Given that it says "randomised trial", it's implied that there would be a control group — a group of people who are sent to die for the sake of an experiment.
Given that nobody would ever do this, it's quite obvious that there's some tongue-in-cheek angle to the story.
It isn't misleading if you can read between the lines.
To the contrary, I think it might be you who is jumping to unfounded conclusions. Contrast the current title "Parachutes prevent death when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial" with the first line of from the Conclusion of the paper: "Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention".
Well, maybe it does if you correct for the obvious errors in the statistical analysis. How did this get through peer review? I was particularly bothered by this sentence: "A P value greater than 0.05 was statistically significant."
Presumably they meant "less than", but it's hard to trust any of their conclusions with such sloppy attention to detail.
Given that nobody would ever do this, it's quite obvious that there's some tongue-in-cheek angle to the story.
It isn't misleading if you can read between the lines.