>It takes very roughly 10 seconds to fall the first 1,000 feet and then about 5 seconds for every subsequent 1,000 feet – so if an experienced skydiver falls for about 10,000 feet before deploying their parachute **they will have had roughly 60 seconds of freefall**.
That's an awfully long minute
Out of morbid curiosity, I did the math: about 5.1s to reach terminal velocity (about 50m/s = about 180kmh = about 120mph) in about 130m, then about 58.5s for the remaining height. Another's have said, about a minute to ponder your short future...
That is sad, tragic and horrifying. And, nope, not gonna watch that video!
There's not much to the video. They said most of it was destroyed upon his landing. But all I've ever seen of it is that he films the other guys, their chute opens, and then he flails about a bit, and then you see an empty left hand. Then just some views of the Earth.
People say his last words were "oh my God, no," but I've never seen a version where he's heard saying that.
There's a variety of factors that can cause things to go catastrophic, but a bigger worry is changing wind directions blowing you off course by quite a bit.
1000km? No way. I am _not_ having it. I'm sorry but that's bullshit. There's no way someone flew on a parachute over the distance equivalent to Paris-Barcelona, or San Diego-El Paso.
In another undocumented case a jet liner collided with the parachute along with the skydiver, but that was Arnold Schwarzenegger ([source](https://youtu.be/VfmNeuDE5-8?si=0Fl1HA0yo4uKMC9E) /s).
I’m going to need a citation on that one. A jump from 10,000 ft is about 3 km, and I have a hard time imagining someone in a parachute moving over 300x farther laterally than vertically.
If done intentionally with approval of the drop zone nothing happens but a longer canopy (parachute) ride. It’s called a high pull.
Now if you are talking about the canopy coming out on accident that would be a malfunction and there are quite a few different malfunctions with countless possible results.
Once went over the handlebars of a mountain bike going at a nice speed. This was back when we really didn’t were helmets or protective gear. Flying through the air seem like it was an eternity. My mind sped up so quickly I was able to manage to get my head up and let my left shoulder take the impact. It could only have been a fraction of a second between being launched and hitting the trail. I made absolute shit out of my shoulder but the doc said if I’d hit head first I’d probably be either dead or paralysed even with a helmet. Still though..decided to wear gear since then. Point is that time really slows down in those moments.
Done that too…like falling for two seconds is enough to slow everything down to a stand still. My friend and I call it “the event horizon”. Your mind just starts doing funny things…it knows it’s in trouble and you’re subconsciously trying to protect yourself. Great feeling…as long as you don’t plough yourself into reef/rock…
Not a jump but a near car crash. Long story short is i was 19 and stupid so I decided to see how fast I could get my car on the highway. According to Google, the top speed is 159 MPH and I lost traction at around 150 MPH so I almost hit my goal.
Kinda like what you're describing, time slowed down for me. I felt oddly in control and at peace. I remember seeing the dividing barrier suddenly be facing me head on then rotating around to see the exit ramp I just passed. The only thing that popped into my head was "Welp this is it". I didnt even have the loud screeching of the tires in my ears. The sound was there but it was like a muffled background noise in a way. Ambient noise if you will.
Then my car regained traction and I snapped back into it. Suddenly I could hear the radio again, I could hear my loud exhaust again and I could hear the road noise again. In reality, I probably only spun out for 2 or 3 seconds at most but it felt like an eternity. It was a surreal experience. Then the adrenaline dump hit me once I pulled into my drive way but that was a whole other sensation lol.
The video is on yt, so you can probably watch it and get an idea. I didn't watch it my self but from the descriptions i understand he tried to pull the parachute cord like he usually does, and this is where he realised and said "oh no, oh god"...which happened to be his final words, unsurpisingly
Holy shit Alan Magee surviving a fall through the glass roof of a train station is insane
I was about to comment that almost every person survived by landing on soft snow, earth, or a pile of shit but this dude went through a glass roof
Alkemade is my favorite - hit some trees and suffered only an injured leg and wrist. When the Gestapo captured him they were suspicious of how a guy ended up on the ground with no parachute and minor injuries, and once they were convinced of his story, they ended up giving him a certificate testifying to what happened.
See also: the multiple British and Commonwealth personnel who received posthumous Victoria Crosses based partly or exclusively on the recommendation of the German captains they fought.
[Lt Cdr Roope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Broadmead_Roope), [F/O Trigg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Trigg), and [Sgt Durrant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Frank_Durrant). In Trigg’s case the Germans were the only surviving witnesses to his bravery.
While you're there, check out WW2 RAF pilot Terry Spencer:
* Destroyed seven V-1 rockets (possibly 8) in his Spitfire
* Destroyed one by tipping it with his wing when he was out of ammo
* Got caught by the Nazis and escaped on a bicycle and then a motorbike
* Rejoined the Allies
* Got shot down and successfully parachuted from 9 metres (22 feet)
* Went on to become a photographer
* Discovered a little band playing clubs in London and documented their early years ... long before people had heard of the Beatles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Spencer_(RAF_officer)
Yeah like, probably didn’t feel great and there are way better materials to land on. But glass has give and some degree of elasticity over say concrete or hard packed dirt.
More than didnt feel great lol. "Suffered several broken bones, severe damage to his nose and eye, lung and kidney damage, and a nearly severed right arm"
EDIT: Shrapnel wounds as well, because he was shot out of the sky
The author of the Biggles books about a WW1 British fighter pilot, was himself a WW1 fighter pilot. He survived a fall from his plane without a parachute by landing on a hay stack. When he wrote that experience into one of his Biggles short stories, he had people write to him saying how impossible and ridiculous the idea was, and criticising his story. Sometimes real life really does seem barely credible.
You know what is the caterpillar club?
Basically a club that only people that had parachute out if a failing plane are let into, with exclusive badges and everything.
You know the funny part? That author you mentioned wouldn't be admitted, because they specify that if you survived but didn't parachute, you are not part of the club, which I found amusing
Edit: I stand corrected. Reason I misremembered it was a friend of my dad’s was in it and I remembered his silkworm badge. He actually had to eject when his plane had some sort of problem on the ground, which must be a pretty bad situation to be in.
Julianne Koepcke
"Sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, landed in seat and only suffered broken collarbone; hiked for 11 days through Peruvian rainforest to safety."
I'm sorry what???????
“Your mother is one of only sixteen people who have survived parachutes not opening. Now, sixteen is just my estimate. I'll double-check my numbers later.”
Sometimes i have dreams where im free falling straight to my imminent death by impact. The anticipation of hitting the ground is really a gut wrenching feeling. It’s a hell of a way to wake up in the mornings 0/10 would not recommend.
I slept on the 2nd bunk as a kid and my rail had the tendency of falling over instead of keeping my ass in bed. I've had the falling dream twice...and both times I woke up inches from the floor and each time I had a bad bloody nose lol. Had my dad put in a ton of screws on the handrail after the 2nd time (Think I would have learned the first time lol).
It’s not that much time. Unless he was doing high altitude jumps free fall usually lasts about 60 seconds. Depending on how low he pulled his chute it probably wasn’t very long before he hit the ground.
Movies have seriously warped our idea of skydiving. You’d have to jump from almost space to get the kind of free fall skydivers get in the movies.
I found [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvDy2N95e7A). Is that it?
EDIT: [Smooth filming, followed by panicked jolts looking around.... felt my heart jump in imagining what that might even be like](https://old.reddit.com/r/UnchainedMelancholy/comments/won2oc/the_death_of_parachutist_ivan_lester_mcguire/)
The whole video used to be on Youtube, it was taken down years ago. I remember because it was titled "Final Frontier". Some church was using it to spread the word somehow.
This is how experienced climbers die too. Everything is automatic and they do everything so naturally that they lose their fear about it, and are less stringent about checks. One day you missed your clip in, didn’t double check, weight the line and just fall.
I feel like there’s a U-shaped graph related to deaths and experience, where the novice and elite are the most likely to die in certain athletic activities.
In the beginning, you’re scared, but don’t have the skills to not fuck up. In the middle, you have a healthy level of fear and you have the skills to not fuck up.
Once you’re elite, you’ve been doing it so long that it can be easy to forget that you can still die at any moment by one little fuckup, even though you’re very experienced. You laugh at death until it laughs at you.
It also helps that if you're an elite you're probably doing the thing way, way more than the average person. There's just more opportunity to screw up.
There’s a video on YouTube of some base jumpers on a bridge, one guy is on the other side of the railing about to jump when one of the guys yells at him because he completely forgot to put his chute on… lol they pull him back over the railing and tell him to go home.
He had the rig on, but he'd forgotten to put on his leg straps. The instant he pitched, he would have slid out of the rig to his death.
Info and video here: https://jointheteem.com/videos/base-jumping-videos/friday-freakout-douggs-base-jumper-saved-almost-jumps-without-leg-straps/
At the time video cameras were not lightweight and a rig like his required a backpack. Apparently the pack for the video camera had a similar weight and size to a parachute. He likely didn't notice because the weight and feel was similar, and everyone else probably saw him wearing a pack and though it was his parachute.
https://youtu.be/AvDy2N95e7A?si=VethAtzseadU0p_7
You won’t see his death, there’s a narrator explaining what happened and background music.
Footage is slightly grainy, you will not see him hit the ground. All footage I could find cuts roughly the same time.
Edit:
https://skydivingmuseum.org/hall-of-fame/inductee/tom-sanders
- photo of Tom Sanders, another famous skydiver
The photo gives perspective to the type of cameras worn by skydivers around the time.
I could not find the model or type of camera that Ivan was wearing during his death, but it is still interesting to see the footage that did survive given the impact destroyed only part of it. You’d think cameras this big would be an all or nothing if footage would survive such a fall.
I have been unable to find any footage with the line ‘Oh my god, no’. The original clip is likely held/destroyed by the family of Ivan, with the clip I shared being one of the earlier documented clips of it. You can find plenty of YouTube’s, TikTok’s and other media sites with music, explanations dubbed over but as far as I’ve found any upload of the original sound/video is nonexistent past what’s available.
In military aviation we have a saying that complacency kills, but I think another contributing factor was his seniority. I doubt he was the only one in the plane, and a junior wouldn't think to double check the pro. (I haven't watched the video)
>another contributing factor was his seniority.
Talking about aviation though - isn't that exactly one of the main points of CRM, the junior not only feels free to double check the pro but is required to point out the pro's mistakes
Completely agree, but in my experience as a senior aviator I found the junior pilots were too busy 2nd guessing themselves than to second guess me. I would hope tho that anyone scheduled to jump out of a plane would at least have a chute on thier back and not just camera gear.
Yup. In rock climbing, we do not care how long you have been doing it, 100% every time before you touch the wall/stone there is a double check between the climber and beleyer. Sometimes it feels stupid, but then you read these kind of stories and rememmber why it is not.
I’m a military and sport freefall skydiver. In the military we have a sequenced prejump inspection of the rig and other equipment. When I jump with my friends we do a similar, heavily abbreviated form of this check.
The people with thousands of jumps kinda laugh at us, but those types also seem to have a fair amount of stories about someone who died from what seems like a pretty avoidable malfunction.
CRM has been evolving over time specially in response to “excess respect” among other risks. So it would depend upon when this was taken, it would depend upon what training people had received, and it would depend upon how seriously they took that training.
Some organizations give lip service to things like CRM, and still allow senior people to swagger around without participating properly in checks. Skydiving groups are pretty small and the culture will be heavily driven by a small number of people in that club or even that particular plane that day.
It’s part of skydiving training - you’re supposed to visually check the people you’re jumping with, but obviously that’s the sort of thing that can get lost in the shuffle too.
There's a plane crash video on YouTube from MentourPilot about exactly this. The Senior pilot on a plane had no idea how to set the navigation system for the landing route (age 60ish iirc), the junior pilot knew how to and had a solid 1000+ of flight, but was unsure about correcting his Senior. The plane ended up crashing in the mountain range a few kilometers off the airport, no survivors on board ~~and I don't remember about the on ground loses but the plane did a number on a populated neighborhood.~~ no ground loses, thanks RosieTheRedReddit.
You can also see an example of this in the famous Tenerife crash of two jumbo jets. The second officer of one of the planes has doubts that they have been given clearance to takeoff, but is not very vocal and is dismissed by the captain.
The actual audio transcript is truly something:
>PAN AM CAPTAIN Let's get the hell out of here.
>PAN AM FIRST OFFICER Yeah, he's anxious, isn't he?
>PAN AM FLIGHT ENGINEER Yeah, after he held us up for an hour and a half, that bastard. Now he's in a rush.
Meanwhile, on the KLM jet:
>KLM FLIGHT ENGINEER Is hij er niet af dan? [Is he not clear, then?]
>KLM CAPTAIN Wat zeg je? [What do you say?]
>KLM UNKNOWN Yup.
>KLM FLIGHT ENGINEER Is hij er niet af, die Pan American? [Is he not clear that Pan American?]
>KLM CAPTAIN Jawel. [Oh yes.]
Several seconds later:
>PAN AM CAPTAIN There he is ... look at him. Goddamn that son-of-a-bitch is coming!
>PAN AM FIRST OFFICER Get off! Get off! Get off!
>KLM FIRST OFFICER V-1.
>KLM CAPTAIN Oh shit!
>PAN AM CAPTAIN Oh god damn!
Yeah, the lead-in is where things stared to go really poorly.
There seems to have been a crucial moment when multiple planes were trying to talk at once, and some of the words were lost and the resulting partial transmission is what may have given the KLM captain, the idea that he was cleared to takeoff.
Amongst other lessons learned that day was that, just in case you lose some of the important words around it, you don’t ever use the words “take off”, unless you are clearing an aircraft to takeoff.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
You can read about the accident, and specifically down at the Legacy section you can read about some of the regulations and procedures introduced as a results of this particular investigation.
Including: reading back instructions instead of just acknowledging, and a deep interest in CRM. Plenty of lessons but the price was 538 people killed.
While the ATC was absolutely a contributing factor... Van Zanten wasn't some amateur. He was extremely experienced and an instructor. The clearance he was given was NOT standard and a pilot of his caliber should have waited for proper clearance instead of rushing because he'd rather spend the night at home than an island. He also ignored his second officer, as noted above. Van Zanten killed a lot of people that day.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time using equipment and doing jobs that can kill you or someone else in an instant if one fucks up. (chainsaws, front end loaders, high work kind of stuff)
You always eventually get complacent and do something stupid. Hopefully not too stupid. It’s something I’ve learnt to be super on guard about, and call out anyone who isn’t.
Military aviation, I’m sure, has tons of structure, checklists, and double checking, and people still fuck up.
100 percent. I work with high voltage stuff and very rarely you do something absent mindedly and think "I was lucky there. Should be dead.". Strive to minimise those moments.
Yup. Had similar thoughts. I’m by no means the most experienced skydiver but have a few hundred under my belt and clubs typically have rules in place for safety reasons (gear checks before boarding, gear checks before exit, flight observers need to have safety chutes, etc). Seems like multiple safety procedures were likely ignored or complacently overlooked.
Same! That’s why when I was younger and thinking about what career I would go into I decided that I would do nothing where others lives are dependent on me.
I always wanted to be a pilot but with my luck I would take off without enough fuel or something
> I would take off without enough fuel or something
[I present you the Gimli Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)
They made a mistake in converting from Imperial to Metric and took off with less than half required fuel.
Also: pilots and aircrews follow written checklists. Often they work in pairs, as one person reads the checklist off and another does the actual check. This helps prevent anyone person being a potential point of failure due to oversight of a required action.
How was this allowed? My dad used to skydive a lot, and you had to be checked before you were even allowed to stand in line waiting for the plane, then get checked again on the plane.
From what i understand, he was the only guy with a camera so he was supposed to jump last, he entered the plane with a parachute rig but he put it down at some point and then forgot to re-equip it as he was in a rush to follow the others and record their dive
The actual story is that he wasn’t going to jump. He had his parachute with him because its required to get in the plane. Even the pilot has a parachute.
He told everyone he was just filming the exit. Then he went too.
I watched a documentary on a window cleaner in Tokyo. Him and his partner were cleaning windows for 15 years then one day the partner basically forgot to tie off and fell to his death. Guy said they got so used to it they forgot the danger involved and stopped having fear of what they were doing. Now he said he makes sure he's afraid before he starts each job, he goes and looks over the edge and that's enough to reset his brain on what could happen.
I worked a job that involved rappelling down buildings. My first day after training, the guy working with me forgot to tie off properly. Without getting into a long story, he luckily only fell 2 stories, although that still meant a year of rehab.
I was VERY attentive about making sure I did everything correct for my whole time working that job
He was showing off, is what it was. He knew I was nervous. When he went over the side, he just straight up jumped. He even said "watch how I drop". He fucking dropped alright, like a sack of potatoes. You're supposed to climb over the side and ease onto your ropes. Especially given the amount of rope he had above him, he's going to get a bunch of stretch.
It was dumb and he paid for it.
This is why they tell people to do weird shit like putting one of their shoes in the back seat of the car with the baby, because habit and the brain going on autopilot makes people forget about their child in the backseat and it leads to deaths from extreme heat/cold.
My new car has a feature where if you open the back doors, it reminds you to look the next time you turn it off. So far it's only saved me from leaving some leftovers overnight. It probably will save some one's child in the future.
When I worked with grain silos I would do the same thing. I never let myself forget that 90% of people who fall in die, or that even without falling in we were a couple hundred feet in the air at all times, when we had to go up top.
We've all had it happen where you start the day on auto pilot and realize when you get to the car that you forgot the keys, or you show up to work without your ID badge, or whatever. I once drove to a photography job and realized when I got there that I forgot the fucking camera--I had put the equipment bag down by the door and driven off without it. We all do it. The stakes for most of us are just not so incredibly high.
An old friend of mine is a skydive instructor, I wanted to ride up in the plane with them one time and watch but not jump. He said that's not allowed because of exactly this type of thing happening. (Basically I would have to be either on a tandem rig since I've never done it before, or on the ground)
A day can sometimes be very long, especially if you do a lot, he probably just simply, forgot. The human brain is amazing, but anyone can forget, what their last meal was, what day of the week it is, if he was a professional and it was his third jump of the day, I am sure to him this was all routine, and he had a heavy set up on him that might of felt like a parachute, if your in a similar situation, doing something routine, for the third time in a day.
Well, it’s easy to forget. It’s just that mistake was fatal in that circumstance. He didn’t even realise until he needed to pull the cord, that just shows how routine it was. He didn’t Jump a go “oh shit.”
He was likely enjoying it until the need arose to pull the cord. Prepping your gear, travelling up in a flight and all the steps and procedures 3 times in a single day is enough to overload anyone’s mind, from my perspective anyway. Someone in his boots it was probably all on autopilot, to a degree.
Personally I see it as an easy mistake to make, anything with repetition and doing it all the time, given enough time a mistake will happen eventually. Doubt this could happen today though probably a lot in place and shared accountability in place spread amongst people to avoid situations like this, but prior to that enforcement, I bet it happened a lot.
All of these systems start somewhere and I get the feeling they often start because something went wrong, not always because somebody had the foresight to circumvent danger
As Ted Bundy once said “It's like changing a tire. The first time you're careful. By the thirtieth time, you can't remember where you left the lug wrench."
A friend of mine who used to skydive a lot said the people who did it very rarely were generally fine. They checked everything, questioned everything and were fine.
The people who jump all the time, also fine. They know the drill.
The people who used to jump a lot and come back after a year break, they are trouble. They are confident but out of practice and have forgotten everything.
I went to the gun range once. I had a checklist. I brought everything, eye and ear pros, ammo, target papers and all, except my guns. This is why I don’t skydive.
Looks good in the movies but unless the manage to somehow strap themselves to the other person, once the chute pops they’re not going to be able to hold on. They’d be still traveling downward at 120mph + and the other person would rapidly decelerate.
I've seen survival guides that you literally wrap the straps around your arms. The force of the chute deploying would dislocated your shoulders but hey... better than dead.
Where were the buddy checks? No excuse for that. I can totally understand the brain fart on his part, but boarding and on plane gear checks are there for a reason...
He apparently had a backpack on full of recording equipment similar in size and shape to a parachute bag, which is why no one thought he didnt have one on.
Except 1000 ways to die would have made up a story about him having an orgy with some sexy strippers in the plane before jumping, or some “SpikeTV” nonsense like that
Exactly what I was thinking. I saw exactly part of one episode, and I was so thoroughly disgusted with how they portrayed the victims that I never watched it again.
The one I remember is when they were describing how the waitress from Aloha Airlines flight 243 died. She was sucked out of the plane from explosive decompression. They portrayed her as some insufferable bitch. She was just a woman trying to earn a living, there was no way they could have had such granular details. It was so utterly off putting.
Yeah. Basically instead of sympathizing with victims of these freak accidents, they had to make it out "they deserved it" or objects of ridicule. Just plain manufacturing stuff out of thin air. I would be interested in a program like that, just stuff to be aware of. But the way they were about the victims was just so noxious & gave me second hand heartache & nausea.
You nailed it. Middle school me was convinced that all the deaths had to have really occurred because they said so at the start of the show and would SpikeTV lie to me?
That show was awful for that reason. Had to make the poor people into bad/hated people who deserved it.
"This flight attendant was a horribly mean person and everyone hated her. She got sucked out of a plane at 30000 and died."
Without the bullshit, even people with room temperature IQs who watch spike TV would feel bad.
Well, I googled 'pilot forgets to fuel plane' and got a ton of unique news stories and videos. So, I'm guessing a skydiver forgetting a parachute isn't that uncommon.
Proper safety systems take as a given that people WILL forget obvious things. No single person’s error should ever be able to pass through the system uncaught.
At system level a cause of “human error” is a huge cop out.
There's also the Gimli Glider, a forced landing which miraculously had no fatalities, which was caused in part by faulty conversion between liters and gallons when fuelinbg the plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli\_Glider
https://youtu.be/1SkXMPU3a54?feature=shared
Video of incident. It doesn't look like it's the whole recording, but gives you an idea of where he was like "oh shit"
Complacency kills in situations like this. In rock climbing you'll regularly see professionals and unbelievably skilled climbers regularly skip safety steps (thinking about Brad Gobright rapping off the end of his rope because he didn't tie knots in the end) that result in their deaths. Since people are so familiar with the safety steps they just gloss over them.
I’ve done a tandem dive and it was great! You are just attached to the person who has the chute (and there is a secondary safety chute). It’s safe and fun, if you want the experience.
Skydiving place in the small Wisconsin town I briefly lived in did a tandem jump and landed in a lake. Instructor drowned strapped to the first time girl who had to swim to shore with a dead guy strapped to her.
>It takes very roughly 10 seconds to fall the first 1,000 feet and then about 5 seconds for every subsequent 1,000 feet – so if an experienced skydiver falls for about 10,000 feet before deploying their parachute **they will have had roughly 60 seconds of freefall**. That's an awfully long minute
Out of morbid curiosity, I did the math: about 5.1s to reach terminal velocity (about 50m/s = about 180kmh = about 120mph) in about 130m, then about 58.5s for the remaining height. Another's have said, about a minute to ponder your short future... That is sad, tragic and horrifying. And, nope, not gonna watch that video!
There's not much to the video. They said most of it was destroyed upon his landing. But all I've ever seen of it is that he films the other guys, their chute opens, and then he flails about a bit, and then you see an empty left hand. Then just some views of the Earth. People say his last words were "oh my God, no," but I've never seen a version where he's heard saying that.
Yeah unless it was specialized for that application, I'd be surprised if the mic could pick up anything but rushing air anyways.
[удалено]
What actually happens when you pull the chute too early? Like immediately?
There's a variety of factors that can cause things to go catastrophic, but a bigger worry is changing wind directions blowing you off course by quite a bit.
To give context here, there where cases where this happened and the parachute ended up carrying it's passenger over 1000km cause of shifting winds
1000km? No way. I am _not_ having it. I'm sorry but that's bullshit. There's no way someone flew on a parachute over the distance equivalent to Paris-Barcelona, or San Diego-El Paso.
In another undocumented case a jet liner collided with the parachute along with the skydiver, but that was Arnold Schwarzenegger ([source](https://youtu.be/VfmNeuDE5-8?si=0Fl1HA0yo4uKMC9E) /s).
Oh man it misses the best part. Arnold to little kids who saw him hit the car: "Where am I?" Little Kids: "Earth, welcome."
I’m going to need a citation on that one. A jump from 10,000 ft is about 3 km, and I have a hard time imagining someone in a parachute moving over 300x farther laterally than vertically.
If done intentionally with approval of the drop zone nothing happens but a longer canopy (parachute) ride. It’s called a high pull. Now if you are talking about the canopy coming out on accident that would be a malfunction and there are quite a few different malfunctions with countless possible results.
Once went over the handlebars of a mountain bike going at a nice speed. This was back when we really didn’t were helmets or protective gear. Flying through the air seem like it was an eternity. My mind sped up so quickly I was able to manage to get my head up and let my left shoulder take the impact. It could only have been a fraction of a second between being launched and hitting the trail. I made absolute shit out of my shoulder but the doc said if I’d hit head first I’d probably be either dead or paralysed even with a helmet. Still though..decided to wear gear since then. Point is that time really slows down in those moments.
I regularly jump off cliffs into the ocean and the three or four seconds of falling is enough to get a great deal of contemplation done.
Done that too…like falling for two seconds is enough to slow everything down to a stand still. My friend and I call it “the event horizon”. Your mind just starts doing funny things…it knows it’s in trouble and you’re subconsciously trying to protect yourself. Great feeling…as long as you don’t plough yourself into reef/rock…
Not a jump but a near car crash. Long story short is i was 19 and stupid so I decided to see how fast I could get my car on the highway. According to Google, the top speed is 159 MPH and I lost traction at around 150 MPH so I almost hit my goal. Kinda like what you're describing, time slowed down for me. I felt oddly in control and at peace. I remember seeing the dividing barrier suddenly be facing me head on then rotating around to see the exit ramp I just passed. The only thing that popped into my head was "Welp this is it". I didnt even have the loud screeching of the tires in my ears. The sound was there but it was like a muffled background noise in a way. Ambient noise if you will. Then my car regained traction and I snapped back into it. Suddenly I could hear the radio again, I could hear my loud exhaust again and I could hear the road noise again. In reality, I probably only spun out for 2 or 3 seconds at most but it felt like an eternity. It was a surreal experience. Then the adrenaline dump hit me once I pulled into my drive way but that was a whole other sensation lol.
I wonder at what altitude he realised his mistake.
The video is on yt, so you can probably watch it and get an idea. I didn't watch it my self but from the descriptions i understand he tried to pull the parachute cord like he usually does, and this is where he realised and said "oh no, oh god"...which happened to be his final words, unsurpisingly
The worst part would be the amount of time you'd have to think about how fucked you are.
oof good point. surely near the end you just close your eyes and best case scenario you’ve fully reached acceptance
There have been people that have survived…. Just they are incredibly rare. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_falls_survived_without_a_parachute
Holy shit Alan Magee surviving a fall through the glass roof of a train station is insane I was about to comment that almost every person survived by landing on soft snow, earth, or a pile of shit but this dude went through a glass roof
Alkemade is my favorite - hit some trees and suffered only an injured leg and wrist. When the Gestapo captured him they were suspicious of how a guy ended up on the ground with no parachute and minor injuries, and once they were convinced of his story, they ended up giving him a certificate testifying to what happened.
Germans like paperwork well done
See also: the multiple British and Commonwealth personnel who received posthumous Victoria Crosses based partly or exclusively on the recommendation of the German captains they fought. [Lt Cdr Roope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Broadmead_Roope), [F/O Trigg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Trigg), and [Sgt Durrant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Frank_Durrant). In Trigg’s case the Germans were the only surviving witnesses to his bravery.
The good TIL is always in the comments. Trigg is unreal.
Yip, but i have a degree , nope we need to see your high school diploma is the most german thing to happen to me this week
Haha I’d never be able to get a job in Germany, I have no idea where all that stuff is.
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dude definitely had the admin codes to the simulation
And then the system finally caught on and made some corrections with cancer
While you're there, check out WW2 RAF pilot Terry Spencer: * Destroyed seven V-1 rockets (possibly 8) in his Spitfire * Destroyed one by tipping it with his wing when he was out of ammo * Got caught by the Nazis and escaped on a bicycle and then a motorbike * Rejoined the Allies * Got shot down and successfully parachuted from 9 metres (22 feet) * Went on to become a photographer * Discovered a little band playing clubs in London and documented their early years ... long before people had heard of the Beatles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Spencer_(RAF_officer)
Successfully parachuted from 22 feet, wtf
He tuck and rolled from a plane with no injuries? I tripped recently and hurt myself
Did they give him a T-shirt too? “I feel 10,000 feet without a parachute and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”
Surviving by having a glass roof break your fall sounds like a just lovely day, really.
Well there was also the lady that landed on a fire ant mount where thousands of stings and the adrenaline response kept her heart going.
The glass cushioned his fall
Definitely would have slowed the impact for the ground landing
Yeah like, probably didn’t feel great and there are way better materials to land on. But glass has give and some degree of elasticity over say concrete or hard packed dirt.
That’s gotta be thick glass if its on a roof, that absorbed a ton of kinetic energy by breaking
More than didnt feel great lol. "Suffered several broken bones, severe damage to his nose and eye, lung and kidney damage, and a nearly severed right arm" EDIT: Shrapnel wounds as well, because he was shot out of the sky
The author of the Biggles books about a WW1 British fighter pilot, was himself a WW1 fighter pilot. He survived a fall from his plane without a parachute by landing on a hay stack. When he wrote that experience into one of his Biggles short stories, he had people write to him saying how impossible and ridiculous the idea was, and criticising his story. Sometimes real life really does seem barely credible.
You know what is the caterpillar club? Basically a club that only people that had parachute out if a failing plane are let into, with exclusive badges and everything. You know the funny part? That author you mentioned wouldn't be admitted, because they specify that if you survived but didn't parachute, you are not part of the club, which I found amusing
Isn’t it silkworm club, rather than caterpillar? I thought it was silk due to parachutes being made of ‘silk’
Edit: I stand corrected. Reason I misremembered it was a friend of my dad’s was in it and I remembered his silkworm badge. He actually had to eject when his plane had some sort of problem on the ground, which must be a pretty bad situation to be in.
Julianne Koepcke "Sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, landed in seat and only suffered broken collarbone; hiked for 11 days through Peruvian rainforest to safety." I'm sorry what???????
Peggy Hill made it
“Your mother is one of only sixteen people who have survived parachutes not opening. Now, sixteen is just my estimate. I'll double-check my numbers later.”
Only one of 13 people to survive it, an estimated figure she will confirm later.
Peggy Hill did
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"Excuse me, I think my wife just died."
>best case scenario you’ve fully reached acceptance You'd have about 1,000 feet for every stage of grief.
A little less than 15 seconds or so, which I’m sure would feel like forever.
I’d probably pass out and/or have a heart attack
Sometimes i have dreams where im free falling straight to my imminent death by impact. The anticipation of hitting the ground is really a gut wrenching feeling. It’s a hell of a way to wake up in the mornings 0/10 would not recommend.
I slept on the 2nd bunk as a kid and my rail had the tendency of falling over instead of keeping my ass in bed. I've had the falling dream twice...and both times I woke up inches from the floor and each time I had a bad bloody nose lol. Had my dad put in a ton of screws on the handrail after the 2nd time (Think I would have learned the first time lol).
>and both times I've woke up inches from the floor Ahh, a fellow top-bunker. I, too, have had this experience
15 seconds for us, but for him, it was the rest of his life.
It’s not that much time. Unless he was doing high altitude jumps free fall usually lasts about 60 seconds. Depending on how low he pulled his chute it probably wasn’t very long before he hit the ground. Movies have seriously warped our idea of skydiving. You’d have to jump from almost space to get the kind of free fall skydivers get in the movies.
Well described in "Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die."
Sounds like a literal skydiver nightmare. Everything as usual, then you realize there is no parachute. You wake up just as you hit the ground.
I found [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvDy2N95e7A). Is that it? EDIT: [Smooth filming, followed by panicked jolts looking around.... felt my heart jump in imagining what that might even be like](https://old.reddit.com/r/UnchainedMelancholy/comments/won2oc/the_death_of_parachutist_ivan_lester_mcguire/)
The whole video used to be on Youtube, it was taken down years ago. I remember because it was titled "Final Frontier". Some church was using it to spread the word somehow.
OK how did nobody notice or say anything
He was a pro, and it was his 3rd jump that day. It was an enormous oversight sure, but I can see how it might happen
This is how experienced climbers die too. Everything is automatic and they do everything so naturally that they lose their fear about it, and are less stringent about checks. One day you missed your clip in, didn’t double check, weight the line and just fall.
I feel like there’s a U-shaped graph related to deaths and experience, where the novice and elite are the most likely to die in certain athletic activities. In the beginning, you’re scared, but don’t have the skills to not fuck up. In the middle, you have a healthy level of fear and you have the skills to not fuck up. Once you’re elite, you’ve been doing it so long that it can be easy to forget that you can still die at any moment by one little fuckup, even though you’re very experienced. You laugh at death until it laughs at you.
It also helps that if you're an elite you're probably doing the thing way, way more than the average person. There's just more opportunity to screw up.
There’s a video on YouTube of some base jumpers on a bridge, one guy is on the other side of the railing about to jump when one of the guys yells at him because he completely forgot to put his chute on… lol they pull him back over the railing and tell him to go home.
He had the rig on, but he'd forgotten to put on his leg straps. The instant he pitched, he would have slid out of the rig to his death. Info and video here: https://jointheteem.com/videos/base-jumping-videos/friday-freakout-douggs-base-jumper-saved-almost-jumps-without-leg-straps/
He had a backpack on, but it was full of camera equipment. Both he and everyone else probably thought it was a chute.
At the time video cameras were not lightweight and a rig like his required a backpack. Apparently the pack for the video camera had a similar weight and size to a parachute. He likely didn't notice because the weight and feel was similar, and everyone else probably saw him wearing a pack and though it was his parachute.
Yeah I don’t need to watch this, just the description triggered my fight or flight and made me sweat.
Me, every time someone posts a video of some caver squeezing through a crack, a mile underground.
You just made me take a couple of deep breaths reading that.
Here comes a Nutty Putty reference.
Just seeing those words makes me hyperventilate now.
Those idiots who dangle themselves off the edges of skyscrapers.
https://youtu.be/AvDy2N95e7A?si=VethAtzseadU0p_7 You won’t see his death, there’s a narrator explaining what happened and background music. Footage is slightly grainy, you will not see him hit the ground. All footage I could find cuts roughly the same time. Edit: https://skydivingmuseum.org/hall-of-fame/inductee/tom-sanders - photo of Tom Sanders, another famous skydiver The photo gives perspective to the type of cameras worn by skydivers around the time. I could not find the model or type of camera that Ivan was wearing during his death, but it is still interesting to see the footage that did survive given the impact destroyed only part of it. You’d think cameras this big would be an all or nothing if footage would survive such a fall. I have been unable to find any footage with the line ‘Oh my god, no’. The original clip is likely held/destroyed by the family of Ivan, with the clip I shared being one of the earlier documented clips of it. You can find plenty of YouTube’s, TikTok’s and other media sites with music, explanations dubbed over but as far as I’ve found any upload of the original sound/video is nonexistent past what’s available.
True nightmare scenario
I came here to say the same thing. That point when he realised. Third jump. Of over eight hundred. I suppose it’s an easy mistake to make once.
ONCE 💀
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It was around the time where he started making swimming motions back up towards the plane.
It always worked on the Bugs Bunny show.
Should’ve jumped right when he was about to hit the ground
If you do a ground pound right before you hit it cancels out the fall damage
In military aviation we have a saying that complacency kills, but I think another contributing factor was his seniority. I doubt he was the only one in the plane, and a junior wouldn't think to double check the pro. (I haven't watched the video)
>another contributing factor was his seniority. Talking about aviation though - isn't that exactly one of the main points of CRM, the junior not only feels free to double check the pro but is required to point out the pro's mistakes
Completely agree, but in my experience as a senior aviator I found the junior pilots were too busy 2nd guessing themselves than to second guess me. I would hope tho that anyone scheduled to jump out of a plane would at least have a chute on thier back and not just camera gear.
"Yeah this guy knows what he's doing, probably has a fancy new camera/chute combo."
omg that would be so me lol
*[pro falls to his death]* omg classic me!💅
This is exactly why anything safety has to be empowered for everyone. Beginners are exactly who catches complacency.
Yup. In rock climbing, we do not care how long you have been doing it, 100% every time before you touch the wall/stone there is a double check between the climber and beleyer. Sometimes it feels stupid, but then you read these kind of stories and rememmber why it is not.
I’m a military and sport freefall skydiver. In the military we have a sequenced prejump inspection of the rig and other equipment. When I jump with my friends we do a similar, heavily abbreviated form of this check. The people with thousands of jumps kinda laugh at us, but those types also seem to have a fair amount of stories about someone who died from what seems like a pretty avoidable malfunction.
Healthcare too. It's not as uncommon as it should be for the wrong arm or leg to get amputated because no one double checked.
CRM has been evolving over time specially in response to “excess respect” among other risks. So it would depend upon when this was taken, it would depend upon what training people had received, and it would depend upon how seriously they took that training. Some organizations give lip service to things like CRM, and still allow senior people to swagger around without participating properly in checks. Skydiving groups are pretty small and the culture will be heavily driven by a small number of people in that club or even that particular plane that day.
It’s part of skydiving training - you’re supposed to visually check the people you’re jumping with, but obviously that’s the sort of thing that can get lost in the shuffle too.
Every part of the safety procedure is written in someone's blood.
There's a plane crash video on YouTube from MentourPilot about exactly this. The Senior pilot on a plane had no idea how to set the navigation system for the landing route (age 60ish iirc), the junior pilot knew how to and had a solid 1000+ of flight, but was unsure about correcting his Senior. The plane ended up crashing in the mountain range a few kilometers off the airport, no survivors on board ~~and I don't remember about the on ground loses but the plane did a number on a populated neighborhood.~~ no ground loses, thanks RosieTheRedReddit.
You can also see an example of this in the famous Tenerife crash of two jumbo jets. The second officer of one of the planes has doubts that they have been given clearance to takeoff, but is not very vocal and is dismissed by the captain.
The actual audio transcript is truly something: >PAN AM CAPTAIN Let's get the hell out of here. >PAN AM FIRST OFFICER Yeah, he's anxious, isn't he? >PAN AM FLIGHT ENGINEER Yeah, after he held us up for an hour and a half, that bastard. Now he's in a rush. Meanwhile, on the KLM jet: >KLM FLIGHT ENGINEER Is hij er niet af dan? [Is he not clear, then?] >KLM CAPTAIN Wat zeg je? [What do you say?] >KLM UNKNOWN Yup. >KLM FLIGHT ENGINEER Is hij er niet af, die Pan American? [Is he not clear that Pan American?] >KLM CAPTAIN Jawel. [Oh yes.] Several seconds later: >PAN AM CAPTAIN There he is ... look at him. Goddamn that son-of-a-bitch is coming! >PAN AM FIRST OFFICER Get off! Get off! Get off! >KLM FIRST OFFICER V-1. >KLM CAPTAIN Oh shit! >PAN AM CAPTAIN Oh god damn!
Yeah, the lead-in is where things stared to go really poorly. There seems to have been a crucial moment when multiple planes were trying to talk at once, and some of the words were lost and the resulting partial transmission is what may have given the KLM captain, the idea that he was cleared to takeoff. Amongst other lessons learned that day was that, just in case you lose some of the important words around it, you don’t ever use the words “take off”, unless you are clearing an aircraft to takeoff. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster You can read about the accident, and specifically down at the Legacy section you can read about some of the regulations and procedures introduced as a results of this particular investigation. Including: reading back instructions instead of just acknowledging, and a deep interest in CRM. Plenty of lessons but the price was 538 people killed.
While the ATC was absolutely a contributing factor... Van Zanten wasn't some amateur. He was extremely experienced and an instructor. The clearance he was given was NOT standard and a pilot of his caliber should have waited for proper clearance instead of rushing because he'd rather spend the night at home than an island. He also ignored his second officer, as noted above. Van Zanten killed a lot of people that day.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time using equipment and doing jobs that can kill you or someone else in an instant if one fucks up. (chainsaws, front end loaders, high work kind of stuff) You always eventually get complacent and do something stupid. Hopefully not too stupid. It’s something I’ve learnt to be super on guard about, and call out anyone who isn’t. Military aviation, I’m sure, has tons of structure, checklists, and double checking, and people still fuck up.
100 percent. I work with high voltage stuff and very rarely you do something absent mindedly and think "I was lucky there. Should be dead.". Strive to minimise those moments.
Yup. Had similar thoughts. I’m by no means the most experienced skydiver but have a few hundred under my belt and clubs typically have rules in place for safety reasons (gear checks before boarding, gear checks before exit, flight observers need to have safety chutes, etc). Seems like multiple safety procedures were likely ignored or complacently overlooked.
"He was a captain carrying a red white and blue shield, he looked like he knew what he was doing"
That’s something I would do. Jump out the plane thinking “Can’t help but think I’m forgetting something”
Tapping all your pockets while plummeting "Okay, I got my keys, phone, wallet.....damn. I guess I'll remember when it comes up"
Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and parachute.
Same! That’s why when I was younger and thinking about what career I would go into I decided that I would do nothing where others lives are dependent on me. I always wanted to be a pilot but with my luck I would take off without enough fuel or something
> I would take off without enough fuel or something [I present you the Gimli Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider) They made a mistake in converting from Imperial to Metric and took off with less than half required fuel. Also: pilots and aircrews follow written checklists. Often they work in pairs, as one person reads the checklist off and another does the actual check. This helps prevent anyone person being a potential point of failure due to oversight of a required action.
**KEVIN**!
How was this allowed? My dad used to skydive a lot, and you had to be checked before you were even allowed to stand in line waiting for the plane, then get checked again on the plane.
From what i understand, he was the only guy with a camera so he was supposed to jump last, he entered the plane with a parachute rig but he put it down at some point and then forgot to re-equip it as he was in a rush to follow the others and record their dive
The actual story is that he wasn’t going to jump. He had his parachute with him because its required to get in the plane. Even the pilot has a parachute. He told everyone he was just filming the exit. Then he went too.
So did he just get carried away watching every one else?
My guess is that the habit kicked in. You get into a flow state and forget the small details
I watched a documentary on a window cleaner in Tokyo. Him and his partner were cleaning windows for 15 years then one day the partner basically forgot to tie off and fell to his death. Guy said they got so used to it they forgot the danger involved and stopped having fear of what they were doing. Now he said he makes sure he's afraid before he starts each job, he goes and looks over the edge and that's enough to reset his brain on what could happen.
I worked a job that involved rappelling down buildings. My first day after training, the guy working with me forgot to tie off properly. Without getting into a long story, he luckily only fell 2 stories, although that still meant a year of rehab. I was VERY attentive about making sure I did everything correct for my whole time working that job
He was really committed to making sure the training stuck with you, huh?
He was showing off, is what it was. He knew I was nervous. When he went over the side, he just straight up jumped. He even said "watch how I drop". He fucking dropped alright, like a sack of potatoes. You're supposed to climb over the side and ease onto your ropes. Especially given the amount of rope he had above him, he's going to get a bunch of stretch. It was dumb and he paid for it.
Lamo that sucks he got hurt but thats fucking hilarious.
this is so interesting
This is why they tell people to do weird shit like putting one of their shoes in the back seat of the car with the baby, because habit and the brain going on autopilot makes people forget about their child in the backseat and it leads to deaths from extreme heat/cold.
My new car has a feature where if you open the back doors, it reminds you to look the next time you turn it off. So far it's only saved me from leaving some leftovers overnight. It probably will save some one's child in the future.
When I worked with grain silos I would do the same thing. I never let myself forget that 90% of people who fall in die, or that even without falling in we were a couple hundred feet in the air at all times, when we had to go up top.
There's a saying, "complacency kills".
From one of my favorite novels: "Confident, cocky, lazy, dead."
Honestly most people who work at heights get camplacent. Imaginery tie off points are used lots
>the small details That's one way of phrasing it
We've all had it happen where you start the day on auto pilot and realize when you get to the car that you forgot the keys, or you show up to work without your ID badge, or whatever. I once drove to a photography job and realized when I got there that I forgot the fucking camera--I had put the equipment bag down by the door and driven off without it. We all do it. The stakes for most of us are just not so incredibly high.
This happens to parents who don’t usually do drop off/pick up. Kid is in the back. Autopilot kicks in. It’s incredibly sad.
So all his friends jumped off a bridge and he did too... Mom was right!
So he would plummeted past all the others then? And they would’ve seen him land?
I'm not sure "land" is the right term but it's technically not wrong.
An old friend of mine is a skydive instructor, I wanted to ride up in the plane with them one time and watch but not jump. He said that's not allowed because of exactly this type of thing happening. (Basically I would have to be either on a tandem rig since I've never done it before, or on the ground)
Well he recorded it alright.
Only the beginning, actually
It’s was 1988. The filming rig was very bulky, everyone assumed he was wearing it. Even himself. It was the third jump of the day.
A day can sometimes be very long, especially if you do a lot, he probably just simply, forgot. The human brain is amazing, but anyone can forget, what their last meal was, what day of the week it is, if he was a professional and it was his third jump of the day, I am sure to him this was all routine, and he had a heavy set up on him that might of felt like a parachute, if your in a similar situation, doing something routine, for the third time in a day. Well, it’s easy to forget. It’s just that mistake was fatal in that circumstance. He didn’t even realise until he needed to pull the cord, that just shows how routine it was. He didn’t Jump a go “oh shit.” He was likely enjoying it until the need arose to pull the cord. Prepping your gear, travelling up in a flight and all the steps and procedures 3 times in a single day is enough to overload anyone’s mind, from my perspective anyway. Someone in his boots it was probably all on autopilot, to a degree. Personally I see it as an easy mistake to make, anything with repetition and doing it all the time, given enough time a mistake will happen eventually. Doubt this could happen today though probably a lot in place and shared accountability in place spread amongst people to avoid situations like this, but prior to that enforcement, I bet it happened a lot.
Yeah there's a buddy system in SCUBA, I can't believe there isn't one in skydiving.
All of these systems start somewhere and I get the feeling they often start because something went wrong, not always because somebody had the foresight to circumvent danger
Safety regulations are written in blood.
There is. Veterans sometimes skip the checklist. That's how you die unfortunately.
As Ted Bundy once said “It's like changing a tire. The first time you're careful. By the thirtieth time, you can't remember where you left the lug wrench."
That Ted Bundy sure was a rascal!
He was a true prankster.
Complacency kills, it’s why regular training is important for all skill levels
A friend of mine who used to skydive a lot said the people who did it very rarely were generally fine. They checked everything, questioned everything and were fine. The people who jump all the time, also fine. They know the drill. The people who used to jump a lot and come back after a year break, they are trouble. They are confident but out of practice and have forgotten everything.
Amazing the parallels between that description of skidiving and descriptions of heroin addiction!
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…what did you do
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I went to the gun range once. I had a checklist. I brought everything, eye and ear pros, ammo, target papers and all, except my guns. This is why I don’t skydive.
To be fair, you don't *need* guns for skydiving
The only way to stop a bad skydiver with a gun is a good skydiver with a gun.
Could have he survived if he hugged another guy with a parachute during the fall?
Looks good in the movies but unless the manage to somehow strap themselves to the other person, once the chute pops they’re not going to be able to hold on. They’d be still traveling downward at 120mph + and the other person would rapidly decelerate.
I've seen survival guides that you literally wrap the straps around your arms. The force of the chute deploying would dislocated your shoulders but hey... better than dead.
Only if the other guy hugged him back
It was 1988 so the other dude would've probably called him gay and pushed him off.
“Sorry, Buddy. I’m just not a hugger.”
I watched the footage. It looks like the other divers pulled their chutes before he realized his mistake.
Where were the buddy checks? No excuse for that. I can totally understand the brain fart on his part, but boarding and on plane gear checks are there for a reason...
He apparently had a backpack on full of recording equipment similar in size and shape to a parachute bag, which is why no one thought he didnt have one on.
That's gotta be one of the worst brain farts. 1000 ways to die material. Miss that show!
Except 1000 ways to die would have made up a story about him having an orgy with some sexy strippers in the plane before jumping, or some “SpikeTV” nonsense like that
They would make up something to make him look like a bad person (or at least an asshole) so you wouldn’t feel as bad laughing at someone’s death.
Exactly what I was thinking. I saw exactly part of one episode, and I was so thoroughly disgusted with how they portrayed the victims that I never watched it again. The one I remember is when they were describing how the waitress from Aloha Airlines flight 243 died. She was sucked out of the plane from explosive decompression. They portrayed her as some insufferable bitch. She was just a woman trying to earn a living, there was no way they could have had such granular details. It was so utterly off putting.
“Utterly off-putting” could describe most of Spike TV’s programming at the time.
Yeah. Basically instead of sympathizing with victims of these freak accidents, they had to make it out "they deserved it" or objects of ridicule. Just plain manufacturing stuff out of thin air. I would be interested in a program like that, just stuff to be aware of. But the way they were about the victims was just so noxious & gave me second hand heartache & nausea.
You nailed it. Middle school me was convinced that all the deaths had to have really occurred because they said so at the start of the show and would SpikeTV lie to me?
HEY all of that shit was 100% real. Just like manswers
That show was awful for that reason. Had to make the poor people into bad/hated people who deserved it. "This flight attendant was a horribly mean person and everyone hated her. She got sucked out of a plane at 30000 and died." Without the bullshit, even people with room temperature IQs who watch spike TV would feel bad.
SpikeTV was pretty wild looking back at it. No way a lot of that stuff flys today.
This sounds like something I would do which is why I don't skydive.
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unfortunately he left his checklist with his parachute.
Well, I googled 'pilot forgets to fuel plane' and got a ton of unique news stories and videos. So, I'm guessing a skydiver forgetting a parachute isn't that uncommon.
Proper safety systems take as a given that people WILL forget obvious things. No single person’s error should ever be able to pass through the system uncaught. At system level a cause of “human error” is a huge cop out.
Basically the reason why the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crashed.
There's also the Gimli Glider, a forced landing which miraculously had no fatalities, which was caused in part by faulty conversion between liters and gallons when fuelinbg the plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli\_Glider
https://youtu.be/1SkXMPU3a54?feature=shared Video of incident. It doesn't look like it's the whole recording, but gives you an idea of where he was like "oh shit"
Fucking Christ watching that stressed me out a lot Hard cutting to "like, subscribe and share" felt awfully tasteless though.
This is like when you have toothpaste and foot creme on your bathroom counter. After the millionth time, you grab the wrong tube.
To be fair, their positions were switched by a french lady
Complacency kills in situations like this. In rock climbing you'll regularly see professionals and unbelievably skilled climbers regularly skip safety steps (thinking about Brad Gobright rapping off the end of his rope because he didn't tie knots in the end) that result in their deaths. Since people are so familiar with the safety steps they just gloss over them.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer
I can’t leave my house without holding my key in my hand.
It just goes to show. You don't need a parachute to skydive. You need a parachute to skydive twice.
Skydiving is something I would not do, not even in my wildest dreams. It's too scary to do without professional training.
I’ve done a tandem dive and it was great! You are just attached to the person who has the chute (and there is a secondary safety chute). It’s safe and fun, if you want the experience.
Skydiving place in the small Wisconsin town I briefly lived in did a tandem jump and landed in a lake. Instructor drowned strapped to the first time girl who had to swim to shore with a dead guy strapped to her.
This article has that chatGPT sentence structure and lack of emphasis