Avbug most definitely is NOT phil. Nice try, though.
TD has virtually a one hundred percent success record when it comes to being exactly wrong...never close to right, so this is quite perfect. My bed, and lie in it, you say? Is that a way of saying "balls in your court?" Very well, then.
There is no risk in skydiving, it's perfectly safe, just ask avbug. Then tell that to the hundreds/thousands killed doing it because it was "necessary" to jump.
AB has deteriorated to ridiculous retorts of meritless banter.
You made your bed AB, now sleep in it.
Hundreds and thousands killed doing it, you say? Hundreds and thousands killed each year? Decade? Since the sport began? Are you merely spitballing, there, or do you have some statistics to back up your wild ideas, this time?
Save yourself the embarassment. You can visit the numbers at the United States Parachute Association web site at the following address:
http://www.uspa.org/about/page2/relative_safety.htm
You'll note, if you do the math, that this boils down to 30 fatalities on the average in any given year, over the last fourteen years of statistics. Put up against that, following various parts of that site, we find a one year quote for only USPA members making skydives, of a total of 2,151,228 skydives recorded. Do a little math, and you'll find that's one fatality for every 717,076 skydives...and that's only counting USPA members. At least as many skydives take place as training and intro jumps, and tandems, further making skydiving one of the safer things you can do for fun or business.
A far cry from your hundreds and thousands of fatalities (presumably yearly, though you failed to quanitify your wild-ass guess) you cited.
As for telling it to those who have died doing sport jumps...nobody ever said it's necessary. Every participant in a sport skydive understands that a potential for failure to act, and act properly, may be injury or death. Everybody is a volunteer.
A popular shirt some time ago in skydiving circles had a sperm wearing a parachute rig jumping out the door of a twotter. The caption said, "remember when sex was safe, and skydiving was dangerous?"
Perhaps next you'll cite sex as an unnecessary risk...much more appropriate to your snide "you've made your bed, now lie in it," comment, don't you think?
See the post about the guy who was killed when he collided with the plane he jumped out of.
Actually, if you'd read the thread, you'd know I was one of the posters. I jumped DeLand, I liked it there. I was excited to be offered a tour of two different parachute and gear manufacturing plants right nearby, as well as hands on instruction from a factory test jumper in packing and company parachute practices (thanks, PD!) for over three hours, all for the price of buying him a beer. I even have a DeLand patch sewn on my gearbag for one of my sport rigs.
I don't recall any need to justify one's own recreation, yet I'd hardly term skydivnig an "unnecessary risk." Enjoyable passtime, relaxing experience, pleasant days, blue skies, whatever...but unnecessary risk? What risk? There's probably more risk crossing the street..
But turbo, really, why stop there? You're wrong about virtually everything, and you did ask me to lie in the bed that you threw down for me, so let's press on. Dan Poynter has written the bible(s) on skydiving and parachuting, including references for military and every other kind of parachuting. He is far and away the authority, and his books the authority, on parachuting, jumping, skydiving, payload delivery, etc. By comparison, looking at Dan Poynter's "A Skydiver's Handbook," (6th edition), we see a few of the following earlier statistics:
1991 121,900 people made 2,440,000 civilian jumps in the US.
25,000 active skydivers average approx. 100 to 125 jumps/year.
Approx. 97,000 students graduate the First Jump Course and make a jump each year.
Approx. 300,000 student jumps/year, 1.9 million experienced skydiver jumps/year. 1987 29 fatal parachuting accidents in the US.
Yielding a fatality rate of 1/75,000 jumps, or 1/3,800 participants. Comparisons Hang Gliding: 1/2,308 hang gliding flights.
Accidental Deaths: 1/2,582 (91,000 out of total US pop. of 235 million in 1983) In a recent year over 140 people died scuba diving, 856 bicycling, over 7,000 drowned, 1154 died of bee stings, and 80 by lightning. In 1982, 43,990 people were killed in highway accidents, 1,171 boating fatalities, 235 airline deaths, and 1,164 light aircraft general aviation fatalities.
Student injuries run about 2%. So out of 90,000 students, 1,800 can expect to be injured.
Seems that routine regular accidental deaths consume more lives on a statistically levelled comparison basis than skydiving does...at a much, much higher rate. Compare one death out of every seventy five thousand jumps from Poynter (or one death for every thirty eight hundred participants) to the national average for plan jane accidental deaths...one in every two thousand five hundred folks out there in the general population. You've got a higher chance getting killed accidentally out of the clear blue on any given day than being an active skydiver, and the chances are that whatever is going to kill you certainly isn't the parachuting, but every day life. Go figure. More folks get killed by lightening every year than parachuting. Come to think of it, for every jumper killed in the stats above, 53.4 general aviation pilots died.
You're a general aviation pilot, TD. Who is taking on the greater unnecessary risk, then? Stop flapping your gums and drop it, already. You'd do far better to shut up and appear the fool you are than to keep this up and remove all doubt. Really.
Do you suppose there's some way you could let us know the registration number first, though, so we can forward an archive of this and a few other threads to the NTSB at the appropriate time? Many times the record contains a plethora of facts, but you just can't know what the pilot was thinking at the time. This information would be vitally important in determining the Primary Causal Factor.
Sort of like that Tom Cruise sleeper, what was it? Minority report. Generate the statistics and find the cause or culprit before the accident. I like it. The truth is, though that often we really can see it coming. I watched one last summer, and said not five minutes before it happened that this individual was going to make a gear up landing. Within five minutes he was sliding sideways in his mooney down the runway with that beer-can grating sound that's all too familiar. Apparently that person was the only one who couldnt' see it coming, and he happened to be one to whom you could never tell a thing...but he survived, and was cavalier about it enough to go try it again...the gene pool is self-clensing.
