WL of 1 for <C-License?

[sfzombie13 324]

not sure what caused it but you get a beer next time i see ya.  i don't jump much over the winter but come spring if i'm still here you'll find me at the dz most weekends at wv skydivers.  my thoughts are "how can you trust a tool that can't even count?"...

[lyosha 50]

On 12/14/2022 at 12:44 AM, serzkawpoije said:

I’m new here and don’t really have a dog in this fight. But the data behind the calculator had me curious. 

So I scraped the dataset from USPA’s incident reports for canopy related incidents, that the calculator is presumably pulling from. It’s pretty terrible as a dataset to make any sort of reliable assessments of risk from. 

Of the 164 IRs since 2008 relating to canopy incidents, I had to remove 41 for garbage data. Things like listing 0 total jumps when the description lists the jumper having 1000 plus jumps, or weird discrepancies with more jumps in the last 12 months than they have total jumps. Lots of missing information overall that makes the IR meaningless for wingload vs experience discussions  

But even once you clean out the egregious stuff I can’t see any statistical significance that shows higher wing loadings are more likely to cause incidents with lower jump numbers. Mostly because there aren’t many incidents of it. I could only find one incident report that you could reliably say the jumper had less than 100 jumps and a wing loading over 1.1.

Anecdotally, as a new jumper in the two large DZs I’ve been to that have a significant high performance canopy culture and on the common internet groups I’ve only ever felt pressure to avoid downsizing until I’ve mastered the canopy size I’m on. So overall this feels kind of like a solution without a problem. Almost all high wingload IRs come from jumpers the proposed BSRs would exempt. 

I've attached the raw data I pulled, cause it's very possible I messed up the scrape or misinterpreted the data. 

canopy_incidents.csvUnavailable

Do yourself a favor and never look up the statistics for cameras. You will instantly be shunned in this place as a heretic.

[riggerrob 643]

I scored "54 Scary" on USPA's survey. I have a Pilot 169 for my 190 pounds (naked), more than 7,000 total jumps over a 45 year span. Mind you, the majority of those jumps were on tandems ranging form 520 to 330 square feet.

Since I quit jumping during COVID, USPA made an accurate assessment.

I have no intention of returning to jumping until the nearest DZ changes their policy on seatbelts. I am too old and too scarred to repeat that lesson.