Skydiving instructor jailed after deaths

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. :frowning:

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