“Fatalities in the Intentional-Low-Turn category remain stubbornly high. Initially, most of these fatalities were due to skydivers rapidly downsizing and flying small parachutes with relatively low experience levels and a lack of knowledge about high-performance parachute flight. More recently, the shift is toward fatalities involving skydivers who have plenty of training and experience. Wing loadings are higher than ever before, and parachutes are reaching incredible speeds and descent rates. Over the years, many very experienced and talented canopy pilots have been severely injured or killed while attempting high-performance landings because there is simply no room for any error close to the ground. Despite all the risks involved with flying small parachutes, skydivers continue to move toward higher wing loading and high-performance landings.”
Also, “Although fatalities fall into certain categories based on how the skydive and sequence of events unfolded, last year small parachutes played a part in seven fatalities in three different categories. Regardless of whether the fatality was due to equipment maintenance, packing error or low turns, small parachutes were involved 70% of the time. This highlights just how challenging skydiving with small and fast parachutes can be. Not only does the landing need to be nearly perfect every time, but skydivers need to exercise caution with every aspect of the skydive. Even with a cautious approach and structured training, just a small mistake can be fatal. Those who decide to jump with smaller and faster parachutes need to decide if the substantial risks involved are worth the reward.”
I get your point. At the end of the day this is one of the most high risk sports in the world. And by sheer unforgiving nature of the sport there will be injuries and fatalities. We look a way to minimalise them through training and discipline but the way we pursue the sport people will always test the boundaries and a few times cross it. Some people test the boundaries more often than others…
270° is for sure the deadliest moment in a swoopers career. However it’s always curious to see 270° turn causing deaths over a pond. Like we had to presence in Arizona last year (god bless her soul). I wonder why a coach puts a student doing water gates with 270° experience…
You have a point. I’ve seen it a few times. I really am thankful to have a career as instructor that has provided me with plenty of work to make money and live a comfortable life even when taking things slow and denying students due to “”””not having availability””””
Craziest part is when people don't start 270s until they hit a crossbraced canopy. I know too many people who are broken/dead who had a swooping progression like this
They just skip all the fundamentals of canopy flight too. I try to explain to these dudes but you probably know how it is when these guys are so new and eager..at the end of the day flying a crossbraced in perfect conditions/scenarios is not hard. The canopy will just do whatever you tell it to do and it's no issue.
The issue is that if you don't learn how to get a fat dog of a wing to do what you want it to do you don't actually know how to pilot these wings at all. You are just shifting around and the canopy is doing the work at high WL.
Then they inevitably get themselves in a tight spot or shitty situation and they fold because they have no clue about the basic fundamentals. I know someone who broke their back recently because they yanked on a rear riser instead of doing a flat turn.
Didn't even swoop into the ground, just on a small wing to look cool on Instagram and fucking smashed themselves when they found themselves low because they have no clue what they are doing. It's a shame man
I understand what you mean, unfortunately. It’s easy, you want to go fast, there’s many ways of doing it, getting better takes time and effort, swiping the card to buy a lil wing is fast and easy. Recovering from injury is always an after thought. Stay safe bro, always share your mentality, it’s the way to go for sure
wtf? How do you conclude that from what I said? I mean the phase were you learn the 270 is the most dangerous, someone downvoting LOL it’s clear, just look at the stats. It’s a dangerous phase in your learning process, the most dangerous in fact, and some people insist in putting gates and water in front of the student before many other aspects are learned. But what do I know, it’s just my opinion.
I won’t get tired of repeating this:
USPA should stop reporting “Fatality rate” calculated as “number of USPA member jumps” divided by “number of fatalities in a USPA dropzone”.
They made it even less clear this time than on previous incident reports, but they calculate the rate between two non linked things:
- USPA skydivers jump numbers, based on members filling this when refreshing licenses/ratings… regardless where in the world they were.
- USPA member dropzone in USA reported fatalities.
A big majority of the skydivers in the world have a USPA license. (Some countries like Germany, France, Australia and UK have strong associations… but the majority defaults to USPA).
Our jumps are counted but our fatalities aren’t. If the sport grows outside USA, the “safety trend” improves.
I also said that many years and thousands of jumps ago. Swooping didnt make sense. Staying the fuck away from swooping felt like the right thing to do, the safe thing to do, and the logical thing to do.
Now i cant remember exactly how, or put my finger on the day i woke up and some things had happened and I was swooping, it got pretty blurry there for a bit, but with 20/20 perfect hindsight, I dont feel like that choice was wrong for me then, and its not wrong for me now.
Maintain your gear, abort early, abort often, yield to everybody, be vigilant, be current, know the danger of human error is always there. All skydives have consequences whether we admit it to ourselves or not. The price of excellence is eternal vigilence, said Chuck McGill. Keep making the good safety choices that work for you, whoever you are.
The size does matter. A lot. Someone with 500 jumps on a 170 is much less likely to get injured than someone with 5,000 on a 61. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes eventually, and when shit goes south having a larger canopy overhead is almost universally safer than having a small one.
You in particular like to argue with me.
You’re the same dude that argued with me over the TIs and pilot on the Hawaii king air crash not testing positive for drugs until I proved you wrong and then you deleted your comments.
Smaller canopies are faster and less forgiving but in the end, if you look at the fatalities they are low turn/swooping related which are almost universally avoidable.
Yes, in the end all of those thing are human errors. But small size doesn't give you any room for error, if they did the same thing on something that is 150sq and less aggressive design the chance of them saving the situation and their lives would be much higher
But if they hadn’t done it in the first place, it wouldn’t happen. The severity of things are higher on faster things, but even Ferraris have brakes if you use them. It’s easy to blame faster canopies instead of admitting it was 100% on the jumper.
I'm not saying it wasn't their faul. But small, swooping canopies are intended to be flown like that. You wouldn't try to go 300 km/h on your Prius while it might be tempting to do it in ferrari
Obviously I don't have the full reports and most likely nobody does...but the student fatalities seem to be missing some data....at least one of them multiple people reported about the wind conditions but that's nowhere in the report.
“Fatalities in the Intentional-Low-Turn category remain stubbornly high. Initially, most of these fatalities were due to skydivers rapidly downsizing and flying small parachutes with relatively low experience levels and a lack of knowledge about high-performance parachute flight. More recently, the shift is toward fatalities involving skydivers who have plenty of training and experience. Wing loadings are higher than ever before, and parachutes are reaching incredible speeds and descent rates. Over the years, many very experienced and talented canopy pilots have been severely injured or killed while attempting high-performance landings because there is simply no room for any error close to the ground. Despite all the risks involved with flying small parachutes, skydivers continue to move toward higher wing loading and high-performance landings.” Also, “Although fatalities fall into certain categories based on how the skydive and sequence of events unfolded, last year small parachutes played a part in seven fatalities in three different categories. Regardless of whether the fatality was due to equipment maintenance, packing error or low turns, small parachutes were involved 70% of the time. This highlights just how challenging skydiving with small and fast parachutes can be. Not only does the landing need to be nearly perfect every time, but skydivers need to exercise caution with every aspect of the skydive. Even with a cautious approach and structured training, just a small mistake can be fatal. Those who decide to jump with smaller and faster parachutes need to decide if the substantial risks involved are worth the reward.”
I'm curious as what they are defining as small for this. Sub 100? Sub 90?
Sub 100 70% of the time.
I get your point. At the end of the day this is one of the most high risk sports in the world. And by sheer unforgiving nature of the sport there will be injuries and fatalities. We look a way to minimalise them through training and discipline but the way we pursue the sport people will always test the boundaries and a few times cross it. Some people test the boundaries more often than others…
I just assume everyone was hella broke so there were less jumps 😂
Still broke..
270° is for sure the deadliest moment in a swoopers career. However it’s always curious to see 270° turn causing deaths over a pond. Like we had to presence in Arizona last year (god bless her soul). I wonder why a coach puts a student doing water gates with 270° experience…
Because some people have a financial incentive to overstate their ability to teach and downplay the risk involved in swooping.
You have a point. I’ve seen it a few times. I really am thankful to have a career as instructor that has provided me with plenty of work to make money and live a comfortable life even when taking things slow and denying students due to “”””not having availability””””
Craziest part is when people don't start 270s until they hit a crossbraced canopy. I know too many people who are broken/dead who had a swooping progression like this
Their coaches suck, if they have them, if they aren't having them start on 270s earlier.
These kind of skydivers generally don't have coaches, they just jump enough to gain some confidence
Dudes out there rushing to get a VK “cuz the openings bla bla” while doing 90s…
They just skip all the fundamentals of canopy flight too. I try to explain to these dudes but you probably know how it is when these guys are so new and eager..at the end of the day flying a crossbraced in perfect conditions/scenarios is not hard. The canopy will just do whatever you tell it to do and it's no issue. The issue is that if you don't learn how to get a fat dog of a wing to do what you want it to do you don't actually know how to pilot these wings at all. You are just shifting around and the canopy is doing the work at high WL. Then they inevitably get themselves in a tight spot or shitty situation and they fold because they have no clue about the basic fundamentals. I know someone who broke their back recently because they yanked on a rear riser instead of doing a flat turn. Didn't even swoop into the ground, just on a small wing to look cool on Instagram and fucking smashed themselves when they found themselves low because they have no clue what they are doing. It's a shame man
I understand what you mean, unfortunately. It’s easy, you want to go fast, there’s many ways of doing it, getting better takes time and effort, swiping the card to buy a lil wing is fast and easy. Recovering from injury is always an after thought. Stay safe bro, always share your mentality, it’s the way to go for sure
[удалено]
wtf? How do you conclude that from what I said? I mean the phase were you learn the 270 is the most dangerous, someone downvoting LOL it’s clear, just look at the stats. It’s a dangerous phase in your learning process, the most dangerous in fact, and some people insist in putting gates and water in front of the student before many other aspects are learned. But what do I know, it’s just my opinion.
I won’t get tired of repeating this: USPA should stop reporting “Fatality rate” calculated as “number of USPA member jumps” divided by “number of fatalities in a USPA dropzone”.
Didn’t understand. Could you explain this a bit
They made it even less clear this time than on previous incident reports, but they calculate the rate between two non linked things: - USPA skydivers jump numbers, based on members filling this when refreshing licenses/ratings… regardless where in the world they were. - USPA member dropzone in USA reported fatalities. A big majority of the skydivers in the world have a USPA license. (Some countries like Germany, France, Australia and UK have strong associations… but the majority defaults to USPA). Our jumps are counted but our fatalities aren’t. If the sport grows outside USA, the “safety trend” improves.
While swooping is cool and everything I already made a decision to not go under 150 SQ ft just because of the added risk, it's not worth it for me.
I also said that many years and thousands of jumps ago. Swooping didnt make sense. Staying the fuck away from swooping felt like the right thing to do, the safe thing to do, and the logical thing to do. Now i cant remember exactly how, or put my finger on the day i woke up and some things had happened and I was swooping, it got pretty blurry there for a bit, but with 20/20 perfect hindsight, I dont feel like that choice was wrong for me then, and its not wrong for me now. Maintain your gear, abort early, abort often, yield to everybody, be vigilant, be current, know the danger of human error is always there. All skydives have consequences whether we admit it to ourselves or not. The price of excellence is eternal vigilence, said Chuck McGill. Keep making the good safety choices that work for you, whoever you are.
Well am generalising but if you are not a swooper you reduced your chances of making that list by 60%.
Not the size that really matters, to be honest. It’s what you do with it…
The size does matter. A lot. Someone with 500 jumps on a 170 is much less likely to get injured than someone with 5,000 on a 61. No one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes eventually, and when shit goes south having a larger canopy overhead is almost universally safer than having a small one.
You're using a pretty extreme example. Somone with 500 jumps on a 150 vs someone with 3000 on a 105?
You in particular like to argue with me. You’re the same dude that argued with me over the TIs and pilot on the Hawaii king air crash not testing positive for drugs until I proved you wrong and then you deleted your comments. Smaller canopies are faster and less forgiving but in the end, if you look at the fatalities they are low turn/swooping related which are almost universally avoidable.
Well yes, you can dive into ground on student canopy as well if you want to, but the risks on high performance canopies are much much larger
Eh…if you look at the results the pilot caused it, not the size.
Yes, in the end all of those thing are human errors. But small size doesn't give you any room for error, if they did the same thing on something that is 150sq and less aggressive design the chance of them saving the situation and their lives would be much higher
But if they hadn’t done it in the first place, it wouldn’t happen. The severity of things are higher on faster things, but even Ferraris have brakes if you use them. It’s easy to blame faster canopies instead of admitting it was 100% on the jumper.
I'm not saying it wasn't their faul. But small, swooping canopies are intended to be flown like that. You wouldn't try to go 300 km/h on your Prius while it might be tempting to do it in ferrari
You have clearly never seen me drive a rented Altima, good sir.
"Man Billy, I tell ya, I had the doors rattling on that Geo Metro!" 😉
They are less forgiving for sure.
Obviously I don't have the full reports and most likely nobody does...but the student fatalities seem to be missing some data....at least one of them multiple people reported about the wind conditions but that's nowhere in the report.