But really, should it be? It’s scary if it is. When I went out to make my first jump, nearly three decades ago, I decided I’d go out, take the course, look things over and if I felt it looked okay, sure, I’d make the jump. (… It was just borderline, by the way…) But I had a background in other high risk sports already when I came to skydiving.

There’s always this big dilemma between how safe the sport actually is and how safe it’s perceived to be. I always believed that if you asked 100 people on the street how safe they thought skydiving was, just about all of them would say it was less safe than it actually is. And yet, there are some remarkable instances of people believing that somehow, because someone is making a business of training students, that they’re somehow safe-guarded — sort of like riders on a carnival ride expect their safety to be assured, while they expect the thrills. Skydiving, however, is a sport — safety is a function of performance. It’s not a ride.

We had a very regrettable instance up here in Canada in which the parents of a young woman bought her a (traditional) first jump course on her 18th birthday. The father even drove her out to the drop zone and watched her first jump — which resulted in her death. She didn’t have a malfunction. Either one of her brakes came undone on opening or she managed to get one brake-line undone but somehow missed the other. In any event, she spiraled down to about 300′ and then cut-away. Her reserve didn’t have a chance to open. Her friend, who made a jump with her that same day, had a similar opening, but she rode a spiraling canopy into the ground, resulting in serious injuries.

It is very possible that the packing method resulted in openings in which one of the steering lines released on opening. The drop zone had most recently been forced to switch over from a IAD system to a static line system, and they were still working out the kinks. Still, this fails to explain why neither student reached up and released their brakes, as per their training, and checked their canopies. Both certainly could have landed without incident had they done so.

Was it the training? Ironically, many in the sport blame that. Yet I sat in numerous first jump courses across the country and I didn’t see anything amiss in the course at this drop zone. (For a while there, I think I might have been one of the experts on student fatalities here — yuck, I know! Some images you never forget — especially at 3 AM when you can’t get back to sleep.)

The parents of this young woman worked hard to get all skydiving shut down in Canada for years. Some of that may have been due to regional politics, but I think some of it too may have been due to an ideology in our sport that masks some of our risks. No matter what we do with respect to safety, the fact of the matter is that this is still a high speed, high risk sport — would we do it if it wasn’t? We shouldn’t take a pollyanna approach to promoting it to the general public. There will always be people who are willing to take the risks in order to experience the exhilaration — but I’ve always wondered, if we’d promoted ourselves more honestly, would the proud parents of a young woman of much achievement, just turning 18, have given her a first jump course for her birthday?

Transport Canada has since “regulated” student training in Canada. I’m not convinced that the methods they settled on do much more than create work for government employees and increase the costs of jumping in Canada. If I had to design a regulation for first jump training, it would have focused on points such as ensuring that every piece of marketing for first jumps included a warning from the federal government that, while serious skydiving incidents were rare, the consequences are significant including severe disability and even death; outlawing the training, equipping or facilitation of any minor in making a jump; and substance testing for all personnel involved in the training of students. Having met the young woman above’s parents briefly in passing, they were highly intelligent people, very much in love with their daughter. I think if they’d read a reasonable warning from the federal government on the first jump marketing materials, I think they would have chosen another birthday gift for her. I don’t think they ever would have risked their daughter’s life knowingly — they only chose to give her a first jump because they were lulled into thinking it was safer than it was. And let’s face it: what first jump training marketing material doesn’t seek to accentuate the safety?

But we skydivers all know the truth. We know the risk we’re taking every time we go up there. It’s only fair to let the general public know too. I don’t think it will stop anybody from jumping who really wants to. It’s just the ethical thing to do.

if i had my way (and the money and time), i’d go skydiving every day. teh funny (though i felt sad for the poor bloke): we went up and this one dude who was twice my size and about half my age, well, he refused to jump. poor guy had no idea what he was missing.