For a lot of us, sky diving is understandably daunting.
The idea of jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet is incredibly scary to many of us, and this isn’t surprising.
But you may be wondering about the safety of skydiving, and the actual, statistical likelihood you have of sustaining any kind of injury.
Driving is often a natural point of reference for safety—so is skydiving safter than driving?
On basic statistics, skydiving is safer than driving. There are around 15 deaths per 3.3 million jumps. There are around 11.7 deaths per 100,000 people driving. But it isn’t necessarily as simple as this. Obviously, driving is a lot more common, and adding skydiving on to your activities won’t make you safer.
Because skydiving is run by licensed practitioners, in commercial settings where safety determines whether or not the owner can keep their livelihood, skydiving is an extremely safe activity compared with driving.
Other drivers always put you at risk no matter how safely you drive.
Let’s look further into this.
Is it dangerous to skydive?
Fundamentally, no, it isn’t.
Obviously, if you and your friends took a plane up into the air and jumped out without any training or know-how, that would be extremely dangerous, not to mention illegal.
But going skydiving with trained professionals is very safe, and they hold themselves to an extremely high standard.
As I mentioned, if nothing else, you only need to remember that whoever owns the skydiving school likely makes a living from the business.
They are going to get very quickly shut down if they don’t abide by safety laws and an injury or death occurs.
Safety in skydiving is a vital part of the activity, and skydiving schools take it very seriously.
That said, there are certain circumstances in which it could be more dangerous.
If you are prone to any sort of heart condition, anxiety, or anything else which could be exacerbated by skydiving, then skydiving is extremely dangerous for you.
You will probably be excluded from trying, and any school you are looking to dive with will not accept you and will ask you about these things before the dive.
So, in that sense, every possible step is taken to ensure that skydiving is safe.
When the rules are observed to the letter, the only danger is in those extremely rare freak events, in which parachutes fail or something similar.
But this is, as I said, extremely rare—around 0.0045 in every 3.3 million jumps.
So, what is the most dangerous part of skydiving?
What is the most dangerous part of skydiving?
If you are skydiving for the first time, then you will almost certainly have an experienced tandem partner.
In this case, you really have absolutely nothing to worry about with any part of the dive.
They will ensure all the conditions are right before jumping, and they will know intimately every part of the process.
There is really no part that is more dangerous than another.
There are some crucial moments, though, where if something goes wrong, it can go really wrong.
One relatively common problem is that people who open their parachutes too early can become tangled in the plane.
Again, though, this is extremely rare and easy to avoid.
The other danger is in crashing into other parachutes while falling.
This can cause tangling and serious problems.
All of this, though, is very easily avoided by careful, experienced skydivers.
So, let’s return to our question and compare skydiving with driving.
Is skydiving safer than driving a car?
The simple answer is statistically, yes.
As I said, there are around 15 deaths per 3.3 million skydivers.
Driving causes more fatalities, by a very long way.
But the question is a little more complicated than this.
For one thing, we all drive a lot more than we skydive.
There are millions of cars on the road at any given time, and you will only ever be one of a handful of people skydiving at the same time.
When everyone drives cars all the time, of course this leads to accidents with more frequency.
If everyone skydived as much as they drove, we would probably see more accidents.
Though, the statistics do show not to the same degree.
So, yes, skydiving is safer than driving. So, what are the actual odds of death during skydiving?
What are the odds of dying while skydiving?
Given the rate of skydiving fatalities in the USA, your chances of dying on a skydive are around 220,000 to 1.
That number reduces even further, though, when skydiving with a tandem partner—to 1 in 500,000.
So, in other words, your chances of dying while skydiving are extremely low.
As I’ve explained, there is every incentive for skydiving schools to adhere to safety rules, and thus the only deaths occur from freak accidents and the very occasional negligence.
If this is what puts you off skydiving, statistically, you have nothing to worry about.
So, there are definitely situations in which skydiving can be very dangerous—if you are especially anxious, with high blood pressure, or at risk of heart attacks.
But all of this should be covered by your instructors, and you won’t be able to go up if you are at risk with these things.
But there is still always an element of danger, however small—though it is, statistically, much less than driving.
