[ChrisMarshallNY]

Parachutes have a minimum altitude. For standard human chutes, that’s 300 feet (100 meters) or so.

Not sure what the ceiling is on this. They don’t have footage of it going too high.

You only need to fall 30 feet (10 m), to buy the farm. Less, in many cases (depending on how you fall, and onto what).

[KineticLensman]

Yes. This is why paragliding from hills is more dangerous than regular parachuting from a plane. Your paraglider canopy can collapse due to bad wind or unexpected updrafts at say 40 feet from the ground and you slam into the ground before it recovers. In contrast, when a parachute malfunctions on a freefall deployment, you are often higher than 2000ft, and there is plenty of time to deploy a reserve, fix twisted lines, etc.

[nikitaga]

What are you comparing, deaths per flight, per flight hour, per participant per year? Do you distinguish tourists, hobbyists, and competitors? What about injuries?

Credible and reliable data for such comparisons does not exist, unfortunately.

Paragliders who aren't idiots don't spend much time at 40ft AGL in weather conditions that can cause a collapse. And not every low altitude collapse is fatal. Spine compression injury is more likely, and they wear padding on their butt to minimize that (some even have airbags).

For better or worse, the main predictive risk factor in paragliding is personal attitude, and I suspect it's the same in parachuting.

[KineticLensman]

Anecdata I know, but I parachuted for two years and paraglided for a year (before airbags were a thing). I saw more injuries in paragliding and people I know broke hips, twisted ankles and bashed into dry-stone walls (head saved by a helmet, which was itself destroyed). The broken hip was a club instructor who was caught out landing.

In my parachuting experience I saw only one really bad accident: in an accuracy contest, a guy who was going to miss the target by a few feet, reached out with his feet and landed on the base of his spine. Stretchered away.

My own skydiving parachute malfunction occurred on opening at approx 2500 ft. The bastard main failed to emerge and I deployed my front-mounted reserve. The act of flipping onto my back unjammed the main and for a moment I had two canopies opening. The main won and I spent half a minute pulling in the reserve canopy so I could see where the fuck where I was going.

I didn't get the shakes until about ten minutes after landing. The jumpmaster confirmed the sequence of events and I got back on the horse and jumped again 40 minutes later.

YMMV

[cannabis_sam]

Beyond the risk level of ground take-off paragliding (and related activities), you have (in my subjective order of least to most risk) wingsuit fliers, base jumpers and then you of course have base jumping wingsuit fliers..

Yet, people still do it..

[VLM]

> Parachutes have a minimum altitude.

If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.

For ultralight sized aircraft, they cost about 1/5 the cost of a new airframe.

Generally they don't provide much survivability IMHO. Most ultralight deaths seem to boil down to CFIT and similar "happened too fast too close to ground" incidents with a side dish of refusal to do maintenance, and you know they're not going to maintain their airframe parachute or how its attached or how to engage it if they refuse to maintain their engine... But they are available and in special cases they might be useful.

[obmelvin]

> "happened too fast too close to ground"

The Jetson One video seemed to show them flying pretty close to the ground - I was wondering if that was to reduce fall height in the event of loss of power.

Your comment seems to indicate that one is sort of trading problems, not really significantly reducing risk (at least at the speeds one would want to go) - do I understand that correctly? Mind slightly expanding? Is the problem that you basically hit the ground with your full speed rather than having some wind resistance reduce your speed before impact?

[NovemberWhiskey]

>If you have the money, zero/zero ballistic parachutes have been a reliable thing for more than half a century.

That's called an ejection seat, right? As in a rocket-propelled vehicle to launch you sufficiently high out of your aircraft to allow your parachute safely to deploy (i.e. about a hundred meters, as described in the prior post)

[IshKebab]

No, it's a parachute that is deployed via a small explosion so it doesn't rely on falling through air to open.

[NovemberWhiskey]

Can you provide a link to such a system? I did a best-efforts search and failed to turn up anything.

[brianwawok]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_parachute

[NovemberWhiskey]

I'm unaware of any of those which are zero-zero. The Cirrus CAPS system has a minimum altitude of 400 ft or 920 ft after a one-turn spin, for example. BRS doesn't make specific claims for their system as far as I know but I'd be amazed if it were that much improved over the Cirrus one.