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.