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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I had a close call this summer whitewater rafting on the Upper Animas River in Colorado and it has caused me to re-think every serious risk I take and has changed me in a big way. I was participating in a multi-day trip run by one of the local guiding outfits through the Upper section of the river, a much more difficult and serious undertaking than the Lower Animas, which is frequently run by average day-tripping tourists. We were on the No Name Rapid [1] and our boat capsized at the entrance to the rapid. I was stuck below the boat, my body somehow entangled in rigging, and was dragged underwater for some distance through a very fierce class V rapid. I was finally able to free myself enough to get my mouth above water and breathe, close to drowning. I managed to fully free myself and swam to shore at the first opportunity. When I made it, I kissed the ground and promised that I would never needlessly risk my life in the pursuit of adrenaline again. I cried like a baby when I returned home that evening and held my kids and wife again.

Prior to this trip, I had done many adventurous and dangerous activities: rock climbing, ice climbing, lots of mountaineering, off-road driving, backcountry skiing... it really brings it all into perspective when you have a close call. All of that adrenaline-chasing just seems completely ridiculous to me now.

[1] The No Name Rapid. We capsized at the spot pictured at around 0:04s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjO37ABQ6mI

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I have a couple of friends, both white-water guides and accomplished outdoorsmen, and they both put whitewater in a different category of risk: you can do everything right, and still die just due to the unpredictability of it. One of them said he had an instructor who basically said "if you stick with this long enough, either you'll die or someone you know will". They were both in the latter category.

A pretty popular avalanche safety book [1] has, in the introduction, an actuarial table of your survival probability if you keep going out in avalanche terrain x days a year, year after year...

[1] http://www.mountaineersbooks.org/Staying-Alive-in-Avalanche-...

Yeah, I've heard both wingsuiting and ice climbing described similarly. Possibly not as high-risk, at least for ice climbing, but they have the same issue with random disaster. If you hit a death block somewhere, that's the end, and lifelong ice climbers build up a lot of chances at that no matter how good they are.

It depends on the class of rapids you navigate through. I have done couple in Himalayas below class 5 and in most of them the guide said the risks are pretty minimal.

That said, it's a river. You don't get to choose when bad luck hits. I have been a paddler for most of my life, and I have paddled over flatwater sections that have killed people just as handily as if they were a waterfall or a class VI rapid. We go to great lengths to be conscientious and meticulous in our preparation, and most of the time it pays off. I have run whitewater for many years in rafts and kayaks, and seen folks get hurt, but one of the worst injuries I have seen took place in two feet of calm water. I still go out, and I take my family on the river, but I always try to be meticulous in my preparation. That doesn't prevent calamity, but nothing will do that.

Eight or nine years ago, I lept off a tower from about 800 ft. After opening the parachute and scanning for my landing area I turned towards it to the left, which was slow and felt off. "Maybe I'll turn to the right and come around from the back", at which point the parachute collapses and spins violently from behind. I reach up and grab the left riser, the strap that connects you to the harness, and stopped the spin. When I let go the spin started again violently I again grabbed the riser and got the parachute over my head. I was descending fast below tree top level and I saw my shadow in my peripheral vision. Knees together and crash.

I immediately pat myself down to check for compound fractures. Safe.

On the ride home it was all really brought into perspective: if I didn't want to deal with such life threatening situations I'd of stayed at home. I made another couple of jumps that weekend.

Just a nit, because I spent years not realizing this due to my accent, but it's "I'd have" not "I'd of". It sounds like "I'd of" because "I'd've"

gz on surviving the fall so that you could have random people correct your grammar in the future. Glad to hear you kept with it-- people are surprisingly risk adverse yet will ignore passive danger

Possibly the use of "I'd of" had authorial intent, e.g. to sound more colloquial. In my opinion this is valid usage in English.

There's nothing valid about it, it's a misspelling and a grammatical mistake.

It's language evolving. When the misspellings/misinterpretations of "a napron" and "an eekname" became common enough we got "an apron" and "a nickname".

If anyone — especially native speakers and others with a high degree of mastery of English — claims to have difficulty understanding "I'd of stayed home" then they're most likely being deliberately obtuse or needlessly contrarian.

Or you know, we like to read sentences without getting cerebral SEGFAULTs

I'd hate to loose a common language standard, though.

> loose

Intentionally funny, or irony?

I think the word you're looking for is "at"

As in "I would at stayed home." or "I at good grammar."

The reason English speakers understand it is because "I would have" when contracted to the maximum "I'd've" sounds like "I'd of". The fact that the two are effective homonyms doesn't make both spellings right. Rather, the "of" variant just looks a little bit ignorant. Not much, just a little.

Yes, the fact that they sound very much alike is exactly what's seeping into the written language, and as any linguist (like myself) will tell you, the written language is not what drives linguistic evolution, it's the spoken language. Writing commonly lags way behind, ergo the spoken language drives evolution of the written one, not vice versa.

There's only a difference in the written word. In the spoken word, it's still "I'd've".

Yes, that's what I'm saying. They're pronounced the exact same and now the written language is starting to exhibit that very thing.

The language isn't changing along your suggested dimension of change.

People have been misspelling homonyms since the beginning of the written word. Variance in homonym spelling decreases over time, though. "I'd of" is no more likely to supplant "I'd've" than "their" is "they're" - i.e. it's just a weak signal that someone is ignorant.

Two things:

1. Examples like those involve changes in speech; there's no difference between the pronunciation of "of" and "'ve."

2. It hardly makes something correct just because you can understand it. I bet you can understand the intent of "the dog seems slieping," but it's also clearly not right.

Changes in speech drives changes in writing — every linguist will tell you that (I should know, I am one). Writing is — and always has been — way behind speech in terms of innovation.

Edit: Downvoting isn't going to change that. But you're welcome to show me an example of a linguist that claims that writing is the driving force in linguistic evolution.

I completely agree, but I can't see how that contradicts anything I just said. Using "of" here is not an example of "language evolution" any more than confusing "to" and "too" is.

I am not a linguist but you are using "evolution" as having another meaning than LilleSvin. For you it is something which is positively improving as in the layman idea about Darwin's evolution theory and for LilleSvin "evolution" means exactly what it means in biology: Changes that are at a wide scale.

For example in old Norse that was used on the north and east coasts of UK in 900 CE, "time" was not pronounced like "ta-ii-me" and the English word for "ship" was pronounced "skip", the more modern pronunciation happened after the great vocalic change, an evolution of the spoken dialect. There is nothing positive or negative in the great vocalic change, but it is an evolution of the language because after some time, most people spoke it that way, not anymore like old vikings did.

(edited because I made many spelling errors)

No, I'm not using "evolution" in some sort of Enlightenment sense where only things that contribute to the onward march of Progress count. I'm saying changes in spelling are nothing like the process of organic language evolution.

Also, one wonders why the "great vocalic change" (maybe the Great Vowel Shift, you mean) would have changed the pronunciation of the consonants leading "ship."

It most certainly is evolution. Among other things it shows a change in how "would have" is analyzed by speakers (into "would of"). They wouldn't actually be writing "would of" if it wasn't coherent with their analysis of the parts. (I feel like I shouldn't need to say that the analysis is of course subconscious, but now I did anyway.)

Re-analyses like this aren't exactly uncommon. Here are a few other examples with "would have/of": http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001291.h...

What analysis could plausibly link the word "of" with this usage?

You're both right - it's evolving the language, just like lies evolve the truth, and a kid's clumsy drawing of a flower is a creative and unique artwork. Not being flippant. There is an inherent conflict between how people want it and how it is. The future might not care either way.

To my way of thinking, questions of orthography should be thought about differently than questions of grammar or vocabulary or other spoken-language issues. After all, we all learn to speak naturally and a standards body's decrees have little effect on how we speak. On the other hand, we have to make a conscious effort to learn to read and write, and standards bodies do regularly undertake, successfully, efforts to reform spelling.

It's a mistaken spelling of an expression, "I'd've," pronounced exactly the same way.

you mentioned seeing your shadow in your vision, what does this mean? That the way the sun was oriented compared to where you were in your fall, that you were close to the ground?

If you've jumped off something and see your shadow, you're close to the ground no matter where the sun is.

I've been a paraglider for a long time and have observed this pattern so many times. When we have a brush with death or lose a friend, we go flying ASAP and confront the fear immediately. You invest far too much effort and risk into fear management, to lose ground over a setback. If we really prioritized survival for its own sake, we just wouldn't fly.

I'm not and have never been a thrill seeker but it was important to me to get back on the road and confront my anxiety after getting into a fairly bad car accident so I guess I can understand the impulse.

I gave up paragliding after 3 years. Had some close calls but never got injured myself. But I saw way too many ambulances up close loading people I knew.

Nowhere near that close for me and a lot more soft, but still one of these “oh shit” moments was when I decided to go swimming when waves were bigger than usual due to a coming storm. It was all fun until I realized I wasn’t able to swim back to the shore to where I can stand. Every time I tried, a wave knocked me further into the ocean and my leftover stamina kept dropping. I was freaking out and had no idea how to get out of there.

Luckily the waves went smaller for some time and I was able to swim back to where I was able to feel the ground and pushed from there.

I knew that in the worst case the coastguard or other swimmers would have jumped in but still.

It is better to swim parallel to the coast until you find an easier place to approach. Fighting the currents is exhausting.

I confirm. I grew up near the Atlantic Ocean, in an area of high current. It is something that was taught to us as teenagers.

I think knowing that and having the presence of mind to do it as you drown are two different things.

I found that the hard way. I was caught in an outward current and was desperately trying to swim towards the beach with waves constantly hammering me. When I was about to drown a lifeguard appeared from nowhere and dragged me sideways out of the current and then towards the beach.

Also waves come grouped in series of 3-10 (at least in the Atlantic Ocean) so the strategy is usually not to panic (easy to say) and wait for a small calm moment

The same happened to me. It was fun to swim in the big waves and spend half of the time under the water until I got tired and realized that the current was stronger than me.

I've been in that situation myself, a wave luckily brought me closer to the shore as I was about to quit and then I could just run to safety. I'm much more aware of dangerous zones in beaches nowadays. I recommend everyone to see a few of these videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+get+out+...

I ride dirtbikes and ski regularly. I wear all the protective gear and am satisfied with the risk/adrenaline profile. I am often looked at as an adventurous risk taker, but I think people often underestimate other risky activities which impart nowhere near as much adrenaline. Case in point, I was in Thailand last winter. Tourists who otherwise aren't adventurous ride scooters freely because everyone in Thailand does. They ride scooters wearing flip flops without a helmet. The worst was when I was at a bar with an otherwise boring couple, we wanted to go to another bar so they suggested that I get on the back of their scooter, all three of us. They weren't hammered but had been drinking and had little overall two wheel experience. Riding on a scooter in the first place isn't particularly fun, riding with two other people on a scooter is downright dangerous, why risk it. I hired a tuktuk.

Had an experience like this while surfing, years ago. I trusted a friend and went out surfing when it was double overhead. Had no business doing that, being a fumbling idiot on a board but trusted him.

Made it out and caught a wave and wiped out -- can remember fighting the white water for what felt like 20 minutes, tumbling end over end and trying to time my gasps and keep cool. Just hoping I'd be washed inland if I just kept balancing the conservation of energy with forward progress.

Life isn't a joke and we shouldn't take it trivial. There are such joys all around us which don't require unnecessary high risks.

"double overhead"?

http://www.surfline.com/surf-science/wave-heights---forecast...

If you stand 6' tall then double overhead is a 12' wave (generally). Kinda depends on Hawaiian vs mainland scale, but pretty good size to be sure.

My very first whitewater rafting experience I went overboard on the first rapid. Boat just disappeared from under me and I was underwater not knowing which way was up. I had a lifevest and was nowhere near drowning, but it pretty well soured me on adventure sports for the rest of my life.

I've heard that skydiving triggers this experience at some point.

The first time it's frightening.

The second to fourth time it gives you an adrenaline rush.

The fifth time suddenly you think "holy shit, what am I doing?"

At least, that's what a friend told me.

Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard. There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits, climbing, or whitewater rapids. The deaths that do occur are almost always from experienced jumpers that not following recommended safety processes, often in the pursuit of pushing things to the edge. The point is that unlike some other extreme sports, most skydiving deaths are preventable by conservative jumping.

> Skydiving is actually a very safe and low-risk 'adrenaline' activity, from what I've heard

I'm sorry, but you've heard wrong. Skydiving is super dangerous, relative to other sports. Less than wingsuit flying, but more death per participant than most other sports.

There's an unfortunate infographic that's made the rounds that makes skydiving look relatively as dangerous as football, but they made a mistake with the numbers and left people with an incorrect and extremely misleading impression. A lot of people are now saying that skydiving is "as safe" or "safer" than football, and that is flat out false. I hope nobody is motivated to skydive thinking it's super safe, because it's not.

> There are multiple redundancies and you are almost never at the mercy of randomness like with winsuits

For a single jumper, there's one redundancy - a spare chute - and they fail and/or tangle at about the rate of 1 in 800 jumps, from what I recall.

For a BASE jumper, there's no redundancy, they don't normally have a spare.

Almost everyone who jumps more than a few times does formation jumping or other group activities, if not get into BASE or wingsuit. Formation jumps put you at the mercy of other people, which are less controllable than mountains or trees. I stopped formation jumping after a couple of bad ones where I had close calls that were other people's mistakes.

Most of the people I knew during my time skydiving are now dead, more than a dozen people.

Here we go again.. (I think we discussed this topic previously)

Skydiving, hang gliding,Paragliding and many other "adventure sports" contain a significan amount of risk.. the difference is that skydiving (not base jumping) is tightly regulated by the FAA, there are strict training requirements, equipment maintenance etc etc .. it is almost like flying a plane. so.. it is super dangerous compared to knitting.. but it's quite safe compared to many other risk activities.. (Paragliding, hang gliding, motorcycle racing on a street, experimenting with drugs, proximity flying etc)

Most of the people I've met during 20 years skydiving are very much alive and still jumping, several hundred people..

Oh hey, you're right, we did discuss this a while ago. Nice to see you again!

Yes, you're right that skydiving is safe compared to the sports that are more dangerous than skydiving. I agree and admit there are sports and activities that are more dangerous than skydiving. Wingsuit flying is one of them.

Last time we talked, you said the risk of dying skydiving is 1 in 100,000 and pointed at the comparative table here: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507

That number is per jump, not per year. The other 11 pictures in the top 12 of that page are per year figures. The units are different, the comparison is invalid. Juxtaposing these numbers is wrong, and quoting 1/100,000 per jump is super misleading when you compare it to the annual fatality rates of other sports.

This is what I was talking about above. The annual fatality rate of skydiving is 1 in 1,580. Skydiving is a bit safer than hang-gliding, roughly 3x. It's definitely not 180x safer, which is the very first thing the infographic implies.

The infographic depicts skydiving as safer than boxing, football, canoeing, and SCUBA. That is flat false, skydiving is much more dangerous than all of those combined.

BTW, with respect to regulation, about one in about 1600 skydivers die each year after having gone through training, after safety inspections, after exposure to the risks and liability waivers, after subscribing to USPA magazine and reading about each and every death in the U.S., etc. etc. Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it. Skydiving has a relatively high fatality rate despite the fact that it's regulated and the skydiving population has more training and safety equipment than other sports.

  Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe,
  you may expect a higher percentage of people who
  are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it

Breaking down the numbers, the skydiving fatality rate is a reported 1 in 101,083 jumps. To normalise that to a per-year rate, we can take the USPA rate of 350,000 participants conducting 3,000,000 skydives per year [1]. That gives a mean of 8.6 jumps per year for each participant.

Given the 1 in 101,083 risk, that amounts to roughly a 1 in 11,750 risk of fatality per year.

The risk of canoeing in the linked article [2] is 1 in 10,000, so according to those reported statistics, skydiving is slightly safer than canoeing, significantly safer than boxing, is roughly 3 times as risky as scuba diving, and 5 times as risky as football.

[1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm

[2] http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/

Wrong. USPA has 35k participants, not 350k. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety

  Decade                           2010-2015
  Average fatalities per year      22.3
  Average membership per year      35,189
  Fatalities per thousand members  0.63

You didn't bother reading my comment? You just shared the same link I shared and discussed above. Those two links you shared are both examples of failures of statistics. They are comparing the risk of a single jump to the risk of a year of participation in other activities. That's a math fail.

Skydiving is most definitely not safer than canoeing or boxing or SCUBA or football. It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. You've been misled by a cute poster that someone who's bad at stats screwed up.

I did read the comment, and reposted the same link to identify it as the source of the canoeing stat.

My reference to 350,000 participants is this text [1]:

  The United States Parachuting Association has nearly 35,000 members.

  It estimates that about 350,000 people complete more than
  3 million jumps in a typical year.

3,000,000 jumps / 350,000 people = 8.57 jumps per person per year (approx).

  It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could
  be more dangerous than skydiving.

The perception of football as "safe" can be attributed to its popularity: many people play football, therefore it's viewed as normal, just like driving.

[1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm

You've used an unsourced figure from a website that used faulty logic to evaluate the risks of skydiving relative to driving, in an intentionally misleading way.

You've done some calculation based on this unsourced number, while ignoring the mortality rate that the USPA publishes.

The USPA themselves says the annual risk of mortality is 0.63 per thousand members. That's about 1 in 1600.

You are off by an order of magnitude. It's no wonder you think skydiving is safer than canoeing, but it is not true.

The stats we have are for members and excludes non-members. But one thing you might be missing is that non-members jump an average of once. At least 90% of the 3.2 million jumps are repeat jumps by members, members comprise the bulk of the statistics anyway.

I agree that the reference to 350,000 is unsourced - the article claims that number comes from the USPA, but I can't find any relevant data on the USPA site.

  non-members jump an average of once.
  At least 90% of the 3.2 million jumps are repeat jumps by members

That was the figure that I was struggling to source, but 90% feels high to me. At 90%, that gives a mean of 82 jumps per member per year, which feels high to me (although my experience as UK skydiver may be skewed by the amount of time we spend on the ground waiting for the skies to clear!)

It would be useful to see a more complete breakdown of the jump stats and fatalities, because it might indicate the riskier elements of skydiving (my gut feel says swooping or high wing-loading), but I haven't found a data breakdown that detailed.

You're right; it would be useful to see a more complete breakdown, and get a better sense of what specific aspects are riskier. Hook turns are definitely a significant culprit, I agree with you. The BPA website (link below) has some claims about what the risk factors are.

> 90% feels high to me.

Well, I'm guessing on top of the unsourced 350k number you shared, so maybe it would be best if we stop guessing. But most non-members that jump are doing a tandem jump. A tandem jump in the US involves a USPA member doing a repeat jump, and most of the time a non-member making their first jump.

All we can say firmly is that 1 in around 1,600 trained and qualified USPA members die each year. That is the actual mortality rate for people who continue to participate in skydiving. Since you're in the UK, the BPA also publishes safety info separately http://www.bpa.org.uk/staysafe/how-safe/

The one thing you can't say is that canoeing is more dangerous than skydiving. According to the sources we have, canoeing mortality rate is 1/10k while skydiving is 1/1.6k. Skydivers die ~6x more per year than canoers.

Drivers in the US die at the rate of 1/6k per year according to the sources you shared. So skydiving is ~4x riskier than driving. And canoeing is less risky than driving.

We can ignore the question of how many jumpers are USPA members if we look at the per-jump fatality statistics. The 1 death per 101k jumps lets you evaluate the risk of doing a single jump vs doing 100 jumps in a year. Let's use the current USPA numbers instead, which is now averaging around 1 death per 140k jumps (shown here http://www.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety).

Your chance of dying doing a single jump is 1 in 140k. That seems low, but it's a single jump. Your chance of dying in a given year, if you make 100 jumps, is 100 in 140k, or 1 in 1,400. Some people do more than a thousand jumps per year, so if you jump 1000 times, your odds are 1 in 140. Looking at it this way, it's easier to gauge the risks because jumping more means risking more.

Please look at my comment above on Accidents vs Recklessness. As an example of a group that is well trained, follows procedures and plans properly, take the Golden Knights skydiving team.

They had a handful of deaths since they started in 1959. And their worst accident was a fatal aircraft failure, which is technically an aircraft accident, not a skydiving accident.

Read & replied. Valid point, IMO. I would agree completely that people who make safer choices will live longer statistically speaking than people who push the limits, cross more lines, fail to plan, etc.

The numbers we have are averages, there are definitely people beating the average through greater attention to safety. And, unfortunately, some groups that are on the other side of average.

Equipment is getting better too, and I have no doubt is helping lower the death rates. Pretty sure that loads more people were dying under old rounds that today's controllable squares. Lots of people died in WWII in Jeeps under parachutes. I remember the museum in New Orleans saying that Jeep jumps had a fatality rate of something like 30%. Can't tell you how thankful I am that I've never been asked to do that.

Would be interesting (but small sample size) to do the math on the Golden Knights and find the mortality rate. I totally expect it to be lower than for the general skydiving populating.

Some drivers take more risks than others, and insurance companies gather a bit more data on that kind of stuff. Rates might be higher if you get a speeding ticket, precisely because that correlates with accidents and claims more than people who have no record.

For some perspective here, the maternal mortality rate in the USA is 28 per 100,000 births. So skydiving is about 50x safer than giving birth.

If not dying every time I jumped resulted in a new human being born, I might agree, but the death rate of births is a net negative. :P

Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US.

A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.

>but the death rate of births is a net negative

That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).

There is a convenient unit for assessing risk : the micromort. 1 micromort = 1 in a million chance of dying.

Micromort values from wikipedia :

- skydiving : 8 per jump

- hang gliding : 8 per trip

- motorcycle : 1 per 10km

- Ecstasy (MDMA, drug) : 0.5-13 per pill

- BASE-jumping : 430 per jump

So as you can see; skydiving, hang-gliding, motorcycling and drugs are in the same ballpark. BASE-jumping is way worse.

When you are young, you "spend" around 1 micromort per day just being alive, it goes up steeply as you get older.

I hadn't heard about micromorts before, thanks! That's definitely an interesting and valuable unit for comparison. It adds perspective to the fatalities per year.

I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it.

For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes.

It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.

There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.

Let me explain: When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing..

On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations.

So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence)

On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky)

My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.

With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)

> I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.

That is definitely true. These figures are dividing all deaths annually by number of participants. We are in murky water just by talking about risk rather than mortality rate. I'm guilty of doing that. We can't know the risk of a skydive per-se, we just know that 1/100k skydives in the past has ended in a death. We also know that the rate of deaths per skydive is going down over time, given the last 20 years of data.

> There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.

You're right on both counts. 1- some people take more risk than others in a given sport, and 2- that relative risk-taking within a sport is not taken into account in the mortality rates we have at hand.

Recklessness is a subjective, touchy-feely concept though. It's opinion and not something we can measure, so we will never be able to take it into account. We also don't know whether people within one sport are any more "reckless" than in another. Reckless behavior might be correlated with overall risk, or it might be heavily influenced by training and regulation and community.

Most deaths aren't due to crossing the line of any specific safety procedure. It's not recommended to hook turn, but it's also not a rule or law. A lot of people choose to do it for the extra thrill, and know that it's riskier than a straight upwind landing. All reckless deaths are also accidents. The line just might be too hard to draw.

Many people do call choosing to participate in a risky sport "reckless". Proximity wingsuit flying seems reckless to me, it's an activity that is very prone to deadly accident. You can certainly play it safer than some other people, but by choosing to participate you're accepting a level of risk that is unacceptable to some other people. I also acknowledge individual choice in this regard. It's okay to accept a higher level of risk than someone else.

The main thing that's probably bad to do is to rationalize a choice by thinking it's less risky than it really is. If you calculate your risk wrong, then you can't make an informed choice, which leads to unintentionally reckless decisions.

The other thing not being considered in this thread is injury rate vs fatality rate. I think it's pretty reasonable to weigh fatality much more heavily than recoverable injury, but I will openly admit that the big picture has a lot more gray area than the black/white numbers on fatalities per year.

How many skydiving deaths are a result of swooping - relative to normal, vanilla jumps, I wonder.

I don't know, it's probably significant, and I think that data is out there. The USPA reports all the accidents monthly. I just looked here: http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/ and 2 of the 5 most recent are low turn accidents. I once watched a guy hook turn and break his back. :(

The sixth time, you realize it's a sport. There are skills to learn, goals to achieve, and both fun and serious competitions to pursue

At this point you learn that risk and danger are, to some degree, under your control. Maintain your gear, don't do stupid stunts, do jump with well known safety practices (e.g.: minimum opening altitude, separation before opening, etc.).

Also, skydiving is not the same sport as BASE jumping.

In my 30's I drove a motorcycle, the crotch rocket variety (Kawasaki 750). I had a few very close calls, then decided I had had a good run and a lot of fun, but it was time to hang it up. I could see the writing on the wall: keep doing this and I would have a serious accident, that would either leave me dead or seriously injured. I was, at the time, planning a family, and to this day miss riding but think it was absolutely the right choice.

A friend of mine had a relatively minor accident on his motorbike when his wife was pregnant, decided he'd been lucky and packed it all in. Sold his bike and gear within a few weeks and never went back.

Rode a sportbike all through college. I was - of course - a hooligan and rode with a bunch of other hooligans. After few of the folks in our group died (I didn't see the accidents, just heard about them) I stopped riding with them and slowed down. I recently got married and just gave up riding completely.

I think I'm a pretty safe rider, but the odds are just against me.

It was the right choice for a long and full life for sure.

My brother hung up, after being the < 1 in 10,000 to survive a banal accident on a freeway. Rounded a curve, was looking at the upcoming exit to see if it was a candidate lunch spot; looked back forward and traffic was at a standstill a couple hundred feet in front of him. He was going 70.

Laid down his bike, impact threw him over the median into oncoming traffic. When they put him in the helicopter he had zero blood pressure, a collapsed lung, and a snapped tibia sticking out. He wasn't wearing the armor my wife and I bought him as a Christmas present a few months earlier; it was too hot.

Heart surgeon got to his aorta when there was one layer of cells left. If it had also split, he would have bled out in < 90 seconds.

No one who worked on him had ever even heard of someone surviving injuries of his type.

Happy ending in this case. Rod in his leg but he runs 5ks. Happily married. Works in this industry.

But it's made me the annoying guy who stops colleagues and friends who ride (once) like some crusty Ancient Mariner to say, I'm that annoying guy who's going to urge you to not ride, because ...

Glad you made it!

Let me first say that I'm extremely glad to hear your brother has recovered and is doing well now. Sounds like it was a horrendous crash and to come back from something like that is nothing short of amazing.

With that being said, and for the benefit of anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation: laying the bike down is the absolute worst thing you can do.

For one thing, in doing so you will have relinquished all control over your fate and at best you will slide in whatever direction you were going when you hit the ground and if you're lucky maybe not hit any obstacles.

You are much better off applying the brakes progressively but firmly and scrubbing off as much speed as you can, particularly if you're going in a (roughly) straight line.

A good, reasonably modern, properly maintained bike will stop from 70 in less than 200 feet (the DVLA say it's 315 feet but those figures are based on braking distances for much older vehicles). It'll be damned uncomfortable and you'll feel like you're going to crush your balls on the fuel tank and then fly over the handle bars, and the back end will start skipping, but it'll stop. (Your biggest problem may be that whoever/whatever is behind you won't be able to stop so quickly.)

Even if not, allowing for some reaction time, you will be going a lot slower by the time you've reached the traffic and can go between the lanes or around the outside, and even if you come off you'll be coming off at, say 20 - 40mph, as opposed to 70mph, which is likely to leave you with a much better outcome.

I'd actually recommend, if you've had to suddenly slow down, you go between lanes or around traffic anyway just in case there is somebody behind you who doesn't react so quickly or is driving a heavier vehicle that can't slow down as quickly.

The whole idea of laying a bike down when you get into a sticky situation as the best course of action is a dangerous myth that needs to die.

The only time I can see that being better than any other alternative is if something like an articulated lorry/semi-rig is parked across the road in front of you and your options are to either try and slide under the trailer or smash directly into it. Otherwise stay on the bike, slow down as much as you can, and aim for the biggest gap that's available.

Not to "umm actually" your excellent story, but rock climbing is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as driving, which people do all the time without even thinking about it. Mountaineering is where the danger is there, primarily.

I guess it depends how much you push things and yourself, if it's bouldering, sport climbing or trad (lets skip free soloing for this one :))

I don't have micromort stats around, but for example sport climbing, when not pushing constantly your limits and on bolted route that has not-very-old and reasonably placed protection, it feels as dangerous as some trail run in the forest. Risk of rock falling suddenly is next to 0, same goes for equipment failure.

bouldering & trad are different for obvious reasons, but again depends.

One accidental sweat slip on a 60 foot climbing wall can paralyze you for life.

Trust in your line, I guess.

I have a friend who was a recreational climber. One day she's at the climbing wall with her boyfriend. She's climbing, he's on the ground holding her line.

For those who don't climb, and I don't (although I've been on a climbing wall), the idea is that if you fall the other person is holding on to the rope and and managing the slack so that you don't fall any distance and can be gently lowered or grab back onto the wall.

Her boyfriend wasn't paying attention; he was chatting to some friends of his and hadn't noticed how much slack there was in the line. She's quite high up the wall, loses grip, falls, and doesn't stop until she hits the ground because there's so much slack.

She's paralysed from the waist down, in a wheelchair for life. The boyfriend is, well, not her boyfriend any more.

She's made the best of the situation, has a good career, and has met someone else she's now engaged to, but she's still angry about it, and I can't say I blame her.

> rock climbing is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as driving

  Expert mountain climbers: Annual mortality risk of 1 in 167.
  Skydiving - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 1,580.
  Recreational climbing - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 1,750.
  Driving in the U.S. - Annual mortality risk of 1 in 6,700.

So, mountaineering is indeed 10x more dangerous than rock climbing, but rock climbing is still 4x more dangerous than driving, which is enough that I'd personally hesitate to equate them.

Source: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/

P.S. I hate sharing this because the infographic at the top is wrong on skydiving. (The picture at the top uses annual mortality rate for all other sports, but compares skydiving's risk per jump, so it's invalid to compare them together, but a lot of people aren't looking at the fine print. A single jump is a 1 in 100,000 change of dying, but skydiving lost an annual average of 1 per 1580 participants over the last 5 years. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety)

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