I don’t think he jumped, and I don’t think he was re-assigned: I think it was just some training they put them through because it seemed like a good idea.
I don’t don’t think that my dad or uncles ever told me that the military was very sensible about this kind of thing back in the day: there was a lot of hurrying and waiting and getting shunted around and people training for something then doing something different.
Then you have this one. Thankfully, no one died.
Some of the footage is chilling. :eek:
Chilling indeed.
You don’t need a parachute to go skydiving, you need a parachute to go skydiving twice.
It starts with self-deluding math like this, where 20/37 = “close to one per year”
Go and get the statistics of how many parachute jumps this facility handles, then determine how its accident rate compares with the regional, national or global average.
I haven’t located their stats yet, but they are reported as hosting “several hundreds” of jumps each day.
An image search tagged with their name or location returned more than 43000 hits.
This is a busy parachute center.
And yes, parachutist would consider a facility’s safety record when selecting a place to jump. Along with location, cost, friendliness of experience, availability of bookings, and general “vibe” in the community.
I misunderstood the thread title “So how many skydiving deaths are normal?” as asking about the deaths being normal or not rather than the numbers.
I guessed that multiple injuries commensurate with a fall from a considerable height would be ‘normal’, but as we see from this thread, a small proportion are abnormal as in drowning etc.
I used to tell people that skydiving was statistically safer than the small airplane flying I used to do.
The thing about aviation is that it is brutal in punishing inattention and failure to attend to detail. A lot depends on the the person involved. A lot of people in sport aviation are arrogant (you have to have some just to be the sort that goes way high up when we can’t naturally fly like birds or bees), and it can be very hard to combat complacency or your own ego.
They probably discuss deaths since 1981 rather than 1964 because so many changes have occurred to recreational skydiving that “skydiving in 1964” and “skydiving in 2018” is like comparing apples and oranges, or at least lemons and oranges. Little things that even an outsider can note, like better designed parachutes, the use of helmets to protect your head (kinda hard to pull the cord when you’re unconscious due to being kicked or elbowed on your way out of the airplane through a narrow door, or contacting the airplane, or colliding with another skydiver on the way down, and yes, all of the above have happened and helmets help prevent that, even if imperfectly), and automatic deployment devices (which will open your chute even if you are unconscious).
That last is a good point - if a chute fails generally only one person dies (although there have been a few, very rare, multiple fatalities from such things, they’re really freak accidents). If a jump plane goes down a dozen or more might die. Accidents on the way up tend to kill more people per accident than those that happen on the way down.
There’s the old saw about “why would you jump out of a perfectly good airplane?”. After seeing a few jump planes I came to the conclusion people jump out of them because often they’re NOT “perfectly good airplanes”. It’s not a universal phenomena, but while a lot of people focus on the parachute safety part there’s also the ride up that has all the risks of small airplanes. They’re manageable risks, and most flights end without problem, but they’re part of the overall equation.
The military also conduct operations into active combat zones, and do jumps under conditions that civilians normally don’t. That’s comparing kumquats and oranges (both citrus, but not the same thing). You might want to compare military training and civilian skydiving rather than using the combat stats - civilians normally don’t have the risk of people shooting at them when they’re descending.
I’m told by my friends in the sport that the chutes typically supplied by skydiving centers for beginners are “tame” - easier to control and more forgiving of error in landing technique. Some of the more experienced skydivers are using high-performance canopies that are much less forgiving in regards to technique, which can lead to very fast landing speeds with little margin for error. Smack into a car in a parking lot with a school-supplied chute you’ll get bruised, maybe a broken bone. Do that with some high performance chutes with their high landings speeds and you have a fair risk of dying.
So yes, which equipment you choose to use can affect your odds of injury or death.
It’s like folks who BASE jump or fly wingsuits - the margin for error becomes less and less.
To be fair, some years back my area had a Cessna 150 accident like that - it was never determined what, exactly, happened, but both the airplane and the occupants came down in pieces.
It’s not all-or-nothing, it’s just that the many sprained ankles and cracked shin bones from bad landings don’t make the news the way a death does. Bruises, sprains, and broken limbs happen far more often than deaths (although most landings aren’t that rough). They just don’t make the evening news.
Yes, but you may have to look/ask around a bit. Once the FAA took the “experimental” label off tandem jumping it became quite popular.
I went skydiving at a small facility north of Toronto. I was lucky that they allowed first time solo jumps - I don’t get the point of jumping tandem. they mentioned that every so often they had an accident from poor landing, broken bones, etc. - but no fatalities from parachute not opening. Generally, failure to flare on time, flare too soon, or going too fast horizontally on landing. (The goal was like landing an aircraft, to flare on landing, burn off horizontal speed, and drop maybe 2 feet or so at the end. OTOH, until you reached a certain level of competence, they did not allow you to open your own chute, it opened automatically by the line connected when you jumped. (And you still had an emergency chute)
The main point is that it’s a way to have a thrilling and “brag-worthy” experience that’s quite acceptably safe with very little skill or training.
Think of it as a sort of glorified amusement park ride.
Yeah, that’s what I was looking for, thanks for that Stranger, found several schools in D/FW area that teaches that, still seems popular with a lot of folk. Reasonable in prices too, I think. Going to get going on this soon.
I found a skydiving instructor that seems very knowledgeable as well. Only a 45 second clip of him demonstrating the jump, would like to get a second opinion, what do you guys think? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9g7sBVUFMs
He’s equally adept on being a pilot too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBvWoT_s-R8
Just don’t see anything going wrong with this guy.
Most skydivers die at some point. Statistically, the majority die of some kind of heart failure or terminal illness. We can therefore conclude that skydiving is therefore 100% lethal.
He seems fine. However, if you can’t follow his instructions you should probably be prepared to land without your parachute.
Stranger
Are any skydiving fatalities suicides?
Is that a thing?
Yes, sometimes people use skydiving to commit suicide. In addition to the usual sadness surrounding someone killing him/herself, this can also get the jumpmaster and skydive facility into a lot of of legal trouble with surviving relatives.
I recall one incident I heard about from a couple decades ago that involved a girl who deliberately undid the harness that connected her to the 'chute while at altitude. The parachute and empty harness landed… and then they had to go find the body. That was back in the days when we were all still on usenet newsgroups.
Even so, suicides are only a sub-set of skydiving deaths. Most are accidents, not intentionals.
Actually, at the usual time of death, they’re exactly the same distance from the ground…
Back in the day, dive training was much more difficult than it is now. I was NAUI certified in 1980, and my wife was certified by PADI in 1999. The difference was dramatic. Back in 1980, NAUI was still basing its program on Navy dive training. We had lots of washouts who couldn’t manage the mandatory swims or the distressed diver tow, the classroom lessons were two hours a week for 8 weeks, and two hours per week of pool time for 8 weeks. You had to swim 8 lengths of an olympic pool to qualify for the course, and you had to dump all your equipment into 12 feet of water and swim down and put it all on. The decompression tables were Navy tables that required a lot of calculation for things like altitude, recent flying, temperature, etc. For my open water test I had to tow a distressed diver about 1/2 mile, and had to free-dive 30 feet and pick a rock up off the bottom and bring it back.
My wife’s program was a weekend. A few hours in a classroom, followed by a few hours per day in a pool. This reflects a big change in how people dive - back in my time there weren’t that many dive resorts, and a lot of recreational diving was still done without divemasters or resort personnel, and often in areas that were relatively unexplored. By my wife’s time, almost all recreational diving was being done on shallow reefs on guided tours with a dive master in the water with the group.
Interesting thing about SCUBA diving - It is one of the safest sports around, despite being carried out in inherently hostile conditions. And yet, the industry is completely self-regulated. Aside from commercial operations, the only SCUBA specific regulation that manufacturers have to follow is the DOT certification on a SCUBA tank. Everything else is completely unregulated, and yet fatalities due to equipment failures are almost unheard of now.
Because of the lack of government regulation, there is more private regulation in diving than in just about any other industry. When my wife and I went diving a couple of years ago, we had to show our C cards, plus our logbooks. And because we hadn’t dived in more than six months, we were required to go out with an instructor and do a currency examination dive before we were allowed to dive on our own. If you try to get a tank filled, you have to show a C card. No one will take you out on a charter unless you can show proper training and currency.
It is this way because absent government regulations, liability falls back on the private market. Cruises won’t book with dive operators who do not have NAUI, PADI, or DAN certification. Dive operators won’t sell crappy equipment, because the liability is on them. And the entire industry has a strong incentive to maintain safety to keep the tourists coming. So you’ll find more stringent regulations in diving than in almost any other sport. They just don’t come from the government.
Back to skydiving - when I worked at a flying club, one of our students was a military jumper who suffered a double failure - his main chute failed and streamered, and he panicked and released the reserve without cutting away the main, and it tangled up with it. He hit the ground and broke both his legs and his back, but survived. He survived because he hit a freshly plowed field, and because the two chutes streaming in the breeze slowed him down to maybe 60 mph or so before he hit the ground. So he decided to learn to fly planes instead of jumping out of them.
That’s exactly what I did, too. I never had any injuries from skydiving, it was just that somehow sanity set it. It worked out really well because instead of being nervous about all the ordinarily scary stuff you have to do when learning to fly (like recovering from a stall and spin) all I could think was, hey, I don’t have to jump out of this one, I can land in it just like a normal sane person! And plus, the jumping experience had me fully accustomed to small planes (specifically, rickety small planes with the door missing! :D), so I approached the flying experience in a modern intact airplane with great comfort.
Probably safer than being a motorcyclist. Approximately 25 times more likely to get you killed than driving a car, per mile driven.
I was in NROTC in college, and the (fairly similar) words we were taught by the Marines during summer training at Camp Pendleton in the 1980s went like this:
C-130 rolling down the strip,
Marine Corps charlie gonna take a little trip.
Stand up, buckle up, shuffle to the door,
Jump right out and shout “MARINE CORPS”!
If that chute don’t open wide,
I’ve gotta re-serve by my side.
If that chute don’t open round,
I’ll be the first killer on the ground.
A-kickin’ and a-jabbin’!
Punchin’ and a-stabbin!
Back to the main topic, I took a one-day skydiving course back in the '80s that involved a solo static-line jump. It looked something like the “IAD/Static Line” section here that was linked to previously.
Anyway, I mainly did it to shut my stepfather up. He was U.S. Army Airborne qualified and immensely proud of this fact. He talked up parachuting so much during my childhood that I agreed to take a civilian training course with him when I was 18 years old. The “jump” consisted of climbing out of a Cessna and hanging from a wing strut before letting go. I was so sure I was going to die that I put my driver’s license inside my boot so that they could identify my body afterwards.
And…it wasn’t that bad. It was actually pretty fun. To prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke, I did it twice more the next day. After that, I consciously decided that was enough, and that the whole sport was not much different than playing Russian roulette. I won’t say I’ll never do it again, though. In particular, I wouldn’t mind doing a long freefall jump someday, but don’t particularly want to do a tandem, and also don’t want to do the dozens of jumps required for a solo freefall, so there you go.
More recently, I took up scuba diving along with my son. Interesting seeing the accident stats above – nevertheless, as **Stranger **mentioned previously I feel like there are many things I can do if something goes wrong in the course of a scuba dive; there is a lot less you can do if things go south while skydiving.
And you can’t just subtract off the direct combat deaths, either, because there will be indirect effects. Like, a faster jump (both more freefall, and a faster descent under the chute) probably makes you safer from enemy attack, even while it also makes the jump itself more dangerous. So there’s going to be a tradeoff, and some net optimal speed that minimizes the total risk, but which will still have more jump risk than a civilian jump would. And you might even get an increased risk in training jumps, even without the people shooting at you, because they’ll be training for the same sort of jumps they’d make in combat situations.