.. like being better not to wear seat belts in a car
- or have an air bag - because they have been known
to cause injury?

John Galloway

At 23:30 21 January 2005, Mark James Boyd wrote:
In article ,
Stewart Kissel wrote:
Does having an extra 20 pounds behind you during an
impact of more than 20 Gs cause enough additional
stress to measurably increase the chance of
death in an accident?

As opposed to that 20 pounds of silk over your head
allowing you to float down?

EXACTLY! If you are more likely to
be in a impact where the extra 20
pounds is the difference between life and death,
than to be in a situation where parachuting is
the only option, then wearing a chute is
something to consider.

So how many chute saves have there been compared
to fatal accidents where the pilot almost
survived? If a 20 pound chute adds 4% to impact morbidity,
and lifesaving use of the chute only happens one time
for every 50 impact crashes, then there are things
to
consider.

I'm not talking about situations where wearing or not
wearing seems pretty clear. Competitions, aerobatics,
test
flights, formation flight may be
pretty hard to argue. And pattern tows, winch launches
in unsoarable weather seem the same way.

But what about ridge soaring alone on a
day away from MTRs, nobody else around, in a
well established sturdy glider?

I wonder, because I have a parachute, and I tend to
fly in an isolated area, with no MTRs and no
company. And I read Kempton Izuno's stuff about
wearing a chute on a wave day and wondering
about being dragged at 40 knots along the ground
if he bailed.

Sure, if you gotta have it to save your life,
then you got to have it. But for every chute
save, how many impact fatalities have there been?
How many of these had a chute as a contributing
factor because they increase effective BMI?

I don't know the answer. But one part of it comes
from the ratio of bailouts to fatal impacts.
I'd really like to see stats on that...
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Mark J. Boyd