Why are so many BASE jumpers dying?
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
"How close can I come to the cliff-face? How close to the ground can I skim? I've seen others who have gone this close, can I go closer?"
It's right there in Sat Dex's narration. "Today you fly with me." In that phrase is both the sharing of the experience and the central-ness of that experience to the individual identity of the jumper.
I was watching the Philando Castile facebook live video shot by his girlfriend and watched him get shot live, half-way across the country. What a queer and unsettling feeling to be sitting in my house and know that a human being is dying at that same moment so viscerally...
It is not just adrenaline junkies that like to show off for their fans on social media, it seems that everyone is at it and the 'disease' is getting worse as time goes on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selfie-related_injurie...
"See also: Darwin Awards"
Most BASE courses won't accept you without a minimum of 200 jumps either.
"Most beginners who die appear to be making variations of the exact same error, according to Webb. “They jump off a cliff, get flying, and for some reason there's just this human reaction to try to hug the air like a big, gigantic beach ball,” he explains. “By hugging air you feel as if you're creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What ends up happening is your suit can only grab so much air, and it starts to stall. When it starts to stall, it loses lift, starts to drag, and then, splat."
Source: am a skydiver/base jumper
You'll also see it referenced on the websites of places that run BASE courses [1], where it's repeatedly acknowledged that it has been done in the past, but it's now seen as a reckless practice.
You can still find people that will teach this way, but for the most part, it's underground, and described as a "deathcamp" [2][3][4].
[1] http://base-book.com/skydive-to-base-jump
[2] http://www.basejumper.com/Articles/Getting_Into_BASE/Number_...
[3] http://www.dropzone.com/forum/Skydiving_C1/General_Skydiving...
Likewise, the idea here would be for wingsuit pilots to practice stalls and recovery while skydiving at a safe altitude. That way, when BASE jumping for real, they can recognize and prevent stalls before they happen so that recovery is unnecessary.
"You know, fear is a super-important thing now. And without fear, you will die."
"I'm actually pretty happy this happened. I think in the long run it saved my life."
Mind you, he doesn't leave much margin for error in his come-back jump!
The possibility of stalling should be obvious to anyone who has flown a kite or thrown a paper airplane. Inexperienced wingsuiters just seem to forget it. They are lured into trying to achieve the illusion of lift whereas an experienced practitioner would maintain speed.
Of couse, the main problem is people not flying within their limits, or giving themselves a good margin, but that's proximity flight by definition.
With modern Bluetooth it feels like it ought to be possible to design a wingsuit HUD to help with this.
Yes: there are devices that can be mounted to skydiving helmet, and provide audible feedback (using different tones to communicate information such as airspeed). FlySight is one example.
"Audibles" are common practice throughout skydiving: usually two, mounted inside the helmet, next to each ear. They're usually set to beep at certain altitude thresholds: e.g. 5000' (break away from the formation), 3500' (deploy your parachute), 2000' (cut-away and deploy your reserve, if your main canopy is malfunctioning).
The GPS devices have to be outside the helmet in order to receive signal, and they're typically used for communicating performance data rather than safety alerts.
> "it ought to be possible to design a wingsuit HUD"
Recon announced their Flight HUD in 2012 [1], but I don't know whether it succeeded as a product. I don't know of anyone using it.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2012/10/18/recon-instruments-offeri...
Anyway, you're right, it's an important piece, and I'm sure the hugging the beach ball thing might become an instinct response that overrides your training and happens very quickly when it becomes obvious that you're going to collide in 0.5 seconds. But, the article also immediately follows that with 'but that doesn't explain why the best flyers are dying'.
The singular reason people are dying is because they're pushing the boundaries of proximity flying, not because beginners are accidentally stalling once they're too close.
That explains it. They fall convex side down...
This is true of the first 20 or so jumps, before achieving your "A" licence or equivalent: you're taught a belly-down arch.
When you advance past your A-licence, and especially when studying for your FS1 qualification (Formation Skydiving), you're taught variations of that arch, which are much flatter and even concave, in order to adjust fall-rate, so that you can stay in formation, with everyone falling at the same speed.
You also figure out very quickly that those slower fall-rate body positions are much less stable in the airflow…but that's why we practice.
Well put. As noted in the article, the margins for error (esp in wingsuit BASE) are becoming ever tighter.
- Popularisation of the sport thanks to social media and silly videos with fancy dubstep music.
- BASE jumpers trying to push forward the sport.
- Irresponsible companies sponsoring pro jumpers in order to film "even more difficult yet" maneuvers.
Personally I tried to get into BASE some years ago, but after watching a russian documentary with explicit and horrible scenes [0] made me seriously think.
People in social media only get to see the successful jumps but not the dark side of the sport...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1etupz/russian_d...
BASE jumping is starting to go through this maturity process. When the sport first started, there was no known procedures and people died from 'silly things', which were easily avoidable..
There also wasn't purpose designed BASE equipment, people were using modified sport skydiving equipment.
Now that BASE is going through this process, equipment and training is improving. There is quite a lot of peer pressure to not even start BASE jumping unless the person has a few hundred skydives... and even then, more people seem to be doing First Jump Courses, with experienced BASE instructors.
However, some parts of BASE seems to be trying to grow too fast and use the technology advancements from skydiving too soon.
Proximity BASE is really mental. It's super impressive to see, but a significant majority of recent deaths and injuries have occurred from this. This is why there has been a re-emergence of high death statistics.. The traditional BASE statistics were starting to reflect massive improvements in safety.
One of the respected BASE instructors did a really useful talk here.. and it contains a bunch of advice which is pretty portable to general life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2O-Dpw0Yfc
The sport is very unforgiving of mistakes, obviously. Only today I saw a video of someone about to do a rollover without their legstraps on. Luckily the same guy as in your video noticed and yelled at him to stop. Fatality avoided.
Most of the recent spate of deaths though don't follow any particular pattern apart from the wingsuit being the common factor.
(To be clear this is an interesting topic to me. I followed Dean Potter for years, back from when he first made his name for slacklining and climbing.)
I personally feel very lucky to have passed through the skydiving phase of my life alive. Every jumper I knew personally except one is dead now. Some died in the most crazy unlikely ways, and a bunch of them died together in a plane crash after a weekend boogie. Skydiving is super dangerous, and BASE is even more dangerous, and wingsuit BASE trying to buzz the ground within inches -- How are so many BASE jumpers NOT dying??
3. Anecdotally, I've been a skydiver for over 20 years, in that time I've seen very few deaths. (much less than other adventures sports)
The old saying goes. Skydiving is not inherently dangerous, but it is terribly misforgiving of your mistakes.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say exactly. You've disagree but not clarified. Are you saying skydiving is safe? It is objectively, demonstrably not "safe". Unless you define safe to mean it's possible to do once without dying.
Your perceived safety level depends on how you measure it. You can measure deaths per participant, in which skydiving compares favorably to some other sports. You can also measure deaths per participation-hour, which some people feel is a much more accurate and fair way to measure, and in that case skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.
No matter how you measure it, and no matter what license and training you have, skydiving is quite risky. I have a USPA C license, and every single person I've known who died skydiving had a D license (more than 500 jumps).
Also for participation-hour are you only including free fall/canopy flight? Because 99% of skydiving is hanging out at the DZ, packing, drinking beer, waiting for fuel loads, etc. An hour of air time is a ridiculous amount of "participation" relative to other sports.
Yes, participation hours are only free-fall + canopy time. Drinking beer at the DZ does not count as skydiving in my book.
Yes, an hour of air time means a lot of jumps. That's the point. If you measure it that way, and some people feel that is the only fair way to measure it, then you find out that a combined hour of skydiving is a lot more dangerous than an hour of motorcycling.
I'm pretty sure that eg solo belly on a low wing loading with an AAD and RSL is more or less arbitrarily safe as long as you're not in Lodi.
One woman I knew died in tandem certification training. She had a primary chute malfunction, then deployed the 2nd without cutting away properly. They got tangled, and she and the instructor both went in. The instructor had > 10k jumps and was very well known.
Another person I knew was the DZ safety instructor. During an AFF course, she had to pull the student's chute because he failed to respond. When his chute deployed, his body flipped and she was kicked in the face. It knocked her unconscious, and her parachute auto-deployed. That AAD would have saved her life, but when she landed still unconscious, she hit the only rock in the field with her head and died.
Riding a bike on the street is somewhat dangerous, that's demonstrably true. Not nearly as dangerous per hour of activity skydiving, and far less likely to result in death if you have an accident, but by your own admission of tens of accident stories, bike riding has considerable risks, right? Mountain biking is a lot more dangerous than casual riding in the street, and I've gotten far more injured mountain biking than I ever did skydiving. But, I don't know anyone who's died mountain biking, and statistics prove that biking is overall less dangerous that skydiving, so I wouldn't put biking in the same danger category as skydiving. I would (and do) describe mountain biking as "super dangerous" to people just learning for the first time. But if I talked about skydiving with those same people I'd call skydiving "extremely dangerous" to differentiate it.
Look, it's a subjective matter of opinion whether you summarize skydiving or any other sport as safe or dangerous relative to something else. Jumping on a trampoline, it turns out, is pretty damn dangerous, enough that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends an outright ban on them.
So, what, exactly, is your objection? What do you want to have happen here? I'm fine with you calling it safe while I call it dangerous. Both are true, depending on what you compare it to. Is that unacceptable to you?
Or if you just mean after the fact, hanging out at the end of the day, then never mind.
You'd be ignoring the entire concept of "inductive arguments" if you honestly thought that's the case. Arguments that aren't directly based on fact can still hold up if they're cogent.
So I'd urge you not to give undue importance to the subjectivity or opinionated nature of an argument.
(I neither agree nor disagree with any of your other points. Just that one particular thing.)
Here are the numbers: Deaths per year http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/
Risk of dying 1/100,000 http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm
A comparative table: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
Anyway you count it, skydiving properly done is a fairly safe sport.
Yeah, so this quite nicely highlights the problem with your argument. You, and this article are both clearly downplaying the risks. One single jump per year. One in a hundred thousand for a single jump actually seems like bad odds to me. Go ahead and call it safe if you want, but plenty of active skydivers are doing hundreds or thousands of jumps in a year. A thousand jumps a year puts your odds, according to these stats you just provided, at one in a hundred. Sounds pretty risky to me!
Now, on top of that, this article compares 10,000 miles of driving in a year - an entire year's worth of driving every single day - to one single jump, and then somehow concludes that driving is riskier. Sorry, but that's kinda horse shit, and I think you know it. To me, this smells like an agenda to show skydiving is safer than it really is, and far from an accurate analysis. If they had tried to compare days, or car trips vs jumps, or participation hours, you'd find out that surprise! skydiving is significantly riskier than driving.
My question is, what is the benefit to presenting skydiving as 'safe'? Does it make a difference to you if people think it's safe? Are you concerned about validating your choices? Do you want beginners who are unsure to feel like they should try it?
What are the risks to calling it dangerous? Does that prevent people from trying it? Does that say something about you? Why does it upset you to suggest that skydiving might hurt you?
Seems like the entire problem with wingsuit BASE is people thinking it's safer than it is, so calling it dangerous can only have a positive effect. In fact, that's exactly what happened with skydiving, and what the USPA is still doing. It used to be much more dangerous than it is now, and people calling it dangerous and raising awareness of the risks have increased the safety of the sport. But since we haven't eliminated the risks, why would we stop calling it risky?
This shows that one skydiver dies in every 570 participants on average, per year. That's for average participation. If you jump more, you risk more. 0.006 deaths in 1,000 jumps is 1 in 167. So if you jump 2000 times in a year, your odds of dying are better than 1 in 100 for that year, assuming uniform risk distribution. That's playing russian roulette with a gun that can hold 100 bullets. Sure, it's safer than playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet in 6 slots, but only a single order of magnitude safer. I pulled that trigger once, and I think I'm done.
To put this in a more accurate perspective than howstuffworks is capable of, ~210 million licensed drivers in the US in 2014 divided by 34k deaths = 1 driver dies for every 6,176 participants on average, per year. How that works out to riskier than skydiving isn't a mystery, it's simply not true.
I used non-specific and subjective language.
Please tell me how skydiving ranks against boxing per participation-hour.
EDIT: The comment above used to say "stop spreading lies". That's why I said "slow your roll", I was being called a liar for expressing my opinion.
Now that he edited his comment, mine looks bitchy. But maybe you can stop downvoting me anyway?
You are free to express your opinion, and free to disagree with mine. What you can't do is call me a liar for expressing my opinion, that is unreasonable.
All of the sports you listed are super dangerous.
Plus, you ignored the larger point. I wasn't making a point about skydiving, I was saying something about BASE jumping. Do you disagree that wingsuit BASE is more dangerous than skydiving?
I am a skydiver. I'm not current, but as a subscriber to USPA magazine, I'm well aware of the safety levels and risks. As are you. How you interpret the stats is up to you, but it's fair to call any significant number of deaths in any activity "super dangerous". It's equally fair to say that something with lower deaths than something else is, relatively, "super safe". All a matter of perspective.
But really, why do you care? It's not a secret that skydiving has risks. What's your point trying to call me out for saying that? Do you think people aren't participating in it because of the risks, and that my speaking it out loud is going to prevent someone from trying it?
The article the thread is about is talking about how the display of risky behavior has led to more risky behavior, not less. My local DZs are curious how every single time there's an accident and the local news talks about it, business triples for a month or so.
Somewhat you missed the safety section in USPA's website:
"According to the National Safety Council, a person is much more likely to be killed getting struck by lightning or stung by a bee."
What you just cited is both irrelevant and not a statistic. Getting stung by bees doesn't typically result in injury or death, so who cares how likely it is relative to anything?
Neither lightning strikes nor bee stings are "activities" per se, it's not something you choose to do. It's more fair to compare skydiving to motocross. But people don't accidentally skydive, so comparing to lightning strikes and bee stings is meaningless.
BTW, after looking at the reference you provided, it's clear that skydiving is more dangerous than every other activity you just quoted, you got it backwards.
Scroll to the bottom.
Parachuting Mortality rate: 0.1754 (/100 participants)
Boxing Mortality rate: 0.0455 (/100 participants)
Mountain hiking Mortality rate: 0.0064 (/100 participants)
Scuba diving Mortality rate: 0.0029 (/100 participants)
American football Mortality rate: 0.0020 (/100 participants)That's an incredibly complex ethical decision for the brand. I think Clif is doing the right thing by pulling out of sports with very low margins for error.
I sometimes go to http://voat.Co and poke around when I want to remember what the Internet used to be like. It's one of the few forums that doesn't have a blanket ban on expressing anger.
What's funny is that it's very Californian to never express anger. East coast culture is more direct. People will say to each other that they don't like something the other person did or are upset or angry at the other person. On the west coast, especially California, it's really important to be nice, so people will just cut off contact when they've been offended or decided they don't like someone rather than confront them. Those California social values seem to have migrated online.
I think they've still got at least another year or two before this becomes really obvious to the mainstream, but Facebook is definitely headed in a dangerous direction right now. Not to culture; it will survive. It can't be killed even if you want to kill it. (You can hurt it, but not kill it.) But to Facebook. The appeal of a space where you can't say anything that is negative that might be associated with Facebook isn't great to start with, but when you realize that it's Facebook that has sole control over what it considers negative you also get that helpless feeling. Most people aren't going to analyze this... they're just going to realize they don't feel good when they use Facebook, either because their posts are getting censored or because they are subconsciously self-censoring, and operant conditioning will lead them away.
It's becoming more obvious every week that Facebook's instinctive reaction to everything is to control it with a heavy hand.
I used to do free-climbing. The first time that I climbed with ropes was with friends. It was also their first time with ropes. They didn't know how to tie a knot. The first time I repelled off a cliff was with a gold line with partner feeding from below. The knot slipped. I felt a vibration and hands instinctively grasped. I was 4 stories up and hanging on literally at the end of my rope. I was 22.
I started to look at my body as a resource. Climbing helped to fine tune a sense of balance. Kept the mind sharp. Then read that Chris Langton (an A-Life pioneer) had a hang gliding accident. Started to make risk-reward assessments. Changed sports.
Climbing has some inherent danger, obviously, but with a bit of knowledge and staying within some reasonable safety limits, the likelihood of dying is nowhere near BASE. I think part of that is that, at least amongst the climbing community, the celebrities aren't wholly people pushing the limits with danger. Sure, we have Alex Honnold, but we also have Tommy Caldwell, Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, Alex Puccio, and so on, climbers who are pushing the limit in difficulty but not really danger. Perhaps that's because "difficulty" and "danger" are not inexorably linked with climbing. You can have a close-bolted route in good rock with modern bolts that's not particularly dangerous that's still really, really hard. La Dura Dura is the hardest sport climb in the world. I probably wouldn't kill myself on it, even if it's way above my pay grade (assuming I could even reach the first bolt). I don't know that you can do the same with BASE.
I really admire the focus and patience. Back in the 70's, my inspiration was Royal Robins. I like the idea of leaving no trace on the rock. Not sure what modern bolts are like.
Not to be too glib, but if it was, 'safe' nobody would be interested in watching them do it. If many didn't die doing it, well that is what safe means.
For example, my 12 hour video "United Flight, Coach, Extreme Red Eye" got way less views.
I assume you equally have no sympathy with people that die on non-essential car journeys that have crashes. Motorcycling, biking, scubadiving?
You, walking down the street are equally playing Russian roulette.
Lets consider just traffic-related accidents for simplicity. About 17 deaths per 100,000 people per year worldwide. Assuming that a person "walks down the street" twice a day, that's means that when you walk down the street the probability that you'll die is 2.5*10^(-7). By comparison the probability of dying from Russian roulette is between 1/6 and 1/2, depending the rules you're playing by. You've just made a mistake as big as 6 orders of magnitude. This alone should get you banned from HN.
I totally agree that walking down the street doesn't carry the same magnitude of risk, but there is measured risk there. Just because someone is participating in an activity which carries more risk than you consider acceptable, doesn't mean we shouldn't sympathise for their death.
My analogies were pointing out other activities, which also carry risk... and you've latched onto the one which obviously has the least risk. The point is, any activity has a calculated risk.
You made the identical mistake.. by your own analysis, playing Russian roulette 6 consecutive rounds would guarantee a fatality...
However, just 3 off the top of my head (for the avoidance of doubt, these people have died 0 times):
- Miles Daisher has over 4000 base jumps.
- Chris McDougall has over 3000.
- Dan Schilling did over 200 in one day back in 2006.
"The simple truth is that wingsuit BASE jumpers don’t know what they are getting into, don’t know how to practice the sport safely, and don’t even know enough to know how little they know."
This is pretty dumb in general, and particularly so when you aren't a skilled skydiver. Serious accidents are pretty common even among experienced military paratroopers.
I would suggest that the danger isn't the glide-ratio, but the proximity to the ground.
Could better materials improve safety? If there were improvements in the predictability and consistency of flight characteristics, that might have a more positive effect, but I can't see improvements in the glide-ratio having an impact on safety.
1) From BASE jumping.
2) For no reason.
3) From incomplete cognitive development (risk assessment, awareness of one's mortality etc.)
4) Because the world economy is sufficiently developed to keep them alive long enough to die this type of optional/discretionary death.