71–80 of 275 posts
That tree that was upright yesterday, might have dropped. The birds that where far away in the morning, might get in your way. The little pond on the way, that was just mud, is dryed dust today swirling up.
Wind drafts coming and going.
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I will call bullshit. There is no way it is safer to hug terrain than to jump at altitude from an airplane.
They said safer than BASE jumping, though they didn't capitalize it. BASE jumping is jumping off stuff, not out of stuff. It is an acronym. Building Antenna Span Earth, I think.
Flying is not natural for humans. Our instincts are wrong, and our senses misinform us. This is well known among pilots, and why one has to fly regularly to keep the license, and why a large part of pilot training focuses on trusting the instruments rather than your body.
Anyway, pilot training is focused on dealing with critical and problematic situations. To be able to fly with instruments only, without them in case of failure, to glide safely, to not fly in proximity to other objects ;-) etc. Unfortunately, IMO in wingsuit flying, the safety is so thin that it would be hardly significantly improved with regulated training.
I had a close call this summer whitewater rafting on the Upper Animas River in Colorado and it has caused me to re-think every serious risk I take and has changed me in a big way. I was participating in a multi-day trip run by one of the local guiding outfits through the Upper section of the river, a much more difficult and serious undertaking than the Lower Animas, which is frequently run by average day-tripping tou…
Not to "umm actually" your excellent story, but rock climbing is not that dangerous. It's about as dangerous as driving, which people do all the time without even thinking about it. Mountaineering is where the danger is there, primarily.
I don't have micromort stats around, but for example sport climbing, when not pushing constantly your limits and on bolted route that has not-very-old and reasonably placed protection, it feels as dangerous as some trail run in the forest. Risk of rock falling suddenly is next to 0, same goes for equipment failure.
bouldering & trad are different for obvious reasons, but again depends.
I've seen this mentioned before, it seems to be the main point. > Most beginners who die appear to be making variations of the exact same error, according to Webb. “They jump off a cliff, get flying, and for some reason there's just this human reaction to try to hug the air like a big, gigantic beach ball,” he explains. “By hugging air you feel as if you're creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What e…
This sport has no safety margin. The reasons this margin is insufficient for beginners and experts differ.
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Why should it be? It's not like poeple don't understand the risk - especially by the time they get to the point where they can actually do it. What about all the other 'extreme' sports where death and/or serious injury is a possible outcome?
> Why should it be? Because someone one has to clean up the mess . And it wastes the coroners time. I'm not saying I agree that it should be banned, but those seem like two obvious angles.
one out of endless examples - what about forumla 1/indycar racing? utterly useless and highly unecological activity, pushing technology and people to its limits. sounds faimilar? is it more acceptable because you own a car?
Proximity flying is just inherently dangerous. Even with power, many people have died. Sparky Imeson, who wrote the "bible" of mountain flying, died from flying too close to terrain. The strange thing is that he was actually flying back to somewhere that he had had an accident in the past (the first time he just got seriously injured, the second time he died). If you look at the accident location, there is a valley a…
The higher you fly, the safer it is. Flying higher gives the pilot more time to fix problems. Took a while for early aviators to realize this. Many died.
And the faster you land, the safer it is. Landing faster reduces the relative effects of wind shear. For a couple of reasons. The most obvious is the effect of a 20mph wind shear is less at 120mph than 60. And higher landing speed, higher stall speed, higher wing loading, less effects due to buffeting. This took even longer to realize. For a while the FAA had a rule limiting the maximum stall speed of commercial aircraft. That rule killed people.
Point being guys flying wing suits are flying in an intrinsically dangerous flight envelope.
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Bet its even closer than you think. Nobody I know who does BASE is still alive. Some quit, others died. Everyone just kind of expects to die doing it. Blue skies, black death.
Why is it not banned?
The Antenna part of BASE must be getting harder to achieve. When I worked in the radio and TV broadcast industry we had problems with BASE jumpers climbing masts at remote unmanned sites, but physical security is always being improved. Also, you wouldn't want to try climbing onto a live high power mast radiator, you would be vaporized.
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Why is it not banned?
It is in the land of the free. It's generally not banned in Europe, so most BASE jumpers who are active spend at least a few weeks a year there. About 10 to 20 die world wide in about a population of 1000 or so active jumpers. It can be done relatively safely but the group isn't big enough to regulate effectively and most BASE jumpers are hostile to anyone mentioning the idea.
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A lot of highly experienced jumpers are also dying, probably due to a mix of complacency, envelope-pushing and the inherent lack of margin for error in terrain flight. This point is made in the latter part of the article: > Figuring out why the best are dying confounds, saddens, and even irritates just about everyone I’ve spoken to in the wingsuit BASE world. “It’s really puzzling to me,” says Rich Webb. “I wish I kn…
This reminds me of Freeman Dyson's research on British Bombers during WWII -- the data showed experienced crews didn't fair better than novices, but they didn't figure out why till after the war. > Bomber Command told the crews that their chances of survival would increase with experience, and the crews believed it. They were told, After you have got through the first few operations, things will get better. This idea…
My first instinct for where to look to find things that would affect experts and beginners alike is manufacturing defects or poor suit design.
I'd say also weather but that seems more likely to be highly variable and prone to skill (i.e. experts know when conditions are poor).