Cause of decline over time in annual fatalities per 100k jumps

[JDBoston 0]

Mods, feel free to move if this is the wrong forum. I was struck recently by the significant decline in deaths per 100k jumps since I started in the early 2000s (stumbled on https://uspa.org/Discover/FAQs/Safety following a thread from a mainstream news article).

I found this surprising & am very curious what high/old-time jumpers, DZOs, S&TAs etc. think of the causes behind this.

Changing demographics of jumpers? Better/more training? Absence of certain categories of incident more common in the past? Equipment improvements? More attention paid to minor incidents that form the base of the incident "pyramid" thereby nipping potential later fatalities in the bud? Other?

Edited March 30, 2022 by JDBoston

[gowlerk 2,060]

The same basic reasons for the decline in automobile deaths per mile. Better equipment especially AADs and RSLs led to an acceptance among jumpers of using them. I'm not sure better training is a huge factor, but it is one for sure. And a big one is a change in culture to one that does not easily accept jumpers who take excessive risks. 

[wmw999 2,286]

If you go farther back, the early 1980's brought a very significant decline in the number of fatalities in a very small period. It went from the high 40's/low 50's down into the 30's. That was probably a combination of things:

• Equipment: the vast majority of jumpers were using 3-rings by then; student programs were starting to use (slightly) higher-performance canopies (better steerability); some doubtful equipment was no longer made (plastic reserve handles, blast handles, belly band throw-out), and helmets became more accepted
• Training: a far larger number of dropzones followed more rigorous student programs, with defined goals. As well, the introduction of tandem and AFF brought a higher level of instruction as well

And in general, skydiving was becoming a little more mainstream, which meant that it had to behave in a more mainstream manner.

I'd say that in the last 20 years, RSLs have gone from a good idea to almost (though not quite) universal; likewise AAD's. Before the advent of the Cypres, failure to pull either the main or reserve accounted for a significant number of fatalities. In the last 20 years, canopy instruction has become an accepted and standard part of a skydiver's development. In addition, traffic rules and exit rules have become stricter across most dropzones. As canopies get faster, these become necessary, just as speed limits and roads became necessary as cars got faster.

I'll ping Chuck Akers to weigh in on this as well.

Wendy P.

[chuckakers 406]

4 hours ago, wmw999 said:

If you go farther back, the early 1980's brought a very significant decline in the number of fatalities in a very small period. It went from the high 40's/low 50's down into the 30's. That was probably a combination of things:

• Equipment: the vast majority of jumpers were using 3-rings by then; student programs were starting to use (slightly) higher-performance canopies (better steerability); some doubtful equipment was no longer made (plastic reserve handles, blast handles, belly band throw-out), and helmets became more accepted
• Training: a far larger number of dropzones followed more rigorous student programs, with defined goals. As well, the introduction of tandem and AFF brought a higher level of instruction as well

And in general, skydiving was becoming a little more mainstream, which meant that it had to behave in a more mainstream manner.

I'd say that in the last 20 years, RSLs have gone from a good idea to almost (though not quite) universal; likewise AAD's. Before the advent of the Cypres, failure to pull either the main or reserve accounted for a significant number of fatalities. In the last 20 years, canopy instruction has become an accepted and standard part of a skydiver's development. In addition, traffic rules and exit rules have become stricter across most dropzones. As canopies get faster, these become necessary, just as speed limits and roads became necessary as cars got faster.

I'll ping Chuck Akers to weigh in on this as well.

Wendy P.

Wendy makes some good points.

RSL's and MARD's have definitely helped. Note that every year we record fatalities that would likely not have happened if the jumper used an RSL or MARD. There are jumpers who remain steadfast to their opinion that these devices are dangerous, but the data says otherwise by a big margin.

More and better canopy training has been very effective in lowering our canopy injuries and fatalities by number, although the overall percentage of canopy-related fatalities each year has remained about the same for quite a while. About 50% of our annual fatalities come from flying parachutes into the ground, either from intentional low turns (swooping) or unintentional low turns (confusion, mis-judging recovery altitude, avoidance turns, etc.). By the way, the vast majority of intentional turn canopy fatalities involve male jumpers with less than 1,000 jumps and rapid downsizing. That pattern will only change when we change it.

Better training doctrine and techniques have been effective. Drop zones take ongoing training more seriously than in the past, as do most jumpers. Students graduate from training programs with better skill sets these days and that leads to fewer mistakes. The same holds true with more and better information.

I do think our changing demographic has contributed to better numbers. Skydivers are older on average than in the past, and that has probably led to fewer poor, testosterone-fueled decisions. Same goes for income. We are wealthier on average than we were years ago so more jumpers can afford state-of-the-art gear, audibles, training courses, etc. They can also afford to maintain their gear better - fewer mals means fewer EP errors.

Looking at just about every calendar year, we are losing the bulk of our jumpers from the same causes.

Flying fast canopies with too much ego and too little training
Failing to utilize equipment that will save us when we can't or won't
Performing EP's improperly or too slowly
Not following landing priorities

Just my 2 cents

#projectzero

Edited March 30, 2022 by chuckakers

[pchapman 271]

All good answers so far.

Perhaps a minor additional factor is that I'm guessing that there are fewer dropzones overall, and they tend to be bigger. I still see new small DZ's open up, but what with land costs or availability of airports, the desire to have turbine aircraft, and a generally greater age of dropzones, those that are around tend to be larger. When there are more assets involved, drop zones become more conservative, more risk adverse, and more interested in having more rules. (Although that's also a function of cramming more skydivers at one time into the same patch of sky, as others have noted.) 

More and more DZ's these days like to shift the cost of safety onto skydivers, mandating AAD's, to minimize liability to themselves. Even though almost every skydiver prefers to have an AAD these days anyway, for most types of jumping.

All that's combined with an increase in safety culture in society in general. (Although extreme sports are popular, and there are plenty of skydiving disciplines that have more hazards than just doing a belly 4-way.)

[gowlerk 2,060]

There is also the fact that since skydiving is often seen as a little more tame these days many of the jumpers who want greater thrills, challenge, and risk will go onto BASE jumping. The BASE fatality list currently contains 423 entries, 238 of them in the ten year period of 2012 to 2021. Almost two dozen per year average. Nearly all of these people were also skydivers. At one time riskier behaviors happened at DZs and while not encouraged there was more tolerance. Now more people go to where there are few if any rules and everyone is even more individually able to decide on their own level of risk exposure.

[JDBoston 0]

19 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

There is also the fact that since skydiving is often seen as a little more tame these days many of the jumpers who want greater thrills, challenge, and risk will go onto BASE jumping. The BASE fatality list currently contains 423 entries, 238 of them in the ten year period of 2012 to 2021. Almost two dozen per year average. Nearly all of these people were also skydivers. At one time riskier behaviors happened at DZs and while not encouraged there was more tolerance. Now more people go to where there are few if any rules and everyone is even more individually able to decide on their own level of risk exposure.

I find this point super interesting. It's in line with the big broader societal trend of the middle going away & the ends of the distribution growing.

[JoeWeber 2,512]

7 hours ago, chuckakers said:

Wendy makes some good points.

RSL's and MARD's have definitely helped. Note that every year we record fatalities that would likely not have happened if the jumper used an RSL or MARD. There are jumpers who remain steadfast to their opinion that these devices are dangerous, but the data says otherwise by a big margin.

More and better canopy training has been very effective in lowering our canopy injuries and fatalities by number, although the overall percentage of canopy-related fatalities each year has remained about the same for quite a while. About 50% of our annual fatalities come from flying parachutes into the ground, either from intentional low turns (swooping) or unintentional low turns (confusion, mis-judging recovery altitude, avoidance turns, etc.). By the way, the vast majority of intentional turn canopy fatalities involve male jumpers with less than 1,000 jumps and rapid downsizing. That pattern will only change when we change it.

Better training doctrine and techniques have been effective. Drop zones take ongoing training more seriously than in the past, as do most jumpers. Students graduate from training programs with better skill sets these days and that leads to fewer mistakes. The same holds true with more and better information.

I do think our changing demographic has contributed to better numbers. Skydivers are older on average than in the past, and that has probably led to fewer poor, testosterone-fueled decisions. Same goes for income. We are wealthier on average than we were years ago so more jumpers can afford state-of-the-art gear, audibles, training courses, etc. They can also afford to maintain their gear better - fewer mals means fewer EP errors.

Looking at just about every calendar year, we are losing the bulk of our jumpers from the same causes.

Flying fast canopies with too much ego and too little training
Failing to utilize equipment that will save us when we can't or won't
Performing EP's improperly or too slowly
Not following landing priorities

Just my 2 cents

#projectzero

Did you not also point out in these pages that your personal safety regime was to descend fast under a small parachute thus avoiding the crowd? I'm sure that's a paraphrase but is it close?

[airdvr 200]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to remember the number of fatalities listed back then was US only.

[wolfriverjoe 1,441]

Interesting discussion.

In the unlikely event that anyone doesn't know, Chuck Akers is President Of USPA (Captain Obvious, at your service).
Kinda cool that someone at that level in the sport is participating in this.

Something I didn't see (or missed) is the concept of "Safety Culture" at the DZ.

Dan BC is big on this. 
He's written a lot of stuff about it, and it's worth reading.

One reason behind 'safety culture' is that with the bigger DZs, and the dependence on tandems for revenue, having a DZ in the media for accidents isn't a good thing (yes, I know the stats that jumps go up after an accident).

People who want to do tandems often ask about the accident rate. Even though we can (truthfully) say that the majority of accidents are experienced jumpers who make foolish mistakes or exhibit bad judgement, many of the students just want to hear that 'there haven't been any accidents here for a long time.'

So the DZO has an incentive to promote a safety culture. Not all of them do, but the big DZ I (normally) jump at has a very strong attitude towards safety. Nobody gets ridiculed for pulling off a load when the wind picks up. Or for making any sort of 'conservative' decision. 

I don't know for sure, but that sort of attitude seems to be a lot more prevalent than the old 'cowboy' or 'daredevil' attitudes of the past.

[sfzombie13 317]

14 hours ago, wolfriverjoe said:

So the DZO has an incentive to promote a safety culture. Not all of them do, but the big DZ I (normally) jump at has a very strong attitude towards safety. Nobody gets ridiculed for pulling off a load when the wind picks up. Or for making any sort of 'conservative' decision. 

I don't know for sure, but that sort of attitude seems to be a lot more prevalent than the old 'cowboy' or 'daredevil' attitudes of the past.

this is interesting, as it seems to be the norm at my small 182 dz in wv(safety culture).  of course, our landing area is only about 300' wide and that includes the runway, and of course the prevailing wind direction comes straight off the river and blows over the tree line causing massive rotors most of the time and normally a cross wind landing.  they say that when our students learn how to land here they can jump anywhere, since our whole landing area is the size of most d license areas on bigger dropzones. 

i also started jumping back when that cowboy attitude was prevalent.  back before tandems were the norm and most folks came to do a static line jump.  it doesn't seem to be that way any more, at least most of the time.  it is perfectly normal for them to stop jumping completely when the winds pick up.  most of us watch the treetops to determine when to stop jumping.  i don't care how fast it blows, or which direction it is coming from, if the treetops are acting funky, it's time to take a break.  i like that safety is a bigger part of jumping now than it was when i started, even though i never felt unsafe at all.  i've been blessed with good instructors and folks at the dz who care about safety.

[sundevil777 98]

12 hours ago, sfzombie13 said:

it is perfectly normal for them to stop jumping completely when the winds pick up.

Quite right, wind holds seem more common than decades ago.  The availability of wind speed data is so common, and maybe that makes it more difficult to not call a wind hold, compared to interpreting a wind sock and judging it to be OK. However, this improvement in safety culture doesn't explain fatality rates changing.

Very important is the big difference in pull altitudes compared to when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  Also, cutting away to a round reserve was intimidating, even if a jumper had experience on rounds, even if it wasn't a windy day, even if the spot wasn't deep over the trees.  We know hesitation kills, and the natural reluctance to go to a round reserve might actually explain a number of no/low cutaway incidents.

Edited April 2, 2022 by sundevil777

[ufk22 32]

1. The ISP. Find an old SIM (the blue loose leaf binder) and look at the student training section. Microscopic.

2. The IRM. Standardized training for instructors to teach a standardized training program (see ISP).

3. Equipment changes/improvements and their effects (audibles, Mars’s, AAD’s which also cause higher deployments, etc).

4. “Point Break”. This movie brought incredible number of new people into the sport, a lot of whom were professional/normal folk, eventually almost eliminating the “outlaw-no rules culture”. Most of the current “bad boy” skydivers are pretty tame compared to 20 years ago.

If you don’t count the medical issues and the intentional low turns, neither of which was a factor 20-30 years ago, last years number drops in half, to 5.

Edited April 2, 2022 by ufk22

[riggerrob 597]

Since my first jump - in 1977 - I have seen massive improvements in equipment, training and accident rates, despite vastly larger numbers of jumps being made every year.

Back in 1977, static-line students jumped military surplus gear from World War 2 surplus airplanes. The vast majority of the revenue was from static-line students. The smaller DZs used 1950s vintage Cessnas.

When I earned my first instructor rating in 1982, military surplus rounds were still considered the safest for students. Over the years - but mostly the 1980s - I worked with a wide variety of student systems: military surplus S/L, civilian S/L, IAD, tandem, accompanied freefall, etc.

I also saw much improvement in teaching techniques lead by Rob Laidlaw.

Circa 1980, gov'ts quit selling military surplus parachutes intact, so in a mere decade, S/L students converted to large docile squares packed into piggy-back containers. The fiercely competitive capitalists who ran parachute factories constantly upgraded their equipment to minimize malfunctions. Skydivers benefitted from more reliable equipment. Despite expansion in the numbers of S/L students, accident rates remained low and I attribute that to more reliable square parachutes. Fewer malfunctions meant that solo students had to make fewer decisions during stressful malfunctions. The 1980s also saw that popularization of more professional AFF instruction. We also saw DZs shift from crude arrows to modern radios to steer students back towards the correct landing field. this further reduced the numbers of students who had to be retrieved from trees or rivers.

Tandem may have been introduced during the 1980s, but it really came to dominate during the 1990s. Having a professional TI pulling the handles vastly reduced the numbers of S/L student who needed to be retrieved from the trees. Since professional TIs were trying to earn a living, they discouraged any behavior that interfered with them making a dozen jumps per day.

As WW2 surplus airplanes wore out - during the 1990s - DZOs purchased more reliable turbines which can go well beyond TBO with the proper maintenance. Some DZOs start3ed to treat their investments in airplanes as their pension funds and to keep the value up, invested more in airplane maintenance.

As DZOs invested more in airplanes and equipment, they became more risk adverse and the older, dirty biker type of skydiver was no longer welcome. At least not to sell recreational drugs on the DZ. With that source of revenue gone, fewer dirty biker jumpers could afford to continue skydiving.

Electronic Automatic Activation Devices - Cypres was introduced in 1991 - removed the traditional 1/3 of "no pull/low pull" fatalities from USPA's data base. More fatalities were attributed to heart attacks in freefall.

[pchapman 271]

Quote

Having a professional TI pulling the handles vastly reduced the numbers of S/L student who needed to be retrieved from the trees

It sure was fun and a bit scary to be around students in the static line days!   I'm surprised more DZO's didn't have heart attacks. As a young jumper at the time, watching static line students was great entertainment and sure made skydiving seem cool & dangerous. (Doing radio or dispatching them did get a little more stressful of course.)

Most students of course did fine, but there were always a few problem students. All sorts of tales and horror stories to be told, as they scattered themselves across the landscape when having trouble hearing or processing the radio instructions (or even turned the radio off because they didn't like the instructor's "attitude"), moved their hands in accordance with the steering instructions....but didn't actually grab the toggles first, lied on their forms and jumped with undisclosed medical conditions ("Don't worry about that eye," said the student to the paramedic checking his pupils for proper neurological functioning after a crash landing, "I can't see out of that eye anyway."), spiralled down into the ground with one toggle still stowed (and getting lucky and surviving with minor injuries), occasionally just went unconscious, chopped for minimal reason ('the parachute was the wrong colour', 'the slider didn't go back up again', whatever), got edgy and chopped because another student had chopped on the previous load, delayed chopping for way too long, started to chop then decided not to and left the cutaway handle partially pulled and dangling, thumped down under round reserves, lost gear in fields of crop after taking gear off before walking out of the field, backlooped into their risers on exit to cause malfunctions and near main-reserve entanglements, suddenly decided to put in a full toggle turn too close to the ground, didn't flare, flared too early but then let it up,  and so on.

Not that tandems are perfect, but having someone experienced along for the ride really helped make things safer for the STOOOPID ones out there.

Edited April 2, 2022 by pchapman

[lasharp 4]

One big factor that hasn't been mentioned is when USPA required its group member DZs to separate high-performance landings from standard landings by either space (separate landing areas) or time (separate passes). In the late 2000s and early 2010s, collisions in the pattern could account for 25% of a year's fatalities (and they often occurred two at a time). Those have virtually disappeared.

[riggerrob 597]

I finally got around to reading the entire summary and was surprised at how many fatalities were more than 50 years old. Does this reflect demographics among licensed jumpers? Are we all getting that old????? (Staring at a 64 year old man in my mirror???????)

Back when I started jumping (1977) most students were in their teens or twenties and students older than 30 were considered "odd."

Continuing jumping as a member of POPS was considered a big deal back during the 1980s. POPS rarely made more than 2 or 3 jumps per day before sore knees forced them to quit for the day. Most of those sore knees were caused by too many down-wind landings under round parachutes.

[faulknerwn 38]

On 4/7/2022 at 12:22 PM, riggerrob said:

 

It seems even a large amount of the 'normal' fatalities tend to be older people.  This year alone was an older jumper doing a low cutaway in Florida.  An older jumper getting caught by a dust devil in Eloy.  Most of the stupid deliberate low turns are still young males, but it does seem that sometimes there are older people reacting poorly or slowly to emergencies.

[wolfriverjoe 1,441]

41 minutes ago, faulknerwn said:

... but it does seem that sometimes there are older people reacting poorly or slowly to emergencies.

Reaction times slow as we age. That's a simple fact.

The reliability of the gear has resulted in a lot of people not having to cut away very often.
I know of people who've been jumping for a long time who have never had a cutaway.

Combine the slowing reflexes with potentially rusty EPs...

 

I don't know how much this applies, but complacency and 'stale' EP training are two things I fear and try to avoid.

[riggerrob 597]

16 hours ago, wolfriverjoe said:

Reaction times slow as we age. That's a simple fact.

The reliability of the gear has resulted in a lot of people not having to cut away very often.
I know of people who've been jumping for a long time who have never had a cutaway.

Combine the slowing reflexes with potentially rusty EPs...

 

I don't know how much this applies, but complacency and 'stale' EP training are two things I fear and try to avoid.

Wiser jumpers manually and mentally review emergency procedures on a regular basis. Tandem instructors are REQUIRED to rehearse the hand movements of EPs before every jump.

Rob Warner

Strong Tandem Instructor Examiner

Also certified on Vector 1 (pre-drogue) Vector 2, Sigma and Racer Tandems.