> RWY had the original idea but was reluctant to say it out loud for years. In a moment of weakness, he shared it with MWY and BKN, both of whom immediately recognized this as the best idea RWY will ever have. RWY and LRV wrote the first draft. CS, DBK, JBS, EAS, and JLH provided critical review. RMD provided subject matter expertise. DSK took this work to another satirical level. All authors suffered substantial abdominal discomfort from laughter. RWY worried that BKN would not keep his mouth shut until the Christmas issue was published.
I believe it is a real, satirical study that was performed to address a real, serious issue with the way some studies are performed.
My understanding of the target of the satire is studies that compare a treatment to a placebo only in "low risk" populations, and then find that they're is no significant difference between the treatment and the placebo.
> they jumped from an average altitude of 0.6 m (SD 0.1) on aircraft moving at an average of 0 km/h
> The study also has several limitations. First and most importantly, our findings might not be generalizable to the use of parachutes in aircraft traveling at a higher altitude or velocity. Consideration could be made to conduct additional randomized clinical trials in these higher risk settings. However, previous theoretical work supporting the use of parachutes could reduce the feasibility of enrolling participants in such studies
I believe that deplorable paucity of RCT evidence was first noted in 2003, in "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials"
I'm glad to see that's finally been addressed! Though for the counterpoint, also see "Most medical practices are not parachutes: a citation analysis of practices felt by biomedical authors to be analogous to parachutes"
Are you joking? Conclusion from the article: "Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice."
For emphasis: "... the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps."
Okay, parachutes don't help when jumping from stationary aircraft that are on the ground. I will not leap to the conclusion that parachutes do not help with high altitude jumps.
The BMJ Christmas edition is a bit of humour. It's making fun of how everything needs to be a randomized controlled trial and observational evidence is considered inferior ignoring all common sense.
Solid "you had me in the first half" energy. I was seriously raising my eyebrow until I got to the bit about parachute-less participants jumping from a half meter altitude. Well done.
> Even as Hatmaker spiralled towards the ground, she says the thought she might die never crossed her mind. At most, she thought she might break a leg – jeopardising her plans to climb to Mount Everest Base Camp three days later, a trip that had been a goal of hers for a couple of years.
Stories of people surviving falls from planes 'without a parachute' are inevitably somewhat exaggerated- they survived a fall with a partially functional parachute. Her injuries were horrific and it's incredible that she and the baby survived, but with no parachute at all at terminal velocity (at least 120mph) there would have been few pieces of her left large enough to scrape up.
“Experts have said that she survived the fall because she was harnessed into her seat, the window seat, which was attached to the two seats to her left as part of a row of three. That was thought to have functioned as a parachute which slowed her fall.”
I didn’t say ‘never’, these stories are generally exaggerated, for example:
“Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact”
Again incredible that she survived but she was inside some piece of plane which sounds like it both protected her and slowed her fall.
Wikipedia summarizes what I was getting at:
“Over the years, other skydivers have survived accidents where the press has reported that no parachute was open, yet they were actually being slowed by a small area of tangled parachute. They might still be very lucky to survive, but an impact at 130 km/h (80 mph) is much less severe than the 190 km/h (120 mph) that might occur in normal freefall”
I jumped (not from a plane, from the ground) and landed wrong, and my knee has been hurting for like 4 years. This story gives me inspiration to get back to training, if you can recover from a failed parachute in 2 years, it should not take 5 years to recover from slipping.
If you land a bit funny and slightly tear a meniscus or something, you just have an annoying knee until you get around to seeing a doctor about it, whereas you can be pretty sure that doctors are involved right from the get to in recovery from a failed chute.
Good for you. But I agree with the "survivorship bias" story. I wanna hear from the person who didn't recover physically and developed the emotional, mental and spiritual strength to still enjoy life. Life sometimes doesn't get better from the outside looking in.
I sort of doubt that she was actually feeling calm. Adrenaline could potentially create such a feeling because of the mental concentration coming from it, but it's extremely hard to believe a novice parachuter, who seemed to make several mistakes, remained "calm" during an event in which her breaking her back was about the best outcome she could hope for.
> Even as Hatmaker spiralled towards the ground, she says the thought she might die never crossed her mind. At most, she thought she might break a leg – jeopardising her plans to climb to Mount Everest Base Camp three days later, a trip that had been a goal of hers for a couple of years.
This seems completely illogical and naive. I mean, really? I'd be worried about dying, breaking my leg, or breaking my back falling off my roof, much less from 13,000 feet.
Why doubt what someone felt when they specifically said what they felt?
> I'd be worried about dying, breaking my leg, or breaking my back falling off my roof
I sort of doubt he was actually worried about dying as he was falling off his roof. I mean, really? It's extremely illogical and naive. Unbelievable that an adult would be so irrational. Plus unless his house is so tall the fall would take minutes he would simply not have enough time to properly worry about anything.
Naive? How would it be naive? Falling off a roof is one of the easy ways for someone to accidentally kill themselves. Anyone dealing with a roof should have "falling -> death" near the top of their mind.
She didn't seek to climb Everest; she was going to the base camp. Going to base camp is not without hazard (people have died from altitude sickness, falls, or avalanches), but it's tiny compared to the hazards involved in summiting.
> I sort of doubt that she was actually feeling calm. Adrenaline could potentially create such a feeling
That was the claim, wasn't it? ... feeling calm?
> This seems completely illogical and naive. I mean, really?
Statistically, it was a good assessment. Skydiving accidents are 40x more likely to by injuries, rather than deaths, and most of those are lower extremity injuries.
You’d be surprised how the human mind and body automatically reacts to extreme situations that we cannot fathom while sitting comfortably on our chairs. :-)
I think it's just the wrong implied use of calm. There's no way her body was in a calm state. It's just that adrenaline adjusts the bodies resources, which could create a feeling of mental calm. But describing this as a sense of calm is a world away from the calm some Buddhist up on a mountain experiences and other such uses of calm.
I guess my issue is just describing this as if it was just another day commuting to the office. The stakes were very high and her description and this article almost imply otherwise.
There are many clues that this article is employing some amount of dramatic storytelling. That said, stories of people feeling calm in extreme situations are pretty common, so your intuition and logic might be off here, especially if you lack experience skydiving.
Jumping out of a plane is very different than being on your roof. When I jumped, part of it was wanting to conquer my fears, heights being one of them. I discovered that fear of heights doesn’t occur to me when looking out an airplane door, you’re high enough that the fall is abstract and impact not immediately imminent. Jumping was easier than it is to clean my rain gutters, I still get weak knees on a ladder.
It seems like you’re thinking of worrying about death before an accident starts, and even before choosing to skydive, not during a mishap. I’ve never worried about dying during an evolving accident, and it makes complete sense to me, having had a few, that lots of people would say they weren’t thinking about dying while it was happening. You usually don’t have time to. There might be some panic without specific thoughts of death, or there might be thoughts about how to fix the situation, but I think it’s common to not think about death while something is going wrong, at least for survivors. I’m sure there are situations where the outcome becomes obvious and there’s nothing you can do, but I suffer from survivor bias and can’t ask them.
I don't understand people taking unnecessary, potentially terminal risks just for the adrenaline. Like parachuting or bungee jumping. Maybe they have some endocrine deficit and try to overcompensate? Can't they get it in another, more earthly way (no pun intended)?
Like I have an acquaintance (ex-workmate) who lived in a house next to the aerodrome, not since very long. There's frequent parachuting and so far already several guys have free-fallen near to his location. Eventually he sold the house and moved.
I recommend motorcycling, not necessarily riding it, just being nearby a location frequently transited by extremely loud exhaust bikes should be enough to raise your blood pressure. And if being on the receiving end of the assholes doesn't do the trick, become one: buy a Japanese "race" motorcycle with brutally loud exhaust and circle the neighbourhood all day enjoying making people's lives miserable. If confronted, play the victim switcheroo: lament how bikers are at risk of being hit by negligent car drivers and the demented cry "wee wee" is just a necessary protection measure to make sure they notice you.
(BTW the part about motorcycles is satire, if you don't get it. My dislike for them is real, though. So the adrenaline spike when they pass nearby).
Honestly, motorcycling at track days is pretty adrenaline inducing (I've never personally done it) but decently safe if the track staff take it seriously and you do too.
Seriously, do get a motorcycle. Do your research first, watch crashes, learn to be safe, but get a motorcycle. You control your amount of risk, and good god is it excellent stress relief. Also cheaper than a skydiving habit.
Hmmm I’m pretty sure my total expenditure for several years of jumping, with a parachute purchase, a USPA C license, and a few boogie trips, was less than the cost of my dirt bike. I agree on the stress relief part, but I’d say don’t understate the risks or think it’s super controllable in traffic. Motorcycling is the most dangerous form of road transport. Cars and their drivers take bikers out all time. I looked and can’t find it right now but I remember seeing an NTSB report a couple years back indicating a serious uptick recently in motorcycle accidents by middle aged men.
There's been an increase in motorcycling in the US over the past 20 years, and I think a decent amount of the newcomers have a disproportionate amount of respect compared to the capabilities of the machine they're buying.
Okay I can buy that and the IIHS report seems to back it up with “27% of the fatally injured motorcyclists in 2022 were younger than 30, compared with 80% in 1975.”
I think the stats I was thinking of might be the NHTSA crash stats, and they have a section on age correlations. If younger riders are getting safer, that would lead to higher percent of older riders having trouble.
Alternative that pops in my mind is that there is more older riders. That might be due to variance in disposable income. Or change in habits. I wonder how does this correlate with ownership. So is there more over 30 owners and by how much.
I think that a lot of people of multiple age groups are driving (and riding) more aggressively than in the past.
But also there’s culturally a subset of people who have adopted motorcycling with more of an interest in the aesthetics of motorcycling rather than the practice of it. The show-offs, macho tough guy wannabes.
Were middle age accountants trying to act tough on a straight piped motorcycle in the 70?
If you're a safety person like me, I cannot recommend a cruiser enough. It's relaxing, still fast enough to be fun, and having a nice lady passenger is one of the great joys in life.
For some, it's about adrenaline. Those people often go on to pursue base jumping to keep pushing the limits. For others, it's about overcoming fear as a measure of personal growth. For me, when I used to skydive, it was less about adrenaline and much more about a brief moment of when all other thoughts disappear and you're fully present. It's a way of getting out of one's head without narcotics and experiencing a unique state of being. I suppose it's a similar in spirit to why astronauts go to space. There's no proxy for the perspective gained in leaving the confines of terra firma. Definitely not for everyone.
There's risk associated with many activities that are enjoyable yet not 100% necessary to sustain life. Why do any of them? Because they enable someone to enjoy said life.
63% of American adults voluntarily drink carcinogenic poison, for fun.
Well skydiving is a lot closer to playing the Russian roulette "for enjoyment" and face an immediate and gruesome death than drinking a couple glasses of wine and possibly get cirrhosis in 50 years.
The chance of a drunk driver killing a third party is considerably higher than that of a skydiver landing on someone.
That aside:
With modern equipment and training methods, fatalities occur in less than 1 per 100,000 cases and serious injuries requiring hospitalization in less than 2 per 10,000 cases.
This puts the assessment of skydiving as a high-risk sport into perspective, especially considering the definition of high-risk sport as a sporting activity in which athletes must accept the possibility of serious injury or death as an immediate part of the sporting activity, especially when comparing these results with other so-called high-risk sports.
For example, amateur boxers suffer an injury on average every 2.5 h in competition and every 772 h in training, or one in three recreational surfers suffers a traumatic injury within 12 months
That’s totally true, though people routinely make bad decisions that get them killed while on a couple glasses of wine. In 2023, in the U.S., where I live, more than 100,000 people died of alcohol related causes, while a mere 10 people died from skydiving, out of almost 3.5 million skydives. Romania (where you live?) seems to have pretty high per-capita binge drinking. Maybe drinking actually is closer to Russian Roulette and skydiving is further than it seems at first…
Parent comment is also totally true: there are lots and lots of enjoyable and risky activities. Driving your car is very dangerous and results in immediate and gruesome death for hundreds of thousands of people every year. People do rock climbing, river rafting, heroine, fentanyl, motorcycle racing, boxing, scuba diving, football…
Maybe you also take unnecessary and potentially terminal risks, and don’t even get the adrenaline benefit.
For me personally, I just have so little want to do anything like that. If it goes wrong, you go splat, and there's very little you can do about it. Is that the way you want to go, just jumping out of something? I mean, even getting injured and living is still ridiculous sounding. "How did you break your back?" "Oh, I jumped from 10,000 feet." The best case is that you get a "thrill" out of being reminded that gravity exists.
I wonder if a lot of these people have some issues that cause them to seek the adrenaline and other hormone rushes from these activities. And it's very likely many get addicted to it once they start such extreme activities.
> I wonder if a lot of these people have some issues that cause them to seek the adrenaline and other hormone rushes from these activities.
Everyone has a different calculus of what risks are worth it. I don't think it's fair to characterize them as "issues."
Skydiving is dangerous, but not ridiculously so-- about a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying per jump, though this does wobble a little bit on your preparation and where you choose to jump (places like Lodi are disproportionately dangerous). One way to understand this order of magnitude is that you're spending a few hours of life expectancy per jump.
I was into airplanes; the fatal general aviation accident rate per hour is about the same as the skydiving risk per jump. But I loved the feeling of being in the air, the things I saw, and the way it felt to control an airplane. This meant on a day with 5 hours of flying, I "spent" much more life expectancy than someone who skydived once. I went into it open-eyed, and I'm glad that I have the experiences of having flown.
Personally, just wanting the experience is what made me jump out of an airplane at 10,500 feet. I knew I was taking a risk, but what the heck, I can't live in a closet my whole life and avoid experiencing things I want to just because there are risks. I did it, I enjoyed doing it, but I've never felt any motivation to do it again. I certainly wouldn't encourage anybody who isn't interested in doing it, it wasn't honestly all that amazing.
Vice versa, people overestimating risk is likely what leads to them people being excessively scared of things that are relatively harmless. The Wiki page on micromorts [1] is pretty informative. A micromort is something that has a 1 in a million chance of fatality. One skydive exposes you to about 8 micromorts of risk. That's about the same risk as 80 miles of bicycling, 1900 miles of driving, or a bit less than your chance of being murdered in England within a year.
When I was skydiving, everyone who is licensed and current in the U.S. received the USPA’s Skydiving Magazine, and in every issue was a report of every death and serious accident, and a “post-mortem” analysis of what went wrong and ways to avoid the same situation.
The 28 people thing strikes me as a bit of tabloid writing. That’s 28 people in like 30 or 40 years, and it’s a big and busy drop zone. I can’t read the paywalled article but you need to compare the number 28 to the total number of jumps over that period, and to the national accident rate. 28 deaths without context is pretty meaningless. Yes, skydiving is a bit risky, and yes accidents occasionally happen. We’ve been losing 30,000 to 40,000 people to car accidents every single year for those 40 years. We’ve lost more than 700,000 people just since the year 2000. How does this country not shut down? (It’s easy to fling incredulity… just sayin’)
Anyway, my local drop zone owner said that every time there was any kind of accident in the news, business tended to go up. The risk is part of the attraction.
I had a chute deploy with tangled lines and it wouldn't get square or flare. it was my first jump as I did the training for a solo static line jump. was able to untangle them. landed a bit hard but can legit say it's not my thing. I did a second one to get the jitters out, and that was it. as the saying goes, if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is probably not for you.
This happened to a friend of mine about 25 years ago; parachute didn't open and neither did the reserve. He landed in a tree. Had some broken ribs and collapsed lung, but was basically fine. From what I recall he didn't spend any time on the ICU. I saw him one or two weeks after the accident, and he wasn't doing gymnastics or anything, but was just walking around (with a bit of a limp).
His brother was supposed to jump next, and his parents were in the plane to watch. First thing he did was get up and wave to show he's okay.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, right?
Reading the recovery process from this woman, he was massively lucky not just to have survived, but also to have survived relatively unscathed.
From personal experience, a skydiving crash happens in a surreal moment of calm. There isn't much time to process what's going on when the ground is rushing up at you. There's little to do but kinda surrender to what's happening. Fortunately, my accident was much less severe than hers. I walked away (to the hopsital) after being knocked out for a bit. The weirdest part is waking up on the ground with people looming over and kinda freaking out.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadSomehow I am not convinced this is a real study.
My understanding of the target of the satire is studies that compare a treatment to a placebo only in "low risk" populations, and then find that they're is no significant difference between the treatment and the placebo.
> they jumped from an average altitude of 0.6 m (SD 0.1) on aircraft moving at an average of 0 km/h
> The study also has several limitations. First and most importantly, our findings might not be generalizable to the use of parachutes in aircraft traveling at a higher altitude or velocity. Consideration could be made to conduct additional randomized clinical trials in these higher risk settings. However, previous theoretical work supporting the use of parachutes could reduce the feasibility of enrolling participants in such studies
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
I'm glad to see that's finally been addressed! Though for the counterpoint, also see "Most medical practices are not parachutes: a citation analysis of practices felt by biomedical authors to be analogous to parachutes"
https://www.cmajopen.ca/content/cmajo/6/1/E31.full.pdf
For emphasis: "... the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps."
Okay, parachutes don't help when jumping from stationary aircraft that are on the ground. I will not leap to the conclusion that parachutes do not help with high altitude jumps.
I would have linked the older version of this joke study: https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/363/bmj.k5094/F2.large.jpg
Okay, Miss Humblebrag :-)
Still not impressive as Shayna Richardson surviving while pregnant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shayna_Richardson
“Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact”
Again incredible that she survived but she was inside some piece of plane which sounds like it both protected her and slowed her fall.
Wikipedia summarizes what I was getting at:
“Over the years, other skydivers have survived accidents where the press has reported that no parachute was open, yet they were actually being slowed by a small area of tangled parachute. They might still be very lucky to survive, but an impact at 130 km/h (80 mph) is much less severe than the 190 km/h (120 mph) that might occur in normal freefall”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_(accident)#Surviving...
> Even as Hatmaker spiralled towards the ground, she says the thought she might die never crossed her mind. At most, she thought she might break a leg – jeopardising her plans to climb to Mount Everest Base Camp three days later, a trip that had been a goal of hers for a couple of years.
This seems completely illogical and naive. I mean, really? I'd be worried about dying, breaking my leg, or breaking my back falling off my roof, much less from 13,000 feet.
> I'd be worried about dying, breaking my leg, or breaking my back falling off my roof
I sort of doubt he was actually worried about dying as he was falling off his roof. I mean, really? It's extremely illogical and naive. Unbelievable that an adult would be so irrational. Plus unless his house is so tall the fall would take minutes he would simply not have enough time to properly worry about anything.
Anyway of course if you fall off the roof and say you worried about dying while falling then it's kinda nonsensical for me to doubt that.
And that's the point of my comment
- House
That was the claim, wasn't it? ... feeling calm?
> This seems completely illogical and naive. I mean, really?
Statistically, it was a good assessment. Skydiving accidents are 40x more likely to by injuries, rather than deaths, and most of those are lower extremity injuries.
I guess my issue is just describing this as if it was just another day commuting to the office. The stakes were very high and her description and this article almost imply otherwise.
Jumping out of a plane is very different than being on your roof. When I jumped, part of it was wanting to conquer my fears, heights being one of them. I discovered that fear of heights doesn’t occur to me when looking out an airplane door, you’re high enough that the fall is abstract and impact not immediately imminent. Jumping was easier than it is to clean my rain gutters, I still get weak knees on a ladder.
It seems like you’re thinking of worrying about death before an accident starts, and even before choosing to skydive, not during a mishap. I’ve never worried about dying during an evolving accident, and it makes complete sense to me, having had a few, that lots of people would say they weren’t thinking about dying while it was happening. You usually don’t have time to. There might be some panic without specific thoughts of death, or there might be thoughts about how to fix the situation, but I think it’s common to not think about death while something is going wrong, at least for survivors. I’m sure there are situations where the outcome becomes obvious and there’s nothing you can do, but I suffer from survivor bias and can’t ask them.
Like I have an acquaintance (ex-workmate) who lived in a house next to the aerodrome, not since very long. There's frequent parachuting and so far already several guys have free-fallen near to his location. Eventually he sold the house and moved.
The title says "Monthly accidents. Last month two skydiving learners fell during a jump with the parachute. This Sunday another 23 years old parachutist ended in the hospital": https://ziardecluj.ro/dezmir-luna-si-accidentul-un-parasutis...
I recommend motorcycling, not necessarily riding it, just being nearby a location frequently transited by extremely loud exhaust bikes should be enough to raise your blood pressure. And if being on the receiving end of the assholes doesn't do the trick, become one: buy a Japanese "race" motorcycle with brutally loud exhaust and circle the neighbourhood all day enjoying making people's lives miserable. If confronted, play the victim switcheroo: lament how bikers are at risk of being hit by negligent car drivers and the demented cry "wee wee" is just a necessary protection measure to make sure they notice you.
(BTW the part about motorcycles is satire, if you don't get it. My dislike for them is real, though. So the adrenaline spike when they pass nearby).
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/motor...
I think the stats I was thinking of might be the NHTSA crash stats, and they have a section on age correlations. If younger riders are getting safer, that would lead to higher percent of older riders having trouble.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
But also there’s culturally a subset of people who have adopted motorcycling with more of an interest in the aesthetics of motorcycling rather than the practice of it. The show-offs, macho tough guy wannabes.
Were middle age accountants trying to act tough on a straight piped motorcycle in the 70?
63% of American adults voluntarily drink carcinogenic poison, for fun.
That aside:
Recreational Skydiving—Really That Dangerous? A Systematic Review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9859333/Parent comment is also totally true: there are lots and lots of enjoyable and risky activities. Driving your car is very dangerous and results in immediate and gruesome death for hundreds of thousands of people every year. People do rock climbing, river rafting, heroine, fentanyl, motorcycle racing, boxing, scuba diving, football…
Maybe you also take unnecessary and potentially terminal risks, and don’t even get the adrenaline benefit.
“28 people died from skydiving near Lodi. How does the Parachute Center stay in business?”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/article282562433....
I wonder if a lot of these people have some issues that cause them to seek the adrenaline and other hormone rushes from these activities. And it's very likely many get addicted to it once they start such extreme activities.
Everyone has a different calculus of what risks are worth it. I don't think it's fair to characterize them as "issues."
Skydiving is dangerous, but not ridiculously so-- about a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying per jump, though this does wobble a little bit on your preparation and where you choose to jump (places like Lodi are disproportionately dangerous). One way to understand this order of magnitude is that you're spending a few hours of life expectancy per jump.
I was into airplanes; the fatal general aviation accident rate per hour is about the same as the skydiving risk per jump. But I loved the feeling of being in the air, the things I saw, and the way it felt to control an airplane. This meant on a day with 5 hours of flying, I "spent" much more life expectancy than someone who skydived once. I went into it open-eyed, and I'm glad that I have the experiences of having flown.
Indeed, the times in an airplane where I acutely felt the risk were not fun and were not what I was looking for at all.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
The 28 people thing strikes me as a bit of tabloid writing. That’s 28 people in like 30 or 40 years, and it’s a big and busy drop zone. I can’t read the paywalled article but you need to compare the number 28 to the total number of jumps over that period, and to the national accident rate. 28 deaths without context is pretty meaningless. Yes, skydiving is a bit risky, and yes accidents occasionally happen. We’ve been losing 30,000 to 40,000 people to car accidents every single year for those 40 years. We’ve lost more than 700,000 people just since the year 2000. How does this country not shut down? (It’s easy to fling incredulity… just sayin’)
Anyway, my local drop zone owner said that every time there was any kind of accident in the news, business tended to go up. The risk is part of the attraction.
His brother was supposed to jump next, and his parents were in the plane to watch. First thing he did was get up and wave to show he's okay.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, right?
Reading the recovery process from this woman, he was massively lucky not just to have survived, but also to have survived relatively unscathed.