… with a revolver that has 142,000 chambers in its cylinder.
I’m afraid this argues that the training you received for your three jumps wasn’t notably thorough. To be fair, the broad subject of deployment problems and how to deal with them typically doesn’t get fully addressed until later in your training.
Also in the interests of fairness: typical skydiving problems do require more prompt attention than typical scuba issues.
The most immediate problems in scuba diving also require a pretty prompt response. At depth you have about 30-60 seconds of useful consciousness off of a typical breath, so you have to be prepared to figure out a solution in case you run out of air or your regulator stops working completely. Ideally, you turn to your buddy and signal for air, or pull your secondary reg or backup air source. Other problems like losing a mask or getting entangled in something require staying calm and figuring things out. One of the problems I had with revisions to training was that they started discouraging us from putting students in stress conditions (under safe pool-level depths) whether they would have to confront a panic and solve a problem in order go not discourage people from diving. But for the most part accidents in scuba diving come out of either a lack of preparation, failing to evaluate the hazards of the dive (strong current, waves, or murky water), or panic under stress, all of which can be mitigated by skill and experience. In skydiving, if your canopy rips or becomes tangled, your only response is to cut away and pull the reserve, and if that fails, you are screwed.
But frankly, my biggest fear was always a failure during ascent, where the plane either loses power or crashes into another plane since there are often multiple flights going on at the same time. I was prepared for every other scenario, but when you are sitting in the cramped fuselage of a Twin Otter smelling everybody elses’ fear and the plane suddenly goes wonky, at 2 kft, you have no choices other than to hang on and pray to whatever deity you favor that day.
Stranger
Actually, for a one-day course that I took over 30 years ago, I thought it was pretty thorough. We went through what seemed like endless drills on the ground that included looking up, letting go, arching your back, counting to three (“one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand”), checking for a good chute deployment, immediately reacting to a bad deployment (e.g. a streamer) if necessary, and immediately deploying the reserve if needed. It was emphasized that we would hit the ground in about 20 seconds without a good chute (from our jump altitude of approximately 3,000 feet). We also carried an automatic activation device for the reserve chute, but were told not to depend on it.
But anyway, other than deploying the reserve, is there a whole lot else you can do in the event of a problem?
Exactly.
I actually had my first equipment malfunction on a scuba dive with my son back in May in Bonaire. At a depth of about 60-70 feet, I went to take a breath and got a mouthful of seawater instead. I cautiously started to take a second breath, and the same thing happened. I had this sense of time slowing down as I immediately decided that I wasn’t going to fool with that regulator anymore and calmly reached down and switched to my backup regulator. As I switched mouthpieces, I realized that the original mouthpiece had come apart from the actual regulator due to a broken zip-tie. I didn’t even let go of the original mouthpiece. I then located the free-floating regulator that had come loose, and held it tight for the rest of the dive (realizing that in the event of a failure with my backup regulator, it would work just fine without a mouthpiece). I then signaled to my son that we were going to turn around early. He never even realized that I had had an issue until he noticed that my bright yellow backup regulator was in my mouth towards the end of the dive. Anyway, I was pleased that I dealt with a minor problem that could have turned into a major problem had I panicked.
With skydiving, on the other hand, it just seems like much more is out of your hands, from possible issues with the plane you are going up in, to putting your life in the hands of whoever packed your chute. I grant that part of this may just be my perception. With scuba diving, I’m also trusting my life to the person who filled my air tank and who maintained my equipment (especially the regulators). On the other hand, I can test these out before starting the dive. You don’t know if a parachute is going to work or not until you deploy it.
An important point is that there are right and wrong ways to handle a main canopy problem, and to deploy a reserve.
Skydiving problems are mostly broken ankles. SCUBA problems you sometimes meet while spending a few hours every day in a compression chamber. It’s like a dirty secret of the SCUBA industry: some people get noticeable decompression symptoms in spite of following the standard protocols.
Either some people are more susceptible to decompression injury (probably true), or some people show decompression injury more clearly (probably also true). And that’s just the few who are outspoken enough to make an issue of it.
That os fairly rare in recreatiinal diving but it does happen, particularly if divers are running up against limits, taking the fastest allowable ascent rate with no stops, are doing multiple dives over multiple days, not planning dives to be progressively more shallow rather than deeper, overweight, or dehydrated when diving (e.g. diving with a hangover).
The Navy dive tables based on Haldane’s reserarch and assumptions about supersaturation are based on experiments on healthy, generally athletic male divers, and does not account for physiological variations to microbubble formation. The PADI tables essentially take that and add margin to it (reduce allowable no-decompression time at depth and increase decompression stop time). The Bulhmann model, which is just a more graduated Haldane model for implementation in a dive computer, also doesn’t account for microbubble formation due to changes in depth (but does stairstep the dive profile like a really graduated Wheel). None of the specify a need for staged ascent with safety stops although PADI and GUE (and I thun NAUI) recommend it as a general pracice (unfortunately not taught by example because most instructors don’t want to mess with a class od students hovering at 30/20/10). The RGBM model does account for microbubble for ation and goves penalty/credit for ascent rate and staged ascent, and is implemented in most good dive computers.
Decompression sickness can occur in anyone (and that point is made in training) but I’ve done a couple thousand dives and I’ve only seen it happen in people who were exceeding no-deco dive limits and pushing the envelope in ascent rates without safety stops. I have, however, seen an entire boatfull of experienced divers led by professional divemasters doing an intentional decompression dive and flagrantly ignoring alarms going off right and left, while I followed my planned dive using the PADI table and hovered 20 feet above them. In-fucking-creddible.
So, in short, there is a lot of margin in dive tables and computer models that covers the bast majority of divers, and while deco sickness can occur in anyone diving more than 30 feet it is typically a result of some reckless behavior and poor dive habits. On the other hand, I knew of a skydiver who was killed after making a perfect landing because the guy coming in behind him did a pivot descent and slammed into him full force feet first, knocking him dozens of feet and causing a massive dual pneumothorax injury. Al least with scuba diving the potential for “ballistic injury” is essentially nil, and the most accidents occur on or getting onto the boat.
Stranger
I actually did four static-line jumps in West Texas in 1981, then decided to stop, because the next step was free fall, and I decided I was not comfortable with that. But one of my fellow static-line jumpers hurt his back on landing. A middle-aged guy in reasonably good shape. He was able to get up and walk but was hunched over and in a lot of pain. Had to go to a hospital.
DinorR pretty much explained it. The static pulls the chute from pack. There’s not other way to deploy the main chute. If the main chute failed to open or deploy for any reason, the only recourse a jumper has is activating the reserve. It is not possible for the jumper to manually activate the main chute.
While we don’t use these older model parachutes anymore, this video has a pretty good demonstration of how it works. https://youtu.be/nGQKeeZu_s0?t=92
That accelerated free fall program I took in Alabama (State Motto; Where life is cheap) drilled us so hard on pulling the cutaway to jettison the main chute that all the way through my freefall my mantra was “Don’t pull the cutaway; don’t pull the cutaway”. I could totally see myself reflexively jettisoning the main.
One trope about skydiving is that the reluctant jumper is told the plane is going to crash so they have to jump. That makes me wonder, has there ever been a case where the skydiver made a successful landing but the plane then crashed?
Not sure, but during my static line training the instructor told us that if the plane got into serious trouble (e.g. loss of all engine power), then he would start pushing us out of the plane without necessarily hooking the static line up first, and that we should follow our training and immediately pull the reserve if necessary.
He said we had a better shot of surviving that way than to stay onboard a plane that was going down. I assume he would only do this if we had enough altitude for a successful chute deployment.
Also, I’m sure there are plenty of cases in WWII in which a plane was shot down after deploying paratroopers.
You have this one in Wisconsin in 2013, where the planes collided as they were getting ready to jump.
Skydiving flight - 9 killed in small plane. In Europe the airplane isn’t grounded, but there is a directive not to use them for anything.
A bit off topic. Which is more dangerous, flying a light plane or riding a motorcycle? I suppose on a per-hour basis.
AIUI, motorcycling has a fatality rate about 20 times that of driving, on a per-mile basis. Mikemike2’s link suggests that the per-hour fatality rate for general aviation is about 20 times that of driving. I suspect average speeds for driving/riding are slower than for flying (since we sometimes ride/drive on city streets), so here’s my pedestrian approach to risk comparison:
If you fly 100 miles, that takes one hour and incurs X risk of fatality.
If you drive 1000 miles, that takes twenty hours and incurs the same risk of fatality.
If you ride a motorcycle 50 miles, that takes one hour and incurs the same risk of fatality.
So on a per-mile basis, GA flight has about half the fatality risk of riding a motorcycle.
On a per-hour basis, GA flight has about the same fatality risk as riding a motorcycle.
I think there are a number of factors that you can eliminate to vastly reduce your motorcycling risk. I think few people pilot a plane with training and licensing, but the same can’t be said for riding a motorcycle. Alcohol is another factor: few people will pilot a plane drunk, but alcohol is a factor in a large number of motorcycle crashes.
Overall, I suspect that for a person who is licensed, sober, and working to mitigate risk, motorcycling is likely safer than piloting a small plane.
Thank you.
:smack:
Sorry, that should read “I think few people pilot a plane without training and licensing, but the same can’t be said for riding a motorcycle.”
Years ago, I did a lot of white water rafting, but absolutely refused to try skydiving. One of my friends got very upset with me. She wanted to go skydiving, she thought I was an adrenaline junkie, and she couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t go. I told her, “If worse comes to worst, I can swim, but I can’t fly.”
I never jumped, but my wife did, once. I went with her and sat through a full morning’s training and familiarization. The instructor had student jumpers stand in a vertical harness (attached to floor and ceiling) and pull a fake ripcord, using the proper procedure (something like “count to three, pull, count to three again, visually check main chute, if there’s a problem pull the cutaway and then pull the reserve”).
Occasionally the instructor would stealthily hold the other end of the main ripcord, so that when the prospective jumper pulled, nothing happened. Then he would count down to impact.
It was absolutely remarkable to me how many of those students panicked and failed to move to the reserve chute, despite being on the ground in a classroom, despite having just seen some of their peers endure the same test. Some of them completely locked up and “died” when the countdown finished.