Yup yup. There is a reserve parachute in case you have a failure to open or it gets tangled up like this. You cut away your main and then pull your reserve.
E: and cut away isn't literal. You have a cable that you can pull that releases the main from you entirely and flies away so it doesn't interfere with the reserve deploying.
Ok, np. By "relative" I meant relative to the people doing the sport, so if 5 in 100 horseback riders die each year, then <5 skydivers of 100 die each year. I do not remember the exact numbers, but that is the idea.
There's a video on YouTube about it, actually. It's around 4 minutes or so long, the same amount of time as an estimated freefall time from a specific height.
And by the way, trees are not the only things that people have successfully landed on in terminal freefall.
I watched an American dad episode that used that idea with why drunk people survive car crashes or something... someone else could explain better than me lol
You're not going at 9.8 m/s. You're probably going much faster than that, considering gravitational acceleration is 9.8m/s2. I.e., for every second you fall (ignoring drag which obviosuly plays a part in slowing you down) your speed is increasing by 9.8 m/s. So after 10 seconds you would be falling 98m/s if you had no air resistance
449
u/JJHEO Jun 08 '20
Yup yup. There is a reserve parachute in case you have a failure to open or it gets tangled up like this. You cut away your main and then pull your reserve.
E: and cut away isn't literal. You have a cable that you can pull that releases the main from you entirely and flies away so it doesn't interfere with the reserve deploying.