Wingsuit pilot & programmer here. The reason Wingsuit BASE Jumpers keep dying is that you shouldn't jump your wingsuit off a @#$%ing mountain. Please stick to the planes and the helicopters that you're used to.
Yeah. I remember reading about Dean Potter dying at Yosemite. For someone who had taken calculated risks his whole climbing career, it just seemed like such a reckless and dangerous way to go. Sad.
I also imagine - not that I know much about the sport - that the uptake in popularity has both increased the number of people attempting the sport (likely without adequate skill), as well as people performing more risky manoeuvres in order to garner attention to themselves?
You can pilot a wingsuit from a plane or much higher, but most of the people that die wingsuit flying are proximity flying - which has way smaller margin for error and higher mortality rate.
Its safer than regular base jumping provided you don't try to strafe tree and hilltops and cliffsides. These jumpers are trying to do ever riskier stunts all for the clicks.
I don't think it's all for the clicks, if it's like any other dangerous sport/hobby. It's for the rush you get doing it. The feel of being right on the edge.
It's an addictive feeling, and it can trick you, because you know it's dangerous but you're always come out of it fine, great even, until you don't.
This is a very good point. Unlike other sports - when you push you can be hurt badly, but ultimately learn from your mistake, proximity wingsuit is one-mistake-one-kill.
That's how motorcycle accidents were explained to me. It is perfectly fine until it isn't, because there is so little room for error that it can only be fine or a crash.
That was for motorcycles where accidents are survivable and things are much more in your control.
For low wingsuit flying those last two points are both questionable.
They said safer than BASE jumping, though they didn't capitalize it. BASE jumping is jumping off stuff, not out of stuff. It is an acronym. Building Antenna Span Earth, I think.
I'm aware of what BASE means. Grandparent post was comparing BASE jumping to wingsuit skydiving out of airplanes and helicopters. Parent said that BASE jumping off of mountains could be safer. I called bullshit.
[Base Wingsuiting] is safer than regular base jumping provided
you don't try to strafe tree and hilltops and cliffsides
Safer because a wingsuit can allow you to track much further away from the cliff you've just jumped off, which means that a typical deployment issue - where the parachute opens off-heading, therefore inducing a turn - doesn't immediately steer you back into that cliff.
A wingsuit can give you freer air for deployment, which increases the margin for error, but wingsuit BASE seems to be aimed at proximity flying.
A few people have landed with their wingsuits, but that's pretty rare. Look up Gary Connery or Jeb Corliss for example.
You are still going pretty fast, you need ideal terrain (angle, water or boxes), and a hundred things have to go perfectly fine. It's a pretty insane feast.
So I think the article is about Wingsuit Proximity Flying, and what you're describing is Wingsuit BASE Jumping. Are these two considered 2 separate, albeit similar, sports? Can any pilot practicing BASE Jumping leap off a cliff or do you somehow train for this?
Can any pilot practicing BASE Jumping leap off a cliff or do you somehow train for this?
Technically, all that's needed is money to buy a wingsuit and a parachute, and a cliff. Without training, they might manage to get the wingsuit operating properly for some of the flight, but I wouldn't want to see the odds of a successful landing.
The general training arc would be to learn wingsuiting from an aircraft (like a regular skydive), and build up hours/experience flying a wingsuit in clear air (and deploying a parachute several thousand feet above the ground), before going into wingsuit base jumping (and build up experience there before going into prox).
What struck me about the profiled jumpers was their calm, sane demeanor -- not the showboat thrillseekers I expected.
BUT, most seemed unsatisfied by the experience when minimizing risk. To me, being 100 or more feet from terrain would be the experience of a lifetime. But many leaders in the sport keep pushing the envelope to a fatal degree (and in each example it was terrain, not equipment failure or weather).
Bet its even closer than you think. Nobody I know who does BASE is still alive. Some quit, others died. Everyone just kind of expects to die doing it. Blue skies, black death.
It is in the land of the free. It's generally not banned in Europe, so most BASE jumpers who are active spend at least a few weeks a year there.
About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers. It can be done relatively safely but the group isn't big enough to regulate effectively and most BASE jumpers are hostile to anyone mentioning the idea.
And out of a pool of similar 1000 people? I seem to recall that affluent young men used to kill themselves in sports-car racing in the preceding decades.
Perhaps this is a confounding factor: as Spooky23 notes in a sibling comment, "Cars are engineered to protect all but the most reckless and negligent from death" - but indeed, who else would choose BASE but the reckless and the self-proclaimed immortals?
If we're talking about car racing, rather than just driving a car, yes, I agree it is pretty dangerous. Probably still not as dangerous as trying to navigate canyons in a wing suit.
For the age group 25-44 we have 269.8 male deaths per 100k, vs 114.8 female ones - or a total of 192.0 per 100k regardless of gender, or nearly ~2 per 1000.
Looking at http://base-jumping.eu/base-jumping-fatality-list/ , which might be a bit dated, I see 26 fatalities listed for 2015 world wide. I tried to find how many base jumpers exist, and ended up on a forum where it was speculated upon. Perhaps 3000? In which case we have a mortality of ~9 per thousand , no age group discrimination.
So.. from that perhaps naive collection I see a 4-5x increased risk of dying if being a base jumper compared to just being average. However one can ponder if it would help fight depression and such. And, looking at death rates for 45+ , cancer then becoming a major killer with obesity certainly being a factor. How many lives does the fitness regime of base jumping save?
I'm aware that BASE jumping is banned in US National Parks (and it's been argued that this increases the risk [1]), but it doesn't seem to be banned generally in America (see Perrine Bridge, or Bridge Day, for example [2]).
It's not like poeple don't understand the risk - especially by the time they get to the point where they can actually do it. What about all the other 'extreme' sports where death and/or serious injury is a possible outcome?
one out of endless examples - what about forumla 1/indycar racing? utterly useless and highly unecological activity, pushing technology and people to its limits. sounds faimilar? is it more acceptable because you own a car?
Valid concerns, sure. But how is banning it a good solution? How do you even enforce a ban on a group of people who are okay risking their lives for fun?
Maybe instead you get them contributing to a local SAR organization. Maybe they have to get insurance. Or something else more constructive and less ham-fisted than just making it illegal.
Why is banning stuff so high on everyone's list of solutions to problems that don't really affect them?
Personally, I think as few things as possible should be banned/restricted. If things directly impact other peoples lives, then sure, but if its indirect or minimal, then perhaps not. Its a difficult balance though (but in general, I'm in the "the less government involvement in the peoples lives the better" camp).
> About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers.
How is 10-20 peoples worth of coronor time worldwide an appreciable number for taxpayers. Furthermore is it even remotely comparable to the cost of trying to enforce a ban, which would presumably also be funded by tax payers.
My point is more that you've at least thought about it a little, unlike the OP of this thread.
People get injured all the time while just walking/climbing and have to be helicoptered out, one august week in the alps has probably enough deaths to cover yearly wingsuits deaths.
I could list 100 things people should not do that are less flamboyant but waste more life and more resources. I'm not saying "Give up on reducing dangerous behaviors." I am saying there are more effective priorities.
Quite: cigarettes, alcohol, bad driving, and cooking whilst drunk and passing out with the stove still on[1] kill way more people annually than BASE jumping and I don't see anybody banning them.
[1] I'm obviously not 100% sure about this last one but it seems likely.
How would you enforce a ban on people jumping off tall objects?
The Antenna part of BASE must be getting harder to achieve. When I worked in the radio and TV broadcast industry we had problems with BASE jumpers climbing masts at remote unmanned sites, but physical security is always being improved.
Also, you wouldn't want to try climbing onto a live high power mast radiator, you would be vaporized.
A ban might not stop people from jumping, but it would certainly underscore that this is dangerous. I don't think there's any commercial BASE jumping, but if there is/was, a ban would definitely stop that.
How are there so many people willing to do something so insanely stupid?
I looked at the BASE fatality list. Vast majority of the names and nationalities are of European descent and/or nationality.
Are adventure sports (risk taking for thrill) a white European thing? Do you have to have a sort of arrogance and privilege to disrespect risks like this?
I personally have no desire for any of this stuff, as I'm quite aware of risk generally.
> I've managed to have a somewhat clean track record in my two years in the sport, with only two broken bones
...
> It does, and most BASE jumpers that I know / have met / have taught
2 years in the sport, already broke yourself twice, and already "teaching" other jumpers?
Don't forget to burn some sites on youtube and facebook, to complete the package. Remember - if you didn't get any likes for it, the jump never happened.
Watching people discuss BASE on a tech forum feels like watching technology being discussed on a knitting forum.
To clarify, it was one landing where I broke two bones. Made a bad decision at the bridge on my 9th jump and broke both sides of my ankle smoking into the side of the canal. I tell everyone I know exactly how I ended up in that situation, what my decision making process was, and how I assess jumps now in order to not put myself in the same situation again.
Also, I work at a large dropzone and with a well-organized group to help coach new jumpers along the way. Me breaking myself on my first weekend is a pretty strong coaching moment that I've watched shift people's view on the sport.
Happy to let you know who I am in real life if you feel this strongly that I'm part of the problem.
"Watching people discuss BASE on a tech forum feels like watching technology being discussed on a knitting forum."
I'm not so sure: BASE is expensive. Think about the demographic in here: tech workers, probably a lot of them doing reasonably well financially, and probably quite a few are outdoorsy.
Any of these hobbies is expensive when you really get into them: BASE, mountain-biking, motorcycling, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, paragliding, skydiving. Yet you find lots of techies doing all of them because they can actually afford to.
Except, I wasn't talking about whether or not people could afford to do it (though, BASE is only expensive if you make it expensive - or get arrested), or whether it was likely that some people in the tech industry were jumpers (I know for a fact that many jumpers work in tech).
I was talking about the actual content of the many cringeworthy comments coming from people who were clearly trying to sound informed on a subject they don't understand. Like a knitting circle discussing cryptocurrency.
I see it constantly when anything about flying comes up as well. One or two actual pilots will show up, and 500 people who did an intro lesson or got to take the controls in a friend's plane once, will start trying to share their vast knowledge of the finer points of powered flight.
> How are there so many people willing to do something so insanely stupid?
You're going to die anyways, probably from something a lot more terrifying and/or painful like cancer or Alzheimer's. I'm not convinced that hitting the ground really hard is a worse death than average.
Once you're dead you won't know the difference between having died at 30 and 80.
It's not insane to maximize your enjoyment while alive instead of compromising on quality to get more quantity. It's up to every individual to decide on that balance for themselves.
Having watched my aunt die at the age of 52 of stage 4 lung cancer over a period of 9 months post-diagnosis I can absolutely and unwaveringly assert that I'd rather die from hitting the ground really hard. It's not even a question.
I've seen this mentioned before, it seems to be the main point.
> Most beginners who die appear to be making variations of the exact same error, according to Webb. “They jump off a cliff, get flying, and for some reason there's just this human reaction to try to hug the air like a big, gigantic beach ball,” he explains. “By hugging air you feel as if you're creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What ends up happening is your suit can only grab so much air, and it starts to stall. When it starts to stall, it loses lift, starts to drag, and then, splat.
A lot of highly experienced jumpers are also dying, probably due to a mix of complacency, envelope-pushing and the inherent lack of margin for error in terrain flight. This point is made in the latter part of the article:
> Figuring out why the best are dying confounds, saddens, and even irritates just about everyone I’ve spoken to in the wingsuit BASE world. “It’s really puzzling to me,” says Rich Webb. “I wish I knew, but I think it has to do with complacency.”
> Webb points out that many of the best are dying on flight lines that might be considered either “easy” for them, or they’re lines that they’ve done before. “It comes down to the fact that they're so comfortable in a stupidly high-risk environment,” says Webb. “We just don't have the luxury of margins in our sport, so at some point it catches up to you if you're not on it all the time.”
> Andy Lewis speculates, “I would say so many experienced wingsuiters are dying because they are trying to execute jumps with very low margin for error. Eventually when you make a mistake you hope you have room. And now low margins are so standard in the sport. It just kills people.”
The mortality risk here is ridiculously high. No matter how good you are at something, you're not perfect. In any other sport, you can be a half-second late and have normal consequences, recover and be okay. In BASE, you're dead.
This reminds me of Freeman Dyson's research on British Bombers during WWII -- the data showed experienced crews didn't fair better than novices, but they didn't figure out why till after the war.
> Bomber Command told the crews that their chances of survival would increase with experience, and the crews believed it. They were told, After you have got through the first few operations, things will get better. This idea was important for morale at a time when the fraction of crews surviving to the end of a 30-operation tour was only about 25 percent. I subdivided the experienced and inexperienced crews on each operation and did the analysis, and again, the result was clear. Experience did not reduce loss rates. The cause of losses, whatever it was, killed novice and expert crews impartially. This result contradicted the official dogma, and the Command never accepted it. I blame the ORS, and I blame myself in particular, for not taking this result seriously enough. The evidence showed that the main cause of losses was an attack that gave experienced crews no chance either to escape or to defend themselves. If we had taken the evidence more seriously, we might have discovered Schräge Musik in time to respond with effective countermeasures.
...
> the German pilots were highly skilled, and they hardly ever got shot down. They carried a firing system called Schräge Musik, or “crooked music,” which allowed them to fly underneath a bomber and fire guns upward at a 60-degree angle. The fighter could see the bomber clearly silhouetted against the night sky, while the bomber could not see the fighter. This system efficiently destroyed thousands of bombers, and we did not even know that it existed. This was the greatest failure of the ORS. We learned about Schräge Musik too late to do anything to counter it.
The wingsuit jumpers consider possible dangers to lie with complacency of experts on easy flights, experts envelope pushing, or novices jumping unprepared. But these factors are all so contradictory that I'm left wondering if there is a hidden risk that affects novices and experts alike.
I would look no further than the basic ingredients of the sport: speed, gravity, zero margin for error and over a long enough run of events you are destined for the morgue. This is not a sport, it is suicide in disguise.
One more thing: it's turned into a small industry. Some of the work in it I am certain is considered to be partly art (I am thinking of the analogy to the sailing industry in the early years of yachting). I wouldn't rule out a look to "advances" in suit design where the new engineering has an unforeseen consequence. Something the advanced guys would jump on board with, but we don't have enough data yet to determine the failures.
It could just be the non-linearity inherent in flight. Or perhaps being in proximity to the surface causes the Reynolds number to be more variable, meaning 10 experts could do the same maneuver and have different outcomes.
Does experience grow the margin of error? Do "incidents" become less fatal? Like in Russian roulette, its possible that experience doesn't improve your odds when something bad happens.
Sky diving is a little different, if a chute fails to open, your ability to remain calm and deal with it and deploy the backup makes a difference. In a lot of extreme activities I could see experience making a huge impact during incidents, flying suits might not be that forgiving.
In a comment elsewhere on this page capncrunch suggests downdrafts[1]. Seems like the kind of thing that could randomly strike novices and experts alike.
I had a close call this summer whitewater rafting on the Upper Animas River in Colorado and it has caused me to re-think every serious risk I take and has changed me in a big way. I was participating in a multi-day trip run by one of the local guiding outfits through the Upper section of the river, a much more difficult and serious undertaking than the Lower Animas, which is frequently run by average day-tripping tourists. We were on the No Name Rapid [1] and our boat capsized at the entrance to the rapid. I was stuck below the boat, my body somehow entangled in rigging, and was dragged underwater for some distance through a very fierce class V rapid. I was finally able to free myself enough to get my mouth above water and breathe, close to drowning. I managed to fully free myself and swam to shore at the first opportunity. When I made it, I kissed the ground and promised that I would never needlessly risk my life in the pursuit of adrenaline again. I cried like a baby when I returned home that evening and held my kids and wife again.
Prior to this trip, I had done many adventurous and dangerous activities: rock climbing, ice climbing, lots of mountaineering, off-road driving, backcountry skiing... it really brings it all into perspective when you have a close call. All of that adrenaline-chasing just seems completely ridiculous to me now.
I have a couple of friends, both white-water guides and accomplished outdoorsmen, and they both put whitewater in a different category of risk: you can do everything right, and still die just due to the unpredictability of it. One of them said he had an instructor who basically said "if you stick with this long enough, either you'll die or someone you know will". They were both in the latter category.
A pretty popular avalanche safety book [1] has, in the introduction, an actuarial table of your survival probability if you keep going out in avalanche terrain x days a year, year after year...
Yeah, I've heard both wingsuiting and ice climbing described similarly. Possibly not as high-risk, at least for ice climbing, but they have the same issue with random disaster. If you hit a death block somewhere, that's the end, and lifelong ice climbers build up a lot of chances at that no matter how good they are.
It depends on the class of rapids you navigate through. I have done couple in Himalayas below class 5 and in most of them the guide said the risks are pretty minimal.
That said, it's a river. You don't get to choose when bad luck hits. I have been a paddler for most of my life, and I have paddled over flatwater sections that have killed people just as handily as if they were a waterfall or a class VI rapid. We go to great lengths to be conscientious and meticulous in our preparation, and most of the time it pays off. I have run whitewater for many years in rafts and kayaks, and seen folks get hurt, but one of the worst injuries I have seen took place in two feet of calm water. I still go out, and I take my family on the river, but I always try to be meticulous in my preparation. That doesn't prevent calamity, but nothing will do that.
Had an experience like this while surfing, years ago. I trusted a friend and went out surfing when it was double overhead. Had no business doing that, being a fumbling idiot on a board but trusted him.
Made it out and caught a wave and wiped out -- can remember fighting the white water for what felt like 20 minutes, tumbling end over end and trying to time my gasps and keep cool. Just hoping I'd be washed inland if I just kept balancing the conservation of energy with forward progress.
Life isn't a joke and we shouldn't take it trivial. There are such joys all around us which don't require unnecessary high risks.
My very first whitewater rafting experience I went overboard on the first rapid. Boat just disappeared from under me and I was underwater not knowing which way was up. I had a lifevest and was nowhere near drowning, but it pretty well soured me on adventure sports for the rest of my life.
Nowhere near that close for me and a lot more soft, but still one of these “oh shit” moments was when I decided to go swimming when waves were bigger than usual due to a coming storm. It was all fun until I realized I wasn’t able to swim back to the shore to where I can stand. Every time I tried, a wave knocked me further into the ocean and my leftover stamina kept dropping. I was freaking out and had no idea how to get out of there.
Luckily the waves went smaller for some time and I was able to swim back to where I was able to feel the ground and pushed from there.
I knew that in the worst case the coastguard or other swimmers would have jumped in but still.
I found that the hard way. I was caught in an outward current and was desperately trying to swim towards the beach with waves constantly hammering me. When I was about to drown a lifeguard appeared from nowhere and dragged me sideways out of the current and then towards the beach.
Also waves come grouped in series of 3-10 (at least in the Atlantic Ocean) so the strategy is usually not to panic (easy to say) and wait for a small calm moment
The same happened to me. It was fun to swim in the big waves and spend half of the time under the water until I got tired and realized that the current was stronger than me.
I've been in that situation myself, a wave luckily brought me closer to the shore as I was about to quit and then I could just run to safety. I'm much more aware of dangerous zones in beaches nowadays. I recommend everyone to see a few of these videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+get+out+...
Eight or nine years ago, I lept off a tower from about 800 ft. After opening the parachute and scanning for my landing area I turned towards it to the left, which was slow and felt off. "Maybe I'll turn to the right and come around from the back", at which point the parachute collapses and spins violently from behind. I reach up and grab the left riser, the strap that connects you to the harness, and stopped the spin. When I let go the spin started again violently I again grabbed the riser and got the parachute over my head. I was descending fast below tree top level and I saw my shadow in my peripheral vision. Knees together and crash.
I immediately pat myself down to check for compound fractures. Safe.
On the ride home it was all really brought into perspective: if I didn't want to deal with such life threatening situations I'd of stayed at home. I made another couple of jumps that weekend.
Just a nit, because I spent years not realizing this due to my accent, but it's "I'd have" not "I'd of". It sounds like "I'd of" because "I'd've"
gz on surviving the fall so that you could have random people correct your grammar in the future. Glad to hear you kept with it-- people are surprisingly risk adverse yet will ignore passive danger
It's language evolving. When the misspellings/misinterpretations of "a napron" and "an eekname" became common enough we got "an apron" and "a nickname".
If anyone — especially native speakers and others with a high degree of mastery of English — claims to have difficulty understanding "I'd of stayed home" then they're most likely being deliberately obtuse or needlessly contrarian.
The reason English speakers understand it is because "I would have" when contracted to the maximum "I'd've" sounds like "I'd of". The fact that the two are effective homonyms doesn't make both spellings right. Rather, the "of" variant just looks a little bit ignorant. Not much, just a little.
Yes, the fact that they sound very much alike is exactly what's seeping into the written language, and as any linguist (like myself) will tell you, the written language is not what drives linguistic evolution, it's the spoken language. Writing commonly lags way behind, ergo the spoken language drives evolution of the written one, not vice versa.
The language isn't changing along your suggested dimension of change.
People have been misspelling homonyms since the beginning of the written word. Variance in homonym spelling decreases over time, though. "I'd of" is no more likely to supplant "I'd've" than "their" is "they're" - i.e. it's just a weak signal that someone is ignorant.
1. Examples like those involve changes in speech; there's no difference between the pronunciation of "of" and "'ve."
2. It hardly makes something correct just because you can understand it. I bet you can understand the intent of "the dog seems slieping," but it's also clearly not right.
Changes in speech drives changes in writing — every linguist will tell you that (I should know, I am one). Writing is — and always has been — way behind speech in terms of innovation.
Edit: Downvoting isn't going to change that. But you're welcome to show me an example of a linguist that claims that writing is the driving force in linguistic evolution.
I completely agree, but I can't see how that contradicts anything I just said. Using "of" here is not an example of "language evolution" any more than confusing "to" and "too" is.
I am not a linguist but you are using "evolution" as having another meaning than LilleSvin. For you it is something which is positively improving as in the layman idea about Darwin's evolution theory and for LilleSvin "evolution" means exactly what it means in biology: Changes that are at a wide scale.
For example in old Norse that was used on the north and east coasts of UK in 900 CE, "time" was not pronounced like "ta-ii-me" and the English word for "ship" was pronounced "skip", the more modern pronunciation happened after the great vocalic change, an evolution of the spoken dialect. There is nothing positive or negative in the great vocalic change, but it is an evolution of the language because after some time, most people spoke it that way, not anymore like old vikings did.
No, I'm not using "evolution" in some sort of Enlightenment sense where only things that contribute to the onward march of Progress count. I'm saying changes in spelling are nothing like the process of organic language evolution.
Also, one wonders why the "great vocalic change" (maybe the Great Vowel Shift, you mean) would have changed the pronunciation of the consonants leading "ship."
It most certainly is evolution. Among other things it shows a change in how "would have" is analyzed by speakers (into "would of"). They wouldn't actually be writing "would of" if it wasn't coherent with their analysis of the parts. (I feel like I shouldn't need to say that the analysis is of course subconscious, but now I did anyway.)
You're both right - it's evolving the language, just like lies evolve the truth, and a kid's clumsy drawing of a flower is a creative and unique artwork. Not being flippant. There is an inherent conflict between how people want it and how it is. The future might not care either way.
To my way of thinking, questions of orthography should be thought about differently than questions of grammar or vocabulary or other spoken-language issues. After all, we all learn to speak naturally and a standards body's decrees have little effect on how we speak. On the other hand, we have to make a conscious effort to learn to read and write, and standards bodies do regularly undertake, successfully, efforts to reform spelling.
you mentioned seeing your shadow in your vision, what does this mean? That the way the sun was oriented compared to where you were in your fall, that you were close to the ground?
I've been a paraglider for a long time and have observed this pattern so many times. When we have a brush with death or lose a friend, we go flying ASAP and confront the fear immediately. You invest far too much effort and risk into fear management, to lose ground over a setback. If we really prioritized survival for its own sake, we just wouldn't fly.
I'm not and have never been a thrill seeker but it was important to me to get back on the road and confront my anxiety after getting into a fairly bad car accident so I guess I can understand the impulse.
I gave up paragliding after 3 years. Had some close calls but never got injured myself. But I saw way too many ambulances up close loading people I knew.
Not to "umm actually" your excellent story, but rock climbing is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as driving, which people do all the time without even thinking about it. Mountaineering is where the danger is there, primarily.
I guess it depends how much you push things and yourself, if it's bouldering, sport climbing or trad (lets skip free soloing for this one :))
I don't have micromort stats around, but for example sport climbing, when not pushing constantly your limits and on bolted route that has not-very-old and reasonably placed protection, it feels as dangerous as some trail run in the forest. Risk of rock falling suddenly is next to 0, same goes for equipment failure.
bouldering & trad are different for obvious reasons, but again depends.
I have a friend who was a recreational climber. One day she's at the climbing wall with her boyfriend. She's climbing, he's on the ground holding her line.
For those who don't climb, and I don't (although I've been on a climbing wall), the idea is that if you fall the other person is holding on to the rope and and managing the slack so that you don't fall any distance and can be gently lowered or grab back onto the wall.
Her boyfriend wasn't paying attention; he was chatting to some friends of his and hadn't noticed how much slack there was in the line. She's quite high up the wall, loses grip, falls, and doesn't stop until she hits the ground because there's so much slack.
She's paralysed from the waist down, in a wheelchair for life. The boyfriend is, well, not her boyfriend any more.
She's made the best of the situation, has a good career, and has met someone else she's now engaged to, but she's still angry about it, and I can't say I blame her.
> rock climbing is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as driving
Expert mountain climbers: Annual mortality risk of 1 in 167.
Skydiving - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 1,580.
Recreational climbing - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 1,750.
Driving in the U.S. - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 6,700.
So, mountaineering is indeed 10x more dangerous than rock climbing, but rock climbing is still 4x more dangerous than driving, which is enough that I'd personally hesitate to equate them.
P.S. I hate sharing this because the infographic at the top is wrong on skydiving. (The picture at the top uses annual mortality rate for all other sports, but compares skydiving's risk per jump, so it's invalid to compare them together, but a lot of people aren't looking at the fine print. A single jump is a 1 in 100,000 change of dying, but skydiving lost an annual average of 1 per 1580 participants over the last 5 years. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety)
In my 30's I drove a motorcycle, the crotch rocket variety (Kawasaki 750). I had a few very close calls, then decided I had had a good run and a lot of fun, but it was time to hang it up. I could see the writing on the wall: keep doing this and I would have a serious accident, that would either leave me dead or seriously injured. I was, at the time, planning a family, and to this day miss riding but think it was absolutely the right choice.
A friend of mine had a relatively minor accident on his motorbike when his wife was pregnant, decided he'd been lucky and packed it all in. Sold his bike and gear within a few weeks and never went back.
Rode a sportbike all through college. I was - of course - a hooligan and rode with a bunch of other hooligans. After few of the folks in our group died (I didn't see the accidents, just heard about them) I stopped riding with them and slowed down. I recently got married and just gave up riding completely.
I think I'm a pretty safe rider, but the odds are just against me.
It was the right choice for a long and full life for sure.
My brother hung up, after being the < 1 in 10,000 to survive a banal accident on a freeway. Rounded a curve, was looking at the upcoming exit to see if it was a candidate lunch spot; looked back forward and traffic was at a standstill a couple hundred feet in front of him. He was going 70.
Laid down his bike, impact threw him over the median into oncoming traffic. When they put him in the helicopter he had zero blood pressure, a collapsed lung, and a snapped tibia sticking out. He wasn't wearing the armor my wife and I bought him as a Christmas present a few months earlier; it was too hot.
Heart surgeon got to his aorta when there was one layer of cells left. If it had also split, he would have bled out in < 90 seconds.
No one who worked on him had ever even heard of someone surviving injuries of his type.
Happy ending in this case. Rod in his leg but he runs 5ks. Happily married. Works in this industry.
But it's made me the annoying guy who stops colleagues and friends who ride (once) like some crusty Ancient Mariner to say, I'm that annoying guy who's going to urge you to not ride, because ...
Let me first say that I'm extremely glad to hear your brother has recovered and is doing well now. Sounds like it was a horrendous crash and to come back from something like that is nothing short of amazing.
With that being said, and for the benefit of anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation: laying the bike down is the absolute worst thing you can do.
For one thing, in doing so you will have relinquished all control over your fate and at best you will slide in whatever direction you were going when you hit the ground and if you're lucky maybe not hit any obstacles.
You are much better off applying the brakes progressively but firmly and scrubbing off as much speed as you can, particularly if you're going in a (roughly) straight line.
A good, reasonably modern, properly maintained bike will stop from 70 in less than 200 feet (the DVLA say it's 315 feet but those figures are based on braking distances for much older vehicles). It'll be damned uncomfortable and you'll feel like you're going to crush your balls on the fuel tank and then fly over the handle bars, and the back end will start skipping, but it'll stop. (Your biggest problem may be that whoever/whatever is behind you won't be able to stop so quickly.)
Even if not, allowing for some reaction time, you will be going a lot slower by the time you've reached the traffic and can go between the lanes or around the outside, and even if you come off you'll be coming off at, say 20 - 40mph, as opposed to 70mph, which is likely to leave you with a much better outcome.
I'd actually recommend, if you've had to suddenly slow down, you go between lanes or around traffic anyway just in case there is somebody behind you who doesn't react so quickly or is driving a heavier vehicle that can't slow down as quickly.
The whole idea of laying a bike down when you get into a sticky situation as the best course of action is a dangerous myth that needs to die.
The only time I can see that being better than any other alternative is if something like an articulated lorry/semi-rig is parked across the road in front of you and your options are to either try and slide under the trailer or smash directly into it. Otherwise stay on the bike, slow down as much as you can, and aim for the biggest gap that's available.
Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard. There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits, climbing, or whitewater rapids. The deaths that do occur are almost always from experienced jumpers that not following recommended safety processes, often in the pursuit of pushing things to the edge. The point is that unlike some other extreme sports, most skydiving deaths are preventable by conservative jumping.
> Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard
I'm sorry, but you've heard wrong. Skydiving is super dangerous, relative to other sports. Less than wingsuit flying, but more death per participant than most other sports.
There's an unfortunate infographic that's made the rounds that makes skydiving look relatively as dangerous as football, but they made a mistake with the numbers and left people with an incorrect and extremely misleading impression. A lot of people are now saying that skydiving is "as safe" or "safer" than football, and that is flat out false. I hope nobody is motivated to skydive thinking it's super safe, because it's not.
> There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits
For a single jumper, there's one redundancy - a spare chute - and they fail and/or tangle at about the rate of 1 in 800 jumps, from what I recall.
For a BASE jumper, there's no redundancy, they don't normally have a spare.
Almost everyone who jumps more than a few times does formation jumping or other group activities, if not get into BASE or wingsuit. Formation jumps put you at the mercy of other people, which are less controllable than mountains or trees. I stopped formation jumping after a couple of bad ones where I had close calls that were other people's mistakes.
Most of the people I knew during my time skydiving are now dead, more than a dozen people.
Here we go again.. (I think we discussed this topic previously)
Skydiving, hang gliding,Paragliding and many other "adventure sports" contain a significan amount of risk.. the difference is that skydiving (not base jumping) is tightly regulated by the FAA, there are strict training requirements, equipment maintenance etc etc .. it is almost like flying a plane. so.. it is super dangerous compared to knitting.. but it's quite safe compared to many other risk activities.. (Paragliding, hang gliding, motorcycle racing on a street, experimenting with drugs, proximity flying etc)
Most of the people I've met during 20 years skydiving are very much alive and still jumping, several hundred people..
Oh hey, you're right, we did discuss this a while ago. Nice to see you again!
Yes, you're right that skydiving is safe compared to the sports that are more dangerous than skydiving. I agree and admit there are sports and activities that are more dangerous than skydiving. Wingsuit flying is one of them.
That number is per jump, not per year. The other 11 pictures in the top 12 of that page are per year figures. The units are different, the comparison is invalid. Juxtaposing these numbers is wrong, and quoting 1/100,000 per jump is super misleading when you compare it to the annual fatality rates of other sports.
This is what I was talking about above. The annual fatality rate of skydiving is 1 in 1,580. Skydiving is a bit safer than hang-gliding, roughly 3x. It's definitely not 180x safer, which is the very first thing the infographic implies.
The infographic depicts skydiving as safer than boxing, football, canoeing, and SCUBA. That is flat false, skydiving is much more dangerous than all of those combined.
BTW, with respect to regulation, about one in about 1600 skydivers die each year after having gone through training, after safety inspections, after exposure to the risks and liability waivers, after subscribing to USPA magazine and reading about each and every death in the U.S., etc. etc. Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it. Skydiving has a relatively high fatality rate despite the fact that it's regulated and the skydiving population has more training and safety equipment than other sports.
Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe,
you may expect a higher percentage of people who
are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it
Breaking down the numbers, the skydiving fatality rate is a reported 1 in 101,083 jumps. To normalise that to a per-year rate, we can take the USPA rate of 350,000 participants conducting 3,000,000 skydives per year [1]. That gives a mean of 8.6 jumps per year for each participant.
Given the 1 in 101,083 risk, that amounts to roughly a 1 in 11,750 risk of fatality per year.
The risk of canoeing in the linked article [2] is 1 in 10,000, so according to those reported statistics, skydiving is slightly safer than canoeing, significantly safer than boxing, is roughly 3 times as risky as scuba diving, and 5 times as risky as football.
Decade 2010-2015
Average fatalities per year 22.3
Average membership per year 35,189
Fatalities per thousand members 0.63
You didn't bother reading my comment? You just shared the same link I shared and discussed above. Those two links you shared are both examples of failures of statistics. They are comparing the risk of a single jump to the risk of a year of participation in other activities. That's a math fail.
Skydiving is most definitely not safer than canoeing or boxing or SCUBA or football. It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. You've been misled by a cute poster that someone who's bad at stats screwed up.
I did read the comment, and reposted the same link to identify it as the source of the canoeing stat.
My reference to 350,000 participants is this text [1]:
The United States Parachuting Association has nearly 35,000 members.
It estimates that about 350,000 people complete more than
3 million jumps in a typical year.
3,000,000 jumps / 350,000 people = 8.57 jumps per person per year (approx).
It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could
be more dangerous than skydiving.
The perception of football as "safe" can be attributed to its popularity: many people play football, therefore it's viewed as normal, just like driving.
You've used an unsourced figure from a website that used faulty logic to evaluate the risks of skydiving relative to driving, in an intentionally misleading way.
You've done some calculation based on this unsourced number, while ignoring the mortality rate that the USPA publishes.
The USPA themselves says the annual risk of mortality is 0.63 per thousand members. That's about 1 in 1600.
You are off by an order of magnitude. It's no wonder you think skydiving is safer than canoeing, but it is not true.
The stats we have are for members and excludes non-members. But one thing you might be missing is that non-members jump an average of once. At least 90% of the 3.2 million jumps are repeat jumps by members, members comprise the bulk of the statistics anyway.
I agree that the reference to 350,000 is unsourced - the article claims that number comes from the USPA, but I can't find any relevant data on the USPA site.
non-members jump an average of once.
At least 90% of the 3.2 million jumps are repeat jumps by members
That was the figure that I was struggling to source, but 90% feels high to me. At 90%, that gives a mean of 82 jumps per member per year, which feels high to me (although my experience as UK skydiver may be skewed by the amount of time we spend on the ground waiting for the skies to clear!)
It would be useful to see a more complete breakdown of the jump stats and fatalities, because it might indicate the riskier elements of skydiving (my gut feel says swooping or high wing-loading), but I haven't found a data breakdown that detailed.
You're right; it would be useful to see a more complete breakdown, and get a better sense of what specific aspects are riskier. Hook turns are definitely a significant culprit, I agree with you. The BPA website (link below) has some claims about what the risk factors are.
> 90% feels high to me.
Well, I'm guessing on top of the unsourced 350k number you shared, so maybe it would be best if we stop guessing. But most non-members that jump are doing a tandem jump. A tandem jump in the US involves a USPA member doing a repeat jump, and most of the time a non-member making their first jump.
All we can say firmly is that 1 in around 1,600 trained and qualified USPA members die each year. That is the actual mortality rate for people who continue to participate in skydiving. Since you're in the UK, the BPA also publishes safety info separately http://www.bpa.org.uk/staysafe/how-safe/
The one thing you can't say is that canoeing is more dangerous than skydiving. According to the sources we have, canoeing mortality rate is 1/10k while skydiving is 1/1.6k. Skydivers die ~6x more per year than canoers.
Drivers in the US die at the rate of 1/6k per year according to the sources you shared. So skydiving is ~4x riskier than driving. And canoeing is less risky than driving.
We can ignore the question of how many jumpers are USPA members if we look at the per-jump fatality statistics. The 1 death per 101k jumps lets you evaluate the risk of doing a single jump vs doing 100 jumps in a year. Let's use the current USPA numbers instead, which is now averaging around 1 death per 140k jumps (shown here http://www.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety).
Your chance of dying doing a single jump is 1 in 140k. That seems low, but it's a single jump. Your chance of dying in a given year, if you make 100 jumps, is 100 in 140k, or 1 in 1,400. Some people do more than a thousand jumps per year, so if you jump 1000 times, your odds are 1 in 140. Looking at it this way, it's easier to gauge the risks because jumping more means risking more.
Please look at my comment above on Accidents vs Recklessness. As an example of a group that is well trained, follows procedures and plans properly, take the Golden Knights skydiving team.
They had a handful of deaths since they started in 1959. And their worst accident was a fatal aircraft failure, which is technically an aircraft accident, not a skydiving accident.
Read & replied. Valid point, IMO. I would agree completely that people who make safer choices will live longer statistically speaking than people who push the limits, cross more lines, fail to plan, etc.
The numbers we have are averages, there are definitely people beating the average through greater attention to safety. And, unfortunately, some groups that are on the other side of average.
Equipment is getting better too, and I have no doubt is helping lower the death rates. Pretty sure that loads more people were dying under old rounds that today's controllable squares. Lots of people died in WWII in Jeeps under parachutes. I remember the museum in New Orleans saying that Jeep jumps had a fatality rate of something like 30%. Can't tell you how thankful I am that I've never been asked to do that.
Would be interesting (but small sample size) to do the math on the Golden Knights and find the mortality rate. I totally expect it to be lower than for the general skydiving populating.
Some drivers take more risks than others, and insurance companies gather a bit more data on that kind of stuff. Rates might be higher if you get a speeding ticket, precisely because that correlates with accidents and claims more than people who have no record.
If not dying every time I jumped resulted in a new human being born, I might agree, but the death rate of births is a net negative. :P
Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US.
A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.
That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).
I hadn't heard about micromorts before, thanks! That's definitely an interesting and valuable unit for comparison. It adds perspective to the fatalities per year.
I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it.
For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes.
It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.
There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.
Let me explain:
When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing..
On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations.
So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence)
On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky)
My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.
With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)
> I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.
That is definitely true. These figures are dividing all deaths annually by number of participants. We are in murky water just by talking about risk rather than mortality rate. I'm guilty of doing that. We can't know the risk of a skydive per-se, we just know that 1/100k skydives in the past has ended in a death. We also know that the rate of deaths per skydive is going down over time, given the last 20 years of data.
> There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.
You're right on both counts. 1- some people take more risk than others in a given sport, and 2- that relative risk-taking within a sport is not taken into account in the mortality rates we have at hand.
Recklessness is a subjective, touchy-feely concept though. It's opinion and not something we can measure, so we will never be able to take it into account. We also don't know whether people within one sport are any more "reckless" than in another. Reckless behavior might be correlated with overall risk, or it might be heavily influenced by training and regulation and community.
Most deaths aren't due to crossing the line of any specific safety procedure. It's not recommended to hook turn, but it's also not a rule or law. A lot of people choose to do it for the extra thrill, and know that it's riskier than a straight upwind landing. All reckless deaths are also accidents. The line just might be too hard to draw.
Many people do call choosing to participate in a risky sport "reckless". Proximity wingsuit flying seems reckless to me, it's an activity that is very prone to deadly accident. You can certainly play it safer than some other people, but by choosing to participate you're accepting a level of risk that is unacceptable to some other people. I also acknowledge individual choice in this regard. It's okay to accept a higher level of risk than someone else.
The main thing that's probably bad to do is to rationalize a choice by thinking it's less risky than it really is. If you calculate your risk wrong, then you can't make an informed choice, which leads to unintentionally reckless decisions.
The other thing not being considered in this thread is injury rate vs fatality rate. I think it's pretty reasonable to weigh fatality much more heavily than recoverable injury, but I will openly admit that the big picture has a lot more gray area than the black/white numbers on fatalities per year.
I don't know, it's probably significant, and I think that data is out there. The USPA reports all the accidents monthly. I just looked here: http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/ and 2 of the 5 most recent are low turn accidents. I once watched a guy hook turn and break his back. :(
The sixth time, you realize it's a sport. There are skills to learn, goals to achieve, and both fun and serious competitions to pursue
At this point you learn that risk and danger are, to some degree, under your control. Maintain your gear, don't do stupid stunts, do jump with well known safety practices (e.g.: minimum opening altitude, separation before opening, etc.).
Also, skydiving is not the same sport as BASE jumping.
I ride dirtbikes and ski regularly. I wear all the protective gear and am satisfied with the risk/adrenaline profile. I am often looked at as an adventurous risk taker, but I think people often underestimate other risky activities which impart nowhere near as much adrenaline. Case in point, I was in Thailand last winter. Tourists who otherwise aren't adventurous ride scooters freely because everyone in Thailand does. They ride scooters wearing flip flops without a helmet. The worst was when I was at a bar with an otherwise boring couple, we wanted to go to another bar so they suggested that I get on the back of their scooter, all three of us. They weren't hammered but had been drinking and had little overall two wheel experience. Riding on a scooter in the first place isn't particularly fun, riding with two other people on a scooter is downright dangerous, why risk it. I hired a tuktuk.
Regular BASE jumpers perform worse on all these metrics but don't die as much. All these metrics apply the same to skydiving wingsuit jumpers but they don't die as much.
The real problem is that flying closer to things leads to more likes.
1. BASE Jumping is dangerous, because sometimes the parachute opens backwards and slams you back into the object you jumped off of.
2. Solution: Use Wingsuits to get further from the object before deploying the chute.
3. Thrill Seekers: So this means we can skim over the rocky ground and through forests right?
4. What, no! That would have the opposite effect! Absolutely not! We were trying to make fewer corpses, not more!
5. I'm gonna be a hero...
Met billionaires, actors, famous people. Saw places I'd never have seen that are some of the most beautiful on Earth, and even got married at one of them.
Talking about all the things around the experience. In fact most of the reason I still continue to do it is the people.
I'm with you, it seems like confused macho posturing from people who seem to have little comprehension that they have responsibilities beyond their immediate desire for excitement, I have no statistics but I'm going good to guess it's a predominantly male sport, the mother's, fathers family and friends and responders they leave behind might have expected more, just because you can does not mean you should.
For me, it was probably for the same reasons that some (many? Most?) do drugs, for the moment of mental escape when your entire attention is truly needed in the moment.
While I thoroughly enjoyed adrenaline sports and got off lightly (one clavicle, boxers fracture, one ankle, and a couple of separated shoulders) what actually helped me was years of therapy and mindfulness
I still enjoy the sports, but not at the edge, just being on the mountain/wave/rapids is enough these days
Perhaps for the same reasons certain people are attracted to service in the military. Some people report getting a massive kick out of participating in active armed combat situations, to the point that civilian life seems dull in comparison.
Not sure. The knowledge of fake risk ("you're being shot at, yes, but it's just paint-filled balls - painful yet nonlethal") diminishes the fight-or-flight reaction.
"[W]hen I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain.
It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant. "
[1] 'The Spirit of St Louis,' Charles A. Lindbergh, 1953
Proximity flying is just inherently dangerous. Even with power, many people have died. Sparky Imeson, who wrote the "bible" of mountain flying, died from flying too close to terrain. The strange thing is that he was actually flying back to somewhere that he had had an accident in the past (the first time he just got seriously injured, the second time he died). If you look at the accident location, there is a valley at right-angles to the valley they're flying up, possibly causing katabatic downdrafts or something similar.
Steve Fossett apparently died flying too close to terrain at high density altitude with forecast winds possibly resulting in downdrafts.
Both of those people were extremely experienced pilots, but they just cut the margin for error too low. The main problem seems to be that winds are somewhat unpredictable, and if you're flying too close to terrain you might not have a chance to recover if you hit a sudden downdraft. I can't imagine doing this with a powered aircraft, never mind a wingsuit.
These pilots who died were 100-300ft from terrain, never mind a few feet like these unpowered wingsuit pilots. If you stall from 100ft you're dead in almost any type of aircraft as there isn't enough altitude to recover. (I don't know how many of these wingsuit deaths were caused by stalls. It seems equally likely that they just misjudged things or a small change in wind just pushed them into terrain).
There's gotta be safer ways to get an adrenaline rush.
BASE wingsuit fliers tend to skim just above the surface of a slope rather than flying at higher altitude. You'll see it a lot if you watch GoPro videos. This is phenomenally dangerous in a powered aircraft, but it's near-suicidal if you're flying a wingsuit.
But it makes for awesome GoPro footage[1] so people keep doing it. When you see people flying so low that they have to weave between trees you know that they're going to make a mistake or hit an unexpected gust of wind and kill themselves sooner rather than later.
I didn't go out to find a video of someone who died, but I guess if you're looking for videos of people doing insanely dangerous stunts it shouldn't be a surprise.
FYI, here's the article on his death. Yes, he died just as you would have expected: jumping off of a mountain with in a wingsuit.
My dad was a mechanical engineer that spent most of his working career supporting the development of aircraft. Me mentioned there are two paradoxical things about aircraft.
The higher you fly, the safer it is. Flying higher gives the pilot more time to fix problems. Took a while for early aviators to realize this. Many died.
And the faster you land, the safer it is. Landing faster reduces the relative effects of wind shear. For a couple of reasons. The most obvious is the effect of a 20mph wind shear is less at 120mph than 60. And higher landing speed, higher stall speed, higher wing loading, less effects due to buffeting. This took even longer to realize. For a while the FAA had a rule limiting the maximum stall speed of commercial aircraft. That rule killed people.
Point being guys flying wing suits are flying in an intrinsically dangerous flight envelope.
When I was learning how to fly RC airplanes my teacher didn't give me control until we were 3 mistakes high. It's a funny term, but it also gets the point across better than any other unit of measure.
I doubt VR will ever replace dangerous sports. You get adrenaline rush precisely for the fact that you realize it's dangerous with a real potential of getting killed or wounded and the fact that you get away with it. Sitting in an armchair with no such potential consequences might get you some thrills but it's nowhere close to the real adrenaline rush. I don't actively pursuit this feeling, but driving motorcycle regularly had put me in several close calls over the years giving an adrenaline rush I realize can not be replicated in the safer environments.
This is why I always wish I went into game development. Maybe it can't be the same thing, but the experience can still be extraordinary. Even playing a game like Kerbal Space Program makes you feel like an astronaut. I can't imagine how good virtual reality can get.
But you get the rush from playing those games, not developing them. I mean, you do get a rush from releasing something you finished and believe in, but it's not what you're looking for, right?
Correct, 100% right. However, I like to think of it like a musician. If I don't like music, I make music I like. So if I wanted an awesome experience from a game, I could make the game and experience I want. Of course, all that is harder to do with programming (than music), but you get the drift.
Also that feeling of falling, when you jump out of a plane that's the scariest part in my experience the initial drop. Then when the parachute is open, you look up at these thin nylon strings holding you up.
Honestly, I think the existence of free soloists is proof that VR won't replace risky sports.
A non-trivial number of people choose to go out and rock climb without using ropes, even on climbs where ropes could easily be added. That's not purely about risk-taking, but it seems to give lie to any idea that a safe simulation will be satisfying for everyone.
I love VR car racing, and it's way cheaper when I make a mistake and spin or go into a wall, but it's just not the same as an actual track day (not racing, just a standard "high performance driving event") in my boring daily driver. I'm not sure it will ever be.
You don't have to be real in VR, you just have to reach "the suspension of disbelief". That is really quite easy to do. The human mind seems to search for it.
I know in the early days of VR I had a helmet on and was walking between two buildings on a beam. Tricky bastards then made the beam (which was lying on the ground) warp so you lost your balance, I truly thought I was dying for 10 seconds.
...which, of course, defeats the point "I did something insanely dangerous and did not die". Is there a way to increase safety while keeping the feeling of danger? That sounds like a contradiction to me.
Some people get off on the feeling of danger. I read an article once about a solo free climber who had attached some handholds to the ceiling of his apartment for practice, but it wasn't enough, so he build a board full of steak knives pointing upward to place under the handholds for the proper feeling.
Sadly I can't find the article anymore. I suspect it may have been taken down out of respect for the dead.
Kite-surfing introduces the risks of drowning and hypothermia.
Without looking through the stats, I wouldn't like to say which is more dangerous, and without data it would be reckless to assume one or the other because it "seems more dangerous", but kite-surfing comes with unique dangers that don't exist in skydiving, and vice-versa.
I was flying a kite on a wide open beach the other day. With the constant sea-to-land wind it was a piece of cake, once the kite was above 20ft it just stayed up.
However the next day, somehow the airflow was much more turbulent. I would get the kite a good 100 ft up and still, suddenly a particular vortex would flip it upside down and slam it into the ground. Made me think exactly about this kind of activity and how risky it must be.
Flying is not natural for humans. Our instincts are wrong, and our senses misinform us. This is well known among pilots, and why one has to fly regularly to keep the license, and why a large part of pilot training focuses on trusting the instruments rather than your body.
Pilot training only focuses on instruments during IFR training. Private pilot and most VFR is done without emphasis on instruments. Aerobatics rely on senses and no instruments.
Source: Skydiver, BASE jumper, paraglider, aerobatic airplane pilot, private pilot land and sea.
But I bet you check the airspeed and altitude before doing any maneuvers that'll take you near the ground. I've seen the videos of pilots at airshows pulling out of a dive and having not quite enough altitude to do it.
Also, stall recovery is well known to be something that runs counter to every natural instinct a person has.
There's a difference between using one's own senses and using one's own instincts. Stall recovery is easily done with one's own senses (sight, hearing, and proprioception), even though the correct response is counter-intuitive.
Looking at the instruments would even be a bad idea when you stall, because you'd lose time which you could use to save your life.
I even know of a sailplane instructor that turn the instruments off for the student (not for himself, though), so the student can learn to read his own sensory information correctly before relying on instruments.
Yes, this! Flying is hard and our instincts are wrong.
Anyway, pilot training is focused on dealing with critical and problematic situations. To be able to fly with instruments only, without them in case of failure, to glide safely, to not fly in proximity to other objects ;-) etc.
Unfortunately, IMO in wingsuit flying, the safety is so thin that it would be hardly significantly improved with regulated training.
Typing on a keyboard is not natural for humans, and yet here I am doing just that, having gotten here in unnatural ways: by car, train, and bicycle. I don't think flying is any more unnatural than any of the myriad things that we do each day.
I've picked up a bicycle after not riding for 10 years, and it's true, you never forget how to ride. But this is just not true for flying. You must fly regularly or your license will be suspended.
A large part of instrument flying training is teaching you to ignore what your body is telling you and trust the instruments.
(My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force. When JFK Jr crashed, the first thing he said was "spacial disorientation". Weeks later, that was the conclusion of the investigation.)
>In researching 2016’s dramatic rise in BASE jumping deaths, I was almost unable to keep up with the pace with which people were dying.
Perhaps something to do with the increased popularity of social media and action cameras -- thus attracting a large body of non-seriously committed, in it for the views, darwin award nominees?
You have to wonder, how many of them would be doing this (or any other "crazy" thing) if there were no cameras, no YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram Live, etc.?
I don't know how many people are doing it for the "internet fame" (my gut instinct is that it's a small percentage), but I'm sure there are many people who got into the sport in the first place because they watched it on the internet.
> I don't know how many people are doing it for the "internet fame" (my gut instinct is that it's a small percentage)
I don't have any numbers, but as with anything else (e.g. Russian dash cams) I don't feel that the behaviour of people has really changed.
The difference now is everyone has a camera strapped to them, and with social media it's much easier to hear about someone who died doing X than in previous decades.
BASE jumping is a dangerous sport. The advent of live streaming and HD cameras small enough to strap to your helmet and hand haven't changed this, but rather raised the profile of a failure.
People were white-lining with their crotch-rocket motorcycles at 135 mph before cameras got small enough to mount on their helmets.
They used to just be a page 3 story in the local newspaper. Now their final rides are re-posted to every "rekt" thread.
Perhaps eventually, enough people will absorb the lesson that doing a dangerous thing is dangerous, and will stop trying to make the "oh shit" glands above their kidneys express their "we're about to die" juice.
I have seen enough of those videos that I'm pretty sure that the way I will die is by my tiny commuter sedan being forcibly disassembled by a heavy tractor-trailer or large SUV that crosses the center line. Humans are such fragile things. Why would you intentionally do things that might get your brains splattered across a rock, when we only have another 40 to 60 years to go until you can make a backup almost as good as biology provided?
To some extent I agree, but there are fads and fashions.
I'd say the massive growth in popularity of, not just BASE, but other extreme sports, is down to publicity (in various forms) and accessibility. There's now so much content online that if, say, you've ever been skiing it's pretty hard to avoid seeing some BASE jumping footage, and then you get to thinking, "that looks pretty cool," and then some of those people decide to try it.
My take on BASE jumping is that it is kind of cool and exciting but not something you should take up if you have any kind of aspirations or ambitions in any other area of your life because the risk profile is simply too extreme.
You can ski your whole life and unless you're constantly doing hardcore back-country, probably, the worst thing that might happen to you is a broken leg. Even that's too much for some people.
Contrast that with BASE jumping, where if you do it for long enough it seems like the chances of dying for any other reason drop almost to zero.
But people see how cool it is and don't necessarily assess the risk.
And then there's the fact that to achieve any kind of success/celebrity, even enough to just about eke out a living, you have to keep pushing to ever more extreme feats. Filming that is part and parcel of ekeing out that living. And of course, as a side-effect, it increases interest in the sport and gets more people into it.
I have been volunteer in a Spanish org called "proyecto hombre" that help people with drugs.
People on drugs are almost non human in order to take a dose, they will kill you,or steal and they really don't care because the only thing they care about is their next dose.
Once you have recovered the person it looks like another one, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I also did BASE in the past. I don't do it anymore because my girlfriend, I do sky diving which is way safer.
Most of what we have today, like airplanes, is possible because someone quasi suicided(Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Pasteur, the Curies, von Braum with rockets...).
Almost any single aircraft pioneer died as a result of accidents on their prototypes.
Pugilism is almost unique. Players are trying to hurt eachother. That's the competition. If many people were dying, then it would be a sport where you try and sometimes succeed in killing an oponent. That's different in most minds from "dangerous."
A lot of things are tolerated (in that they aren't prevented) that are very high risk. Mountaineering is the first one that comes to mind.
All that said, I kind of agree with you. GoPro (also redbull and some others) are drawing benefits from uniquely risky activities. This creates an incentive problem. It would make sense for this issues to go in front of a judge.
There are just to many factors you do not controll, especially if you fly close to terrain.
That tree that was upright yesterday, might have dropped.
The birds that where far away in the morning, might get in your way.
The little pond on the way, that was just mud, is dryed dust today swirling up.
Carl Boenish, who is considered father of modern base jumping, died while performing a base jump next day after marking his name in Guinness World Records. 'Sunshine Superman'[1] a documentary made on his life and death is worth watching.
>People expected wingsuit BASE to become safer with experience;
And I'm sure safety does improve with experience. They're still rolling the dice though. Some roll it with better odds than others sure but ultimately:
>On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
>(but that it actually doesn't) is the primary thesis of this article
Kinda.
It does improve safety in the sense that someone with zero jumps under their belt is far more likely to die than someone with some experience. That should be fairly self-evident and the fact that they even list a common beginner mistake shows this effect.
That quote you've got there to me is trying to communicate that experience will improve your odds but won't save you from my "on a long enough timeline..." quote.
The other thing that screw this up is that a noob and an experienced jumper won't be doing comparable things. So the experienced jumper is safer, but is also doing substantially more dangerous stuff. Measuring deaths vs experience doesn't capture that.
The most telling fact is that there is no clear bias of experience in these accidents. This simply means that the method is wrong. For sure, this is a bit like calling water wet, but people will continue to turn themselves into high performance lawn darts until they change their approach to safety.
I think a lot of them don't fully appreciate how little room for error there is. They fly at around 150 MPH which is 220 feet per second. Once someone has realized there is a problem, they have gone 55 feet. Once their body and flight suit have reacted to that problem, they could easily be well past having traveled 300 feet. This is assuming perfection in body and suit. It's radically easy to blow through 600+ feet before your mid/body/suit can come up with a survival plan if you are even a little bit panicky.
Quite a few deaths are from impacting terrain. By this I mean in transit terrain, meaning that they flew into something like the talus or a giant rock and didn't have enough time to avoid it.
Quite a few more deaths are from inability to deploy the parachute in time.
I think there are a lot of parallels with motor racing here. It was extremely dangerous on its early days, and didn't get safer when drivers got more experienced. It got safer when the cars got safer, and we still get deaths anyway (most recently in F1 the death of Jules Bianchi)
I have been a serious F1 fan for closing on four decades and I must implore you and anybody else who might be tempted to discount to present values the hope that you express, to consider just how far motorsports* the physical environment and envelope of racing has been altered:.
- magnesium (not alloy!) monocoque body shells were ruled out.
- as were countless rare or highly expensive materials that created paper thin transitions in operation before failure.
- strict cockpit exit limits are enforced, 5s max to be standing on the tarmac and already have the steering wheel replaced
- pit speed limit introduced and lowered
- cornering radii universally enlarged, both by track design and track enlargement
- ditto above because high torque hybrid formula propulsion gives you more apex profiles
- driver aides have been a feature of F1 regardless of the rules, at no time has every assistant device become illegal
- hundreds billions of dollars in chassis, monocoque and aerodynamic R&D have been expended since I was born.
- delta sector split times read out on the steering wheel, feeding the driver closing dynamics and other indicators alert to track slicks and debris
Those were in no particular order, but all changes to far more than likely possible with wingsuits and skydiving.
Moreover these changes happened over decades.
That may be too obvious.
Until you next hear a water cooler cringe worthy moment when a proverbial PHB or sales jock exclaims how everything is enabled nowadays to the ultimate, by modern technology. We're all susceptible to a little bit of that..
* in my example F1, which suffered a near 30% fatality rate in years around the time of my birth, causing F1 to take a early lead, but it is not the solitary work of F1, the HANS device is a NASCAR R&D product that has saved F1 lives certainly.
(I'm a rare advocate of taking much more of the American culture than would be popular, as I feel that avoidable accidents have occurred due to overreliance on the systems and that gut instincts are not on balance a negative in racing, as you may be inclined to imagine, if you are a American fan visiting your first F1 weekend. But the culture as a danger is something that F1 had to address internally, or be outlawed, very early in relative time.)
So, you're agreeing with me? F1 got safer because the cars got safer, not because the drivers drive more safely (safety measures were pushed by drivers though)
> I later learned this man’s real name was Armin Schmieder. He was Italian, but lived in Freiburg, Germany. He was a father to a young child. He was 28.
this pisses me off so much. Why would anyone but that irresponsible?
Reading through I surprised to learn that both novices and veterans of the sport are dying. I suppose that's just how dangerous it is.
As for myself, while I'm sure these are incredible experiences, there are other amazing things I can experience in life that aren't nearly as deadly. I'll stick with those and optimize for total volume of as incredible life experiences as is possible before I (hopefully) die of natural causes at an old age. Having a kid on the way changes my perspective as well.
> Wingsuiters are striking apple-size targets from a mile away. And they’re flying mere inches above, around, and sometimes even through terrain that’s barely wider than their own outstretched arms.
Well, seems like they've answered their own question.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 70.1 ms ] threadAntennae
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You can pilot a wingsuit from a plane or much higher, but most of the people that die wingsuit flying are proximity flying - which has way smaller margin for error and higher mortality rate.
It's an addictive feeling, and it can trick you, because you know it's dangerous but you're always come out of it fine, great even, until you don't.
That was for motorcycles where accidents are survivable and things are much more in your control.
For low wingsuit flying those last two points are both questionable.
A wingsuit can give you freer air for deployment, which increases the margin for error, but wingsuit BASE seems to be aimed at proximity flying.
Do you just jump and then use a parachute when you get low enough?
A few people have landed with their wingsuits, but that's pretty rare. Look up Gary Connery or Jeb Corliss for example.
You are still going pretty fast, you need ideal terrain (angle, water or boxes), and a hundred things have to go perfectly fine. It's a pretty insane feast.
Then pull your chute whenever.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2VIbrVVQRw
The general training arc would be to learn wingsuiting from an aircraft (like a regular skydive), and build up hours/experience flying a wingsuit in clear air (and deploying a parachute several thousand feet above the ground), before going into wingsuit base jumping (and build up experience there before going into prox).
There's some more detail in this Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-take-to-become-a-wingsuit...
https://youtu.be/X6zxtGyZFSE
What struck me about the profiled jumpers was their calm, sane demeanor -- not the showboat thrillseekers I expected.
BUT, most seemed unsatisfied by the experience when minimizing risk. To me, being 100 or more feet from terrain would be the experience of a lifetime. But many leaders in the sport keep pushing the envelope to a fatal degree (and in each example it was terrain, not equipment failure or weather).
About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers. It can be done relatively safely but the group isn't big enough to regulate effectively and most BASE jumpers are hostile to anyone mentioning the idea.
Perhaps this is a confounding factor: as Spooky23 notes in a sibling comment, "Cars are engineered to protect all but the most reckless and negligent from death" - but indeed, who else would choose BASE but the reckless and the self-proclaimed immortals?
For the age group 25-44 we have 269.8 male deaths per 100k, vs 114.8 female ones - or a total of 192.0 per 100k regardless of gender, or nearly ~2 per 1000.
Looking at http://base-jumping.eu/base-jumping-fatality-list/ , which might be a bit dated, I see 26 fatalities listed for 2015 world wide. I tried to find how many base jumpers exist, and ended up on a forum where it was speculated upon. Perhaps 3000? In which case we have a mortality of ~9 per thousand , no age group discrimination.
So.. from that perhaps naive collection I see a 4-5x increased risk of dying if being a base jumper compared to just being average. However one can ponder if it would help fight depression and such. And, looking at death rates for 45+ , cancer then becoming a major killer with obesity certainly being a factor. How many lives does the fitness regime of base jumping save?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/may/22/did-rules...
[2] http://www.nerverush.com/base-jumping-locations-plan-jump/
It's not like poeple don't understand the risk - especially by the time they get to the point where they can actually do it. What about all the other 'extreme' sports where death and/or serious injury is a possible outcome?
Because someone one has to clean up the mess. And it wastes the coroners time.
I'm not saying I agree that it should be banned, but those seem like two obvious angles.
one out of endless examples - what about forumla 1/indycar racing? utterly useless and highly unecological activity, pushing technology and people to its limits. sounds faimilar? is it more acceptable because you own a car?
Cleanup the mess is a valid point, but only justifies posting a bond at most.
Maybe instead you get them contributing to a local SAR organization. Maybe they have to get insurance. Or something else more constructive and less ham-fisted than just making it illegal.
Why is banning stuff so high on everyone's list of solutions to problems that don't really affect them?
Perhaps because:
> And it wastes the coroners time.
means it does affect them (the tax payers)?
Personally, I think as few things as possible should be banned/restricted. If things directly impact other peoples lives, then sure, but if its indirect or minimal, then perhaps not. Its a difficult balance though (but in general, I'm in the "the less government involvement in the peoples lives the better" camp).
Okay sure. but...
> About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers.
How is 10-20 peoples worth of coronor time worldwide an appreciable number for taxpayers. Furthermore is it even remotely comparable to the cost of trying to enforce a ban, which would presumably also be funded by tax payers.
My point is more that you've at least thought about it a little, unlike the OP of this thread.
[1] I'm obviously not 100% sure about this last one but it seems likely.
On the other hand, in many states it is banned and illegal to sign a waiver stating you understand the risks, then buy and consume unpasteurized milk.
Twice in one week without supplemental oxygen:
http://www.kilianjornet.cat/en/blog/kilian-jornet-summits-ev...
Anyway, it's a good economic resource for those countries.
The Antenna part of BASE must be getting harder to achieve. When I worked in the radio and TV broadcast industry we had problems with BASE jumpers climbing masts at remote unmanned sites, but physical security is always being improved. Also, you wouldn't want to try climbing onto a live high power mast radiator, you would be vaporized.
Some people are comfortable taking greater risks than others. We should be free to make that choice without threat of legal harassment.
I looked at the BASE fatality list. Vast majority of the names and nationalities are of European descent and/or nationality.
Are adventure sports (risk taking for thrill) a white European thing? Do you have to have a sort of arrogance and privilege to disrespect risks like this?
I personally have no desire for any of this stuff, as I'm quite aware of risk generally.
...
> It does, and most BASE jumpers that I know / have met / have taught
2 years in the sport, already broke yourself twice, and already "teaching" other jumpers?
Don't forget to burn some sites on youtube and facebook, to complete the package. Remember - if you didn't get any likes for it, the jump never happened.
Watching people discuss BASE on a tech forum feels like watching technology being discussed on a knitting forum.
Also, I work at a large dropzone and with a well-organized group to help coach new jumpers along the way. Me breaking myself on my first weekend is a pretty strong coaching moment that I've watched shift people's view on the sport.
Happy to let you know who I am in real life if you feel this strongly that I'm part of the problem.
I'm not so sure: BASE is expensive. Think about the demographic in here: tech workers, probably a lot of them doing reasonably well financially, and probably quite a few are outdoorsy.
Any of these hobbies is expensive when you really get into them: BASE, mountain-biking, motorcycling, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, paragliding, skydiving. Yet you find lots of techies doing all of them because they can actually afford to.
I was talking about the actual content of the many cringeworthy comments coming from people who were clearly trying to sound informed on a subject they don't understand. Like a knitting circle discussing cryptocurrency.
I see it constantly when anything about flying comes up as well. One or two actual pilots will show up, and 500 people who did an intro lesson or got to take the controls in a friend's plane once, will start trying to share their vast knowledge of the finer points of powered flight.
You're going to die anyways, probably from something a lot more terrifying and/or painful like cancer or Alzheimer's. I'm not convinced that hitting the ground really hard is a worse death than average.
It's not insane to maximize your enjoyment while alive instead of compromising on quality to get more quantity. It's up to every individual to decide on that balance for themselves.
> Most beginners who die appear to be making variations of the exact same error, according to Webb. “They jump off a cliff, get flying, and for some reason there's just this human reaction to try to hug the air like a big, gigantic beach ball,” he explains. “By hugging air you feel as if you're creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What ends up happening is your suit can only grab so much air, and it starts to stall. When it starts to stall, it loses lift, starts to drag, and then, splat.
> Figuring out why the best are dying confounds, saddens, and even irritates just about everyone I’ve spoken to in the wingsuit BASE world. “It’s really puzzling to me,” says Rich Webb. “I wish I knew, but I think it has to do with complacency.”
> Webb points out that many of the best are dying on flight lines that might be considered either “easy” for them, or they’re lines that they’ve done before. “It comes down to the fact that they're so comfortable in a stupidly high-risk environment,” says Webb. “We just don't have the luxury of margins in our sport, so at some point it catches up to you if you're not on it all the time.”
> Andy Lewis speculates, “I would say so many experienced wingsuiters are dying because they are trying to execute jumps with very low margin for error. Eventually when you make a mistake you hope you have room. And now low margins are so standard in the sport. It just kills people.”
The mortality risk here is ridiculously high. No matter how good you are at something, you're not perfect. In any other sport, you can be a half-second late and have normal consequences, recover and be okay. In BASE, you're dead.
> Bomber Command told the crews that their chances of survival would increase with experience, and the crews believed it. They were told, After you have got through the first few operations, things will get better. This idea was important for morale at a time when the fraction of crews surviving to the end of a 30-operation tour was only about 25 percent. I subdivided the experienced and inexperienced crews on each operation and did the analysis, and again, the result was clear. Experience did not reduce loss rates. The cause of losses, whatever it was, killed novice and expert crews impartially. This result contradicted the official dogma, and the Command never accepted it. I blame the ORS, and I blame myself in particular, for not taking this result seriously enough. The evidence showed that the main cause of losses was an attack that gave experienced crews no chance either to escape or to defend themselves. If we had taken the evidence more seriously, we might have discovered Schräge Musik in time to respond with effective countermeasures.
...
> the German pilots were highly skilled, and they hardly ever got shot down. They carried a firing system called Schräge Musik, or “crooked music,” which allowed them to fly underneath a bomber and fire guns upward at a 60-degree angle. The fighter could see the bomber clearly silhouetted against the night sky, while the bomber could not see the fighter. This system efficiently destroyed thousands of bombers, and we did not even know that it existed. This was the greatest failure of the ORS. We learned about Schräge Musik too late to do anything to counter it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/406789/a-failure-of-intel...
The wingsuit jumpers consider possible dangers to lie with complacency of experts on easy flights, experts envelope pushing, or novices jumping unprepared. But these factors are all so contradictory that I'm left wondering if there is a hidden risk that affects novices and experts alike.
My first instinct for where to look to find things that would affect experts and beginners alike is manufacturing defects or poor suit design.
I'd say also weather but that seems more likely to be highly variable and prone to skill (i.e. experts know when conditions are poor).
Sky diving is a little different, if a chute fails to open, your ability to remain calm and deal with it and deploy the backup makes a difference. In a lot of extreme activities I could see experience making a huge impact during incidents, flying suits might not be that forgiving.
In a comment elsewhere on this page capncrunch suggests downdrafts[1]. Seems like the kind of thing that could randomly strike novices and experts alike.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15114380
This sport has no safety margin. The reasons this margin is insufficient for beginners and experts differ.
Prior to this trip, I had done many adventurous and dangerous activities: rock climbing, ice climbing, lots of mountaineering, off-road driving, backcountry skiing... it really brings it all into perspective when you have a close call. All of that adrenaline-chasing just seems completely ridiculous to me now.
[1] The No Name Rapid. We capsized at the spot pictured at around 0:04s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjO37ABQ6mI
[1] http://www.mountaineersbooks.org/Staying-Alive-in-Avalanche-...
Made it out and caught a wave and wiped out -- can remember fighting the white water for what felt like 20 minutes, tumbling end over end and trying to time my gasps and keep cool. Just hoping I'd be washed inland if I just kept balancing the conservation of energy with forward progress.
Life isn't a joke and we shouldn't take it trivial. There are such joys all around us which don't require unnecessary high risks.
Luckily the waves went smaller for some time and I was able to swim back to where I was able to feel the ground and pushed from there.
I knew that in the worst case the coastguard or other swimmers would have jumped in but still.
I immediately pat myself down to check for compound fractures. Safe.
On the ride home it was all really brought into perspective: if I didn't want to deal with such life threatening situations I'd of stayed at home. I made another couple of jumps that weekend.
gz on surviving the fall so that you could have random people correct your grammar in the future. Glad to hear you kept with it-- people are surprisingly risk adverse yet will ignore passive danger
If anyone — especially native speakers and others with a high degree of mastery of English — claims to have difficulty understanding "I'd of stayed home" then they're most likely being deliberately obtuse or needlessly contrarian.
Intentionally funny, or irony?
As in "I would at stayed home." or "I at good grammar."
People have been misspelling homonyms since the beginning of the written word. Variance in homonym spelling decreases over time, though. "I'd of" is no more likely to supplant "I'd've" than "their" is "they're" - i.e. it's just a weak signal that someone is ignorant.
1. Examples like those involve changes in speech; there's no difference between the pronunciation of "of" and "'ve."
2. It hardly makes something correct just because you can understand it. I bet you can understand the intent of "the dog seems slieping," but it's also clearly not right.
Edit: Downvoting isn't going to change that. But you're welcome to show me an example of a linguist that claims that writing is the driving force in linguistic evolution.
For example in old Norse that was used on the north and east coasts of UK in 900 CE, "time" was not pronounced like "ta-ii-me" and the English word for "ship" was pronounced "skip", the more modern pronunciation happened after the great vocalic change, an evolution of the spoken dialect. There is nothing positive or negative in the great vocalic change, but it is an evolution of the language because after some time, most people spoke it that way, not anymore like old vikings did.
(edited because I made many spelling errors)
Also, one wonders why the "great vocalic change" (maybe the Great Vowel Shift, you mean) would have changed the pronunciation of the consonants leading "ship."
Re-analyses like this aren't exactly uncommon. Here are a few other examples with "would have/of": http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001291.h...
I don't have micromort stats around, but for example sport climbing, when not pushing constantly your limits and on bolted route that has not-very-old and reasonably placed protection, it feels as dangerous as some trail run in the forest. Risk of rock falling suddenly is next to 0, same goes for equipment failure.
bouldering & trad are different for obvious reasons, but again depends.
Trust in your line, I guess.
For those who don't climb, and I don't (although I've been on a climbing wall), the idea is that if you fall the other person is holding on to the rope and and managing the slack so that you don't fall any distance and can be gently lowered or grab back onto the wall.
Her boyfriend wasn't paying attention; he was chatting to some friends of his and hadn't noticed how much slack there was in the line. She's quite high up the wall, loses grip, falls, and doesn't stop until she hits the ground because there's so much slack.
She's paralysed from the waist down, in a wheelchair for life. The boyfriend is, well, not her boyfriend any more.
She's made the best of the situation, has a good career, and has met someone else she's now engaged to, but she's still angry about it, and I can't say I blame her.
Source: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
P.S. I hate sharing this because the infographic at the top is wrong on skydiving. (The picture at the top uses annual mortality rate for all other sports, but compares skydiving's risk per jump, so it's invalid to compare them together, but a lot of people aren't looking at the fine print. A single jump is a 1 in 100,000 change of dying, but skydiving lost an annual average of 1 per 1580 participants over the last 5 years. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety)
I think I'm a pretty safe rider, but the odds are just against me.
My brother hung up, after being the < 1 in 10,000 to survive a banal accident on a freeway. Rounded a curve, was looking at the upcoming exit to see if it was a candidate lunch spot; looked back forward and traffic was at a standstill a couple hundred feet in front of him. He was going 70.
Laid down his bike, impact threw him over the median into oncoming traffic. When they put him in the helicopter he had zero blood pressure, a collapsed lung, and a snapped tibia sticking out. He wasn't wearing the armor my wife and I bought him as a Christmas present a few months earlier; it was too hot.
Heart surgeon got to his aorta when there was one layer of cells left. If it had also split, he would have bled out in < 90 seconds.
No one who worked on him had ever even heard of someone surviving injuries of his type.
Happy ending in this case. Rod in his leg but he runs 5ks. Happily married. Works in this industry.
But it's made me the annoying guy who stops colleagues and friends who ride (once) like some crusty Ancient Mariner to say, I'm that annoying guy who's going to urge you to not ride, because ...
Glad you made it!
With that being said, and for the benefit of anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation: laying the bike down is the absolute worst thing you can do.
For one thing, in doing so you will have relinquished all control over your fate and at best you will slide in whatever direction you were going when you hit the ground and if you're lucky maybe not hit any obstacles.
You are much better off applying the brakes progressively but firmly and scrubbing off as much speed as you can, particularly if you're going in a (roughly) straight line.
A good, reasonably modern, properly maintained bike will stop from 70 in less than 200 feet (the DVLA say it's 315 feet but those figures are based on braking distances for much older vehicles). It'll be damned uncomfortable and you'll feel like you're going to crush your balls on the fuel tank and then fly over the handle bars, and the back end will start skipping, but it'll stop. (Your biggest problem may be that whoever/whatever is behind you won't be able to stop so quickly.)
Even if not, allowing for some reaction time, you will be going a lot slower by the time you've reached the traffic and can go between the lanes or around the outside, and even if you come off you'll be coming off at, say 20 - 40mph, as opposed to 70mph, which is likely to leave you with a much better outcome.
I'd actually recommend, if you've had to suddenly slow down, you go between lanes or around traffic anyway just in case there is somebody behind you who doesn't react so quickly or is driving a heavier vehicle that can't slow down as quickly.
The whole idea of laying a bike down when you get into a sticky situation as the best course of action is a dangerous myth that needs to die.
The only time I can see that being better than any other alternative is if something like an articulated lorry/semi-rig is parked across the road in front of you and your options are to either try and slide under the trailer or smash directly into it. Otherwise stay on the bike, slow down as much as you can, and aim for the biggest gap that's available.
The first time it's frightening.
The second to fourth time it gives you an adrenaline rush.
The fifth time suddenly you think "holy shit, what am I doing?"
At least, that's what a friend told me.
I'm sorry, but you've heard wrong. Skydiving is super dangerous, relative to other sports. Less than wingsuit flying, but more death per participant than most other sports.
There's an unfortunate infographic that's made the rounds that makes skydiving look relatively as dangerous as football, but they made a mistake with the numbers and left people with an incorrect and extremely misleading impression. A lot of people are now saying that skydiving is "as safe" or "safer" than football, and that is flat out false. I hope nobody is motivated to skydive thinking it's super safe, because it's not.
> There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits
For a single jumper, there's one redundancy - a spare chute - and they fail and/or tangle at about the rate of 1 in 800 jumps, from what I recall.
For a BASE jumper, there's no redundancy, they don't normally have a spare.
Almost everyone who jumps more than a few times does formation jumping or other group activities, if not get into BASE or wingsuit. Formation jumps put you at the mercy of other people, which are less controllable than mountains or trees. I stopped formation jumping after a couple of bad ones where I had close calls that were other people's mistakes.
Most of the people I knew during my time skydiving are now dead, more than a dozen people.
Skydiving, hang gliding,Paragliding and many other "adventure sports" contain a significan amount of risk.. the difference is that skydiving (not base jumping) is tightly regulated by the FAA, there are strict training requirements, equipment maintenance etc etc .. it is almost like flying a plane. so.. it is super dangerous compared to knitting.. but it's quite safe compared to many other risk activities.. (Paragliding, hang gliding, motorcycle racing on a street, experimenting with drugs, proximity flying etc)
Most of the people I've met during 20 years skydiving are very much alive and still jumping, several hundred people..
Yes, you're right that skydiving is safe compared to the sports that are more dangerous than skydiving. I agree and admit there are sports and activities that are more dangerous than skydiving. Wingsuit flying is one of them.
Last time we talked, you said the risk of dying skydiving is 1 in 100,000 and pointed at the comparative table here: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507
That number is per jump, not per year. The other 11 pictures in the top 12 of that page are per year figures. The units are different, the comparison is invalid. Juxtaposing these numbers is wrong, and quoting 1/100,000 per jump is super misleading when you compare it to the annual fatality rates of other sports.
This is what I was talking about above. The annual fatality rate of skydiving is 1 in 1,580. Skydiving is a bit safer than hang-gliding, roughly 3x. It's definitely not 180x safer, which is the very first thing the infographic implies.
The infographic depicts skydiving as safer than boxing, football, canoeing, and SCUBA. That is flat false, skydiving is much more dangerous than all of those combined.
BTW, with respect to regulation, about one in about 1600 skydivers die each year after having gone through training, after safety inspections, after exposure to the risks and liability waivers, after subscribing to USPA magazine and reading about each and every death in the U.S., etc. etc. Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it. Skydiving has a relatively high fatality rate despite the fact that it's regulated and the skydiving population has more training and safety equipment than other sports.
Given the 1 in 101,083 risk, that amounts to roughly a 1 in 11,750 risk of fatality per year.
The risk of canoeing in the linked article [2] is 1 in 10,000, so according to those reported statistics, skydiving is slightly safer than canoeing, significantly safer than boxing, is roughly 3 times as risky as scuba diving, and 5 times as risky as football.
[1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm
[2] http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
Skydiving is most definitely not safer than canoeing or boxing or SCUBA or football. It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. You've been misled by a cute poster that someone who's bad at stats screwed up.
My reference to 350,000 participants is this text [1]:
3,000,000 jumps / 350,000 people = 8.57 jumps per person per year (approx). The perception of football as "safe" can be attributed to its popularity: many people play football, therefore it's viewed as normal, just like driving.[1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm
You've done some calculation based on this unsourced number, while ignoring the mortality rate that the USPA publishes.
The USPA themselves says the annual risk of mortality is 0.63 per thousand members. That's about 1 in 1600.
You are off by an order of magnitude. It's no wonder you think skydiving is safer than canoeing, but it is not true.
The stats we have are for members and excludes non-members. But one thing you might be missing is that non-members jump an average of once. At least 90% of the 3.2 million jumps are repeat jumps by members, members comprise the bulk of the statistics anyway.
It would be useful to see a more complete breakdown of the jump stats and fatalities, because it might indicate the riskier elements of skydiving (my gut feel says swooping or high wing-loading), but I haven't found a data breakdown that detailed.
> 90% feels high to me.
Well, I'm guessing on top of the unsourced 350k number you shared, so maybe it would be best if we stop guessing. But most non-members that jump are doing a tandem jump. A tandem jump in the US involves a USPA member doing a repeat jump, and most of the time a non-member making their first jump.
All we can say firmly is that 1 in around 1,600 trained and qualified USPA members die each year. That is the actual mortality rate for people who continue to participate in skydiving. Since you're in the UK, the BPA also publishes safety info separately http://www.bpa.org.uk/staysafe/how-safe/
The one thing you can't say is that canoeing is more dangerous than skydiving. According to the sources we have, canoeing mortality rate is 1/10k while skydiving is 1/1.6k. Skydivers die ~6x more per year than canoers.
Drivers in the US die at the rate of 1/6k per year according to the sources you shared. So skydiving is ~4x riskier than driving. And canoeing is less risky than driving.
We can ignore the question of how many jumpers are USPA members if we look at the per-jump fatality statistics. The 1 death per 101k jumps lets you evaluate the risk of doing a single jump vs doing 100 jumps in a year. Let's use the current USPA numbers instead, which is now averaging around 1 death per 140k jumps (shown here http://www.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety).
Your chance of dying doing a single jump is 1 in 140k. That seems low, but it's a single jump. Your chance of dying in a given year, if you make 100 jumps, is 100 in 140k, or 1 in 1,400. Some people do more than a thousand jumps per year, so if you jump 1000 times, your odds are 1 in 140. Looking at it this way, it's easier to gauge the risks because jumping more means risking more.
They had a handful of deaths since they started in 1959. And their worst accident was a fatal aircraft failure, which is technically an aircraft accident, not a skydiving accident.
The numbers we have are averages, there are definitely people beating the average through greater attention to safety. And, unfortunately, some groups that are on the other side of average.
Equipment is getting better too, and I have no doubt is helping lower the death rates. Pretty sure that loads more people were dying under old rounds that today's controllable squares. Lots of people died in WWII in Jeeps under parachutes. I remember the museum in New Orleans saying that Jeep jumps had a fatality rate of something like 30%. Can't tell you how thankful I am that I've never been asked to do that.
Would be interesting (but small sample size) to do the math on the Golden Knights and find the mortality rate. I totally expect it to be lower than for the general skydiving populating.
Some drivers take more risks than others, and insurance companies gather a bit more data on that kind of stuff. Rates might be higher if you get a speeding ticket, precisely because that correlates with accidents and claims more than people who have no record.
Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US.
A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.
That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).
Micromort values from wikipedia :
- skydiving : 8 per jump
- hang gliding : 8 per trip
- motorcycle : 1 per 10km
- Ecstasy (MDMA, drug) : 0.5-13 per pill
- BASE-jumping : 430 per jump
So as you can see; skydiving, hang-gliding, motorcycling and drugs are in the same ballpark. BASE-jumping is way worse.
When you are young, you "spend" around 1 micromort per day just being alive, it goes up steeply as you get older.
I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it.
For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes.
It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.
Let me explain: When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing..
On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations.
So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence)
On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky)
My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.
With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)
That is definitely true. These figures are dividing all deaths annually by number of participants. We are in murky water just by talking about risk rather than mortality rate. I'm guilty of doing that. We can't know the risk of a skydive per-se, we just know that 1/100k skydives in the past has ended in a death. We also know that the rate of deaths per skydive is going down over time, given the last 20 years of data.
> There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.
You're right on both counts. 1- some people take more risk than others in a given sport, and 2- that relative risk-taking within a sport is not taken into account in the mortality rates we have at hand.
Recklessness is a subjective, touchy-feely concept though. It's opinion and not something we can measure, so we will never be able to take it into account. We also don't know whether people within one sport are any more "reckless" than in another. Reckless behavior might be correlated with overall risk, or it might be heavily influenced by training and regulation and community.
Most deaths aren't due to crossing the line of any specific safety procedure. It's not recommended to hook turn, but it's also not a rule or law. A lot of people choose to do it for the extra thrill, and know that it's riskier than a straight upwind landing. All reckless deaths are also accidents. The line just might be too hard to draw.
Many people do call choosing to participate in a risky sport "reckless". Proximity wingsuit flying seems reckless to me, it's an activity that is very prone to deadly accident. You can certainly play it safer than some other people, but by choosing to participate you're accepting a level of risk that is unacceptable to some other people. I also acknowledge individual choice in this regard. It's okay to accept a higher level of risk than someone else.
The main thing that's probably bad to do is to rationalize a choice by thinking it's less risky than it really is. If you calculate your risk wrong, then you can't make an informed choice, which leads to unintentionally reckless decisions.
The other thing not being considered in this thread is injury rate vs fatality rate. I think it's pretty reasonable to weigh fatality much more heavily than recoverable injury, but I will openly admit that the big picture has a lot more gray area than the black/white numbers on fatalities per year.
At this point you learn that risk and danger are, to some degree, under your control. Maintain your gear, don't do stupid stunts, do jump with well known safety practices (e.g.: minimum opening altitude, separation before opening, etc.).
Also, skydiving is not the same sport as BASE jumping.
- because their sink rate is too high, and gets worse when they stall?
- because 3:1 is a lousy glide angle?
- because their wings are too small?
The real problem is that flying closer to things leads to more likes.
1. BASE Jumping is dangerous, because sometimes the parachute opens backwards and slams you back into the object you jumped off of. 2. Solution: Use Wingsuits to get further from the object before deploying the chute. 3. Thrill Seekers: So this means we can skim over the rocky ground and through forests right? 4. What, no! That would have the opposite effect! Absolutely not! We were trying to make fewer corpses, not more! 5. I'm gonna be a hero...
I've been skydiving and base jumping longer than I've not been and it's led me to some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Sure, but to be fair, so is everything else.
Talking about all the things around the experience. In fact most of the reason I still continue to do it is the people.
For me, it was probably for the same reasons that some (many? Most?) do drugs, for the moment of mental escape when your entire attention is truly needed in the moment.
While I thoroughly enjoyed adrenaline sports and got off lightly (one clavicle, boxers fracture, one ankle, and a couple of separated shoulders) what actually helped me was years of therapy and mindfulness
I still enjoy the sports, but not at the edge, just being on the mountain/wave/rapids is enough these days
My father was an abusive alcoholic FWIW
"[W]hen I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain.
It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant. "
[1] 'The Spirit of St Louis,' Charles A. Lindbergh, 1953
Steve Fossett apparently died flying too close to terrain at high density altitude with forecast winds possibly resulting in downdrafts.
Both of those people were extremely experienced pilots, but they just cut the margin for error too low. The main problem seems to be that winds are somewhat unpredictable, and if you're flying too close to terrain you might not have a chance to recover if you hit a sudden downdraft. I can't imagine doing this with a powered aircraft, never mind a wingsuit.
These pilots who died were 100-300ft from terrain, never mind a few feet like these unpowered wingsuit pilots. If you stall from 100ft you're dead in almost any type of aircraft as there isn't enough altitude to recover. (I don't know how many of these wingsuit deaths were caused by stalls. It seems equally likely that they just misjudged things or a small change in wind just pushed them into terrain).
There's gotta be safer ways to get an adrenaline rush.
Is that a euphemism for crashing into the ground?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTzwvyzzfjk
FYI, here's the article on his death. Yes, he died just as you would have expected: jumping off of a mountain with in a wingsuit.
http://globalnews.ca/news/3219444/canadian-wingsuit-flyer-gr...
The higher you fly, the safer it is. Flying higher gives the pilot more time to fix problems. Took a while for early aviators to realize this. Many died.
And the faster you land, the safer it is. Landing faster reduces the relative effects of wind shear. For a couple of reasons. The most obvious is the effect of a 20mph wind shear is less at 120mph than 60. And higher landing speed, higher stall speed, higher wing loading, less effects due to buffeting. This took even longer to realize. For a while the FAA had a rule limiting the maximum stall speed of commercial aircraft. That rule killed people.
Point being guys flying wing suits are flying in an intrinsically dangerous flight envelope.
I have heard pilots refer to "mistakes" as a unit of measure for altitude. You want to spend as much time as possible 2+ mistakes high.
I was suprised to see no mention of VR as a potential alternative anywhere in the thread. I suppose realism still has a long way to go!
A non-trivial number of people choose to go out and rock climb without using ropes, even on climbs where ropes could easily be added. That's not purely about risk-taking, but it seems to give lie to any idea that a safe simulation will be satisfying for everyone.
I know in the early days of VR I had a helmet on and was walking between two buildings on a beam. Tricky bastards then made the beam (which was lying on the ground) warp so you lost your balance, I truly thought I was dying for 10 seconds.
What about kite surfing?
Sadly I can't find the article anymore. I suspect it may have been taken down out of respect for the dead.
Without looking through the stats, I wouldn't like to say which is more dangerous, and without data it would be reckless to assume one or the other because it "seems more dangerous", but kite-surfing comes with unique dangers that don't exist in skydiving, and vice-versa.
However the next day, somehow the airflow was much more turbulent. I would get the kite a good 100 ft up and still, suddenly a particular vortex would flip it upside down and slam it into the ground. Made me think exactly about this kind of activity and how risky it must be.
Source: Skydiver, BASE jumper, paraglider, aerobatic airplane pilot, private pilot land and sea.
But I bet you check the airspeed and altitude before doing any maneuvers that'll take you near the ground. I've seen the videos of pilots at airshows pulling out of a dive and having not quite enough altitude to do it.
Also, stall recovery is well known to be something that runs counter to every natural instinct a person has.
Looking at the instruments would even be a bad idea when you stall, because you'd lose time which you could use to save your life.
I even know of a sailplane instructor that turn the instruments off for the student (not for himself, though), so the student can learn to read his own sensory information correctly before relying on instruments.
Anyway, pilot training is focused on dealing with critical and problematic situations. To be able to fly with instruments only, without them in case of failure, to glide safely, to not fly in proximity to other objects ;-) etc. Unfortunately, IMO in wingsuit flying, the safety is so thin that it would be hardly significantly improved with regulated training.
I've picked up a bicycle after not riding for 10 years, and it's true, you never forget how to ride. But this is just not true for flying. You must fly regularly or your license will be suspended.
A large part of instrument flying training is teaching you to ignore what your body is telling you and trust the instruments.
(My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force. When JFK Jr crashed, the first thing he said was "spacial disorientation". Weeks later, that was the conclusion of the investigation.)
Virtually zero or really zero?
Apparently the author hasn't heard about all the human powered flight initiatives, including crossing the English Channel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft
The past few years is pretty sobering, especially given that most of these guys were experts and clearly knew their stuff
Perhaps something to do with the increased popularity of social media and action cameras -- thus attracting a large body of non-seriously committed, in it for the views, darwin award nominees?
>Five days earlier, the GoPro star Uli Emanuele, 29, died when he crashed in the Dolomites of his native country, Italy.
Freedom for these people (mostly young men) to die is one thing.
But part of GoPro's profits are knowingly built up by a quasi-suicide cult.
That's not that different from dealing heroin.
I don't have any numbers, but as with anything else (e.g. Russian dash cams) I don't feel that the behaviour of people has really changed.
The difference now is everyone has a camera strapped to them, and with social media it's much easier to hear about someone who died doing X than in previous decades.
BASE jumping is a dangerous sport. The advent of live streaming and HD cameras small enough to strap to your helmet and hand haven't changed this, but rather raised the profile of a failure.
They used to just be a page 3 story in the local newspaper. Now their final rides are re-posted to every "rekt" thread.
Perhaps eventually, enough people will absorb the lesson that doing a dangerous thing is dangerous, and will stop trying to make the "oh shit" glands above their kidneys express their "we're about to die" juice.
I have seen enough of those videos that I'm pretty sure that the way I will die is by my tiny commuter sedan being forcibly disassembled by a heavy tractor-trailer or large SUV that crosses the center line. Humans are such fragile things. Why would you intentionally do things that might get your brains splattered across a rock, when we only have another 40 to 60 years to go until you can make a backup almost as good as biology provided?
I'd say the massive growth in popularity of, not just BASE, but other extreme sports, is down to publicity (in various forms) and accessibility. There's now so much content online that if, say, you've ever been skiing it's pretty hard to avoid seeing some BASE jumping footage, and then you get to thinking, "that looks pretty cool," and then some of those people decide to try it.
My take on BASE jumping is that it is kind of cool and exciting but not something you should take up if you have any kind of aspirations or ambitions in any other area of your life because the risk profile is simply too extreme.
You can ski your whole life and unless you're constantly doing hardcore back-country, probably, the worst thing that might happen to you is a broken leg. Even that's too much for some people.
Contrast that with BASE jumping, where if you do it for long enough it seems like the chances of dying for any other reason drop almost to zero.
But people see how cool it is and don't necessarily assess the risk.
And then there's the fact that to achieve any kind of success/celebrity, even enough to just about eke out a living, you have to keep pushing to ever more extreme feats. Filming that is part and parcel of ekeing out that living. And of course, as a side-effect, it increases interest in the sport and gets more people into it.
I have been volunteer in a Spanish org called "proyecto hombre" that help people with drugs.
People on drugs are almost non human in order to take a dose, they will kill you,or steal and they really don't care because the only thing they care about is their next dose.
Once you have recovered the person it looks like another one, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I also did BASE in the past. I don't do it anymore because my girlfriend, I do sky diving which is way safer.
Most of what we have today, like airplanes, is possible because someone quasi suicided(Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Pasteur, the Curies, von Braum with rockets...).
Almost any single aircraft pioneer died as a result of accidents on their prototypes.
I agree with some of that. Progress and freedom have costs.
Where it gets problematic for me is when there is a promoting entity that doesn't have skin in the game [0].
Also, maybe drugs weren't the best analogy:
What about MMA (mixed-martial arts)? Would the UFC be tolerated if the death-rates matched wing suit jumping?
Also, one-way trips to Mars: Are those people and entities promoting the idea planning to go to Mars themselves?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_game_(phrase)
A lot of things are tolerated (in that they aren't prevented) that are very high risk. Mountaineering is the first one that comes to mind.
All that said, I kind of agree with you. GoPro (also redbull and some others) are drawing benefits from uniquely risky activities. This creates an incentive problem. It would make sense for this issues to go in front of a judge.
How is that?
That tree that was upright yesterday, might have dropped. The birds that where far away in the morning, might get in your way. The little pond on the way, that was just mud, is dryed dust today swirling up.
Wind drafts coming and going.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1322313/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Do something stupidly dangerous enough & in large numbers and you get rows of bodybags.
Sounds callous but that is the reality of it.
People expected wingsuit BASE to become safer with experience; practitioners didn't expect it to be a toss of the dice no matter what.
And I'm sure safety does improve with experience. They're still rolling the dice though. Some roll it with better odds than others sure but ultimately:
>On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
The fact that people generally seem to assume it does (but that it actually doesn't) is the primary thesis of this article:
"What’s more worrying about wingsuit BASE fatalities, though, is that there appears to be no consistent bias toward experience."
Kinda.
It does improve safety in the sense that someone with zero jumps under their belt is far more likely to die than someone with some experience. That should be fairly self-evident and the fact that they even list a common beginner mistake shows this effect.
That quote you've got there to me is trying to communicate that experience will improve your odds but won't save you from my "on a long enough timeline..." quote.
The other thing that screw this up is that a noob and an experienced jumper won't be doing comparable things. So the experienced jumper is safer, but is also doing substantially more dangerous stuff. Measuring deaths vs experience doesn't capture that.
Somebody should calculate P-value for that claim.
I think a lot of them don't fully appreciate how little room for error there is. They fly at around 150 MPH which is 220 feet per second. Once someone has realized there is a problem, they have gone 55 feet. Once their body and flight suit have reacted to that problem, they could easily be well past having traveled 300 feet. This is assuming perfection in body and suit. It's radically easy to blow through 600+ feet before your mid/body/suit can come up with a survival plan if you are even a little bit panicky.
Quite a few deaths are from impacting terrain. By this I mean in transit terrain, meaning that they flew into something like the talus or a giant rock and didn't have enough time to avoid it.
Quite a few more deaths are from inability to deploy the parachute in time.
I have been a serious F1 fan for closing on four decades and I must implore you and anybody else who might be tempted to discount to present values the hope that you express, to consider just how far motorsports* the physical environment and envelope of racing has been altered:.
- magnesium (not alloy!) monocoque body shells were ruled out.
- as were countless rare or highly expensive materials that created paper thin transitions in operation before failure.
- strict cockpit exit limits are enforced, 5s max to be standing on the tarmac and already have the steering wheel replaced
- pit speed limit introduced and lowered
- cornering radii universally enlarged, both by track design and track enlargement
- ditto above because high torque hybrid formula propulsion gives you more apex profiles
- driver aides have been a feature of F1 regardless of the rules, at no time has every assistant device become illegal
- hundreds billions of dollars in chassis, monocoque and aerodynamic R&D have been expended since I was born.
- delta sector split times read out on the steering wheel, feeding the driver closing dynamics and other indicators alert to track slicks and debris
Those were in no particular order, but all changes to far more than likely possible with wingsuits and skydiving.
Moreover these changes happened over decades.
That may be too obvious.
Until you next hear a water cooler cringe worthy moment when a proverbial PHB or sales jock exclaims how everything is enabled nowadays to the ultimate, by modern technology. We're all susceptible to a little bit of that..
* in my example F1, which suffered a near 30% fatality rate in years around the time of my birth, causing F1 to take a early lead, but it is not the solitary work of F1, the HANS device is a NASCAR R&D product that has saved F1 lives certainly.
(I'm a rare advocate of taking much more of the American culture than would be popular, as I feel that avoidable accidents have occurred due to overreliance on the systems and that gut instincts are not on balance a negative in racing, as you may be inclined to imagine, if you are a American fan visiting your first F1 weekend. But the culture as a danger is something that F1 had to address internally, or be outlawed, very early in relative time.)
Edit: phone
this pisses me off so much. Why would anyone but that irresponsible?
As for myself, while I'm sure these are incredible experiences, there are other amazing things I can experience in life that aren't nearly as deadly. I'll stick with those and optimize for total volume of as incredible life experiences as is possible before I (hopefully) die of natural causes at an old age. Having a kid on the way changes my perspective as well.
Well, seems like they've answered their own question.