Skydiving or SCUBA Which is safer?

[Hickdive]

What's safer Skydiving or SCUBA?

For me, skydiving.


Because there's no chance at all that you'll ever get me jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft.

 

[spacemanspiff1974]

I've never gone skydiving but I wonder about what counts as a "diving related death". I wouldn't imagine that there is a lot of physical exertion on a normal civilian skydive that could cause a heart attack for someone who is out of shape. On the other hand, scuba allows an out of shape person who is prone to a heart attack to enter an environment that requires exertion and is very unforgiving in the case of heart attack.

If you didn't count heart attack victims and only death via ooa situations, AGE, DCS, oxtox, hypercapnia, hypoxia, HPNS etc would the death rates per sky dive or scuba dive be different?

Are we factoring in rebreather deaths into scuba diving deaths?

 

[paddler3d]

.

I've done 49 Military Jumps, 51 Civilian skydives, and 15 SCUBA dives.

How are those knees?

 

[scubadude79]

What's safer Skydiving or SCUBA?

I feel that your question here will get biased responses.
SCUBA of course!

 

[drbill]

I've routinely dived to 180-200' but wouldn't even think of jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft... even if I packed my own chute (or, perhaps I should say, especially if I packed my own chute).

 

[Brian Sharpe]

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.

It would be interesting to get a handle on the number of jumpers vs the number of divers worldwide to put that 70 fatalities a year in perspective.

 

[MSilvia]

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

Injuries per year isn't a valid basis for comparison unless you also account for the number of participants.

If 100 people died last year doing something only 200 people attempted, that thing is way more dangerous than something 1000 people died doing that 10,000,000 people attempted.

there's no chance at all that you'll ever get me jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft.

I've been skydiving before, but I've never jumped out of an aircraft I'd consider "perfectly good". Working, yes... perfectly good? Not so much.
Jumping out of a P.O.S. flying hoopty isn't really that difficult. It's taking off in one in the first place that made me nervous.

 

[Crush]

Taken from an alertdiver.com summary of a study conducted by Dr. Petar J. Denoble, Neal W. Pollock, Panchabi Vaithiyanathan, Dr. James. L. Caruso, Dr. Richard Vann and Joel A. Dovenbarger, R.N., published in the medical journal Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine in December 2008:

1. Comparisons with other sports are problematic since the measures of exposure (e.g., the number of dives, hours of jogging, etc.) are not always available. For example, the annual rate of 16 fatalities while diving per 100,000 divers is comparable to the 13 deaths while jogging (per 100,000 joggers). However, a jogger may run several times a week, but a diver might only dive two to three weeks a year;
2. Fatality rates for scuba diving and driving a car are nearly identical when calculated per number of participants. However, the vast majority of us will spend much more time in traffic situations than in diving; and
3. The rate of injury among divers is much lower than the rate of injury amongst most other sports. However, the likelihood that a diving injury will result in death is much higher than for most other sports.

 

[NoVaScuba]

I think people must be nuts to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft.

On the other hand, I consider breathing underwater to be a perfectly reasonable activity so what do I know?

 

[Thalassamania]

Taken from an alertdiver.com summary of a study conducted by Dr. Petar J. Denoble, Neal W. Pollock, Panchabi Vaithiyanathan, Dr. James. L. Caruso, Dr. Richard Vann and Joel A. Dovenbarger, R.N., published in the medical journal Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine in December 2008:

1. Comparisons with other sports are problematic since the measures of exposure (e.g., the number of dives, hours of jogging, etc.) are not always available. For example, the annual rate of 16 fatalities while diving per 100,000 divers is comparable to the 13 deaths while jogging (per 100,000 joggers). However, a jogger may run several times a week, but a diver might only dive two to three weeks a year;
2. Fatality rates for scuba diving and driving a car are nearly identical when calculated per number of participants. However, the vast majority of us will spend much more time in traffic situations than in diving; and
3. The rate of injury among divers is much lower than the rate of injury amongst most other sports. However, the likelihood that a diving injury will result in death is much higher than for most other sports.

The facts with respect to football, baseball and auto racing:

FOOTBALL: There were three fatalities directly related to football during the 2005 football season. Two were associated with high school football and one with professional football. In 2005 there were 12 indirect fatalities. Eight were associated with high school football, two with college football, one youth league, and one professional football.

BASEBALL & SOFTBALL: Between 1973 and 1995, 88 baseball deaths were reported and of these deaths 68 were due to ball impact injuries.

AUTO RACING: From 1990 through July of 2002, at least 287 people died in U.S. auto racing, including 29 spectator deaths. Head and neck injuries killed at least half the drivers.

I have a major problem with the word "safe" as in "diving is a safe activity." Safe means, "without risk." We should not be trying to make diving "safe." We should be bending our efforts toward minimizing the risk.

Sounds like the same thing no? NO! It's a glass half full/half empty question. As long as we continue to use the "S" word we are deceiving folks and lulling them into a stupor. When we talk about minimizing or reducing risk, folks have an entirely different attitude.

For the approximately 1,800,000 football participants in 2005, the rate of direct fatalities was 0.17 per 100,000 participants. To reach that level of risk there would have to be more than 52 million active divers in the US.

Play with the numbers a little more. There are a little less than 22 player hours per game with about 100 player hours at the field, so each player averages .25 hours per fame (more or less) and about 15 practice hours per week. So lets round down to make it more dangerous and say that each player is exposed to the risks of football for about ten hours per week and 100 hours per season. So for 180 million risk exposure hours there were three fatalities. Carrying this over to diving, to have the same level of risk there would have to have been over five billion diver hours spent underwater (or more than 20 hours underwater for every person in the United States), not likely.