The safety of skydiving

Today, I am going to talk about the safety of skydiving; and believe it or not skydiving is a very safe sport. Every year over 3.1 million skydives are made, and last year there were only 19 fatalities. I will talk about this fatality rate in a minute, but first I will compare this rate to other rates.

Every time you get into a car, you are 25 times more likely to die in a car crash than in a skydiving accident. I know what your thinking, way more people drive cars than skydive. I am not talking about the number of people killed in car crashes versus the number of people killed in skydiving accidents, I am talking your percent chance of dying in a car crash verse a skydiving accident. The percent of people that die in car crashes is 25 times higher than the percent of people that die in skydiving accidents. You are also more likely to be killed by a strike of lightning or a bee sting than to die skydiving.

Now I will talk about why the deaths in skydiving occur. In almost every case of a skydiving fatality, there was a perfectly good parachute over the head of the jumper. This is because some jumpers try to perform crazy stunts under canopy. In skydiving believe it or not, experts are more likely to have fatal accidents than beginners because they are over confident and try to push their limits. Experts tend to have small parachutes that allow them to have more forward movement. Some experts also perform a very dangerous maneuver called swooping. In swooping the skydiver purposely aims his parachute towards the ground when he is getting close to the ground to gain speed and then at the last second try pulls up in an attempt to be going very fast right above the ground. One skydiver that likes to swoop told me that you spend 10-12 seconds getting into a "kill mode" and then spend the next 5-6 trying to get out of it and go flying across the ground. Swooping is the cause of the large majority of the deaths in skydiving; so, if you were to eliminate the deaths from swooping from the skydiving death statistic, skydiving would have almost no deaths every year.

Swooping done right and swooping gone wrong and cool red bull swooping video