Double fatality at Dunkeswell
 

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5ecdd4d43.jpeg
Tandem skydive double fatality yesterday at Dunkeswell.

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/two-die-devon-skydiving-tragedy-10264693

Very unfortunate. Skydive accidents are rare these days
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The article doesn't say which jumpers were killed. It's quite common for a tandem to be photographed/videod by a third jumper. Three such jumpers left my aircraft one day and the tandem passenger died after a collision with the photographer. The tandem master was knocked unconscious but survived the landing.

Article:

The sites Google found say yes.

​​​​​​You're out of date, reserves are invariably incorporated into the main pack. Unless you're using a vintage rig. Plus almost all parachutes have an Automatic Activation Device AAD which opens the parachute if it detects a high rate of descent below a certain altitude.

I've seen one operate when a solo student had a malfunction with the main but failed to cut away and the AAD fired the reserve very low. I thought she was a dead woman.

Reading around it seems it was a tandem. If there's a malfunction with the main, which happens occasionally, it's cut away and the reserve deployed. If the reserve has a mal, it's very bad.

Anybody can pack a main parachute but only qualified Riggers can pack a reserve. If the reserve didn't deploy the Rigger may have a few questions to answer.

Tandem instructor and their student. TI's name is out and about amongst the community and BS Investigation sounds like it'll have something very soon. Unclear if they had a solo camera flying with them, but most students want a memento of their jump so TI might have had a GoPro on hand camera.

Skydiving super safe these days with all kinds of backups in play. SteepClimb covers things nicely, but for context it's not unusual to take a reserve ride and really no big deal. AAD is required for UK jumping and we have a good culture of mutual flightline checks in this country.

That said, we've not had a good year so far; if someone has had enough, this sport can present a determined individual a simple opportunity to check out early :sad:

Student been identified now in the press

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon...devon-10265871

Sincere condolences....

Very sad all round and my home DZ for 20 years. Equipment and training are excellent these days and fatality rates very low circa 1/500,000 jumps for tandems. This is an oddity and root cause should be determined by investigation which will be thorough.

Both named now.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...chute-failure/

Blue skies

A young man of my acquaintance did his first parachute jump, planned as a tandem, recently. The main failed, so the pair came down on the reserve. He seemed unperturbed, other than not having the (expensive) photographs/GoPro footage he had ordered. His bald comment was that he was the last to leave the aircraft, but first to reach the ground. He appears keen to do it again.

I must admit, I can't quite work out in my head why he lacks the pictures and video, as I would have expected the photographer to do their bit before the parachute was attempted to be deployed. I'm unlikely to get further information from the participants.

Free-falling in groups is not risk free, as this illustrates. I hope all were fully informed of the risks before choosing to participate, and the relatives, colleagues, friends and staff affected are getting all the support they need.

Are there any reports that this tandem was jumping with a group?

Whether the pics and video were being obtained by another jumper as videographer, or by GoPro hand cam by the instructor, I have heard of dropzones "losing" the media if there was something embarrassing on it. ("Sorry, we'll refund you for the video. Had a camera problem and it didn't record.") Particularly if it showed a screwup by the tandem instructor. Normally a random, run of the mill malfunction wouldn't spook the dropzone's management, but it is possible even then, if they are worried about "I almost died!" social media posts.

- Peter (1000+ tandems)

'Mals' are not unknown but really rare. Of the several thousand tandems I dropped I can only remember three or four. So this accident stands out as almost unheard of.
It looks worse from the ground. One day the cut away main landed in the nearby village. It caused consternation because the locals thought the skydiver had fallen out of the harness. When we arrived to collect it, a crowd had gathered and the police called. We were able to reassure them that no one had been hurt.

Vast majority of tandems only have a camera flyer with them to capture the moment. On special occasions, more than one extra jumper will join the formation but that's all well briefed and only experienced skydivers can participate.

As with all things aviation, sometimes things go pear shaped and we don't have a lot of time to rectify things. Sounds very much like this is one of those instances.

To reports/rumours of what happened:
From a now deleted account, a apparent member of the club posted a rather salty expose of the club internals and in a follow-on comment reports a double malfunction, suggesting it may have been a line-over on the reserve.

I cannot post links yet, but googling 'dunkeswell tandem accident reddit' should get you to the aforementioned post in r/SkyDiving "Skydivers killed in 'tragic accident' ...".

ymmv

An alleged expose. I found the thread and there are people disagreeing with him or her.

My apologies: No.

I misread (Permalink->) https://www.pprune.org/accidents-clo...l#post11901964 , and thought it applied to this incident. A tandem jump plus a photographer is a group - admittedly small (only two in the 'group', but still a group where the members are capable of independent motion).

I am happy for a mod to remove my postings if they are promulgating misinformation. Apologies for the mistake.

Thank you for your explanation of a possible reason. That had not occurred to me.

Funny how appropriate your username is. He quit flying and driving coaches immediately afterwards.

You are quite wrong in your implications. The BPA will investigate this thoroughly, without the bias you imply. They have no interest in allowing rogue operators to offer tandems.

The sport itself is incredibly safe. I pointed out out earlier that in dropping thousands of tandems in my time as a skydive pilot. I only had a couple of injuries to a customer. Usually a broken or sprained ankle because they failed to lift their legs on landing. Multiply that by all the skydive operators out there around the world and to use a cliché it's safer than the drive to the airfield. A quick check revealed that the fatal accident rate for all skydiving is 0.0011%. For tandems it's even lower.

As for Charities turning a blind eye. That's a ridiculous suggestion.



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I don't think it is an issue.
British Skydiving has long had a very high standard for investigating skydiving accidents in detail, I'd say as an outsider with experience in skydiving in Canada and the US. The real knowledge about the sport comes from within the sport. Sometimes there are military skydivers who do civilian style skydiving and have the requisite knowledge. But otherwise, people in the airworthiness authorities or elsewhere tend not to have the knowledge of the sport to properly judge what happened (or else can only find out and learn by being particularly open minded, and conducting excruciatingly detailed and long investigation and inquiries). I have seen a few coroner's inquests or workplace safety investigations in North American, for skydiving accidents, where they made absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical statements, and various recommendations, that show a total lack of understanding of the sport.

Who would you suggest to be more qualified that someone representing British Skydiving to carry out such an investigation? It's a small community, with a correspondingly limited pool to draw from. Military boards of enquiry could have the same criticism levelled but have arguably overwhelming been fair and objective in their findings.

I certainly have no involvement here but I do have a natural concern for people in the aviation sphere, and have long supported the principles of justice.

Viewed dispassionately, CayleysCoachman comments makes a great deal of sense. I don't imagine an independent investigation, by a Coroner or other suitable person/body, would preclude expert input from British Skydiving - or perhaps even better a skydiving expert from a different country, assuming British Skydiving wished to present evidence, or be called as a witness. If said organisation has nothing to hide or worry about then why wouldn't this be welcomed?

Speaking as a person who has some experience of societies, skydiving, and having to attend a Coroner's Court as expert + witness :(

FP.

Those people are either employed by, or are involved with, the organisation in question.

’If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target’

My daughter spoke to me last night and told me she was really shaken by this tragic accident. She did a similar, tandem parachute jump from Dunkeswell just very recently.

Where can one read past BPA incident/accident reports?

I feel your daughters pain and stress.Just 3days ago I looked at doing a tandem parachute jump, I looked a few options, but in the end I decided not to do it!!!
Phew!!! FFS

The Reddit thread is interesting, the chap ‘Chris Judd’ is conveying that the investigation needs to be completed before conclusions can be drawn. I agree.

According to the same thread, it appears that the skydiving outfit in question is to restart operations on Saturday.

This raises some pertinent questions relating to safety, questions that haven’t been addressed.

At this point, let’s not lose sight of the fact that two people have died as a result of this tragedy, made worse by the fact that the partner of the tandem passenger raced to the scene in his car to be confronted by a, no doubt, horrific scene. He and other members of her family, quite understandably, want answers.


I would imagine questions such as:

The Reddit thread alludes to a ‘line over’ the reserve. If that’s the case, why was the ‘line over’?

What’s to stop it happening again, maybe next week?

If it’s not a line over, maybe the Tandem Instructor mishandled the malfunction? Hardly fair blaming him when he can’t defend himself. There may well be video to prove or disprove this.

Unless the video was ‘lost’ as alluded to above.

Maybe it was nefarious activity that made the parachutes malfunction. See Emil Cilliers case, he was jailed for life as a result.

There are many theories, lines of enquiry, call it what you will. Having been involved for more than a few decades, at the sharp end of fixed wing engineering, with investigation experience, I’m sure there will be a full and transparent enquiry, as there would be in any other aviation accident where members of the public were killed.

The investigation is not about apportioning blame, it isn’t a witch hunt. It’s a matter of finding out the facts. A member of the public has put their full trust in this company and the TI, that trust was failed in the most awful way. This is about finding out what went wrong and to put in place a protocol to ensure that families and loved ones never ever have to go through this again.

Two people are dead and no one knows why.

Maybe it’s just me but I am more than a bit concerned that, as of this weekend, it’s business as usual at Dunkeswell.

Do you say that about mass fatality airline accidents?

I knew that was coming.
Airliners have FDR and CVR. Anything out of the ordinary (787 Max) and the fleet is grounded.
First tandem fatality in over 30 years (out of the ordinary) and you think it’s ok to just carry on, don’t worry about it etc.
I was only trying to explain the reasoning behind investigation work.

Lucky escape, you could be second person to die in a tandem accident in 65 million jumps throughout the world.

Then you got into your car and drove to Sainsburys, or whatever your favourite supermarket is without regard to the actual reality of the real danger.

The fundamental reality is that driving a car is more dangerous than skydiving or flying. That's a literal truth.

The best example of people misunderstanding actual versus perceived risk was after 9/11, when people in the US stopped flying and began driving long distances because of the perceived risk.

I'd rather you didn't try anyway. On a couple of occasions we had a customer who panicked. We really tried to reassure him. He came back and panicked again. He didn't get a refund. The smell of fear is a real thing.

737 Max? Grounding that took two fatal accidents and several other incidents.

A parachute rig is a very, very simple flying machine compared to the other types we talk about on this forum. It shouldn't be hard for a group of experts to determine the cause with a high degree of confidence, even in the absence of external video.

Always amazed me that Cilliers was so up himself that he thought he could get away with it :rolleyes:

btw, this is what a Line Over looks like - usually a mistake made whilst packing

A good question. Their website has been completely reorganized after going from bpa.org.uk to britishskydiving.org, and all their minutes & reports might be behind a member's only login now.... I haven't dug around enough to see for sure, but all my old links are dead.

An excellent question. There's been a major change to the whole membership setup this year - I'll have a poke around the new site and see if I can find them. No reason they shouldn't be public; that's how we learn.

I see that in this link the statement is made that "We ... Investigate skydiving accidents and incidents. Compile and publish safety data."

After a bit of a search I was able to find related information here, and in the list of documents there seemed to be at least one created as a response to an incident, probably there are more.

That said the title wasn't clear that this was the case in that report, and there seems not to be any direct reporting on investigations into accidents or incidents - or at least they don't appear to be published, judging by the titles.

I italicise because the detail may be there somewhere, but if it is it's not immediately obvious to me where - and I suggest that it should be. Under this title I did see there was an unpublished document, maybe that's a sensitive accident investigation (?) but in any event I'd have thought it highly important that all such investigations were clearly published and available for all to see?

FP.

That is a huge assumption and I hate assumptions. They are often the basis of the conflicts in the world. How do you know that "no one" knows? Surely it is possible that the Skydivers in Dunkeswell know exactly how this happened and can be certain that it will not happen again. In this case there may be strong legal reasons why this information should wait for the coroner to investigate. Certainly, if I was going skydiving at Dunkeswell, I would be seeking assurance that whatever went wrong would not happen to me and I would be surprised if they couldn't give me that assurance.. My son is a skydiver and did many of his early dives at Dunkeswell. Personally, the only reason I would wear a parachute would be if it was required to operate the aircraft, eg. gliding

We need to wait until the investigation by BS is completed before we consider jumping to conclusions.

A few things to think about for those not knowledgeable in skydiving.

1: Skydiving is inherently safe. Tandem containers are over-engineered and are inspected during the reserve repack for airworthiness. And no DZ in the UK will let a tandem container back into circulation that is not airworthy. The harnesses that the students wear are also inspected regularly.

2: No parachute (canopy) is guaranteed to open. That's why we have a reserve. The forces acting on an opening canopy are pretty wild. The individual or pair can affect how the canopy reacts when it opens. Not being symmetrical in the harness can cause the canopy to open in a turn. This shouldn't be an issue with a tandem canopy or a student copy, as they are loaded at a low wing loading and are very docile.

3: A tandem instructor must be thoroughly familiar with various emergency and non-emergency drills when addressing nuisance factors and malfunctions. If you get these wrong, the results can be fatal. Tandem instructors reduce mischaracterisation of malfunctions by practising their drills in front of another tandem instructor at regular intervals and then being signed off as current.

4: AADs do not 'open' the reserve parachute. When they activate, a propellant charge initiates the cutting of the reserve closing loop, which keeps the reserve securely in the container. Without going down a rabbit hole! The malfunctioning main canopy acts as a large pilot chute, serving as an anchor in the sky that pulls out the reserve bag as the parachutist falls away. The reserve then inflates normally (or not). You can manually activate the reserve by pulling on the reserve handle on the left side of the container. This handle is attached to a metal or fabric cord that ends with a metal pin. The metal pin passes through the reserve closing loop, keeping the reserve in the container. Upon pulling the reserve handle, the pin is extracted from the closing loop, and a large metal spring, contained within a smaller parachute, fires off the parachutist's back and acts as an anchor, much like the malfunctioning main parachute mentioned earlier.

5: Dunkerswell is quite within its rights to open again. While some might find this unpalatable, accidents happen. It's a commercial operation. As long as all the required investigative paperwork is completed, witness statements taken, and they have the ok from the police and British Skydiving. Then they are free to operate. I don't have first-hand knowledge of what happened, but following previous deaths in the UK that I was privy to and around. I know that British Skydiving has a very thorough process. And Dunkerswell will have internal checks that they will perform before allowing any revenue jumping to commence.

6: Tandem deaths, as tragic as they are. Do increase the number of people doing tandems, as this was mentioned to me by a DZO in the aftermath of a fatality.

7: We sign a lot of waivers before we are allowed to jump. In the US, it's way worse; you sign your life away. However, the dangers of skydiving are downplayed during the tandem brief. They are not hidden in any way. Tandem students know exactly what they are getting into. In my opinion, previous comments suggesting that students are unaware of the dangers associated with the sport are incorrect.

Condolences to all at Dunkerswell, to the TI, the tandem student, and their families.

BSBD.

Thank you pchapman MostlyHarmless First_Principal for your input and efforts. Looks like that link is a list of safety bulletins but not clear if it includes actual reports, which would be useful to fulfill just culture principles.