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Comment by SirMaster | Hacker News Reader

But is that sky diving number for just general skydiving, or a tandem dive with a completely new to the sport customer like anyone here would actually care about.

Like one, I assume tandem has a higher incident rate, and also that first time divers has a higher rate as well.

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I would have assumed that tandem dives have a lower rate of fatality - I'd imagine that an instructor pays a bit more attention if someone else's life is at stake (this is just my intuition). edit: from a cursory google search, tandem dives are about 2.5 times safer.

The thing that makes tandem jumps potentially more dangerous is that the gear is completely different from a regular sport rig - so it’s important to ask how many tandem jumps your tandem master has. He/she might have 10k jumps, but maybe only 200 on a tandem rig. As a former sport skydiver I wouldn’t go near a tandem jump unless the instructor had at least 500 tandem jumps.

2.5 times safer compared to anyone jumping, what about compared to the instructor non-tandem jumping on his/her own?

The source from the statistic is international including statistics from the USA, Germany and France. If you want further details you can read the NIH article here.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9859333/#:~:tex...

As I understand it, single beginner jumps are more dangerous than tandems with experienced jumpers which are more dangerous than experienced singletons. However, I don't think there is a significant difference overall. But in this study, there is no such data other than the overall statistics.

Yeah on the subject of single beginner jumps, you're allowed to jump on a static line without too much training. What this means in practice is that you have to get yourself out of whatever situation is causing you to approach the ground at terminal velocity. Someone I worked with did a static line jump for her first skydiving experience and her chute twisted together. Luckily she remembered the training they gave her and she was able to kick her legs and get the chute untwisted, but she was probably in the top 10-20% of people I've met in terms of her willingness to pay attention and remember directions. I think a lot of people would give in to panic.

When I skydived it was tandem, so at least I would be going out with someone who was experienced. I would probably do it again if I wasn't married with a child.

Could you imagine being a skydiving instructor? Strapping yourself to some stranger, a first-timer in a terrifying task, and jumping out of an airplane with them? I'd only do it if they wore a straightjacket.

I have never been a tandem instructor, but AFF instructor, where we teach people to jump on their own. The satisfaction of seeing how much happiness those people get is undescribable.

For skydivers in the sport - this task is not terrifying anymore. It is the same as driving a car. You know shit can happen, but the more open you keep your eyes and check everything, the less likely anything is going to happen.

I'm not criticizing skydiving, BTW. Have fun!

> For skydivers in the sport - this task is not terrifying anymore.

Yes, I understand. I meant that the stranger who you are strapped to is inevitably, unavoidably terrified.

The skydiving accident rate also includes very experienced divers who do exceedingly reckless things, like wingsuiting next to mountains.

It does not because it only counts as a skydive if you exit an aircraft. If you're jumping off of land, it's BASE.

People deploy from aircraft and proceed to fly close to terrain with wingsuits. [1] is one example.

1. https://youtu.be/kooYQ0IOnoM?si=xCpGxbSmivlNY3e-

You may be right, I do know that there are very few total skydiving deaths per year so high risk activities could inflate the figures fairly easily. However, I don't think wing suiting is counted in the statistics.

It is if they exited a plane to do so.

I mean, based on the observations in the article, there's really no way to know the accident rate with any certainty. No one is even keeping track. It's all reliant on self-reporting to a lobbying organization that most these places aren't even a part of.

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