I jumped from a plane, my parachute failed, I hurtled towards earth feeling calm

> RWY had the original idea but was reluctant to say it out loud for years. In a moment of weakness, he shared it with MWY and BKN, both of whom immediately recognized this as the best idea RWY will ever have. RWY and LRV wrote the first draft. CS, DBK, JBS, EAS, and JLH provided critical review. RMD provided subject matter expertise. DSK took this work to another satirical level. All authors suffered substantial abdominal discomfort from laughter. RWY worried that BKN would not keep his mouth shut until the Christmas issue was published.

Somehow I am not convinced this is a real study.

hmm...

> they jumped from an average altitude of 0.6 m (SD 0.1) on aircraft moving at an average of 0 km/h

> The study also has several limitations. First and most importantly, our findings might not be generalizable to the use of parachutes in aircraft traveling at a higher altitude or velocity. Consideration could be made to conduct additional randomized clinical trials in these higher risk settings. However, previous theoretical work supporting the use of parachutes could reduce the feasibility of enrolling participants in such studies

Are you joking? Conclusion from the article: "Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice."

For emphasis: "... the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps."

Okay, parachutes don't help when jumping from stationary aircraft that are on the ground. I will not leap to the conclusion that parachutes do not help with high altitude jumps.

Solid "you had me in the first half" energy. I was seriously raising my eyebrow until I got to the bit about parachute-less participants jumping from a half meter altitude. Well done.

Quite the jump...

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/363/bmj.k5094/F2.large.jpg

Why doubt what someone felt when they specifically said what they felt?

> I'd be worried about dying, breaking my leg, or breaking my back falling off my roof

I sort of doubt he was actually worried about dying as he was falling off his roof. I mean, really? It's extremely illogical and naive. Unbelievable that an adult would be so irrational. Plus unless his house is so tall the fall would take minutes he would simply not have enough time to properly worry about anything.

Underassessment of risk probably helps contribute to the desire to do things like skydive and climb Everest.

Some people are just built differently.

> I sort of doubt that she was actually feeling calm. Adrenaline could potentially create such a feeling

That was the claim, wasn't it? ... feeling calm?

> This seems completely illogical and naive. I mean, really?

Statistically, it was a good assessment. Skydiving accidents are 40x more likely to by injuries, rather than deaths, and most of those are lower extremity injuries.

You’d be surprised how the human mind and body automatically reacts to extreme situations that we cannot fathom while sitting comfortably on our chairs. :-)

There are many clues that this article is employing some amount of dramatic storytelling. That said, stories of people feeling calm in extreme situations are pretty common, so your intuition and logic might be off here, especially if you lack experience skydiving.

Jumping out of a plane is very different than being on your roof. When I jumped, part of it was wanting to conquer my fears, heights being one of them. I discovered that fear of heights doesn’t occur to me when looking out an airplane door, you’re high enough that the fall is abstract and impact not immediately imminent. Jumping was easier than it is to clean my rain gutters, I still get weak knees on a ladder.

It seems like you’re thinking of worrying about death before an accident starts, and even before choosing to skydive, not during a mishap. I’ve never worried about dying during an evolving accident, and it makes complete sense to me, having had a few, that lots of people would say they weren’t thinking about dying while it was happening. You usually don’t have time to. There might be some panic without specific thoughts of death, or there might be thoughts about how to fix the situation, but I think it’s common to not think about death while something is going wrong, at least for survivors. I’m sure there are situations where the outcome becomes obvious and there’s nothing you can do, but I suffer from survivor bias and can’t ask them.

If you land a bit funny and slightly tear a meniscus or something, you just have an annoying knee until you get around to seeing a doctor about it, whereas you can be pretty sure that doctors are involved right from the get to in recovery from a failed chute.

Stories of people surviving falls from planes 'without a parachute' are inevitably somewhat exaggerated- they survived a fall with a partially functional parachute. Her injuries were horrific and it's incredible that she and the baby survived, but with no parachute at all at terminal velocity (at least 120mph) there would have been few pieces of her left large enough to scrape up.

Yeah, let's hear about a mother of four that this happened to, not the jet-setting single defense contractor.

For me personally, I just have so little want to do anything like that. If it goes wrong, you go splat, and there's very little you can do about it. Is that the way you want to go, just jumping out of something? I mean, even getting injured and living is still ridiculous sounding. "How did you break your back?" "Oh, I jumped from 10,000 feet." The best case is that you get a "thrill" out of being reminded that gravity exists.

I wonder if a lot of these people have some issues that cause them to seek the adrenaline and other hormone rushes from these activities. And it's very likely many get addicted to it once they start such extreme activities.

Lodi is exceptionally bad. Like, it's kinda infamously bad.

When I was skydiving, everyone who is licensed and current in the U.S. received the USPA’s Skydiving Magazine, and in every issue was a report of every death and serious accident, and a “post-mortem” analysis of what went wrong and ways to avoid the same situation.

The 28 people thing strikes me as a bit of tabloid writing. That’s 28 people in like 30 or 40 years, and it’s a big and busy drop zone. I can’t read the paywalled article but you need to compare the number 28 to the total number of jumps over that period, and to the national accident rate. 28 deaths without context is pretty meaningless. Yes, skydiving is a bit risky, and yes accidents occasionally happen. We’ve been losing 30,000 to 40,000 people to car accidents every single year for those 40 years. We’ve lost more than 700,000 people just since the year 2000. How does this country not shut down? (It’s easy to fling incredulity… just sayin’)

Anyway, my local drop zone owner said that every time there was any kind of accident in the news, business tended to go up. The risk is part of the attraction.

Does medical insurance cover injuries sustained thrillseeking? I assume they would.

Honestly, motorcycling at track days is pretty adrenaline inducing (I've never personally done it) but decently safe if the track staff take it seriously and you do too.

Seriously, do get a motorcycle. Do your research first, watch crashes, learn to be safe, but get a motorcycle. You control your amount of risk, and good god is it excellent stress relief. Also cheaper than a skydiving habit.

For some, it's about adrenaline. Those people often go on to pursue base jumping to keep pushing the limits. For others, it's about overcoming fear as a measure of personal growth. For me, when I used to skydive, it was less about adrenaline and much more about a brief moment of when all other thoughts disappear and you're fully present. It's a way of getting out of one's head without narcotics and experiencing a unique state of being. I suppose it's a similar in spirit to why astronauts go to space. There's no proxy for the perspective gained in leaving the confines of terra firma. Definitely not for everyone.

There's risk associated with many activities that are enjoyable yet not 100% necessary to sustain life. Why do any of them? Because they enable someone to enjoy said life.

63% of American adults voluntarily drink carcinogenic poison, for fun.