How dangerous is a wingsuit?

base283

Re: [niallandrewh] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

niallandrewh wrote: It's not the wingsuits..Its the mentality that has changed the most because of Facebook and YouTube.
It's too easy now. Money changes everything.
Some courses take anyone.
There is some awful fuckwits ya meet now.
I think BASEjumpers With paragliding backgrounds have great understanding of the weather and jump conditions. you got it Dude!

platypii

Re: [base283] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

base283 wrote: Brento is my home DZ since 1995. I do not know of any wingsuit fatals.
BFL 194 George Allan Staite
BFL 236 Abraham Cubo Lopez

BASEline - Wingsuit Flight Computer

MrAW

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

I believe WS is more dangerous due to being less forgiving of bad exit technique (presuming the exit is from a solid object).
That is provided you are also reducing the risk by flying away from the wall, pulling high, and having tons of WS skydiving experience before you got to this point.
Flying close to stuff, pulling low, or generally not having much basic WS experience all increases the risk.

base283

Re: [platypii] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

platypii wrote: base283 wrote: Brento is my home DZ since 1995. I do not know of any wingsuit fatals.
BFL 194 George Allan Staite
BFL 236 Abraham Cubo Lopez
Wow, i must be getting dementia. I was there a day before Abraham went in. I and another BASE Mentor spoke with George about repairing his canopy but soon realized that it was a lost cause. His concept of the sport was a lost cause i mean. We saw the uselessness of carrying the convo further. We just made sure not to be on his load.
IMHO he didnt do enough research. I am really sorry of his death.
take care, thanks for reminding me.
space

Fledgling

Re: [base283] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

base283 wrote: platypii wrote: base283 wrote: Brento is my home DZ since 1995. I do not know of any wingsuit fatals.
BFL 194 George Allan Staite
BFL 236 Abraham Cubo Lopez I was there a day before Abraham went in.
Are you sure?

CLab

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

The wingsuit jump will always be more dangerous due to the additional degrees of freedom it creates. With these degrees of freedom comes a diverse set of new skills required to perform a successful flight plan. Add to this the increased difficulty in recognizing a close-call or even just minor non-consequential mistakes. Making mistakes in a stowed bridge jump are pretty easy to recognize, whereas mistakes in a wingsuit flight can easily go unnoticed when it all ends well. Confirmation bias reinforces this danger as pilots continue to repeat mistakes and get away with them over and over, and then continue their chosen path of progression. As we've regrettably learned this danger applies equally to beginners as it does to veterans. It's something I think about before and after every flight.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard P. Feynman

jeb

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

Anyone who thinks you can jump off cliffs using nylon and string to stop you from slamming into earth at high rates of speed can be done in a safe way is living in a fantasy land. This sport by very definition is dangerous, period. There is nothing wrong with doing dangerous things, but be honest with yourself and others. It is irresponsible to try and sugar coat an activity that kills people. This is not safe, not now, not ever. You can do everything right and still die. With proper training and good judgment you can increase your chances for success. But even then it only helps push the odds in your favor, it guarantees nothing. You can still get a tension knot at any time. Line twists happen even with perfect pack jobs and perfect body positions. I have watched the majority of my friends die. Some were pushing it, others were not. Some were inexperienced, others were the best the sport has ever seen. To answer your question, YES, 100% this sport is fucking dangerous and to say anything else is STUPID and dishonest...

elex

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

In reply to: In reply to: seldomseen_mark wrote:
OK.

So of the 110 WS fatalities (39%)
What % of those are related to Proxy Flights?

Just curious.
Maybe 70%? I guess the rest go under exit or deployment issues. Rarely the odd drowning or landing somewhere fucked up.
i am running my own list since a few years (pdf attached). i personally don't belive this gives a value to the question how dangerous wingsuits are because we cannot compare total number of wingsuit jumps to total number of other jumps per year.

but the stats show two important things:
- proximity wingsuit flights is where most people die no matter the expierence they have (and i personally believe future proximity tracking jumps will lead into the same)
- second most wingsuit fatalities are caused by instable exits (wich i personally belive is a sign of to fast progression; how much expierence you take on tracking until you start wingsuiting)

88094-year-stats-12-15.pdf

79.49kB

Hajo

Re: [jeb] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

jeb wrote: ... You can do everything right and still die. With proper training and good judgment you can increase your chances for success. But even then it only helps push the odds in your favor, it guarantees nothing. ...
That´s the point.

The only 100%-way to not get killed in a WS-Jump is: don´t do one.
To answer your question: it can´t be answered.
If you use a WS, see above.

But this is equal to everything in our sport.
all statistics are useless for that question.
WS-fatalities happened and will happen again.
Like Jeb said, you can do everything right and still die.

With sufficient thrust, pigs just fly fine ...

kerblammo

Re: [Fledgling] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

My opinion is not worth much but here it is.

A wingsuit is a piece of nylon. It's not dangerous until you put it on and jump off something. It's the person wearing it that is dangerous, to themselves, as I am, as we all are.

BASE jumping is so seductive and fun, but it is technically dangerous, which can be managed to a certain extent, and also mentally dangerous, where our judgement gets clouded, our judgement about ourselves and whats happening around us, and that's the tricky bit. We all have this complicated emotional relationship with it. Wingsuits attract the shit out of some people and drag them into areas where their judgement is sub-optimal.

Cocaine or heroin is fine sitting on the table. Some people ignore it. Some people can't look away. Some people take it and can handle it. Some people ruin their lives with it. It's all in your head. Wingsuits are a bit the same. Just a new more powerful drug. If you can handle it, it's cool. If not, it might kill you. You won't know until you try.

Wingsuits opened up new ways to kill yourself and we are still exploring them. Same as all aviation inventions.

hjumper33

Re: [Hajo] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

I think its a very answerable question, and ive enjoyed reading the discussion people have created. I think that like jeb and many other have stated very correctly, you can do absolutely everything right and still die, is there more likely to go wrong in a wingsuit. Its interesting to see opinions can vary greatly on this from absolutely its much more dangerous, to maybe tracking is more dangerous, to if used in a perfect setting as in my example, its no more dangerous than a non-wingsuit base jump.

My own personal thoughts come from trying to decide if wingsuit base jumping is almost its own separate identity from base jumping. If I hang up my wingsuit and keep jumping my wonderful local S, am I more likely to survive? If I stick to my favorite wingsuit haunts which are quite safe by current standards, can I keep doing this forever? If we strip wingsuit base jumping back down to its essential components, is it repeatable just the same as jumping the perrine 3000+ times, or will something "eventually just happen"?

434

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

How many in the list, did everything right?

I come to one, who pulled high, but pilotchute made a knot, and,,,,,,

I had the same pilotchute as him, and I had seen it in skydiving more than once, making a knot, so we knew it could happend.

I know one who had twists, and the canopy turned back to the building. That is the closest one I know of, was a shit happens incident. There are some few more, but they are really really rare.

Gravity never fails!

Mikki_ZH

Re: [jeb] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

jeb wrote: Anyone who thinks you can jump off cliffs using nylon and string to stop you from slamming into earth at high rates of speed can be done in a safe way is living in a fantasy land. This sport by very definition is dangerous, period. There is nothing wrong with doing dangerous things, but be honest with yourself and others. It is irresponsible to try and sugar coat an activity that kills people. This is not safe, not now, not ever. You can do everything right and still die. With proper training and good judgment you can increase your chances for success. But even then it only helps push the odds in your favor, it guarantees nothing. You can still get a tension knot at any time. Line twists happen even with perfect pack jobs and perfect body positions. I have watched the majority of my friends die. Some were pushing it, others were not. Some were inexperienced, others were the best the sport has ever seen. To answer your question, YES, 100% this sport is fucking dangerous and to say anything else is STUPID and dishonest...
I also agree 100% with what Jeb sais. And I think so will everybody else who is in the sport for more than 10 years and jumps regulary. I acutally think that people are not aware of this is one of the biggest killer in our "sport". Everytime someone goes in, the main discussions are why the guy did that stupid error and went in (this could never happen to me...). But I'm sure that the jumpers who went in thought the same everytime someone else went in. Instead of thinking that the jumper went in because he did a silly mistake, we should think, fuck, this could easaly happend to me as well.
Jumpers need to know that it is very, very easy to fuck up and in base, if you fuck up chances are big that you die. And with the additional complexity of a wingsuit, chances to fuck up are for sure bigger than without a wingsuit.

Michi (#1068)
hsbc/gba/sba
www.swissbaseassociation.ch
www.michibase.ch

Hajo

Re: [hjumper33] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

hjumper33 wrote: ...
If I hang up my wingsuit and keep jumping my wonderful local S, am I more likely to survive? ...
why not, you can jump your local "S" until you die ...
(joke)

hjumper33 wrote: ...
is it repeatable just the same as jumping the perrine 3000+ times, or will something "eventually just happen"? ..
as Jeb said: you´ll never know ..

Now seriously..
first, the question "did they do everything right? (as for the cause for fatalities)" is hard to answer..
did they? well, probably not, otherwise it would not be that high numbers of deaths. but (I guess) all who went in in WS fatalities thought they did. the same as most of non-WS fatalities ...

But back to the main question, is WS more dangerous if I compare it to other jumps with the identical circumstances without a WS?
I think yes because you add a couple of possible problems you don´t have without the nylonsuit.
At a terminal wall, however, a poor tracker endangers himself more than a badass WS-flyer .. and vice versa.
it depends on the parameters you give as standard...
What should be the outcome?
For me it´s a little like:
Is a racecar more dangerous than a family-van if we, let´s say, let them drive on the same day, by the same driver on a sunny and dry road straight from A to B?

If the thoughts go more to:
is WS more dangerous in general? then I ´m convinced that you can answer that with "yes" because of the different usage and suitstyles nowadays, combined with all the technical, physical, meteorological, and so on issues.

With sufficient thrust, pigs just fly fine ...

434

How dangerous is a wingsuit?

Any thoughts about this video?

https://jointheteem.com/...southern-california/

Gravity never fails!

colsco

Re: [434] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

434 wrote: Any thoughts about this video?

https://jointheteem.com/...southern-california/
I think it's next level shit. He's an animal and he's sciencing the fuck out of it. If you didn't see the NatGeo spot with him, you should.

Using Science to Map a Wingsuit BASE Jump

434

Re: [colsco] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

Skijumping is scinence, where you have every factor measured, but still jumpers perform very different from jump to jump. Imagine

Gravity never fails!

wasatchrider

Re: [434] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

which is why he took flysite data from many many jumps found out his start arc average and does not jump anything that is not below his lowest start arcs
science

BASE 1519

434

Re: [wasatchrider] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

Base is more a suicidal sport, than a dangerous one.

Living to the fullest, bla bla bla, or life is not worth anything without being extreme, pushing limits, etc.

Enough said.

Gravity never fails!

hjumper33

Re: [434] How dangerous is a wingsuit?

Yup I know both Chris and rich well. They're taking things to a whole new level for sure, and approaching it in the safest way possible. My thought on these jumps is that I've had bad starts, not many, not even probably more than 3-4 in 800 wingsuit jumps, but I've had them, which excludes me from being able to do these jumps where there is basically no margin for error. Self confidence and ability have a lot to do with being able to do these jumps, and bad luck and freak circumstances have a lot to do with bad things happening, but to me, at least these days, I like to keep a cushion.

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