, then, those are not the kind of odds I was looking for.
I’d like to do this, but can’t stand the piggyback way of learning, surely some schools still offer the old way of letting you jump out solo?
You see, this is exactly why I don’t want a parachute if I ever try skydiving. I don’t want to take the chance that the 'chute won’t open.
I related to another skydiver about my flight instructor experiences on skydiving, so I asked him too, has there ever been a time your first chute didn’t open. He said, once. I asked him how many times have both chutes failed you? He looked at me, paused, then smiled.
I was at Flightsuits, Ltd. once, and there was a guy looking to buy a couple of G-1 jackets for his identical twin sons who were about to become Naval Aviators. Only one son was with him. I said to him, ‘You have a twin brother? What does he look like?’
[Moderating]
smithsb, quoting the entire lyrics of a song is copyright infringement. Please only quote a small except.
Those numbers are consistent with each other. If we assume that both chutes have the same probability of failure, and that failure of the two chutes are independent of each other, then a 1 in 142,000 chance of both chutes failing would mean a 1 in 376 chance of the first one failing, or about 1.3 first-chute failures in 500 jumps. Which makes your flight instructor only slightly unlucky.
Now, the assumptions of equal chance for each chute and independent failures might or might not be accurate, but when the simple model already agrees that well, there’s no need to look at more complicated models.
It’s probably screwed towards main failure. If they owned their own equipment then they likely packed their own main, the reserve is generally required to have been packed/repacked by an FAA certified rigger within the last six months to be considered in date.
I made a few jumps in my youth (you couldn’t pay me enough to do it now!!) and had never even heard of the piggyback method. The standard procedure for novices was the static line, plus the guidance of an experienced jumper who determined the right point for each jumper to exit based on wind conditions. Plus lots and lots of training, including obviously on the use of the reserve. I appreciated the training because it gave you so many technical things to focus on that you forgot to be nervous about the fact that you’re going to jump out of a goddam airplane 3000 feet above the ground!
FTR, reliability may be similar for old-fashioned basic chutes, but (at least back in my day) the high-performance chutes used by competitive jumpers were more prone to malfunction than the standard round ones, and the reserve was of course designed for reliability above all. I don’t know how often the main chutes failed but the experienced guys didn’t seem to think of it as a big deal, and SOP was to release a malfunctioning main completely even if it was partially deployed and more or less working, on the basis that a failure of the reserve was far less likely than the reserve getting tangled with the mess.
As for the all-or-nothing nature of parachuting mishaps, not quite, because there’s always the chance of minor or at least non-fatal injuries on landing, for any number of reasons. On one of my own jumps I got blown off course and narrowly avoided both power lines and railway tracks. But standard non-competitive chutes have a pretty low forward speed by design, so the amount of maneuvering you can do is limited.
I wouldn’t have thought that, but you forced me to do the math, and I see you’re right. Think I’d still feel like packing yet a 3rd chute, if there was room, which using these figures on this thread, I came up with 1/53,000,000 odds.
wolfpup, my way of thinking is, if something happened to me like this while in my youth, it would have been a great tragedy. At 60, not so much, but still not good. At 80, even less so, and if I can make it to 100, doubt I would even bother packing a chute.
I’m going to look around and see if I can find a school that still does it the way you were taught.
A friend said he’d joined the parachute club. He showed me his membership card and I said, ‘Uh… This says The Prostitutes Club!’ He said, ‘Really? All I know is that they guaranteed me 50 jumps a year!’
That was my thought too… How many skydiving deaths are normal? All of them.
What do you expect when you fall 2000 feet or more?
Actually I’m trying to imagine what’s an abnormal parachute death. Land in high voltage power wires? get tangled in an airplane prop in mid-air? Parachute into the crocodile exhibit at the zoo?
Seriously, though - modern parachutes are a lot more maneuverable that the old canopies; but a book I read on D-Day preparations mentioned that the army decided not to teach the regular troops how to parachute because the risk of minor injuries like broken legs was too high (not deaths); the casualties would be less if they jump into combat was their first jump.
My first (and only) jump 30 years ago was solo; the most notable thing I took from it was - when you are coming down into a field of plain grass, it’s hard to tell looking straight down how high up you were. Grass from 80 feet and 30 feet looks the same, from 10 feet and 30 feet looks the same. All you can tell is - it looks closer - not how far. I had a radio so the ground crew could tell me when to flair… I still sat on my ass when I landed.
I can’t imagine jumping in pitch dark into a combat zone - whoever in the Army thought it was a good idea obviously wasn’t going to do it himself.
I don’t have the stats, but I’m confident that non-fatal injuries (e.g. sprained / broken ankles) are a LOT more common than fatalities.
Wait, are you saying the book said that the paratroopers, like 82nd & 101st Airborne divisions, made no jumps before D-Day? That’s utterly untrue. It was their first combat jump, but they had made multiple training jumps to get their wings.
My impression was that this was about the troops who were jumping in but were not regular paratroopers. Obviously the real paratroop regiments, that would expect to jump many times during the war, actually trained. but I gathered that there were a number of regiments where the plan said - “these guys will get there by jumping” even though they were not trained paratroops. (Just like the glider troops).
You die if your chute doesn’t open properly. If you don’t land properly or the landing zone is crap, you break a leg or ankle.
Note that double deployment failures are only a part of the total accident picture.
One common cause of serious injury - and death - is bad landings under a properly deployed, fully functioning canopy. Many of these involve overly aggressive canopy maneuvers close to the ground.
Which is the problem; at 500 feet AGL, you can pull your reserve chute and still have a reasonably good chance of having a safe (if overly exciting) landing. At 10 feet AGL, you are just going to hit, and if you are falling off a ladder there is a good chance you are going to hit headfirst.
Someone should come along and make a Douglas Adams reference; I’m tapped out today.
It’s called Accelerated Freefall; your first jump you dive with two jumpmasters, and then just one on the next 2-3 jumps, and then on your own after that with a radio earpiece to direct you as you descend under canopy, with the last jump being totally untended.
The worst part of skydiving isn’t the jump, but the ride up. Unless you are with a really high line dive organization, you are probably flying in some beat up Twin Otter, elbow to asshole with eighteen of your new best friends, listening to those old engines struggle to make it off the airstrip and pull that plane up to 12 kft while glancing back at the open rear door and wondering how many people you can shove out of it if the plane suddenly starts falling out of the sky. I mean, I know the Twin Otter has a record of being a really reliable brush plane/drug courier, but I really want a big rear hatch I can jump out of that can ascend to 3 kft within a couple of minutes, so if I can’t jump out of a C-123 or better I’m staying on the ground.
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