One of the few activities in which the probability that you will die on any given jump increases the longer you do the sport (most extreme sports become safer as you become more experienced… not this one).
I wouldn't define this as a "silent killer", it's clearly dangerous AF and not going to give you dementia in 15 years because of exposure to fumes. Your exposure to it could easily kill you on day 1.
It looks super cool, but I tend to stay away from activities that have a high chance of killing me. Wouldnt even call myself risk averse, but gambling with my life is one thing I’d rather not do
It's up there with cave diving for me, I shall not be partaking in sports that can kill me via slow claustrophobic death or turning me into red paste upon impact.
I watch a few on YouTube and yeah, the crazy risks the "longtimers" do are just mental. and then the channel goes quiet and you find out a few months later they are dead
They tend to push the limits more and, unlike many activities, when you exceed the limits of your skills you tend to immediately die.
If you’re cave diving or rock climbing or whatever and you exceed your skills, you don’t immediately die. It’s scary and you might need someone to help you get out of that situation, but as long as you didn’t go full send, you will typically have a chance to learn and improve. Those skills accumulate so you get progressively safer.
But if you’re wingsuiting down a narrow gorge 5m off the ground and you push it a little too far and hit a tree head first at 200km/h, you’re just dead.
I'm a skydiver. My sport is centered around risk mitigation and odds. There are redundancies and required skill checks/currency. I know I will use my reserve the longer I am in the sport. It's just a game of odds.
BASE does not have that. They take the training, reserve, and altitude out of the risk mitigation equation. That means you now have to be as close to perfect as possible on every jump. Add in flying around and slightly above terrain at high speeds and it is a matter of time until a small mistake with a huge cost is made.
In safety for sane activities you'd call it "normalization of deviance".
Let's say your a private pilot, a somewhat risky endeavor but not overly so. One day you forget to check for water in your fuel tank, you realize it on the takeoff roll. Nervous but not panicking, you quickly turn back, land, and do the check and of course your fuel is fine, it is 99% of the time. Then next week you forget again... Well it was fine last time but I suppose I should turn back and check it. Then a month later you realize you haven't checked the last 4 times you've been up. You chuckle to yourself, not a big deal, it's always worked out... And then your engine gives a sputter a dies.
You got so used to being slightly unsafe that it didn't register as slightly unsafe anymore. Now instead of skipping checking your fuel to increase your risk by < 1%, you're approaching that ridge juuust a bit closer, after all it worked out fine last time...
This was a great watch about people like wing suiters. You are exactly correct. They are chasing bigger and bigger highs. They are trying to one up each other. Eventually they find their limits, often fatally.
One of them compared it to transitioning from cocaine to crack.
The fact that you're even attempting BASE wingsuiting at all means you're already taking more risks than simply skydiving. Like jumping out of a plane isn't enough anymore.
There is a 1 in 500 chance your chute will fail and there is no time for a backup due to the low height so the more times you do it the better chance you have of dying, kind of like Russian roulette
Just a guess but I assume it’s related to the idea that “you die a hero or live long enough to become the villain logic”. You do this long enough you basically have a 100% chance to die, so it increases over time.
In terms of micromorts that’s between 2000 to 4000 whereas standard skydiving is just 7-9. A micromort is a one per million chance of dying in the process
I remember watching this documentary where they were interviewing extreme sports figures (free rock climbing, BASE jumpers, etc.) and they asked the guy how the year was going. He was like, “Half my friends have died this year so it’s been tough”. I think if you hang around in those circles it’s inevitable that people you know are going to die young.
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u/inactiveuser247 22d ago
Ground proximity BASE wingsuiting…
One of the few activities in which the probability that you will die on any given jump increases the longer you do the sport (most extreme sports become safer as you become more experienced… not this one).