SethInMI

That's the helmet you will be jumping with? That's great! Did people actually strap med-kits to their helmets on the jump?

Oh I get it, and I think it's funny, but I think you can get more flies with honey than shit. You disagree.

I don't know the post / context, so can't judge specifics, and it is hard to generalize a comment like that, it can be said to be funny or to be serious, and be taken as funny or serious all depending on context, people involved, etc. Sounds a little like the "can I be on your ash dive?" line. I don't really like that comment, but that's just me.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and if I do so I can imagine a situation where there is a new person at manifest who says "we got someone who wants to know about injuries / etc" and a senior employee thinks "I don't want another flores discussion" and tells the manifester to say "no we have never had a problem of any kind" just to get rid of the caller. But I doubt that is what actually went down, as I just can't understand how any dropzone employee would claim the DZ to be injury free without a "spidey-sense" tingle from the conversation that it is not going in a useful direction. Hopefully the OP comes back in here and explains some more to help clarify things.

In his defense, as a student skydiver one of the things you can do to be responsible for yourself is to try and find a dropzone and instructors you can trust, as you need to trust others to train and equip you properly, so I salute his efforts at doing research and asking questions, but he should not have recorded the conversation without permission. Also, from a style POV, the post was a little much with the signs and lots of tags and large font.

I would say in the USA very few injuries are reported to USPA (at least that make it into parachutist incident reports), and that lack of statistics makes discussing risk of injury just about impossible, as all we have are anecdotal observations. Maybe a large DZ, like SDAZ which has a strong safety reporting culture, would be able to give decent statistics on say number of broken bone jumps per million jumps, or sprained ankle jumps per million jumps etc. But I feel that death risk alone is probably a good metric for comparing activities for overall risk, as we all know injury risk is far higher than death risk for most activities (riding in a car, other "extreme" sports)

Hi Taha, There are not a lot of engineers in the skydiving equipment manufacturing world, because there are not a lot of people in that world. It is a small industry, and restricting it to wingsuits is way smaller. If wingsuits interest you, perhaps going for an aeronautical degree would be a good idea.

What you experienced is not unusual. For one of my student jumps, I think it was jump 5 or 6, I drove to the dropzone, got out of the car, walked into the building through one door, walked past manifest and out the other door, got back in the car and drove home. Just too nervous. A week or so later I came back and picked up where I left off. In my experience, the 1st few jumps are easy, you just completely trust your instructors, and then as you take on more responsibility for the jump the stress goes up. It took probably until jump 40-50 to be comfortable with the basics. I have almost 500 jumps now, and still get a little bit of nerves when I get to the DZ but I hope that never goes away, it is part of the thrill of jumping.

I wondered that too, but the fact that he talked about swoop distance in meters made me think he was not from the USA, so he could be legit (are there any other countries with hard 18 year age limits like the USA?). He sure sounds like a teenager, so idk...

Well the USA based people haven't seen anything. The europeans are largely sleeping by now, so you will have to wait for that region, but no idea what the rest of the world sees...

I agree with what you said in your response, and how you said it. Don't give it another thought. Plenty of people do hop-n-pops without jumpsuits on, including putting students out, so it's not like it's a BSR violation. For reference, here is me getting ready for my clear and pull from 2002, rocking a, yes, t-shirt. And plenty of student jumpsuits are baggier than tight-fitting t-shirt would be.

Instructor Assisted Deployment. It's a replacement for static line, so very similar in its process, but a free fall rig is used and the instructor throws the pilot chute as the student leaves the airplane.

From that angle you can't tell how loose you t-shirt is, but a jumpsuit is a good idea for free fall jumps for many reasons. Congrats on the clear-and-pull! I still remember mine back way back in 2002, I was shitting bricks getting ready for that jump, and so happy when my chute opened successfully.

I don't know where you would find an incident database with surface wind speed as a searchable value. I think most of what you will get in this thread are anecdotes and educated guesses. My educated guess is that fatalities don't correlate well with light to nil surface wind conditions.

"Canyon shitter" I thought it was pretty funny. No idea what Austrians themselves think of it. What does the OP think?