cliff

I think that you should go to another DZ. When you buy your first rig, it will likely be BOC throw-out deployment. Go ahead and get trained up on one now. You'll also get to jump into a new landing area, maybe jump a different aircraft, and definitely meet new folks. All good experiences. I travel quite a bit, so for my first 25 skydives I jumped at 3 different DZs in 3 different states. I got to benefit from different perspectives early on. Just make sure you bring your log book. cliff

Trying to relate exposure to risk while engaging in skydiving activities (on plane/ in freefall/ canopy flight/ landing) to driving is tough to do. I've seen some data on fatalities per 1,000 participants that compared boxing, mountain climbing, skydiving, and driving (among other things) on a Ga Tech web page. I'm not sure that the comparison based strictly on # of participants is very valuable. I'm not an economist, but we were kicking around the driving vs. skydiving argument for a while at school the other day. One point that economists might argue is that for most of us, skydiving yields little utility compared to driving. With the possible exception of a few professionals, most of us could give up skydiving tomorrow and our lives would not be affected other than on a recreational/ social level. On the other hand if we were to give up driving, our lives would be seriously changed. Most of us have to drive to maintain the standard of living that we expect. The suburbs don't work unless everyone drives. Going to work, meeting to meeting, groceries, soccer practice, school, etc. I think that the difference is important to note: I take risks driving to work every day because I have to. I take risks skydiving because I enjoy skydiving. For this reason I agree with kallend when he writes that "Not only is skydiving not comparable with driving risk, it's in a different league altogether" Knowing that skydiving is a risky sport that we engage in voluntarily should keep us on our toes. We should fight-off complacency when we make decisions regarging factors that are under our control. Packing, attention to spot, exit order, wing loading, cypres use, etc. cliff

We often see warnings when we purchase skydiving gear. For example, SSK sends a WARNNG that “one out of every 20,000-75,000 jumps results in death” “according to USPA…studies” That’s quite a broad estimation. Further, they expect parachutes to malfunction “once in each 333 activations”. I wonder if there has been any work done to make some estimation about the failure rate of mains vs. the failure rate of reserves? It seems to me that reserves would have a greater mean time between failures as a result of more positive openings with a spring-loaded pilot chute. If mains and reserves have an equal failure rate of .003, then the parallel failure rate would be: (.003)(.003)= .000009. In other words we could expect a double malfunction 9 times every million jumps, or once every 111,111 jumps. I imagine that the “one out of every 20,000-75,000 jumps results in death” statistic is skewed by suicides and fatalities under functional parachutes (low turns, among others). It seems that the military would be the folks most likely to maintain an accurate collection of such data, but I don’t see anything publicly listed. Any thoughts?

1 civilian static line in 1987 5 military static line in 1992 107 skydives since April 2001