Wanna try something new in skydiving?

[wmw999 2,114]

Some thoughts on evaluating risk in skydiving. We all evaluate risks, every single day.

But we evaluate risks differently when it's something we want to do, rather than something we don't want to do.

Four things you can do with risks normally are to avoid, mitigate, share, and accept. In each case, in order to make an intelligent decision, you have to understand the pieces of the risk, and the consequences. And in each case, if you want to be thorough (and when you're talking about high speed impact with the earth, it pays to be thorough), you should start by taking a contrarian view to what you kind of want.

The 4 things come in that order because generally, those offer the easiest or cheapest way to navigate around risk. It's generally cheapest (whether money, injury, whatever) just not to do it; next is mitigating, because then you have to understand it, and it's in your control still. Accepting it is last -- often that just means "shit happens," and shit happens fast in skydiving. Try not to go there.

In other words, if you really don't want to do something, get someone who thinks you should to enumerate the reasons why, and consider them honestly. If the consequence is loss of friendship or macho points, that's different from injury or death.

And if you really want to do something, get someone who thinks it's a bad idea to enumerate the reasons why, and consider them honestly. They are potential costs of doing it, and might have to be paid for. Got insurance? Got a job with sick leave? That might enter into whether you want to start swooping or downsize, because injury is a very honest possible consequence of skydiving, and downsizing will generally increase the chances of injury. Even if you're good.

Mitigating might include getting additional formal training in a new canopy or skill (CRW camp, finding a mentor). It might include starting swooping with a larger canopy than you currently own. It might include limiting you who are willing to skydiving with. But regardless, it means understanding the components and consequences honestly, and not with rose-colored glasses or an unwarranted spirit of optimism. And in skydiving it generally means taking an action, or specifically avoiding one. Mitigating can include running through emergency scenarios in your mind, and considering what you would do in that case. What happens if someone cuts you off? What happens if it happens at 50 feet instead of 200 feet? How about if you end up in someone's back yard?

Risk sharing? Not sure how well that applies in skydiving. The consequences of a bad decision are rarely lessened when they're shared -- it only means more people are damaged...

And accepting should mean that you've seriously considered the risks and are just saying "I'll go for it, with no additional preparation." Which might be just fine, if you really are ready, or if the consequences are supremely unlikely (like an asteroid hitting your canopy, not like dropping a toggle). Or it might just be an immature way of saying "the heck with it, I'm going for it, and assuming that there will be no consequences." Refer to my tag line...

Wendy P.

[sfzombie13 307]

sometimes it is the time to accept the risk.  for example, when i was in the military, we did risk assessments on training, and anything you did really.  you had to get them into the yellow, or green preferably, and if you didn't, you had to have higher ups sign off onto them.  for airborne ops, we could never get them into the yellow and they needed the ag's signature on it.  you can mitigate a lot of things, like using quality equipment and staying current, not doing stupid shit, etc., but you can never take the risk of death out completely, and at some point you just have to accept it. 

[wmw999 2,114]

Absolutely. But too many people’s first step seems to be to accept the risk, based on what Joey at the DZ said, and that alone. 
Wendy P. 

[sfzombie13 307]

yeah, it's hard to accept a risk until it's quantified.  even if someone says you may die skydiving, is that all that is needed to convey the risk?  i doubt it.  even if you've been jumping for decades and you know that you can die, does that properly convey the risks?  again, i doubt it.  as long as everyone has a safety mentality and talks to one another, it is mostly ok.  they say that the safety rules are written in blood, but some of them are more of a nuisance rule (in my opinion only), but it is very hard in some cases to tell them apart. 

i would say that the person is responsible for him(her.whatever)self on every jump, but does that apply in all cases?   i know i would never try to hang responsibility for something on anyone other than the jumper, but if the jumper was not as well trained or well informed as they should have been, then who is at fault?  it is impossible to know what you don't know until you know it, so i think not.  but who is in that case?

[riggerrob 558]

On 12/4/2021 at 4:52 AM, sfzombie13 said:

" ...  they say that the safety rules are written in blood, but some of them are more of a nuisance rule (in my opinion only) ... "

You just have not read the bloody accident report that initiated that rule.

I read USPA Accident Reports religiously for 30 years. After that AR started to blur together. Ho! Hum! Another low turn. Yawn!

But I had to be very careful to not simply quote old rules to young skydivers, because they jsut perceived me as a boring old fart who did not free fly. Unfortunately, young skydivers also lacked the patience to listen to the long version of the accident report.

[riggerrob 558]

The older posters are familiar with Bill Booth's theory about risk homeostasis. Bill states that - in order to keep adrenaline levels up - skydivers often wan to add new risks to keep skydiving exciting. During my 40 years of jumping, I have seen skydivers add: canopy formations, bigger freefall formations, squential freefall formations, sit flying, wing-suit, etc.

 

But what if we look at it from a different perspective. What if - as one risk is reduced -another risk begins to dominate? What if we look at it from the perspective of risky jump-planes? Back when I started jumping, we used 1950s vintage Cessnas that were barley 20 years old. Fast forward and some of those old Cessna 182 s are still hauling jumpers, but now they are approaching 70 years old. Fortunately, Cessnas are durable and easily maintained.

Twin-engined jump-planes have proven more risky. When I started jumping (1977), the only affordable, twin-engined, civilian, jump-planes were World War 2 surplus Beech 18s, DC-3s and Lodestars. As freefall formations got bigger, Lodestars got a dangerous reputation and disappearred from the larger DZs. During the 1980s, a few tired, 40-year-old Beech 182 and DC-3s crashed, so they were replaced by old turbo-prop commuter planes (Beechcraft King Air, DHC-6 Twin Otter and Shorts Skyvan). Those turboprops worked well until a few poorly-maintained, 40-year-old King Airs fell out of the sky.

Somewhere along the way, parachutes became so reliable that they were no longer the greatest risk during a skydive. Then poorly-maintained airplanes became the biggest risk. Then forced landings without seat-belts became the biggest risk.

[fcajump 153]

1 hour ago, riggerrob said:

But what if we look at it from a different perspective. What if - as one risk is reduced -another risk begins to dominate? What if we look at it from the perspective of risky jump-planes?

I do agree you have a point.  I started in the middle years (students had ramair mains, but round reserves, Cypres was just being tested and our big plane was a twin-bo, and everyone over B license opened at 2k unless they did CReW).  Seatbelts in the plane, sure... the pilot has one...

But as to the activities being done...  I think its both.
There were always the extremes ('chuteless jumps, low pulls), but the run-of-the-mill jumper was doing RW, some CReW and a 'high performance' canopy was not very much over 1:1.2 that I knew of...  ZP canopies were not built much different than the other 99% of the canopies made out of F111.

The activities (canopy loading, swooping for distance, playing tag with airplanes, mixing of wingsuits/canopies/belly/freefly to make new hybrids, proximity) are all working to push their respective limits. 

We get new toys or ideas, we try to see how far we can push the new ideas, technology, techniques, and activities.  Unfortunately, the limits are usually found in blood/bones/bodies.

 

JW