Originally published at: Skydiving instructor jailed after deaths - Boing Boing
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It was fun up until those last few feet.
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Lodi Parachute Center has seen 28 deaths since 1985
28!!! Maybe they had a huge volume, but if not, how far out of the averge is that for deaths? I know sky diving can be risky, but that’s a death every 1.3 years!
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True Story: The only time I did a parachute jump, it was in Lodi in 1985.
An enthusiast friend convinced me to give it a try. The training was rigorous but only about 40 minutes long. The jump (story for another time) was awesome and exhilarating.
While back on the ground, my friend was trying to talk me into a second jump, when another diver’s chute failed. She plummeted toward the earth while releasing the tangled chute and deployed the emergency chute. That one unfurled properly and yanked her violently just a couple hundred feet from the ground, slowing her enough to prevent serious injury despite what appeared to be a pretty hard impact.
I declined a second jump, and that’s all I have to say about that.
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As the linked article explains, it’s really hard to know. There’s no requirement to officially track or report the total number of jumps so it’s difficult to establish a reliable denominator when calculating the odds of death per jump.
Years back I was running into a similar situation trying to determine just how dangerous hang gliding is. A friend of mine was an enthusiast and he was trying to convince me that it was much safer than flying Cessnas, which I was doing at the time. But nobody tracks the total number of hang glider flights and it’s also hard to find reliable numbers of deaths.
Eventually he convinced me to take an introductory lesson, which was fun, but then he died in a hang glider accident 2 weeks later, at which point I decided that sometimes anecdotes are ok substitutes for statistics and never tried it again. 
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Looking it up on google street view and seeing the crudely hand painted sign answered a question I long had about what california has in the places where other states have roadside zoos.
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You’d think deaths would make them less popular, too. Did they have an ever-increasing death rate, as the number of customers dried up and more corners were cut to save money?
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I went skydiving as a bucket list thing after turning a certain age. It was a great experience. Not that I’ll go again.
This place looks like a complete outlier on safety. Non certified instructors, many deaths. Besides the civil case - the instructor and owners should face criminal charges. Negligent homicide or whatever.
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It’s impossible to calculate the fatality rate per jump at the Parachute Center, because no one keeps track of how many people jump out of planes there — or how many have died while doing so. In 2018, Dause told Sacramento’s KXTV-TV even he wasn’t sure how many deaths had occurred at his business. Dause declined to speak with SFGATE for this story.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/deaths-california-lodi-skydiving-center-19361603.php
but
The United States Parachute Association does keep its own tally. From 1985 through 2022, it calculated the fatality rate for skydiving to be just under one death per 100,000 jumps. The USPA uses an estimate of jumps made by association members and its best guess of the total number of skydiving deaths in the country to arrive at that figure, according to Ron Bell, the organization’s director of safety and training. The Parachute Center is not a member of the USPA, nor has it ever been. As such, it’s difficult to put the 28 deaths at the Parachute Center into meaningful context. Dause, the center’s longtime but now former owner, has repeatedly stated that he does not know how many jumps occurred at the site. “I have no idea. We have never, ever tracked them,” Dause told The Bee, “or even tried to track them.” When pressed, Dause did note that at its height — pre-pandemic — the Parachute Center ran as many as about eight planes, some of which could carry about 20 people each. Using the organization’s fatality rate, the Parachute Center would have needed to average about 78,000 jumps per year – or roughly 214 jumps a day – over those 38 years to achieve a death rate equal to the association’s average.
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The USPA said four affiliated drop zones reported at least that many annual jumps in 2022, with the busiest coming in at just over 112,000. The average center, however, tallied fewer than 16,000 a year. Those figures are based on a survey in which about one-third of USPA-member centers reported their total numbers, according to Bell.
The article is worth a read.
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I guess they now have first place :-/
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If Stockton Rush ran a skydiving business…
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We don’t need any government regulations, the market will take care of that! 
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I was a glider pilot for many years mostly flying in the mountains along the California/Nevada border. It’s not quite as dangerous as hang-gliding, but in a small community of roughly 300 people, we’d lose one or two pilots per year. Some would just misjudge and smack into the side of a mountain. Others were situations like mid-air collisions and structural failures, which they would have survived if they had decided early enough to pass ownership of the glider to the insurance company and step out using the emergency chutes we always carried. I was not convinced I would jump if circumstances required. So, I talked a local parachute center (not Lodi) into letting me make the first jump of as a free-fall course using a round chute (which is what emergency chutes are). It’s not tandem, two instructors jump with you and give you a few seconds to pull you own D-ring or they’ll pull it for you.
All I remember was sitting with my legs dangling out the door, asking myself where I went wrong with my choices in life, then seeing the plane dwindling away in the distance with the instructors heading my way. I pulled the D-ring (they gave it to me as a souvenir) and the next thing I remember is pain as I crunched up my ankle on landing. The instructors ran up and congratulated me, asked me if I wanted to go again, all I could get out was “hell no”. I never did have to use the chute, and quit flying altogether when two long time friends did an unexplained vertical dive into the side of a mountain, in the same kind of two seat glider I then owned (with partners). I wanted to see my daughter grow up, which she did.
It always seemed to me that a large subset of skydivers and pilots are basically adrenaline junkies, they do it because they enjoy danger and cheating death (until they don’t).
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Well it may reduce the number of people who are reasonably intelligent and want to live who choose to go, but it doesn’t reduce the other two obvious categories…
…and it increases the number of people who buy skydiving lessons for people they don’t like and/or who they have life insurance on (unless they realize that invalidates many policies)
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My SO and son have all agreed that we will go when we retire and at the last days we’re physically fit enough to do so. And we won’t go together lol
I had just said earlier today that everything can just be ‘exciting’ if you don’t care about the PTSD afterwards, but not skydiving!
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