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Is skydiving more dangerous than driving?

My friend and I were having a debate and they insisted that driving is actually more dangerous than skydiving. That can’t be true, can it? Please tell me it isn’t. Which is safer: skydiving or driving?

avatar
Shannon Fitzgerald · Updated on
Reviewed by Shannon Martin, Licensed Insurance Agent.
It’s definitely unnerving to think that driving might be more dangerous than skydiving—especially when most of us have to get behind the wheel every day. Statistics for this comparison are a bit deceiving, though.
Depending on where your friend was looking, they probably saw numbers like this:
Activity
Year fatalities
Daily fatalities
Fatality rate
Skydiving
21
0.058
0.0061 per 3.5 million jumps
Driving
35,092
96
1.12 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled
It’s important to note, most of these statistics are posted by skydiving companies trying to sell the experience. They fail to consider the crucial differences between each activity.
For example, much of the risk from driving comes from:
  • Heavy traffic
  • Bad weather
  • Intoxicated or distracted drivers
Were skydiving an everyday activity like driving, it would face risk from these same factors, as well. As a once-in-a-lifetime experience, though, a skydiving jump would be called off for any one of them.
To visualize how incomparable the two activities are, swap the circumstances surrounding them. If you drove one trip in your car in your lifetime with little to no drivers on the road and perfect weather, your risk would be very low. If you commuted to work every day with millions of other skydivers, that would be a disaster.
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