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Comment by sosborn | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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