Safety

Tired of being left out of the cool malfunction stories around the campfire? Envious of that up-jumper with a double-digit number of reserve rides? Or maybe skydiving’s lost its zing for you, but you’re not ready to invest in a complete set of new gear for edgier sports. more »

It was the perfect kind of day that only the Arizona desert can produce: not a cloud in a dark-blue sky, temperatures in the 90s, humidity in the teens, the smell of cactus blooms in the air. I was on my motorcycle at the end of a two-hour ride from Phoenix to my home in Tucson. Less than a mile from my apartment, a car made a right turn directly in front of me—the classic prelude to an auto-motorcycle collision. Naturally, I slammed on both the front and rear brakes, and my eyes riveted on the exact spot on the passenger door that was promising to be my impact point. But then I did a very unnatural thing—I looked away from the car door toward its rear bumper. Although every fiber of my being was demanding that I stare at where I would hit, I looked to the left. The bike leaned in that direction, the car glided through its turn, and I slid past the rear bumper by inches. more »

On a formation skydive, when things don’t go as intended, the jumpers regroup. Assess the situation and move on. Bring order to the chaos. more »

The Skydiver’s Information Manual (SIM) defines spotting as “selecting the correct ground reference over which to leave the aircraft, selecting the course for the aircraft to fly and directing the pilot on jump run to that point.” For better or worse, the modern-day GPS (global positioning system) device found in nearly every jump airplane today has changed the way most jumpers spot. The pilot now largely handles what used to be a manual process that a skydiver performed on every load. more »

The winter boogie season is upon us, and many of us are starting to count down to when we’ll take that road trip to warmer weather. We are thinking about packing lists, specialty jumps, good friends from distant places and costume parties galore, but in all this preparation, how many people are thinking about the more challenging aspects of boogies? Canopy-related incidents are on the rise in our sport, and boogies—with their unfamiliar environments and lots of canopy traffic—tend to create the kind of situation in which canopy accidents happen. more »

To find a year in which there were fewer U.S. skydiving deaths than 2009, we have to go back to 1961, when there were 14. Considering that USPA membership is more than nine times what it was in 1961 (and that 2009’s members almost certainly made more than nine times the number of jumps), the 16 skydiving deaths that occurred in 2009 indicate that our sport has made real advances in safety. However, anyone who has been touched by the death of a jumper knows that a single fatality is one too many. When we consider the loss that these deaths represent—and the fact that most could have been easily prevented in ways identified years ago—it is clear that we still have a lot of room for improvement. more »

Flying an unairworthy aircraft is like jumping a tattered old rig with a parachute that has big holes in it. And having an untrained or unqualified pilot fly an unairworthy plane is like giving that tattered old rig to a student and not teaching him how to cut away and pull his reserve. Seems absurd, right? Sadly, history shows us a long list of aircraft accidents in the skydiving industry that started with a poorly maintained plane flown by someone who didn’t know how to appropriately handle the malfunctions that occurred. more »