Increasing numbers of wingsuit jumpers are dying (2016)

I'd add that looking at participation-hours is another interesting way to look at it.

For example, my average day skydiving was 3-10 jumps. So I might have spent up to 80 micromorts in a day. But a freefall is at most 60 seconds, so I could also say I spent 80 micromorts in 10 minutes. Hang-gliding is something you only do maybe once or twice in a day, with flight times being 30-60 minutes.

It might not be fair to use participation hours for various reasons, but if you do slice it that way, skydiving looks a lot more dangerous.

I'd say the massive growth in popularity of, not just BASE, but other extreme sports, is down to publicity (in various forms) and accessibility. There's now so much content online that if, say, you've ever been skiing it's pretty hard to avoid seeing some BASE jumping footage, and then you get to thinking, "that looks pretty cool," and then some of those people decide to try it.

My take on BASE jumping is that it is kind of cool and exciting but not something you should take up if you have any kind of aspirations or ambitions in any other area of your life because the risk profile is simply too extreme.

You can ski your whole life and unless you're constantly doing hardcore back-country, probably, the worst thing that might happen to you is a broken leg. Even that's too much for some people.

Contrast that with BASE jumping, where if you do it for long enough it seems like the chances of dying for any other reason drop almost to zero.

But people see how cool it is and don't necessarily assess the risk.

And then there's the fact that to achieve any kind of success/celebrity, even enough to just about eke out a living, you have to keep pushing to ever more extreme feats. Filming that is part and parcel of ekeing out that living. And of course, as a side-effect, it increases interest in the sport and gets more people into it.

Let me explain: When you do a risk activity, the way to mitigate risk is to bound the situation to keep all variables within safe margins.. For example, on aircrafts we look at the mean time of failure on a part, then you replace the part before it gets there, so you reduce the chances of it failing..

On adventure sports we do the same. When Skydiving, Rock climbing, Paragliding etc.. you keep looking at accident causes and develop a plan to avoid those situations.

So, If you do follow all the existing safety procedures,and still get in trouble, it is probably an accident, something you could not prepare or account for. (procedures are then created to mitigate its repeat occurrence)

On the other side.. if you disregard the safety procedures (push de envelope, as we say) and get in trouble, then you were reckless, and you paid heavily for it. That is NO accident. (if you get away with it.. you were just dumb lucky)

My point is.. I bet the micromorts computed here are based on "all" accidents, not on accidental vs reckless deaths.

With all due respect to the death.. if you seen a cluster of 20 deaths within a small group, you need to look closely at the reason why those deaths happened.. Where they trained properly? Where they at the appropriate experience level to engage on the type of activity they where doing? (RW, CRW, fast landings etc) Where there other external factors involved? , was there a single significant accidental event that affected many members of the group at the same time? (Aircraft crash for example..)

That is definitely true. These figures are dividing all deaths annually by number of participants. We are in murky water just by talking about risk rather than mortality rate. I'm guilty of doing that. We can't know the risk of a skydive per-se, we just know that 1/100k skydives in the past has ended in a death. We also know that the rate of deaths per skydive is going down over time, given the last 20 years of data.

> There is a hidden factor here that I don't think is being taken into account. Accidents vs Recklessness.

You're right on both counts. 1- some people take more risk than others in a given sport, and 2- that relative risk-taking within a sport is not taken into account in the mortality rates we have at hand.

Recklessness is a subjective, touchy-feely concept though. It's opinion and not something we can measure, so we will never be able to take it into account. We also don't know whether people within one sport are any more "reckless" than in another. Reckless behavior might be correlated with overall risk, or it might be heavily influenced by training and regulation and community.

Most deaths aren't due to crossing the line of any specific safety procedure. It's not recommended to hook turn, but it's also not a rule or law. A lot of people choose to do it for the extra thrill, and know that it's riskier than a straight upwind landing. All reckless deaths are also accidents. The line just might be too hard to draw.

Many people do call choosing to participate in a risky sport "reckless". Proximity wingsuit flying seems reckless to me, it's an activity that is very prone to deadly accident. You can certainly play it safer than some other people, but by choosing to participate you're accepting a level of risk that is unacceptable to some other people. I also acknowledge individual choice in this regard. It's okay to accept a higher level of risk than someone else.

The main thing that's probably bad to do is to rationalize a choice by thinking it's less risky than it really is. If you calculate your risk wrong, then you can't make an informed choice, which leads to unintentionally reckless decisions.

The other thing not being considered in this thread is injury rate vs fatality rate. I think it's pretty reasonable to weigh fatality much more heavily than recoverable injury, but I will openly admit that the big picture has a lot more gray area than the black/white numbers on fatalities per year.