Safety and Statistics in Skydiving
Skydiving today is safer than ever. The USPA states one in a thousand parachutes needs the reserve. Fatalities are rare – one in 167,000 jumps.
Breathing while skydiving is not much harder than on the ground. Tandem skydiving has the strongest safety with 0.003 fatalities per thousand jumps the past decade.
Though experience helps avoid accidents, even veterans can be victims. People work to develop safer equipment.
Parachute Failure Rate
A study from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found that the overall failure rate of parachutes is about 0.2%.
Double Parachute Failures
Even seemingly properly packed parachutes can fail. Skydivers typically descend with three parachutes to mitigate risks.
Once a skydiver is fully trained, the average injury rate is 0.3 injuries/1000 jumps and the fatality rate is just under 1/100,000.
In short, main parachutes are designed for performance, while reserve parachutes are designed to ensure a safe landing.
Reserve Parachute Deployment
If the main parachute fails or has any sort of malfunction, the reserve can be deployed in three ways.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, about 21 skydivers are killed each year in the United States when their parachutes fail to open.
Double Parachute Failures
The odds of two parachutes failing are thus on the order of one in a million.
Typically, about one in every thousand parachutes will experience a malfunction that requires the use of the reserve parachute.