Skydiving vs Driving
A lot of people have... "complained," to say the least, about the statistics in my AIM profile:
There are 110 fatal car accidents every day in the United States.
Each year 30 people die in parachuting accidents in the United States
The biggest comment being that there are more people driving than skydiving, so that voids the statistics. Not really.
Each year, roughly 3 million jumps are made. During the same year, roughly 30 people die from skydiving. The cause is usually due to an attempt to do a rapid landing and misjudging how high you are. If you want to know what these landings are like, go to Skydive Elsinore and just watch. It is FREAKY! This isn't something I'd be willing to do for a long time. Nonetheless, 30 people out of 3 million jumps die each year. That is 1 in 100,000.
Each year, 40,000 people die in auto related accidents. That equates to a 1 in 6,000 chance of dying if you drive 10,000 miles a year. Since I drive closer to 30,000 miles per year, my chances are 1 in 2,000 of a car related accident, MUCH higher than if I were skydiving.
I will agree to this though: Driving is a (mostly) necessary risk. Skydiving is not. In addition, you have to drive to the drop zone, so you are adding the risk of skydiving to your already risky business of driving.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that skydiving is safer than driving and so everyone should do it. It's that skydiving isn't as dangerous as people make it seem. With relatively few fatalities per year, each one gets a lot of media attention, whereas car accidents are as common as papercuts.
Throwing yourself out of a plane and falling to the earth at 120MPH is never going to be 100% safe. But it's not as dangerous as people make it seem.
There are 110 fatal car accidents every day in the United States.
Each year 30 people die in parachuting accidents in the United States
The biggest comment being that there are more people driving than skydiving, so that voids the statistics. Not really.
Each year, roughly 3 million jumps are made. During the same year, roughly 30 people die from skydiving. The cause is usually due to an attempt to do a rapid landing and misjudging how high you are. If you want to know what these landings are like, go to Skydive Elsinore and just watch. It is FREAKY! This isn't something I'd be willing to do for a long time. Nonetheless, 30 people out of 3 million jumps die each year. That is 1 in 100,000.
Each year, 40,000 people die in auto related accidents. That equates to a 1 in 6,000 chance of dying if you drive 10,000 miles a year. Since I drive closer to 30,000 miles per year, my chances are 1 in 2,000 of a car related accident, MUCH higher than if I were skydiving.
I will agree to this though: Driving is a (mostly) necessary risk. Skydiving is not. In addition, you have to drive to the drop zone, so you are adding the risk of skydiving to your already risky business of driving.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that skydiving is safer than driving and so everyone should do it. It's that skydiving isn't as dangerous as people make it seem. With relatively few fatalities per year, each one gets a lot of media attention, whereas car accidents are as common as papercuts.
Throwing yourself out of a plane and falling to the earth at 120MPH is never going to be 100% safe. But it's not as dangerous as people make it seem.
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