When sport parachuting first started it was horribly dangerous with techniques and equipment mostly adapted from military procedures. As the sport grew in popu

When sport parachuting first started it was horribly dangerous with techniques and equipment mostly adapted from military procedures. As the sport grew in popularity, technology and training advancements made the sport what I would consider safe. BASE jumping is starting to go through this maturity process. When the sport first started, there was no known procedures and people died from 'silly things', which were easily avoidable.. There also wasn't purpose designed BASE equipment, people were using modified sport skydiving equipment. Now that BASE is going through this process, equipment and training is improving. There is quite a lot of peer pressure to not even start BASE jumping unless the person has a few hundred skydives... and even then, more people seem to be doing First Jump Courses, with experienced BASE instructors. However, some parts of BASE seems to be trying to grow too fast and use the technology advancements from skydiving too soon. Proximity BASE is really mental. It's super impressive to see, but a significant majority of recent deaths and injuries have occurred from this. This is why there has been a re-emergence of high death statistics.. The traditional BASE statistics were starting to reflect massive improvements in safety. One of the respected BASE instructors did a really useful talk here.. and it contains a bunch of advice which is pretty portable to general life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2O-Dpw0Yfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2O-Dpw0Yfc