I always wanted to try skydiving, until a guy I knew with over 100 jumps hit the ground without his chute deploying. That ended my desire.

dam that sucks

There's always more to the story than that.

 

With around 650 jumps, I had one mal that I had to cut away and landed fine under my reserve and continued happily jumping for 150 more. Most incidents now occur with a pilot making a bad decision under a perfectly good canopy. Still, you can do everything right and still die. Such is life.

I have few details, as the jump was in FL several years ago. Mutual friends informed me and I read one brief news article.

It is pretty rare for that to happen . Sorry it happened to your friend

 

In the years I hung around the dropzone with Pete the only time I heard of that happening is when someone passed out for one reason or another and did not have an AAD device or if they did they did not have the right altitude for the DZ they were at dialed in.

 

Last I paid attention ( about 7 years ago) the average deaths from skydiving per year hovered around 25 to 30 . That is not a lot considering the amount of people that jump. And , most of those deaths were pilots under small wickedly fast parachutes that made pilot error too close to the ground...usually they had downsized their chute before their skill set made it safe to do so. At least that is all of what I was told.

 

Pond swooping..we use to enjoy watching it . Even though it was rather heartstopping for me at least.

Here are some of Pete's old buddies here :

I'm very sorry to hear about your friend. I've been around or had friends involved in some bad accidents and one acquaintance that had a promising future cut short needlessly.

 

News articles never, ever get it right.

 

If you know the name, chances are there's an incident report in the Incidents forum on dropzone.com. The parachute didn't open is very rare and usually someone jumping without an emergency automatic activation device installed and a complete loss of altitude awareness, such as a seizure or heartattack. A deployment malfunction is more normally that the main opened as a ball of crap. That can be fixed with procedures jumpers train and train again for.

 

Even if you don't find your friend, browsing the dropzone forum will give you a good idea of the common and extraordinary incidents. It's not a safe sport, no matter what someone might try to say. There is a very real element of danger from equipment failure, operator error, other jumpers, weather, etc. Anyone making the decision should understand the danger and fully balance the pros and cons.

 

Skydivers make every effort to mitigate the danger with redundant equipment, constant emergency procedure training and constant awareness. My mal was completely my fault from becoming complacent, but training kicked in when I needed it and overall, my years of jumping were alot of fun.

I always wanted to try skydiving, until a guy I knew with over 100 jumps hit the ground without his chute deploying. That ended my desire.

 

Sorry to hear about your friend, and one of the morbid to most is pilots that read accident reports and really get into them. I do the same thing with Hang Gliding accidents, we have writeup's of them. It's not that we like to read them, but there are always take aways and learning from them. I have actually been in a few situations that remembering others that had a similar problem and what they did have saved me. Also after I had an accident early on, I learned from it and helped teach others not to do what I did and hopefully save a few from falling to a similar fate. Luckily, all I did was turn my Humorous Bone (by the way not that funny if I say so my self) into dust. A little bone replacement, a few plates and a bunch of screws and pins and I'm all better, relatively speaking.. lol