Skydiving or SCUBA Which is safer?

What's safer Skydiving or SCUBA?

scuba is safer I think, if you count military jumps there are more injuries a year jumping out of a plane.

In scuba you fall up and don't go splat. Works for me.

Yep. If your 'primary' fails on skydive, you should have a secondary. If it doesn't work, good luck getting back to solid ground safely. Not much hope of an assist from a buddy, either. Oh yeah, and good luck getting back into the plane if you find something wrong as you start your dive.

I suppose what I just said was that you've got a better chance surviving a mishap under water. I don't think that actually answers the question, though. The other thought would be that you can scuba a reef in 20' of water while you're learning. Not many shallow skydiving opportunities that I can think of.

Skydiving is the only sport I know of in which you're dead until you do something.

I think skydiving is safer. The chance of a double malfunction is pretty low, and even if you do nothing and have an automatic activation device, your reserve will be deployed to save the day.

Other things can happen, you could hit the elevator (the little wings on the back of the plane that control nose up and down) on your way out and even with a helmet suffer life threatening injuries. If you are knocked out and your AAD deploys, you could sustain broken bones but at least you may survive. Powerlines, water hazards, and trees offer some excitement as well.

The biggest danger in skydiving is believe it or not, is low turns. You can have the perfect dive and then decide to do whats called a hook turn or even a minor correction when landing and then your body orientation is not perpendicular to the ground- well bad things happen.

Now these compared to scuba injuries, AGE and DCS, Envenomations, oxygen toxicity, and the most tragic and needless to me, drowning. We read about them on the scuba forums all the time but they still happen.

Check these out. Skydiving Fatalities Query and Engine and dropzone.com fatalities which is a little more detailed. Less than 70 fatalities each year Worldwide. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.

bsee65:

I suppose what I just said was that you've got a better chance surviving a mishap under water. I don't think that actually answers the question, though. The other thought would be that you can scuba a reef in 20' of water while you're learning. Not many shallow skydiving opportunities that I can think of.

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Actually low jumps are much more dangerous. I did some jumps in the military and I always thought those civilians who did the dives at 10k feet were crazy but as one explained to me, I was the crazy one. At altitude you have time to resolve a malfunction. On a military jump it is usually-jump, problem, splat.

mts0628:

Check these out. Skydiving Fatalities Query and Engine and dropzone.com fatalities which is a little more detailed. Less than 70 fatalities each year Worldwide. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.

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70 might be low but to be fair you should look at percents. I suspect that in any group of say 100 random people you would find at least someone who has tried scuba but you would be hard pressed to find a jumper.

Still, I agree in that jumping out of a plane is probably safer.

I think you'd need to get quite extreme / technical in the world of scuba to match the risk of skydiving. This all assumes good training and execution in each sport.

Pete