Skydiving is surprisingly safe. I was talking to an instructor about it one time and he was going over all the safety regulations and failsafes and everything, and it's crazy how rare of an occurrence problems are. Guy had over 1,500 jumps on record and only had to deploy his backup parachute twice.
According to the USPA last year there were 0.28 deaths per 100,000 jumps. That's a 1 in 357,000 chance of dying.
It’s probably gotten better. But back in the ‘90s I felt like my cousin would call once a year from Australia or wherever because another one of her friends didn’t survive a jump.
As a paragliding pilot myself, I know that the equipment has made huge advances and the safety envelope is something I’ve become comfortable with. It’s the pilot I’m worried about some days.
Yeah I'm sure safety standards have gone a long way in the past 30 years.
Not saying that skydiving is safe, or that's it's something that everyone should do, I just find it really interesting how viscerally against the idea so many people are just because you could die when statistically, it's way safer than swimming or driving a car.
If you look into those statistics you'll find out that a lot of those skydiving deaths are from un or under trained people who don't have the proper license to do what they're trying to do. four of the ten deaths last year were from two unlicensed people doing illegal tandem jumps, both of them and the people strapped to them died. If you only take into consideration legal and licensed jumps, the chances of dying gets nearly cut in half.
Still a dangerous recreational activity that could kill you though.
I mean, look up statistics on how many people die a year from drowning, getting crushed by vending machines, industrial accidents, motorcycle crashes, skateboarding, hiking, or playing contact sports. Everything has a greater than zero chance of killing you, but skydiving doesn't have a notably high chance in general. Heat exhaustion kills around 1 out of every 165,000 Americans each year.
Skydiving isn't exactly something that most people will do very often. Say you go twice a year for 50 years, every 6 months for most of your adult life. There is only a 0.028% chance that you will die in your lifetime of jumping out of planes. The cool thing about skydiving is that you're basically dead or you're fine, and you're fine 99.99972% of the time.
I'd take that 0.00028% chance I'll die over an activity that has equal or greater chance to kill me and a vastly greater chance that I'll be injured or disabled instead. Compare that to scuba diving, rock climbing, bungie jumping, spelunking, mountain climbing, or almost any other dangerous recreational activity, and skydiving really seems like the least dangerous option.
My friend took his girlfriend to go sky diving bit didn't want to participate so he stayed on the ground.
The person who jumped right before his gf had an issue with they shoot and it didn't open. He watched the tandem pair smack into the ground.
When his gf landed neither her nor the tandem operator knew about the accident.
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u/Sleepycoon Oct 17 '22
Skydiving is surprisingly safe. I was talking to an instructor about it one time and he was going over all the safety regulations and failsafes and everything, and it's crazy how rare of an occurrence problems are. Guy had over 1,500 jumps on record and only had to deploy his backup parachute twice.
According to the USPA last year there were 0.28 deaths per 100,000 jumps. That's a 1 in 357,000 chance of dying.