Question for skydivers

[NWFlyer 2]

Someone once said "If you torture numbers long enough they'll confess to anything." There's different ways to slice the data that'll tell whatever story you want it to.

I don't think statistics are really a valid way to look at this sport, either ... the numbers are just too small and "probability" doesn't really matter when the shit hits the fan. But... they can be informative, anyway. I, as a newer jumper, can look at the patterns of causes of death, and that may help me focus on what my possible risk areas will be. In that way, they've been useful.

[JohnMitchell 14]

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that's right folks, the old saw is true, you are likelier to die in your car than skydiving. Don't take my word for it, go listen to the latest Skydive Radio interview with Paul Sitter for yourself.

BS. Don't take Paul Sitter's word for it. Check out the actuarial tables yourself. There is about 1 fatality a year per 1000-1500 jumpers or so in the US. That is way worse than driving, maybe a factor of 5 or more. I've known quite a few jumpers that have died, none from car wrecks. Of the 2 dozen jumpers you've known that have died, how many bought it in car wrecks?

Even as the gear gets better, we think of new, improved ways to get killed.

[diverds 0]

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BS. Don't take Paul Sitter's word for it. Check out the actuarial tables yourself. There is about 1 fatality a year per 1000-1500 jumpers or so in the US. That is way worse than driving, maybe a factor of 5 or more.

Would you please point us to where you are getting your numbers from? All the research I have done is pretty much in line with what Paul had to say. If there is other data out there I would like to see it. Thanks.

-Dave

Skydive Radio

[kelpdiver 2]

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BS. Don't take Paul Sitter's word for it. Check out the actuarial tables yourself. There is about 1 fatality a year per 1000-1500 jumpers or so in the US. That is way worse than driving, maybe a factor of 5 or more.

Would you please point us to where you are getting your numbers from? All the research I have done is pretty much in line with what Paul had to say. If there is other data out there I would like to see it. Thanks.

The numbers are trivial to come by.

20some deaths a year in the US. USPA membership, pretty much a requirement, is in the low 30s, but has some number of retired life members and inactives, so 1 in 1000 seems pretty much on target.

40,000 driving deaths a year. Divide that into the US population of 280Million and you get 1 in 7000. 40% of those or more are related to alcohol, so remove that from the mix and your odds go over 1 in 10000.

Scuba, btw, has half the risk of death (3 times the deaths, 6 times the dive count) on a per dive count, and not remotely the risk of serious injury. On a participant count per year, it's not close at all. There are a hell of a lot more than 60,000 scuba diving Americans.

I'll pull the SR broadcast to hear, but it sounds like the guy struck out across the board on factual information.

The only statement that could be supported is that a single tandem jump is safer than driving this year.

[billvon 2,428]

>If you want zero percent chance of getting hurt or killed, then stay home.

Or go to a movie, or an amusement park - which have similar rates of injury/death. (People die at home too.)

The reason it's important to remind people that skydiving is NOT as safe as those things is that it is being sold as a fun, safe amusement park ride by many DZO's as a way to make more money. The waiver used to help with that - but nowadays we live in such a litigious society that you have to sign a waiver for _everything_ - so few people take them seriously any more. (I recently had to sign a waiver, almost as long as a typical skydiving one, to see a movie in a little theater that rolled and pitched a bit!)

So it all devolves to what you define "safe" as. If an amusement park is safe, then skydiving is not safe. If flying in an airliner is safe, then skydiving is not safe.

If, however, your standard for safe is "flying your own GA airplane" or "stopping after two beers then driving home" then skydiving could also reasonably be called safe.

It's this concept of "reasonably safe" that is the important one. We all think what _we're_ doing is safe; heck, I've talked to BASE jumpers who think BASE jumping is inherently safe. (After all, their main parachutes are much more reliable than ours. And one jumper I talked to considered releasable brake lines as a 'reserve', so skydiving reserves don't change things.) But it's not as safe as skydiving overall, just as skydiving isn't as safe as an amusement park (or driving) overall. That's the important thing to get across.

[diverds 0]

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40,000 driving deaths a year. Divide that into the US population of 280Million and you get 1 in 7000

I don't think you can use the population of the country to determine how many people drive. You would need to subtract all those under the age of 16, plus a large majority of the people living in major cities like New York that have good public transport, then there are the elderly, the poor, the blind, those with other handicaps etc.

I read a study done by the US hang gliding association several years ago. The numbers they came up with were very close to the numbers Paul quoted. In their study they looked at hang gliding, general aviation, motorcycle riding, and a bunch of other activities. They compared how many deaths per year per 100,000 participants in each activity. Skydiving was lower than any of the other "high risk" activities, and only slightly higher than motor vehicle deaths.

In the 16 years I've been jumping I've known more people that died in car crashes than skydiving. Maybe that's not the norm, but it has been my experience.

Skydive Radio

[bob.dino 0]

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40,000 driving deaths a year. Divide that into the US population of 280Million and you get 1 in 7000. 40% of those or more are related to alcohol, so remove that from the mix and your odds go over 1 in 10000.

In 1999, 68.6% of the US population had driving licences, so that's a population of 192m. How do you get to arbitrarily exclude alcohol-related deaths? That gives you 1 in 4800.

However, it's pretty obvious that neither you or I are trained statisticians, so how about we admit that we don't have the training to make statistical claims related to skydiving?

[CSpenceFLY 1]

83% of them are made up on the spot anyway.


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[kelpdiver 2]

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40,000 driving deaths a year. Divide that into the US population of 280Million and you get 1 in 7000. 40% of those or more are related to alcohol, so remove that from the mix and your odds go over 1 in 10000.

In 1999, 68.6% of the US population had driving licences, so that's a population of 192m. How do you get to arbitrarily exclude alcohol-related deaths? That gives you 1 in 4800.

However, it's pretty obvious that neither you or I are trained statisticians, so how about we admit that we don't have the training to make statistical claims related to skydiving?

You can choose to admin that if you choose. Since I know that simple statistics is rather basic math, I'll pass.

Why do I use the full population instead of those with drivers licenses? Simple- the leading cause of death for children is not guns, it's auto accidents. Where they are passengers. Pedestrians are also represented in those death numbers. In short, virtually the entire population is involved.

But even using 192M instead as you like, the rate is roughly 4 times higher, so unless you have a way to eliminate another 100+ million people, the end result is pretty clear. Driving is safer. And this of course is just with the annualized risk, which I think is most suitable. If you went to risk per time of exposure....

It's rather obvious what motivation drove the Hangliders to 'establish' the 'safety' of their sport. It's another very expensive recreational sport with a huge upfront cost, and a high risk level.

[kelpdiver 2]

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I read a study done by the US hang gliding association several years ago. The numbers they came up with were very close to the numbers Paul quoted. In their study they looked at hang gliding, general aviation, motorcycle riding, and a bunch of other activities. They compared how many deaths per year per 100,000 participants in each activity. Skydiving was lower than any of the other "high risk" activities, and only slightly higher than motor vehicle deaths.

So did they count "one and done" tandem students as part of that 100,000?

Here we go. There are so many things wrong with this, that I think I'll just say it's an example of badly applied statistics. Note in particular the year, and the number of skydivers.

To the original poster: Don't be so put off by this latter discussion. The risks to tandem students is very different, and much lower, than the risk to those of us sport jumpers that do 50-500jumps/year. There is an irrational need by many to believe that their car represents a bigger threat to their lives.


From: [email protected] (Dave Appel)
Newsgroups: rec.skydiving
Subject: Re: Tandem safetey,was Re: INFO/SUGGESTIONS for first jump.
Date: 27 May 92 19:52:28 GMT

For a comparison to other sports, check the table printed on page 13 of the April 1990 issue of Parachutist. Here is a comparison of the risks of participating in various activities. It was put together by the U.S. Hang Gliding Association using data collected from various air sports organizations and melding it with data from the National Safety Council and other sources.


Activity Participants Fatalities Rate per 100,000
per year participants
All accidents 230,000,000 96,000 42
Traffic Fatalities 162,850,000 46,000 28
Power Boat Racing 7,000 5 71
SCUBA 300,000 140 47
Mountaineering 60,000 30 50
Boxing 6,000 3 50

AIR VEHICLES:
Air Shows 1,000 5 500
Homebuilt 8,000 25 312
General Aviation 550,000 800 145
Sailplane 20,000 9 45
Balloon 4,500 3 67
Hang Gliding 25,000 10 40
SKYDIVING 110,000 28 25

It says the skydiving stats are for 1988, and it implies that the other figures are for 1989.

[JerryBaumchen 1,064]

Hi Spence,

I spent 30 yrs in QA/statistics analysis and that is one of the best come-backs that I have ever heard.

Good show!!!!!!!

Jerry

[diverds 0]

That was the study I was refering too. As you can see, skydiving showed 25 deaths per 100,000 participants per year, and auto accidents showed 28. I don't know how accurate or scientific that study was, but as I said before I have personally known more people that have died in car wrecks than jumping so I don't really doubt those numbers.

Skydive Radio

[JohnMitchell 14]

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Would you please point us to where you are getting your numbers from? All the research I have done is pretty much in line with what Paul had to say. If there is other data out there I would like to see it. Thanks.

30+ years of watching skydivers get killed, but not by car wrecks. (It could be that we skydivers are just superior drivers.) Ten or fifteen years ago, Time magazine had a nice little graph of fatality rates of various sports in their magazine. Snow skiing was the highest of the normal sports, skydiving was the 3rd worst, hangliding 3 times worse than skydiving, and mountain climbing the worst by a huge margin.

The USPA has about 32,000 members, right? There are 30+ fatalities almost every year. That's about 1 in 1000, every year. Auto fatalities in this country are, what, 35,000 a year? Compare to an estimate of # of drivers, maybe 140 million, that's 1 per 4000.

Life insurance can cost a lot more if you skydive, or simply will exclude that from coverage, depending on the policy. Check to make sure if you have dependents.

P.S. Statistically, flying in small planes is not really that safe. It could be, but a lot of bad decisions get made. Same can certainly be said for skydiving.

I'm sure a Google or two could pull up a lot more stats to support my views. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade. Being aware of the magnitude of the risks you are taking is the first step to managing them.

[JohnMitchell 14]

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but as I said before I have personally known more people that have died in car wrecks than jumping so I don't really doubt those numbers.

Were all those friends that died in cars jumpers?

If not, consider jumpers as their own group. Some do get killed in car wrecks, but I still say, from my own experience, skydiving is the more dangerous of the two.

[NWFlyer 2]

This is a general reply, directed at those who are debating statistics...

Is this choice really about statistics? Sure, there are a lot of choices in my life I make that probably have some basis in statistical analysis, but for the most part, 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 or 1 in 1 million doesn't really matter all that much to me if I'm that 1.

I think skydiving is a much more personal decision that can and should be arrived at after looking carefully at the sport and whether what it brings to you outweighs what the risks are (and no matter how you slice the statistics it is not risk free, but then again, neither is life).

[davedlg 0]

If you want to argue statisitcs, you can use them to say almost anything you want by varying your sets.

The way I have always looked at it is like this:

There are Roughly 30 fatilities per year in over 3 million jumps: this equates to about 1 fatality in every 100,000 skydives.

The fatal accident rate for passenger vehicles is about 1.5 in every 100 million vehicle miles. This is about 1 fatlity every 65 million vehicle miles.

The fatality rate for motorcycles is 38 per 100 million miles traveled, or about 1 fatlity every 2.6 million motorcycle miles.

This roughly works out to each skydive being about the same risk as driving a car 650 miles, or a motorcycle 26 miles.

So I want to prove making a skydive is safe? Easy. How many miles do you drive a year? I bet it's more then 650. Therefore skydiving is safer then driving.

I want to prove skydiving is dangerous? OK. An average jumper might make 150 skydives in a year. Now you have to drive almost 100,000 miles a year to equal the risk of skydiving.

If I want to go out drinking and drive now my driving risk just went back up. But if I want to swoop a highly loaded eliptical my skydiving risk just went up.

The basic fact is that a single skydive can be made with a reasonable level of safety. Start multiplying that by hundreds and thousands of skydives and that safety factor starts to go away...

But you can always manipulate the statistics in your favor by making intellegent decisions. If I choose to wear a seat belt and drive conservatively, my chances of getting killed in a car wreck go down dramatically. If I choose to make good decisions about the kind of canopy I fly and the kind of jumps I go on, I can make the risk of skydiving go down considerably too.

There is always that nagging factor though...you know, that "you can do everything right and still die" factor. It is ever present in life. It's the Shit happens factor. You can be the safest driver in the world, but that won't help you when a truck drives off an overpass onto your car. You can be sitting on the couch in your house watching TV and a meteor crashes through your roof and kills you. Or you could be the unlucky one who goes in under a double mal...but it's not very likely.

[kelpdiver 2]

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That was the study I was refering too. As you can see, skydiving showed 25 deaths per 100,000 participants per year, and auto accidents showed 28. I don't know how accurate or scientific that study was, but as I said before I have personally known more people that have died in car wrecks than jumping so I don't really doubt those numbers.

For me, I know a lot more drivers than jumpers, so the statement wouldn't mean very much. Can't say for you how big those two groups are.

But the basic failure of the 25/100,000 is the inclusion of tandems.

[tomvailco 0]

Skydiving is dangerous. It is after all SKYDIVING. It's also as much fun as you can have. Risk and reward. Only you can decide that.

[secondthoughts 0]

All this discussion is both fascinating and confusing. I've come to the conclusion that the tandem skydive probably isn't the best way to face the challenge I've imagined that I wanted to overcome.

The thing that has most captured my attention is the act of will it must take to leave the plane. I can only guess what a wonderful reward must come with that commitment.

Now that I've had the time to read more and talk to several people it seems as though the best way to experience this would be the AFF program. The place that issued this certificate seems very willing to trade in the value towards the class.

Thanks again for the kind words and advice.

[iamsam 0]

good luck secondthoughts - don't forget to pull
thanks for starting an interesting thread (there are lies, lies and damm statistics!!)

good job forum turned a tandem into an AFF

but what do I know

[exnavykds 0]

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The thing that has most captured my attention is the act of will it must take to leave the plane. I can only guess what a wonderful reward must come with that commitment.

Beth, you have a remarkable way with words!

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[Broke 0]

A tandem is for those who would like a little taste. AFF is for those who are not content with just a tazte

Divot your source for all things Hillbilly.
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