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Here we go again.. (I think we discussed this topic previously) Skydiving, hang gliding,Paragliding and many other "adventure sports" contain a significan amou

Here we go again.. (I think we discussed this topic previously) Skydiving, hang gliding,Paragliding and many other "adventure sports" contain a significan amount of risk.. the difference is that skydiving (not base jumping) is tightly regulated by the FAA, there are strict training requirements, equipment maintenance etc etc .. it is almost like flying a plane. so.. it is super dangerous compared to knitting.. but it's quite safe compared to many other risk activities.. (Paragliding, hang gliding, motorcycle racing on a street, experimenting with drugs, proximity flying etc) Most of the people I've met during 20 years skydiving are very much alive and still jumping, several hundred people..

dahart 9y ago
Oh hey, you're right, we did discuss this a while ago. Nice to see you again! Yes, you're right that skydiving is safe compared to the sports that are more dangerous than skydiving. I agree and admit there are sports and activities that are more dangerous than skydiving. Wingsuit flying is one of them. Last time we talked, you said the risk of dying skydiving is 1 in 100,000 and pointed at the comparative table here: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507 That number is per jump, not per year. The other 11 pictures in the top 12 of that page are per year figures. The units are different, the comparison is invalid. Juxtaposing these numbers is wrong, and quoting 1/100,000 per jump is super misleading when you compare it to the annual fatality rates of other sports. This is what I was talking about above. The annual fatality rate of skydiving is 1 in 1,580. Skydiving is a bit safer than hang-gliding, roughly 3x. It's definitely not 180x safer, which is the very first thing the infographic implies. The infographic depicts skydiving as safer than boxing, football, canoeing, and SCUBA. That is flat false, skydiving is much more dangerous than all of those combined. BTW, with respect to regulation, about one in about 1600 skydivers die each year after having gone through training, after safety inspections, after exposure to the risks and liability waivers, after subscribing to USPA magazine and reading about each and every death in the U.S., etc. etc. Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it. Skydiving has a relatively high fatality rate despite the fact that it's regulated and the skydiving population has more training and safety equipment than other sports.
- manarth 9y ago
  Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it Breaking down the numbers, the skydiving fatality rate is a reported 1 in 101,083 jumps. To normalise that to a per-year rate, we can take the USPA rate of 350,000 participants conducting 3,000,000 skydives per year [1]. That gives a mean of 8.6 jumps per year for each participant. Given the 1 in 101,083 risk, that amounts to roughly a 1 in 11,750 risk of fatality per year. The risk of canoeing in the linked article [2] is 1 in 10,000, so according to those reported statistics, skydiving is slightly safer than canoeing, significantly safer than boxing, is roughly 3 times as risky as scuba diving, and 5 times as risky as football. [1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm [2] http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
  - dahart 9y ago
    Wrong. USPA has 35k participants, not 350k. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety Decade 2010-2015 Average fatalities per year 22.3 Average membership per year 35,189 Fatalities per thousand members 0.63 You didn't bother reading my comment? You just shared the same link I shared and discussed above. Those two links you shared are both examples of failures of statistics. They are comparing the risk of a single jump to the risk of a year of participation in other activities. That's a math fail. Skydiving is most definitely not safer than canoeing or boxing or SCUBA or football. It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. You've been misled by a cute poster that someone who's bad at stats screwed up.
    - manarth 9y ago
      I did read the comment, and reposted the same link to identify it as the source of the canoeing stat. My reference to 350,000 participants is this text [1]: The United States Parachuting Association has nearly 35,000 members. It estimates that about 350,000 people complete more than 3 million jumps in a typical year. 3,000,000 jumps / 350,000 people = 8.57 jumps per person per year (approx). It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. The perception of football as "safe" can be attributed to its popularity: many people play football, therefore it's viewed as normal, just like driving. [1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm
caseydurfee 9y ago
For some perspective here, the maternal mortality rate in the USA is 28 per 100,000 births. So skydiving is about 50x safer than giving birth.
- dahart 9y ago
  If not dying every time I jumped resulted in a new human being born, I might agree, but the death rate of births is a net negative. :P Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US. A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.
  - perilunar 9y ago
    >but the death rate of births is a net negative That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).
GuB-42 9y ago
There is a convenient unit for assessing risk : the micromort. 1 micromort = 1 in a million chance of dying. Micromort values from wikipedia : - skydiving : 8 per jump - hang gliding : 8 per trip - motorcycle : 1 per 10km - Ecstasy (MDMA, drug) : 0.5-13 per pill - BASE-jumping : 430 per jump So as you can see; skydiving, hang-gliding, motorcycling and drugs are in the same ballpark. BASE-jumping is way worse. When you are young, you "spend" around 1 micromort per day just being alive, it goes up steeply as you get older.
- dahart 9y ago
  I hadn't heard about micromorts before, thanks! That's definitely an interesting and valuable unit for comparison. It adds perspective to the fatalities per year. I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it. For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes. It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.
- clueless123 9y ago
  There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness. Let me explain: When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing.. On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations. So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence) On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky) My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths. With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)

dahart 9y ago

Oh hey, you're right, we did discuss this a while ago. Nice to see you again! Yes, you're right that skydiving is safe compared to the sports that are more dangerous than skydiving. I agree and admit there are sports and activities that are more dangerous than skydiving. Wingsuit flying is one of them. Last time we talked, you said the risk of dying skydiving is 1 in 100,000 and pointed at the comparative table here: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419507 That number is per jump, not per year. The other 11 pictures in the top 12 of that page are per year figures. The units are different, the comparison is invalid. Juxtaposing these numbers is wrong, and quoting 1/100,000 per jump is super misleading when you compare it to the annual fatality rates of other sports. This is what I was talking about above. The annual fatality rate of skydiving is 1 in 1,580. Skydiving is a bit safer than hang-gliding, roughly 3x. It's definitely not 180x safer, which is the very first thing the infographic implies. The infographic depicts skydiving as safer than boxing, football, canoeing, and SCUBA. That is flat false, skydiving is much more dangerous than all of those combined. BTW, with respect to regulation, about one in about 1600 skydivers die each year after having gone through training, after safety inspections, after exposure to the risks and liability waivers, after subscribing to USPA magazine and reading about each and every death in the U.S., etc. etc. Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it. Skydiving has a relatively high fatality rate despite the fact that it's regulated and the skydiving population has more training and safety equipment than other sports.

manarth 9y ago
Since nobody needs a license to get in a canoe, you may expect a higher percentage of people who are unprepared for the risks of canoeing to die doing it Breaking down the numbers, the skydiving fatality rate is a reported 1 in 101,083 jumps. To normalise that to a per-year rate, we can take the USPA rate of 350,000 participants conducting 3,000,000 skydives per year [1]. That gives a mean of 8.6 jumps per year for each participant. Given the 1 in 101,083 risk, that amounts to roughly a 1 in 11,750 risk of fatality per year. The risk of canoeing in the linked article [2] is 1 in 10,000, so according to those reported statistics, skydiving is slightly safer than canoeing, significantly safer than boxing, is roughly 3 times as risky as scuba diving, and 5 times as risky as football. [1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm [2] http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/
- dahart 9y ago
  Wrong. USPA has 35k participants, not 350k. http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety http://test.uspa.org/facts-faqs/safety Decade 2010-2015 Average fatalities per year 22.3 Average membership per year 35,189 Fatalities per thousand members 0.63 You didn't bother reading my comment? You just shared the same link I shared and discussed above. Those two links you shared are both examples of failures of statistics. They are comparing the risk of a single jump to the risk of a year of participation in other activities. That's a math fail. Skydiving is most definitely not safer than canoeing or boxing or SCUBA or football. It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. You've been misled by a cute poster that someone who's bad at stats screwed up.
  - manarth 9y ago
    I did read the comment, and reposted the same link to identify it as the source of the canoeing stat. My reference to 350,000 participants is this text [1]: The United States Parachuting Association has nearly 35,000 members. It estimates that about 350,000 people complete more than 3 million jumps in a typical year. 3,000,000 jumps / 350,000 people = 8.57 jumps per person per year (approx). It doesn't even pass the smell test that football could be more dangerous than skydiving. The perception of football as "safe" can be attributed to its popularity: many people play football, therefore it's viewed as normal, just like driving. [1] http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm

caseydurfee 9y ago

For some perspective here, the maternal mortality rate in the USA is 28 per 100,000 births. So skydiving is about 50x safer than giving birth.

dahart 9y ago
If not dying every time I jumped resulted in a new human being born, I might agree, but the death rate of births is a net negative. :P Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US. A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.
- perilunar 9y ago
  >but the death rate of births is a net negative That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).

GuB-42 9y ago

There is a convenient unit for assessing risk : the micromort. 1 micromort = 1 in a million chance of dying. Micromort values from wikipedia : - skydiving : 8 per jump - hang gliding : 8 per trip - motorcycle : 1 per 10km - Ecstasy (MDMA, drug) : 0.5-13 per pill - BASE-jumping : 430 per jump So as you can see; skydiving, hang-gliding, motorcycling and drugs are in the same ballpark. BASE-jumping is way worse. When you are young, you "spend" around 1 micromort per day just being alive, it goes up steeply as you get older.

dahart 9y ago
I hadn't heard about micromorts before, thanks! That's definitely an interesting and valuable unit for comparison. It adds perspective to the fatalities per year. I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it. For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes. It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.
clueless123 9y ago
There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness. Let me explain: When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing.. On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations. So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence) On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky) My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths. With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)