Texas Girl in Oklahoma Hospital After Skydiving Fall

By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS and KRISTI EATON | January 30, 2014

  • February 1, 2014 at 9:16 pm
    Doug Simpson says:
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    I see this skydiving accident from several perspectives: as a lawyer (although this is not legal advice), as a dad, as a paraglider pilot of about 500 flights and 250 hours, and as a once-young adventurer myself. I think the heart of the problem is not so much the girl’s age, but what sounds like her unfamiliarity with the sport and the lack of immediate instruction by radio.

    In paragliding, standard protocol among cautious instructors is to have a single student pilot in the air while the instructor is on the ground. And all the while the instructor is on a radio communicating with the student through a helmet rigged with a radio so that the student can make corrective measures immediately.

    But instructors make more money by having more students in the air at a time, and by increasing the ratio of students to instructors.

    Students have no frame of reference; they cannot necessarily implement correct control input if something goes wrong. It’s a bit like teaching a student to drive, but doing so in the snow for the first outing–student reactions to skidding often are not natural or appropriate. In flying things happen exceptionally fast, problems compound quickly all while falling to the earth, and consequences can be terrible.

    The ground is very hard. Gravity is relentless. If you don’t want to become fertilizer, you have got to have good instruction followed by relentless practice to learn the muscle memory to to the right thing immediately. And if you’re signing away your rights or those of your children, you’d better have done your due diligence so you know what you’re getting into.

    Sounds like the girl had not progressed very far in her instruction. I don’t have all the facts. But the article suggests that the sole instructor remained in the plane with a different, reluctant student, after fledgling skydivers and the daughter had already jumped from the plane. Apparently there was no instructor communicating with the daughter via radio. That seems very strange where the consequences are so dire.

    In an intermediate paragliding clinic over a lake in Utah a couple years back, I had a collapse in my wing followed by a parachutal stall. The gist of that is that gravity was happening and I was plummeting to the earth. But for the instructor telling me over the radio to throw my reserve, well, the results would have been a real bummer–I never looked down and would have hit very hard.

    Here, the daughter/student might have had a tuck in her wing on one side, a problem with a line, or might simply have have over corrected with the brakes, any of which circumstances might have induced the spiral dive–any one of which circumstances might panic a new pilot/skydiver, compounding her problems–and any one of which problems probably could have been corrected with immediate radio contact. Or the student could have been radioed to throw her reserve, if at the time she had the altitude allowing it to open before cratering.

    I suppose the dad had to sign an express waiver of the daughter’s rights that likely immunize the skydiving company from liability, depending on the law in Oklahoma. But still I wonder what the terms of that agreement might be. Also I wonder whether the dad and daughter truly knew what they were getting into–whether there was in effect, an informed waiver, informed consent.

    I don’t really fault the dad. I sailed across the Atlantic in a small boat at 17 with my dad–the experience of a lifetime. Any at 15 I had considered trying to be the youngest around-the-world solo sailor. I started my own kids rock climbing before they were teens, and motorcycling during their mid teens. Skydiving is further out there on the danger spectrum, for sure, given the harsh consequences.

    Hopefully the daughter truly wanted to do the jump, not just be pals with her dad pursuing something pushed her into. Sounds like the daughter probably will recover. The dad probably will be scarred for life.



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