I apologize in advance for nitting up your post.
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And I want to avoid that situation more than 15,600 times the thrill of skydiving (the reported risk of fatality is about 1 in 15,600).
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This is very inaccurate for someone doing a tandem skydive. (I think it is a ways off even for any type of skydive.) There were something on the order of 500,000 tandem skydives made last year and 4 fatalities. And last year was a bad one for tandems.
The majority of skydiving fatalities for the last 5-10 years have been experienced skydivers with correctly functioning gear making parachute piloting errors. The canonical example of this is making a high speed turn too low to the ground without enough time to level off and slow down.
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My right eardrum blows out. Big [censored] hole too. Awesome.
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Ouch!
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John pulls the chute. So far we've been dragging a small chute called a drobe.
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It's a "drogue".
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btw my life did not change. People whose life changes when they skydive are shallow and annoy the [censored] out of me.
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I was relatively unimpressed by my tandem jump, but was peer pressured by a friend into returning for AFF (basically "learn to jump yourself" school). Then I landed a parachute by myself and that was all she wrote. There was something about having responsibility that completely changed everything for me.
A skydive I did last Saturday:
Flying by yourself (as opposed to tandem) is a completely different thing. When people ask me why I skydive, the best answer I've been able to come up with is this: Have you ever had one of those dreams where you can fly like Superman? That is exactly what it's like for me.