"Happy Dog" wrote in message
...
"Mike Rapoport" wrote in

I think that Michael's point is that virtually everybody recognizes that
there is risk in skydiving but prefers to think that flying is as safe
as
driving. Nobody takes their two year old skydiving.

I'd like to see some stats on accidents vs. lawsuits before I believe that
dead skydivers' families are that different from dead pilots' families.

I doubt they are. It's just a question of likelihood of winning the suit,
which I suppose gets back to Michael's point. But I maintain that the
general culture of lawyers versus responsibility remains the real problem.

A funny story. Back in the late 80s my father was in a car accident when an
old woman crossed the double yellow on a blind turn. He walked away from it,
but after a few weeks his back started to hurt terribly and he eventually
had to have an operation for a herniated disk. A colleague referred him to a
very successful and well-known personal injury lawyer, who at first
suspected that his case would be worth between 250 and 500 thousand dollars
for suffering and lost wages, etc. But when they kicked the old woman's
insurance company they found she had only the minimum $30k coverage.
Moreover, she had quite literally no assets whatsoever. As the senior lawyer
was relating this to my father, one of the younger associates walked in and
said, "hey, Chevy's been having a lot of problems with seat belts in that
year's trucks, we could probably get them for two hundred." My father said,
"but I wasn't wearing my seatbelt." The associate said, "Don't tell me that!
A lot of times people forget things when they've been in an accident." My
father refused to go ahead with the case, but it provided a very revealing
look into how the system works, and this was fifteen years ago.

-cwk.