Is Skydiving Safe?

You are probably thinking how safe is tandem skydiving really?

Well… Generally Tandem Masters (TM) have to have a minimum of 500 personal skydives and a instructors rating, some DZ’s will not even let someone go through a TM rating exam until they have at least 1000 skydives.

Personally I think TM exams should be offered to skydivers on their personal performance, but in general I think between 500-1000 skydives is enough to look after someone that has not experienced it before and would like to try this thrill of a life time.

You might also like to know that all tandem equipment has Automatic Activating Devices (AAD) attached to the reserve.

For example if the Tandem Master passed out, I have never heard of this happening before, but for an example if the TM passed out, a ADD will open the reserve parachute by itself. Pretty cool, huh.

So in general Tandem Skydiving is really safe. I personally have been a TM for 8yrs with close to 3000 Tandem Skydives and have never hurt anyone (touch wood). I have seen tens of thousands of skydives and have only ever seen a tandem passenger crack an ankle once, and this only happened because he did not lift up his feet like he was trained to do. I know out of all the extreme sports skydiving is considered the safest.

So the question is asked… How do I go about finding a place to skydive? Well there are so many skydiving centers around the world you would probably find one within an hour’s drive of you. Have fun :) Blue Skies & 5 knots ;)