2 posts tagged “death”

What does that mean, anyway? Is luck really that integral of a part of regular life that you'd have to wish it on a TV show?

So, I'm going skydiving tomorrow, assuming we don't get rained out. Part of me is a bit apprehensive, but the dominant part of me wants to turn this into a good yarn.

Let's talk about parachute failures. Apparently, the rate of pulling the secondary chute among novices is roughly 1/750, which, mind you, is NOT the rate of failure for the primary parachute. I read that the estimate is roughly somewhere between 1/1000 and 1/1500 for the actual failure for the primary chute.

The secondary chute is far more reliable than the primary for various reasons (one of which is that you have less control and it's less fun), but that means that my chance of death is somewhere in one in a million and one in two million, assuming that parachute failure is not correlated (which is most likely unreasonable, but hey, it makes for a more interesting argument).

What does this all mean? It means that I'm now less scared of parachute failures and more scared of the dinky little airplane that we're going to fly up in bringing a quick end to my woefully unfulfilled life. But the awesomest thing is that I bet airplane failures are concentrated in the landings, and so it's *safer* to go up in an airplane and jump out of it with a parachute than to land in it.

That's my hope, anyway.

See you on the other side.