18 and 20 yr old Nephews Want to Skydive!

[shortyj 0]

You might be right

Playtime is essential.

[PWScottIV 0]

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(Driving is NOT more dangerous than skydiving. )

You're being sarcastic right? Driving IS more dangerous than skydiving.

Gravity Waits for No One.

[JohnnyD 0]

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(Driving is NOT more dangerous than skydiving. )

You're being sarcastic right? Driving IS more dangerous than skydiving.

The dull thumping noise you hear is lot of people banging their heads on their desks.

[PWScottIV 0]

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Perhaps my brother is afraid they'll like it too much and lose focus at college.

So they should just twiddle their thumbs for fun while they're in school? I'm sure he'd prefer them to skydive as opposed to getting drunk... Oh, oooopps, maybe THAT is why he doesn't want them to skydive...

Gravity Waits for No One.

[RkyMtnHigh 0]

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Perhaps my brother is afraid they'll like it too much and lose focus at college.

So they should just twiddle their thumbs for fun while they're in school? I'm sure he'd prefer them to skydive as opposed to getting drunk... Oh, oooopps, maybe THAT is why he doesn't want them to skydive...

Both experimented with drinking and decided they didn't like it as much as they thought they would. Hmm..perhaps that IS another reason he wouldn't want them around the skydiver hooligans

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[livendive 8]

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It depends... If they are totally self-supporting, they can do whatever they want. If not, then the parents still have a say in what they do.

One is in college at LSU and on his own, but I'm paying for his first tandem...and the other is still living at my brother's place, but again, his first tandem is on me



Well, I'd have to respect the Dad's wishes since he is footing the bill for their support. It doesn't matter if you paid for it or if they saved up their babysitting money. The sky will still be there when they are self supporting. How does their mother feel about it?

I disagree. I think parents who are supporting their adult children should have a say in how the child spends money, but not on what gifts they recieve or how they use them. And yes, my daughter is 18. It's nerve-wracking to simply advise her of my opinions and then let her make her own decisions, but I think it's the best thing I can do for her.

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[PWScottIV 0]

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It depends... If they are totally self-supporting, they can do whatever they want. If not, then the parents still have a say in what they do.

One is in college at LSU and on his own, but I'm paying for his first tandem...and the other is still living at my brother's place, but again, his first tandem is on me

Well, I'd have to respect the Dad's wishes since he is footing the bill for their support. It doesn't matter if you paid for it or if they saved up their babysitting money. The sky will still be there when they are self supporting. How does their mother feel about it?

I disagree. I think parents who are supporting their adult children should have a say in how the child spends money, but not on what gifts they recieve or how they use them. And yes, my daughter is 18. It's nerve-wracking to simply advise her of my opinions and then let her make her own decisions, but I think it's the best thing I can do for her.

Blues,
Dave

I agree, BUT, at some point you have to let them make decisions for themselves... Holding their hand and protecting them from every little potential danger is NOT going to make them independent and able to handle the real world on their own.

Gravity Waits for No One.

[Andrewwhyte 1]

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(Driving is NOT more dangerous than skydiving. )

You're being sarcastic right? Driving IS more dangerous than skydiving.

I am glad I don't have as many friends dead from driving as I do from skydiving.

[popsjumper 2]

Got nieces that age?
Hmmmm?????

My reality and yours are quite different.
I think we're all Bozos on this bus.
Falcon5232, SCS8170, SCSA353, POPS9398, DS239

[livendive 8]

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I disagree. I think parents who are supporting their adult children should have a say in how the child spends money, but not on what gifts they recieve or how they use them. And yes, my daughter is 18. It's nerve-wracking to simply advise her of my opinions and then let her make her own decisions, but I think it's the best thing I can do for her.

Blues,
Dave

I agree, BUT, at some point you have to let them make decisions for themselves... Holding their hand and protecting them from every little potential danger is NOT going to make them independent and able to handle the real world on their own.

Isn't that what I just said?

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[PWScottIV 0]

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(Driving is NOT more dangerous than skydiving. )

You're being sarcastic right? Driving IS more dangerous than skydiving.

I am glad I don't have as many friends dead from driving as I do from skydiving.

I guess it depends on how you look at the statistics... It's sort of comparing apples to oranges in many cases. When I looked at the numbers of car fatalities per annually (about 50 thousand I think) and I think there were 150 million drivers at any one time in the US. So that's a 1 in 3000 chance that you'll die driving per year.

OK, now consider skydiving... There are about 2 million jumps per year, with 300k of those being done by tandems. There are about 25-30 fatalities per year... And on average about one of those is a tandem fatality. So the risk of dieing on a tandem jump is less than about 1 in 300k. The "average" skydiver does about 66 jumps per year, each jump is about a 1 in 80000 chance of dieing, and therefore the "average" skydiver has a one in 1200 chance of dieing per year. BUT, if you are more careful then your chances for survival go up DRASTICALLY.

With driving that's NOT so true. Many accidents happen because the OTHER person does something stupid like drinking and driving. I had some asshole run a red light and t-bone me at 45mph last year... And there was NOTHING I could do about it. With skydiving you have a choice... A choice to make high-performance landings. A choice to jump with "dangerous" jumpers. A choice to use the latest safety equipment. etc, etc. With driving you don't get a lot of those choices. SO, I do think SKYDIVING CAN BE SAFER THAN DRIVING. But ONLY if you make it safer for yourself by making good choices... Something you don't get the luxury of when you're sharing the road with drunk, teenage, or other unsafe drivers. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.

So back to the subject of the kids... They are going to be in MUCH more danger driving around for a year than they will doing a tandem jump.
With that said, if you do hundreds of jumps per year, are relatively complacent, and perform high-performance landings at a crowded DZ with a highly wingloaded canopy, those statistics could be VERY different for you.

Gravity Waits for No One.

[PWScottIV 0]

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I disagree. I think parents who are supporting their adult children should have a say in how the child spends money, but not on what gifts they recieve or how they use them. And yes, my daughter is 18. It's nerve-wracking to simply advise her of my opinions and then let her make her own decisions, but I think it's the best thing I can do for her.

Blues,
Dave

I agree, BUT, at some point you have to let them make decisions for themselves... Holding their hand and protecting them from every little potential danger is NOT going to make them independent and able to handle the real world on their own.

Isn't that what I just said?

Blues,
Dave

Well you had said that the parents should be able to control how they spend all of their money... But I don't totally agree with that. I guess I don't know if you're talking about micromanaging their money or helping them budget it.

Gravity Waits for No One.

[udder 0]

They dont like drinking...Then the parents have nothing to worry about. There's no way they'll make skyidvers

"In one way or the other, I'm a bad brother. Word to the motherf**ker." Eazy-E

[Andrewwhyte 1]

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I guess it depends on how you look at the statistics... It's sort of comparing apples to oranges in many cases. When I looked at the numbers of car fatalities per annually (about 50 thousand I think) and I think there were 150 million drivers at any one time in the US. So that's a 1 in 3000 chance that you'll die driving per year.

OK, now consider skydiving... There are about 2 million jumps per year, with 300k of those being done by tandems. There are about 25-30 fatalities per year... And on average about one of those is a tandem fatality. So the risk of dieing on a tandem jump is less than about 1 in 300k. The "average" skydiver does about 66 jumps per year, each jump is about a 1 in 80000 chance of dieing, and therefore the "average" skydiver has a one in 1200 chance of dieing per year. BUT, if you are more careful then your chances for survival go up DRASTICALLY.

With driving that's NOT so true. Many accidents happen because the OTHER person does something stupid like drinking and driving. I had some asshole run a red light and t-bone me at 45mph last year... And there was NOTHING I could do about it. With skydiving you have a choice... A choice to make high-performance landings. A choice to jump with "dangerous" jumpers. A choice to use the latest safety equipment. etc, etc. With driving you don't get a lot of those choices. SO, I do think SKYDIVING CAN BE SAFER THAN DRIVING. But ONLY if you make it safer for yourself by making good choices... Something you don't get the luxury of when you're sharing the road with drunk, teenage, or other unsafe drivers. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.

So back to the subject of the kids... They are going to be in MUCH more danger driving around for a year than they will doing a tandem jump.
With that said, if you do hundreds of jumps per year, are relatively complacent, and perform high-performance landings at a crowded DZ with a highly wingloaded canopy, those statistics could be VERY different for you.

Nope. All the sophistry in the world doesn't change the fact that I know way more people who ride in cars than I know skydiving, and I know way more people who died skydiving than who died in car accidents.

[livendive 8]

Using your number of an average 66 jumps per year, and a generous estimate of four minutes per jump, that means the average jumper spends about four and a half hours skydiving each year. This works out to one fatality for every 4444-5333 hours (depending on 25 or 30).

The average car is driven what, 12000 miles per year? Being generous and assuming it's all 60 mph, that means the average driver (only...no passengers) spends 200 hours behind the wheel each year. If one out of every three thousand dies, that's one fatality per 600,000 hours of driving. Notice the two orders of magnitude difference?

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

[opurt 0]

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(Driving is NOT more dangerous than skydiving. )

You're being sarcastic right? Driving IS more dangerous than skydiving.

I am glad I don't have as many friends dead from driving as I do from skydiving.

I guess it depends on how you look at the statistics... It's sort of comparing apples to oranges in many cases. [...]

One has to convert the risk to a common unit in order to compare them.

A common unit is the "fatalities per million hours of activity".

Driving, if I recall correctly (IIRC), is like 1 fatality per million hours; skydiving is like 50 fatalities per million hours. Skydiving is much more dangerous than driving.

[PWScottIV 0]

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Using your number of an average 66 jumps per year, and a generous estimate of four minutes per jump, that means the average jumper spends about four and a half hours skydiving each year. This works out to one fatality for every 4444-5333 hours (depending on 25 or 30).

The average car is driven what, 12000 miles per year? Being generous and assuming it's all 60 mph, that means the average driver (only...no passengers) spends 200 hours behind the wheel each year. If one out of every three thousand dies, that's one fatality per 600,000 hours of driving. Notice the two orders of magnitude difference?

Blues,
Dave

Like I said, it has a lot to do with how you look at the numbers. But in reality it has even more to do with the CHOICES you make with respect to skydiving. There's a LOT more latitude with respect to skydiving practices than there is with driving to help keep yourself safe. If you look at the statistics, MOST skydiving accidents do not happen from circumstances that are out of your control.

Gravity Waits for No One.

[PWScottIV 0]

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Driving, if I recall correctly (IIRC), is like 1 fatality per million hours; skydiving is like 50 fatalities per million hours. Skydiving is much more dangerous than driving.

I guess. I just don't think it makes sense to analyze at skydiving using those units. Each skydive takes such a short time... I think it makes more sense to look at it like this:

Jack drives 2 hours to the dropzone and 2 hours back home, for a total of 4 hours, which equals 240 minutes. He jumps 4 times, with a total freefall time of 4 minutes. Therefore, with respect to the activities Jack does that day, he has a higher chance of being killed on the way to the DZ than he does jumping. Doesn't that make more sense? It's about what is gonna be more likely to kill him in the long-run as opposed to how dangerous it is per minute, right?

Gravity Waits for No One.

[RkyMtnHigh 0]

You guys are giving me a mathmatical word problem *headache*

Ya know how people play air guitar? Well, when I walked the campus at Harvard a few years ago, the smart kids were doing *air calculator*...yeah, this is reminding me of that

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[PWScottIV 0]

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You guys are giving me a mathmatical word problem *headache*

Ya know how people play air guitar? Well, when I walked the campus at Harvard a few years ago, the smart kids were doing *air calculator*...yeah, this is reminding me of that

Gravity Waits for No One.

[livendive 8]

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Driving, if I recall correctly (IIRC), is like 1 fatality per million hours; skydiving is like 50 fatalities per million hours. Skydiving is much more dangerous than driving.

I guess. I just don't think it makes sense to analyze at skydiving using those units. Each skydive takes such a short time... I think it makes more sense to look at it like this:

Jack drives 2 hours to the dropzone and 2 hours back home, for a total of 4 hours, which equals 240 minutes. He jumps 4 times, with a total freefall time of 4 minutes. Therefore, with respect to the activities Jack does that day, he has a higher chance of being killed on the way to the DZ than he does jumping. Doesn't that make more sense? It's about what is gonna be more likely to kill him in the long-run as opposed to how dangerous it is per minute, right?

There are (ballpark) 30,000 members of USPA, and (ballpark) 30 of them die each year. That's one per 1,000.

Per this page, we're averaging about 22 fatalities per 100,000 drivers each year. That's one per 4545, and over 20 percent of them are motorcyclists or non-vehicle occupants.

Also note, as to the time thing, traffic fatalities are running around 1.5 per one hundred million miles. Assuming the average jump is made from 2 miles up, there are 30 skydiving fatalities per year, and 2 million jumps per year, skydiving results in a fatality every 133,333 miles, or about 750 per one hundred million miles.

Blues,
Dave

"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)