Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Skydiving Accident: Likely cause?

Every aircraft landing is a controlled crash.
the vast majority being performed satisfactorily.

It is dangerous to jump from an airplane with a parachute. If you don't know that, read the Original Post again.
It is the mark of a man to engage in a dangerous enterprise, and to be fearful, and yet to overcome that fear, and to go ahead and successfully complete the task.
And to go back, having overcome that fear on the initial try, and do it again. It isn't as scary the second time.

When I learned how to do it 50 years ago--no tandem then--it was danged near impossible for a main chute to malfunction unless it was packed wrong. Rule: always pack your own parachute.

If a malfunction did occur, you were supposed to keep the main and deploy the reserve, under the theory that a reserve malfunction would at least let you keep the main. But you had to throw it out from your stomach, so it did not get entangled in the main. No way to practice this in advance.

The only emergency I saw, the guy did in fact release the main before pulling the reserve. Reserves are simple devices and even harder to malfunction.

There are a few other simple rules: Don't jump if the wind is high. Face the wind direction when you land (because the chute has forward speed in the direction you face and you want to cancel out wind speed), don't make a fast direction change when near the ground (because the chute will oscillate and hitting on an oscillation is bad), don't jump when you can't see the ground or when it's raining (rain makes the chute heavier and fall faster), and if you land in the water, immediately release your stuff because the undeployed reserve will fill with water and sink you.

Every fatality I ever heard of was caused by violating these simple rules.

Oh...don't look at the ground when you're about to land. You won't tense up and break an ankle (not so much a problem with more modern chutes).

The most dangerous part in our club was the airplane. Easy to chintz on the maintenance.

Repeat:

Some are not fearful of flying or jumping.

Its not a mandatory requirement to have fear
like others do.



Its not good to generalize.

I know men that had no fear of flying in their
training or on the job, till they had a near fatal
Incident and they gave up flying after that.
then Others I know didnt give it up after such
Incident eventually to be killed in an aircraft.

No doubt there are the same diff. mix of people
in a variety of chosen activities.

Gravity ... it's not just a good idea, it's the law. Safest way to parachute is flat footed on level ground.

I used to think those private little Cessna 130’s (??) and the like droning overhead were sorta lame until I paid for a couple of flight hours for a student who was working on his pilot’s license. Cruising at 400 to 2,000 feet at around 100mph (?) on the backseat inside that thin aluminum and plexiglass shell gave me a different perspective entirely.

It didn’t scare me though. But having to climb out a door, cling to a strut and let go? Whole ‘nother level.

My mom goes every year after her birthday, always tandem, says she no longer has the arm strength to steer a chute even if she wanted to solo.

I think the problem here wasn't that the reserve failed. It was because he used it too late to save them. That part might be found to be pilot error.
We have a 500' bridge here that's used 1000 times a year for BASE jumping. In that game, they don't bother with reserve chutes because there isn't time to use it. If their chutes screw up, they die. About 1 a year bites it off this bridge. Some are accidents and some are pure stupidity.

Google "Jerry Pennacoli"
Skip the stuff about the gerbils.

Apparently not...

One of my masters' students had made so many jumps that TWICE her main chute had failed to open. Twice!

Being a good prof and knowledgeable about statistics, I used this opportunity to teach her about Markov processes. Markov chain LINK

I used the number of her total jumps and the two failures, to calculate the how many jumps she would have to make before both her main and reserve chute failed on the same jump.

She continued to jump, but she started to pack both her main and reserve chutes herself -- very carefully, I presume!

John

I did one static line jump from 5,000 ft. at age 20 after a couple hours of ground training.
Two of us jumped at the 5,000 ft. level then the instructor went up to 10,000 and did a free-fall. His main chute tangled and he had to ride his reserve down. That cured me.

Top 5 favorite song.

Did a 650 nm round-trip with a student PPL,
in the 152 backseat I got motion sickness..LoL

only accepted the invitation because he had
his instructor with him and offered to pay
all our accommodation for inviting me.

Small FW piston engine buzz box contraptions
I really don't see the attraction.

Honestly, I'd rather do aerobatics -- have, in both front and back seats, and it's a joy. Can't see just jumping, if I want to do tricks, they have those vertical wind tunnels, right?

I don't care if it's going to land 'safely' or not.............. I'm riding it down.

I came to the conclusion that that little Cessna was like a motorcycle with wings 😎 We were circling the school at 400-500 feet (minimum legal altitude IIRC) while staff and students waved. Perhaps I am too easily impressed.

So as a 19 year old kid, the first time you ever flew in an airplane, you had to climb out on the strut of the little Cessna, hang onto that strut for five seconds, a half a mile above the hard red Georgia clay, and then jump.
And you would not be scared.

My God you are a real bad ass. Were you a Navy SEAL, or a Green Beret or what. You must be a real bad ass, you were never scared of anything.
If I send you my email, would you please send me your autograph? I am honored to meet such a Real Man Badass such as you, Starman.

IT may disappoint you to know I was not afraid
the first time I got into any type of aircraft
or the first time I jumped... And it's not a 'hero' thing
like you imagine, at least not to me.




WTF are you babbling about?

You need to get out more and discover that
there are more relatively ordinary folk than
you realize. that are not afraid of abseiling,
jumping, flying, etc

You seem upset that not everybody feels
the same way about it as you and others do.



I never made any such claim.

ABSEILING? WHAT A [bleep]. Starfish and stool sample are our subject matter experts on schidt that they have never done. Nary a cred in the pair but they never fail to talk smack.

I will await the onslaught of attacks on my parentage, sexuality et al.

Continuing to LMAO. while knowing that abseiling is the brit and eurotrash word for rappeling. Which is what Americans do.


mike r