Piece

I knew this long before I started to skydive. Are you suggesting that the discussion should end at this? This basic truth is itself semantics: "you will live unless you fall on your head" versus "you will die unless you deploy your parachute." For the parachute not to be deployed something has to go wrong. Whether it goes wrong with you or with the parachute is semantics from the point of view of risk. Parachutes have to be maintained and inspected, people have to be trained and educated. My point earlier was that it usually goes wrong with the jumper, not the parachute, and this is important to me, since I can at least try to control myself. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I agree with you in principle but actuaries are interested in answers to different questions. Furthermore, they typically deal with activities that are very different from skydiving. Anyway, here's what I did, please feel free to criticize it. I will more or less ignore decimal precision since I don't know the conventions about that. The national safety council publishes the following table: http://www.nsc.org/research/odds.aspx. Here we have the odds of dying from, say, an automobile accident, either in 2004 or for a person born in 2004. For skydiving I used USPA statistics at http://www.uspa.org/AboutSkydiving/RiskOverview/tabid/63/Default.aspx. In the last six years there was an average of 24.2 deaths per year. Using the membership surveys we have an average of 2,169,677.2 jumps per year. First let's use yearly numbers. Probability of dying in an automobile accident: 1/6,198. Probability of dying from n skydives using the most braindead model possible: 1-(1-24.2/2168677.2)^n (if anyone wants an explanation of how I got this just ask). If n=100, about 1/897 probability of survival. If n=400, 1/224.5 probability of survival. Now let's use lifetime numbers. Probability of dying in an automobile accident: 1/81. Probability of dying in an accident as defined by the NSC: 1/35. Probability of dying from 1500 skydives: 1/60. Probability of dying from 6000 skydives: 1/15 (due to the simplicity of the model this number is probably completely meaningless). Remember that the risk from skydiving is compressed into a lot fewer years than driving. What this means in terms of how safe the activity is is up to the jumper to interpret. I believe that this comparison is not more valid than yours but it is perhaps more meaningful to an actual jumper. With regards to deaths per active skydiver per year, let us define an active skydiver as an active member of the USPA. Over the last six years there were an average of 31917.8 members in the USPA. 22.4/31917.8 is approximately 1/1425 and this is the rosiest number we have so far, with automobiles approximately 1/5000 according to your estimation. In your estimate skydiving is about 3.5 times as dangerous as driving as defined in this context. This may be due to the fact that many USPA members are, say, recent AFF graduates that may have not performed that many skydives in the previous year. For anyone who thinks that any part of this calculation justifies skydiving as being "safe" remember that this is an average! This includes the jumps of tandem masters (a tandem jump counts as one jump if I'm interpreting USPA correctly), beginners, Arizona Airspeed, etc. Many people, including me, firmly believe that risk in skydiving is not uniformly distributed. Skydive safely and you're less likely to die, skydive unsafely and you're much more likely to die. Skydiving is not, and never will be, a safe activity in the sense that sitting on the couch is a safe activity. This risk must be managed through education and training! Skydiving is made safer by believing that it is unsafe. You deviate from this at your peril... http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I disagree. The probability of catastrophic equipment failure is very important to me personally. If it was high I would not skydive, I do not wish to commit delayed suicide. Certainly catastrophic equipment failure is a bigger deal in skydiving than in driving but it doesn't mean that statistics are meaningless in this context, in fact I think this is the only context in skydiving in which they matter to me... http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

The number of deaths per active skydiver is indirect inference (sorry, not a statistician, this may be the wrong terminology). Being an "active skydiver" (whatever that means) does not cause death, a skydive does. A unit of skydiving really should be the jump, any comparison we make has to involve actual jumps in some way. BTW, there are a little more than 30,000 members of the USPA and there are a little more than 40,000 fatal traffic accidents per year, probably a lot more deaths. Maybe tonight I'll write a post about my way of comparing the two activities that I believe has some meaning, no-one seems to have mentioned it yet. I don't like the idea of posting this comparison since it is very misleading... Safety in skydiving is a catch-22, in order to be safe you must believe that you are unsafe. That is the bottom line for actual skydivers, not the statistics. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

You're assuming that deaths per mile and deaths per jump are comparable. I don't see that necessarily. Comparing skydiving to driving has to be done a bit carefully, otherwise we end up comparing apples to oranges. Skydiving has the rare property that it has a well-defined unit of participation: the jump. What constitutes one unit of driving? People usually compare deaths per jump to either deaths per driver or deaths per mile. It isn't clear to me that either of these things are the equivalents of a jump in driving. Regardless, all comparisons based on averaging have inherent flaws due the non-uniform distribution of risk in skydiving that you hear about a lot on this forum. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

Thank you rehmwa, I saw that thread and am glad to hear all the same opinions still apply. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

Franz is definitely the guy I'll be ordering it through. Jon is Jon Morrison? The team is gonna be Gordon, Jeromy, Greg and me. Like I said, newbie 4-way for fun, but everyone seems to agree that we want to train on a schedule and go south to jump/train over the winter. We may not go to the nationals but I think everyone can really improve from this. People have already progressed a great deal since the Hellfish boogie, last weekend we launched an exit without funneling it. Thanks for the offer to help, we will definitely need some advice at a few points. I was hoping to drag Dale into occasionally critiquing video http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

First of all, I did do a search but all the threads I could find were at least 2 years old and I figured it may be time to ask this question again. I apologize in advance if I'm wrong. So I fell in love with bellyflying this season. I got a newbie 4-way team lined up for next year, plans for camps/tunnel time over the winter, I'm stoked. Unfortunately, I still don't own an RW suit. I've been looking around and I'm thinking the Michigan Tetris suit. It doesn't have a lot of options so I can't screw it up and a lot of people on here seemed to love theirs about two years ago. Do you guys still do? The main question I want to ask is: is the Tetris, being a competition suit, a bit too much for me? I'm 5'10" and 180-185 lbs (my weight changes...), am I going to be unreasonably fast if the front is all nylon? I've read before that weights should be the way to adjust fallrate and not suit material, am I understanding this right? Also, one of my teammates is already faster than everyone else and the team is for fun with friends, cutting people is absolutely out of the question, so being faster may be a good thing for this reason. Also, does anyone have leg zippers on the Tetris? Do they hold up to abuse? I don't want the zippers if they're gonna break and ruin the suit. Are the zippers mostly a comfort thing? Do the soles of the booties hold up to walking and landing on them or are the zippers necessary? Thanks! http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

Get someone who knows how to IAD people, preferably an actual IAD instructor, to hold the pilot chute. Not doing so may lead to such things as the pilot chute wrapping around the leg of the passenger and clearing when the passenger lets go in terror. Also, a Sabre 150 with 400 pounds of suspended weight has a very abrupt stall point somewhere around 1/2 brakes. Just a heads up. (edited for grammar) http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I have a 93 Jav with a chafing strip on the legstrap. Is this what you mean by "double thickness"? If so, it's type 7 webbing like on the MLW with a type 8 strap sown on (I hope I got the numbers right). One of the local riggers told me that Sunpath put these straps on so that the legstraps won't slip in certain weather conditions. It works great on my Jav, never slips at all that I can tell and I like my legstraps tight. Not sure if it was an after-market alteration or not. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I "upsized" from a Stiletto to a Sabre 2 and I like the Sabre 2 better actually. I find that the flare is easier to get right and the front riser pressure is much lighter. Of course, you can do both of these things just as well on a Stiletto, it's just easier on a Sabre 2. On the Stiletto I had to give it a bit of brakes to get the front risers to lighten up, on the Sabre 2 you just grab and pull. The pressure on the fronts builds up slower, too. It doesn't lose nearly as much altitude in a front riser dive and the toggles are more responsive. Mind you I don't do any kind of swooping on it yet, I just play with them at altitude. I'm no expert and I might be wrong, that's just the impression I got. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

Look up a thread in the blue skies forum about someone called Ted Nelson. Downsizing caused his fatality. When reading an incident report, downsizing is never listed as the direct cause of death. The jumper dies from a mistake they make. The point of downsizing slowly is that these mistakes will not cost you your life. Thus, almost any landing fatality for a jumper with less than, say, 600 jumps can likely be at least partially attributed to aggressive downsizing as a root cause. According to the fatalities database, in 2008 so far there were 5 fatalities among such jumpers out of a total of 14 landing accidents, a rate of more than 1 out of 3. 4 of these fatalities were on canopies considered aggressive for the experience level, arguably the 5th one too. You would be on the more aggressive side of these fatalities, most of them had more jumps than you and flew a canopy similar to yours. In fact, all people killed this year due to low turns had more jumps than you do, many of them probably had more jumps on their current canopy than you have in total. Remember that even the most severe injuries are not listed on the fatalities database so this is likely to be an underestimate of how dangerous such flying really is. I downsized aggressively. I now have a permanently damaged right knee that is likely to develop into possibly severe arthritis as I age. This may prevent me from participating in any more adventures once I grow up without some serious surgery/medication. If I had to do it again, I would definitely not move to a Stiletto 150 at 150 jumps. I "upsized" planforms when getting back into the sport, at great expense. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

It was my impression that tandems malfunction less but I don't have any stats on this either. I remember hearing somewhere that it's something like 1/1000 but I can't remember where. I'll quote it for you if I ever find it but I could have just dreamed that up. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

Using the USPA 2007 membership survey, we see that the average is about 3043/2159793, or about 1 in 710 jumps currently. Of course, this includes tandems which seem to malfunction a lot less due to good body position on deployment. I had my first around jump 300 http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

That's what I would have done. Of course, I reserve the right to be wrong http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

It is very naive to think that experience does not matter when it comes to disseminating knowledge. Many things you think you know now may change in a few years and a few hundred jumps. Most importantly, experience will bring perspective on the knowledge that you do have. This is the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. In skydiving, the latter is much more valuable than the former. Because of this, I believe that jump numbers are a very meaningful measure of experience because they indicate that you have been in many different skydiving situations and have had a chance to see how the theories work in practice. For example, in practice one person briefly tracking under another does not usually cause a nuclear explosion over the dropzone. Of course, even people with thousands of jumps can be (and often are...) wrong. They often disagree. That's what our heads are for. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

There was no venom in your posts. I am sorry I did not make that more clear, I did not intend to criticize you. I did not mean all low-timers, only the ones over-reacting. I definitely did not mean, and was careful not to say, that low-timers should shut up in general. I myself am a low-timer. Saying something in a respectful manner in front of an instructor is one thing. Ridiculing and saying things like "I will never jump with you because you suggested not following the dive flow on an AFF jump" or "you are a moron" is another thing entirely, especially when the student is just being a student. If I was an instructor and someone did that to my student they would get a harsh talking-to. That was my point. I also firmly believe that people without instructional ratings and without a lot of jumps should be very careful when talking to students without instructors present. I prefer to not talk to students about their skydiving at all if I can help it. This is a matter of safety as well as good instructional practice. There is a time and a place in skydiving for the harsh talk. When needed it can save lives. Not every small thing deserves such talk. I do want to point out one thing: It is essentially impossible that he would have succeeded to the point of actually burbling his instructor, we are talking about an AFF-I here. Not that that means he should have tried. Billvon addressed this in his earlier post. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

This type of reply is precisely the reason why so many skydivers strongly dislike dz.com. Heaven forbid we just answer someone's question, right? It is not enough to just tell him to follow the dive plan and explain what a burble is. We have to bash him on the head over and over again, tell him he's about to die, ostracize him based on a single post in an anonymous forum, turn him into a public joke and call him a moron. That'll learn him to ask questions... By the way, notice how all of this venom is coming from low-timers? Would you people speak to him this way if you were in front of his instructor at his DZ? Would you even speak to him at all given your experience level? If you wouldn't do it in real life, don't do it on the forums either. I think a total newbie yelling at students is much more dangerous than an over-excited student asking a silly question. You definitely convinced me just now that when I finally become an instructor I will be telling the students I jump with not to read the dz.com forums. Oh and, by the way, it is not uncommon for experienced skydivers to mess around in the sky if things are going well. With more experience you will gain perspective, something these forums are sorely lacking. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I understand where Kallend is coming from, though he could probably be a bit more diplomatic about it A lot of skydiving instruction is very low quality (not necessarily Aggiedave, I've never met him) and part of that may come from a lack of understanding of how teaching works in general. It took me over a year and a bungled class to begin to develop any understanding of what I'm doing and I'm still learning, and this is with full-time support staff in the form of other teachers with decades of experience at my disposal. My students usually give me good reviews ("I thought I would hate this class but loved it" type deal, I teach math) and occasionally perform better than average though I am far from a genuinely good teacher. I am now in my 3rd year of teaching. I have not taken the coaching class yet but it seems inconceivable that anyone who has not tried teaching before could learn anything substantial about it in 3 hours. Granted, teaching skydiving is probably different from teaching Calculus II. For starters, all of your students want to learn. They are under stress in skydiving though students in universities are also under stress during exams. There are definitely many differences but anyone who thinks that a 3 hour class followed by a few sample briefing/debriefing sessions is enough is crazy A 3 hour seminar is a formality, not a class... Maybe my opinion will change after I take it. Honestly, in a sport where good instruction can be the difference between life and death we sure don't seem to take teaching the teachers very seriously Perhaps DZs should have teacher training staff in the form of very experienced instructors that are required to mentor less experienced instructors? Maybe even *gasp* student evaluations? http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I currently teach at a university for a living. This is only my third year of teaching so my opinions are of limited value but this is the internet so here they are While it is true that many professors/lecturers are bad teachers I feel that this is often exaggerated by students as an excuse for their own problems. And yes, Kallends many awards are probably an indication of him being an excellent teacher, I have met many people with this kind of recognition and they were always excellent teachers, without exception. Possibly the most common misconception about teaching in students is that a teacher should be your friend. This is not entirely true. A teacher/student relationship is complicated and can involve a boot in the a** when necessary. This is what the teacher training staff call feedback for the students in our school and it has to be unpleasant, otherwise it won't work. In a classroom setting this feedback ultimately has to be processed by the student. Good students will work to improve while bad students will blame the teacher. I may be wrong about this. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

What makes you believe this? A quick glance at the fatality database shows that the overwhelming majority of skydiving incidents are caused by the failure of the gizmo located between the backpad and chest strap. For example, lots of people pound in after misjudging altitude during a swoop and that's much closer to the ground than breakoff. Admittedly, swooping is probably (I don't swoop) much more sensitive to mistakes. I agree with an earlier post that whether you use mechanical altimeters to back up your eyes or vice versa is mostly a moot point. But to have no back-up at all? What if you misjudge? Anyway, how you determine altitude is your choice. You have 6 times my jumps so it's all good http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

It seems like using the horizon for visual cues introduces even more variables we can't control. Cloud formations, haze and sunsets can really change what the horizon looks like, even in the course of one day. Then again, I'm quite certain that I've trained myself, mostly unconsciously, to recognize 6000' since I always seem to check my altimeter at that exact point. It would be interesting to hear if pilots know anything that I/we don't about recognizing altitude visually. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

I saw, with my own two eyes, a bellyflyer in the tunnel at Eloy surrounded by freeflyers in a slow sit or headdown. They were flying no contact, this was not the usual kind of hybrid. The bellyflyer was not heavy or short, he seemed to have an athletic tall-ish build. He was, however, bent almost in half at the waist and was falling straight down the tube. They looked like they were doing maybe 150mph, its hard for me to say since I don't jump with a Neptune and don't have a clear idea just how fast what kind of sit is. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

One dude I knew did that. Around 1000 jumps, no audible. He was videoing a 4-way and cloud base was, I think, 4000' when they were going up. He entered the clouds (sorry, industrial haze) and his alti fogged up. He thought "no biggie, just wait out the cloud and pull". Well, once the cloud broke he crapped his pants cause he was at 1000'. He went straight to his main like everyone who actually were in this situation seem to do. CYPRES popped his reserve, he chopped the main right away. His main risers snagged on the reserve lines and the main streamered behind him, thankfully it did not choke the reserve. I was scared to death watching him land. Lessons I learned: know what cloudbase is but don't rely on it, it can change quickly. Check your alti before going into a cloud. Stay aware in the cloud. Don't fuck up but wear an audible in case you do. Better yet, don't go if there are clouds at break-off though this is a conversation for a different thread. http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.

That's not what I'm trying to say here. Altitude awareness means more than just "big houses pull." My point is: your eyes are definitely another way to break the links in the chain that lead to an accident but should you really believe them over an altimeter during an otherwise normal jump? If an RW jump plans to break at 4000' and I am used to breaking at 5500' and trained my eyes to do that, unless I believe my altimeter, I'm likely to break at 5500' anyway just like I see freeflyers of all skill levels do. I've watched people with thousands of jumps do this. Breaking high on a large RW jump and disappearing from the group is not necessarily a safe practice. I view my eyes the way I view my audible: it's a useful tool but I wouldn't completely rely on it. If I hear the siren in my audible, I will pull. If the houses are big, I will pull. But there's more to skydiving than that. Don't people typically lose altitude awareness much earlier in the skydive? http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/28/funny-pictures-i-come-with-sarcasm/ Proudly uncool since 1982.