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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

>>"But if it was me in that plane and I saw a 10% risk of serious bodily harm / death in trying to land and a 0.1% risk in jumping, it would be tempting to jump."

Of course. Point is, risk does not actually turn that way. Parachuting into rocks is not exactly safe and easy either! Vast majority of pilots are much more trained to safely land than to safely parachute. Movies give us this idea that you pull a cord and land feather like. That is empathically not the case. Especially for an untrained person, parachuting on safe ground will break your limbs virtually guaranteed.

Small airplanes have very low stall speed. If you fly into the wind you can have your land / crash speed very low and very controlled, you are trained to find best possible spot, and are buckled inside metal chassis.

I genuinely believe most licensed pilots would stay inside the damn plane :)

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> Vast majority of pilots are much more trained to safely land than to safely parachute

So if the person is an experienced skydiver, doesn't the equation change towards ditching the plane?

Mind you, no one is arguing whether the video is real or not, that's conclusive that it's likely fake. But what if an experience skydiver was actually in this situation?

if skydiver has a pilots license he will always prefer to try to land it, unless the wings broke off

I am not an experienced professional skydiver so I really cannot speak to that. :-/

I think he should still follow the procedure far further than showed in video (where he doesn't follow ANY), and I still feel he should have tried far harder to find a landing spot - cessna 152 has 11 to 1 glide ratio, which means for every foot of altitude you can travel 11 feet of distance. I imagine his airplane has roughly comparable gliding distance so given his original height, he had a LOT of time and options he seemed to have immediately squandered. At best, assuming reality, that feels like a yahoo parachuter rather than methodical pilot, and not advice / approach to follow.

The vast majority of private pilots are not trained parachutists and don't fly regularly with parachutes.

I think an important thing to note here is that as a pilot, bailing out does not absolve you of your responsibility for the safe operation of the aircraft, so if it hits something or someone when it goes down, your still on the hook for that.

Its also important to remember that wilderness does not mean people are not there, so if you do something stupid thinking noones around so noone can get hurt, you might still hurt someone.

> Its also important to remember that wilderness does not mean people are not there, so if you do something stupid thinking noones around so noone can get hurt, you might still hurt someone.

And just because people aren't directly in the path of a falling plane doesn't mean that the pilot isn't putting people's lives at risk. The recent rains have improved the situation a bit, but a plane crash in the remote mountains of Southern California? That's how you get wildfires.

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