[Tyrantus]

Originally Posted by lackofreality ↗

I'm doing my 1st tandem jump next April. This doesn't deter me at all, people die crossing the road everyday, and I've survived being run over 3 times.

You should probably pick better places to take a nap.

[William May]

Originally Posted by lackofreality ↗

I'm doing my 1st tandem jump next April. This doesn't deter me at all, people die crossing the road everyday, and I've survived being run over 3 times.

Don't worry.
It's extremely rare that tandem jumpers die. They are with an experienced instructor. This was an airplane accident, not a parachuting accident.

When I went for my parachute training, there were always guys on the front lawn, stuffing their chutes back into their sacks, and running out to catch the next jump plane.
Our chutes were all packed by a licensed parachute rigger, both main and reserve.
Those lawn guys were guys with hundreds or thousands of jumps, just rolling their chutes up and stuffing them back in the sack for the next jump.
Those lawn guys were the ones we would read about in the paper when their chutes malfunctioned and they got killed.
But even that was pretty rare. We have a parachute training place near us, and they haven't had any accidents in a year or so, and they do thousands of flights and tens of thousands of jumps per year. On weekends, there were 3 or 4 aircraft in a constant shuttle, loading up with people and taking them up to jump. They even had DC-3's carrying formation teams up on practice jumps, doing their goofy group aerobatics.
They practiced on the polished floor of one of the hangars, laying on little wooden skateboards and sliding back and forth into different formations.

Parachute malfunctions are pretty rare. And when you go for your training, they teach you a list of things you can actually do if you do have a chute malfunction. You don't just drop and die. There is always SOMETHING you can try. They actually had training videos they had filmed of people jumping with chutes that had a problem, ranging from tangled lines to knots, to canopies that wouldn't inflate. The people would go: "Oh, no! My chute failed!" and then they would explain what they were doing to correct it. Those people must have had some big balls (even the women) to jump out of an airplane with an induced fault in their parachute.
But they also usually had a jump buddy who would close in on them and link up if things didn't work out and their reserve didn't work, but the instructor said that that had never happened in any of the videos they shot.
Or worst case, dump the failed chute and pull the reserve.
People there also did naked jumping. (Which would be fine, as long as you landed in the right place. If you drifted off, it could be a long walk.) Their bulletin board was covered in pics of various people, groups, etc.
That place also does a lot of parachuting for TV shows and movies. They did all the jumps for the film "Terminal Velocity" where Charlie Sheen jumped, and went down a smokestack at a power plant.
I'm sure you will find your jump to be totally awesome!

[v1r]

Footage of the crash.
Sorry about the watermarks.

[houseoftechno]

Nice find! Stall spin crash. Likely lost its lift from overload and/or engine problems.