[StangFlyer]

Here's some interesting factoids about Skydiving:

From HowStuffWorks.com:

How Dangerous is Skydiving?

Skydiving is a remarkably popular sport. The United States Parachuting Association has 34,000 members. It estimates that about 350,000 people complete more than 3 million jumps in a typical year.

The big question is always, "How dangerous is skydiving?" Each year, about 30 people die in parachuting accidents in the United States, or roughly one person per 100,000 jumps. Look at the US Skydiving Incident Reports to get an idea of the types of problems that lead to fatalities. If you make one jump in a year, your chance of dying is 1 in 100,000.

How does the fatality rate in skydiving compare to other common activities? Since most adults in America drive cars, let's compare skydiving to driving. Roughly 40,000 people die each year in traffic accidents in the United States [ref]. That's 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles. Therefore, if you drive 10,000 miles per year, your chance of dying in a car wreck in any given year is something like 1 in 6,000. In other words, we accept a higher level of risk by getting into our cars every day than people do by occasionally skydiving. You would have to jump 17 times per year for your risk of dying in a skydiving accident to equal your risk of dying in a car accident if you drive 10,000 miles per year.

A logical question to ask here is this: Given these statistics, why do we think of skydiving as dangerous and driving a car as safe?

* The first reason has to do with frequency. At 30 per year, fatal skydiving accidents are infrequent. That tends to make each one newsworthy, so you are likely to hear about them. On the other hand, there are about 110 fatal car accidents every day in the United States. In a city of one million people, 160 people die every year in car accidents. If you heard about every car accident, you would go insane, so you only hear about a few of them. That leaves you with the impression that car accidents are infrequent even though they happen constantly.

* The second reason has to do with familiarity. Most people drive every day and nothing bad happens. So our personal experience leads us to believe that driving is safe. It is only when you look at the aggregated statistics that you realize how dangerous driving really is.


Taken from Dan Poynter's Parachuting: A Skydiver's Handbook 6th edition.

1991
121,900 people made 2,440,000 civilian jumps in the US.
25,000 active skydivers average approx. 100 to 125 jumps/year.
Approx. 97,000 students graduate the First Jump Course and make a jump
each year.
Approx. 300,000 student jumps/year, 1.9 million experienced skydiver
jumps/year.

1987
29 fatal parachuting accidents in the US.
Yielding a fatality rate of 1/75,000 jumps, or 1/3,800 participants.
Comparisons
Hang Gliding: 1/2,308 hang gliding flights.
Accidental Deaths: 1/2,582 (91,000 out of total US pop. of 235 million in
1983)

In a recent year over 140 people died scuba diving, 856 bicycling, over 7,000 drowned, 1154 died of bee stings, and 80 by lightning. In 1982, 43,990 people were killed in highway accidents, 1,171 boating fatalities, 235 airline deaths, and 1,164 light aircraft general aviation fatalities.

Student injuries run about 2%. So out of 90,000 students, 1,800 can expect to be injured.

"Why we jump. The explanation use to be simple: jumpers were crazy! Some psychologists talked of Freudian death wishes while others believed in fear displacement or denying one fear in their lives by directing their attention to another more manageable one. Others theorized that participants in high risk sports were acting out psychopathic fantasies in an attempt to make up for feelings of inadequacy or to demonstrate omnipotence. So much for the non-jumping ground hog, whuffo head shrink community.

Fortunately, in the last 25 years, the shrinks have decided that pursuing a high risk sport is not all that bad. Perhaps more of them have tried skydiving. Bruce Ogilvie, professor emeritus of psychology at San Jose State University conducted a study of 293 high-risk competitors including skydivers, race car drivers, fencers and aerobatic pilots in 1973 using psychological batteries and personal interviews. Ogilvie found risk-takers to be success oriented, strongly extroverted, above average in abstract ability and superior in intelligence when compared to the general population. He found these athletes are rarely reckless in their risk taking; their risk-taking is cool and calculated. He estimates that 6% of the athletes compete out of anger or out of deep feelings of inferiority or because they are trying to prove something about themselves. The other 94% are emotionally stable."