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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

> The injury rate in charity-parachutists was 11%

That's how-are-they-even-allowed-to-operate high. Can this really be right?

At first I was thinking no big deal, it probably includes things like minor scrapes and bruises from the landing, but then I saw this:

>Sixty-three percent of casualties who were charity-parachutists required hospital admission, representing a serious injury rate of 7%

Can any skydivers give insight on this?

That sounds extremely high to me, but I couldn't find which 5 year period was studied. Back in round parachute days, injuries were much more common. Most people who have jumped in the last 30 years have never seen someone use a roundy.

These days most people do tandems, and if you follow instructions and raise your legs upon landing, you won't get hurt.

Pfffff, I used a roundy for my first jump here in the UK only yesterday! I mean 1998. Which suddenly seems like yesterday. Jeez...

Back in 1996 (I think), I had the impression they were obsolete, and during the instructional session before jumping, we were told to pay attention because once a guy who had experience in the military thought he knew everything from jumping with the round ones, and didn't listen and died as a consequence. I think it was something about the reserve being automatic on a military rig and not on a civilian one.

Skydiver here. I'm not familiar with this particular event, but that does seem rather high even for those years. In the USA we average ~1 incident per 250,000 sport skydives. Tandems are around 1 in 500,000.

You can find the USPA incidents here: https://uspa.org/Find/FAQs/Safety

I think they are fatality stats, not injury.

I'll bite. Assuming those charity parachutists were doing solo jumps using the static line system, it makes sense. The static line exit isn't dangerous per se, but the landing can be... challenging. For example, the old style round parachute couldn't be slowed down on landing, it had a constant rate of descent. On landing,you had to hit the ground and do a PLF [1].

The square canopy (or the ram-air canopy) can indeed be slowed down. It's also a lot more manoeuvrable, and can go quite fast. A novice might not be able to correctly judge the speed/altitude/wind direction - and if not handled properly, a square canopy can land you on your face or break a leg.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_landing_fall

EDIT: spelling and added a link

Mostly inexperience/doing this with first timers played the major role

> The number of regular jumps by experienced enthusiasts done during this period is estimated at 50,000, giving an incidence of injury for regular parachutists of 0.02% – reflecting better expertise and training

"For example, the old style round parachute couldn't be slowed down on landing"

In the late 90s, wouldn't they have been using the ones that you can fly like a wing? And I don't know how widespread it was, but possibly a radio to give you instructions, when to flare.

I'm a skydiver. My guess (without knowing any details): while regular skydiving is rather safe, event jumps are much riskier. There's the unknown terrain, a usually much smaller landing zone, obstacles (trees etc). Low turns might be necessary, leading to a high speed landing. And there's also a psychological variable (many people are watching you). All those factors make the landing much more difficult.

This seems way too high and is probably the result of not enough data.

Bear in mind that you wouldn't do a jump for charity if you wanted to it anyway. Their usual clientele would probably be very fit and young, whereas charity jumpers would be more likely to be old or unfit.

So I'm sure their overall injury rates are lower

That doesn't ring true to me at all. Almost all of the people I've seen do some kind of charity extreme sport event would definitely have done it without the charity part if that was an option.

I was actually chatting to some friends about this the other day.

I personally would love to go skydiving but I wouldn't get sponsored for it because it isn't actually hard. Unlike running a marathon for instance, it doesn't require any preparation on my part or any superhuman effort, just a lot of cash.

I think most people who do feats of endurance for charity (marathons, cycling, mountaineering, etc) would probably like to do it anyway but it's fair to ask for sponsorship money because of the effort involved.

Why would doing a marathon and pretending to do it for other reasons than doing a marathon be any different? The only reason separating endurance sports efforts "for charity" from a hypothetical "candy crush for charity" or "Netflix binge for charity" is that the athletic efforts apparently impress some potential donors. If the same is true for courage dares like fixed line parachuting then so be it.

An entirely orthogonal question is how event costs are funded: do participants pay out of their own pocket or is it taken from the donations pool? If it's the latter I'd call it borderline charity fraud, no matter if the activity is running, flaggelation, parachuting or smoking weed.

The usual compromise, I think, is clear separation between sponsors (who fund the event) and donors (whose money is given to charity with zero cut or expenses deduction). It's hard to find something to criticize in that model, if someone wants to sponsor entertainment, fine. If tens of thousands of sponsorship dollars yield tens of donation dollars, still fine: the assumption that the tens of thousands would have been donated otherwise cannot be made.

(it still might get muddy if that sponsorship somehow gets different tax treatment than other business expenses or if the main beneficiary of those costs, either as participant or as organizer, is the CEO or something like that but that's totally besides the question of parachuting vs endurance)

Skydiving does not require "a lot of cash".

You don't have to buy a parachute! Or an airplane, for that matter.

Yes, that figure is probably right. I did my first parachute jump in the summer of '98, a year before this study. It was a static line jump, using a round canopy; ancient stuff even then! I had wanted to skydive for a long time, so it wasn't a "charity jump."

However, almost everyone else on my course was - they were really young as well, a bit naive and maybe a little dazed by the idea of jumping out of a plane. Some of them were Chinese/Korean students, with a very, very rudimentary grasp of the English language; I genuinely have no idea how they all passed the course, but they did. When they went on to jump, I think just under half of them ended up with broken legs/sprained ankles and so on. If my memory serves me right during the same drop the jumpmaster managed to kill himself too.

To sum up, 11% sounds about right.

Wait, you're not exactly sure whether your instructor died or not?

Just how drunk were you? Mushrooms are way more rewarding anyways.

Not very drunk at all :)

The instructor's name was Andrew Kelly, and the time was May 1998 [1] - quite a long time ago, so forgive my foggy memory. I wasn't on that particular load; I had already done my first jump a few days before...and my second jump 3 days after he passed.

[1] - http://www.skydivingfatalities.info/search.asp?MinDate=5%2F8...

Ah fair play, makes sense.

This is round parachute static line. You hit the ground at about the same speed as jumping from 10 feet. Completely manageable on a windless day or over a freshly plowed field. Outside of those conditions, it’s a shitshow.

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