Basejumper.com - archive

Hello All,

Myself and another jumper have designed and made this page for the community.

I am asking people to please send PM messages if they can see something they may want in the stats page and if we can make it happen we will try.

Please remember this is fairly new so we will have bugs in play that will need ironing out.

Here is the page for the BFL (please note this is not the original base fatality page)

http://bfl.baseaddict.com/
In here you can filter the fatalitys by date, place and what they were wearing.

Here is the page on the website for Stats
http://bfl.baseaddict.com/analytics

Working on iPhones/computers but not showing much on IPads


Here is the page for reporting incidents/fatalitys
http://bfl.baseaddict.com/report

Further down the track we will be making it grow with base companies jumping on board as well as base training associations (FJC's) and also a place to go to find more informaton.

The attached picture is the one issue i see it is showing 77 unknown and 7 just saying Wingsuits but we do know that the majority of these are wingsuit deaths and we just dont know what type of wingsuit they were using.


Thanks for reading and hoping that the community can get on board and share incidents and fatalitys.


One last thing this website will not show the latest fatalitys in the last 14 days as we do not wish the media to use that information as it happens.

This is already so much better than the old one on Blinc! Well done.

1. Somehow Vapire 1&3 are classified as 'Wingsuits' whereas all other WS fatalities are broken down into beginner, intermediate, expert WS.

I think there should be a category 'Wingsuits' for all wingsuits and beginner, intermediate, expert should be subcategories. Maybe this solve the stats unkown issue, too?

2. It'd be nice if you could link to statistics to a filtered list, such that on the stats page you could click on eg. 'Tracksuits' and get a list of all tracksuit fatalities.

Nice work, much easier to read than the current version.

One minor thing but some of the areas could be combined? e.g. Romsdalen + Andalsnes, Sunndalsora + Litledalen.

Great idea with the 'last 14 days' aspect.

re: 'Unknown'

Some of the reports don't seem to be completed. #294 says 'Clothes: Unknown' but the report says he was flying a Freak.

I'd also suggest to clean up COD and Possible Factors in a more systematic way.

Eg. #354 has 'Unstable Exit' as COD whereas #317 has it as a Possible Factor.

#316 has COD 'Off-Heading' but all other similar fatalities are found under COD 'Canopy - Strike'.

COD 'Strike - Object' is mostly wall strikes under canopy but also has wingsuit fatalities with nothing out.

CODs 'Proxymity', 'Strike - impact', 'Impact - nothing out', 'Impact in full flight', and 'Impact - no pull' are at least overlapping if not partly redundant-

#262 is missing the report and the exit Gitschen is not in the Titlis area.

This one I just fixed but there will be probably more of those issues (It simply happened because Brad did all the work to transfer records to new database himself and some of the records were missing some details and also structure of the data was not consistent so it was just a lot of work for one person). I also moved V1-3 to intermediate WS and deleted Wingsuit type (so now there are beginner, intermediate and expert WS in database). Because of the design of the database and calculation there will appear "Unknown" in the stats as long as no suit is assigned to the incident. I'll probably add under 3 types Unknown Beginner WS, ... Intermediate WS, ... Expert WS and that might solve the issue if we will be able get type of the WS at least. I also hope that we will get updated information from jumpers who know what happened and that is also the reason why we are showing in incident details "Unknown" where we don't know. There is form under the incident which is delivered into our e-mails and linked to specific record so we can update informations. Hopefully we will motivate jumpers to send updates as now it's much easier to browse records and those records are displayed consistently. ;)

It's not easy to maintain Country-Area-Exit database as there is probably no-one who knows all the areas well. Anyway I'll be happy if you can help us to categorise locations? I can print out all the locations hierarchy so it's easier to look into it and make notes what might be changed if that helps?

I understand some of your reasoning but I think especially for the statistics it's not helpful to have those 'unknown' suits not show up as Wingsuits. Even more so, since 'unknown' isn't really true if we know it was a wingsuit.
I am also not sure to what extent it is of interest what type of suit it was (beg/int/exp) but that's just my opinion.
In any case I wouldn't expect a lot of details to be reported soon, especially on older fatalities. So I would suggest to keep beg/int/exp categories and put all other into one category '(unknown type of) wingsuit'.

I can imagine that it is a lot of work since the old format makes parsing difficult. I'd be happy to help (PM me).

Well we probably don't understand each other. In database there is suit type (beginner WS, intermediate WS and expert WS) and then there is table with suits itself where every suit has assigned suit type. So my idea is create unknown or unspecified beginner ws, intermediate and expert and assign those with beginner, intermediate and expert suit type. Then in the stats you will get rid of Unknown suit type and you will have those added into beginner WS, intermediate and expert WS.

But this works only if you find out for every fatality what level of suit it was. Why not make a fourth suit type for all unknown suits that you can not assign to beg/int/exp?

Clearly things like Locations etc. have to be a community effort. I thought you guys wanted bug reports, so I just started listing things I noticed but maybe doing this via Google Doc or something similar is a more effective format?

Regarding countries, it would also be convenient if in the drop-down menu in the filter interface you would only list countries for which there is a fatality.

Edit: Spotted another one: #299 was not at Croix des Tetes but at Chapeau de Napoléon

http://bfl.baseaddict.com/record/BFL296
Error spotted : Chap wasn't jumping a Onesie but a home made onepiece tracking suit.

Looks pretty good so far. Thanks for all the work on it.

The List has needed it's own home since Nick DG shut down his site after getting harassed on the internet. It's good to see the list with it's own place again.

Updated, Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who has sent messages and written in on the forum.

As I said before there will be bugs and we will over time sort them out.

Thanks also to any ideas you guys have come up with.

We can go back and work through them.

Nick DG sadly got harassed after Jimmy Hall went in by Claire and Jimmy Holliday. They both acted like little bitches over it, and neither one of them was at his celebration on Oahu.

One can see how after Jimmy's death the list changed.
I think what Patto has done it amazing!!

Why is the time that someone has been jumping measured in seasons and not years?

Nice work!

Not sure why I chose seasons over years but it's not important actually as it is basically same. Maybe because I consider BASE as sport and in sport usually seasons are used? If you don't like it, you can give me reasons to change it but I think it's just matter of personal preference. ;)

Very Nice job.

For me too, "Unknown" is not good answer for the statistics.

Here for #38 repport says "Alex had 30 BASE jumps and is a very experienced skydiver.This jump took place from a launch point well known to him, at night, with no wind and under a full moon. Witness reports state he did a short delay considering the altitude available and then lost sight of him. Alex is found dead hours later by a rescue team.The rig is reported to be packed slider up (single canopy container, but an old skydiving canopy more or less adapted for BASE).The report went on to say the canopy seems to have been perfectly deployed."
So why not write here "object strike under canopy"?

#135 "Three base jumper at the Murrenfluh went, to take a further leap this day from the Nose. The first base jumper jumped off. His two colleagues noticed that he was unstable in freefall. Only when they were in the air - they took out a leap together - they saw their colleague was crashed and impacted near the cliff on the ground. The helicopter rescue crew found him dead. "
It is probably more an "impact in terminal free fall"?

#132 Phantom wingsuit beginner / Yellow Ocean is not the best exit for wingsuiting... It was common in 2009 to have a leg poutch on Phantom so "No pull find" or "low pull" or "impact in terminal..."?

#173 in Prodigy beginner " Possible Factors: Loss of speed-glide, Proximity flying "
Here perhaps "impact in terminal..." or "object stricke under canopy"

Take care.

I did the COD overhaul and recategorization so I'll reply:

No objections to #38.

#135
"The cause of the incident is not yet known." from the incident report and incident thread.

#132
From the corresponding incident thread "He jumped, disappeared and Magnus lost sight of him, supposedly there was no sound of a canopy opening either. At this particular moment this is all i know."

#173
Basically no info. I think the 'possible factors' are simply because he was in a wingsuit. No further details in incident thread.

I don't know if it makes sense to put these into either of the categories only in order to not have 'unknown' in the statistics. I mean if we actually don't know why not classify it as such? Since it's only three #s it won't skew stats to heavily so I am not that strongly opposed.
Let's see what other people think.

Edit to add: There might very well still be mistakes as well. So please write here, if you spot any. Cheers

Hey Patto,

nice work here.

One idea for me would be for the the statistics to be able to choose the timeline like only the 3 last years or the 5 last years ...

Thank you

We are working on it buddy, keep sending through any suggestions and if we can do it, it will get done..

@flyjeronimo

We keep the list as Factual as possible as we all could assume things but they may be wrong so as usual only information sent to us from the people at the accident or rescuers/police information gets used.


We are actually getting emails sent to us to correct information that has been outstanding for a few years so its looking promising to gain more information due to the new layout.


As i said up above if you have any comments lay them out here and we will try and make it happen.

Really nice effort to improve BFL guys!
Thanks and keep up going!

Hi Patto,

As I said it is a very nice and great job!

Perhaps it's missing some section like: "female / male" "Age" "base experience" or is it your choise to not go in that way about the personnality of these jumpers?

Thx cheers

Hi Antoine.

That's a good idea! I'll extend time-range options with those options or completely individual time range settings. But be patient please, this will take some time.. ;)

Hey,

we do have age and experience data in database and we will also add gender, thanks for bringing up the idea!

The statistics page is really nice to be able to look at all the information in one place, with ease of browsing. It might be nice to make links to the actually persons incident page in the section where it shows OBJECT, COD, CLOTHES, PACKING so you can further read about the incident itself. For example I just saw one jumper died of electrocution, and it would be nice to click electrocution and be able to jump to the BFL for that jumper to further read about the incident itself. Hope this helps

You can already go to the list and filter for COD=Electrocution. Making the statistics clicky is on the To-Do list but is not quick to implement.

Can you generate statistics by clothing type?

I think that it would be a very good idea to let people sort out all the Wingsuit fatalities from the "everything else" at this point. And that in the future, sorting out Wingsuit v One Piece v Two piece would be useful (since my expectation is that we are going to see an increase in the one piece fatalities with the rise in popularity of one piece suits).

Individual time range settings would be awesome too. So you can see what the leading cause of fatalities in different BASE "eras" has been, preferably sorting wing suits in/out depending on what you are trying to figure out.

I'd love to be able to easily generate a graph showing the causes of BASE fatality (both with and without wing suit) by year, for example.

If it can be done we will do it mate, I am trying to get done what the community wants so if we can do that we will get it done. Keep checking it over the next few weeks and hopefully we get it up.

How many genders will you add?

Was thinking about seven but not sure yet..

Hi Tom, I just added options "All Wingsuits Combined" and "All Tracking Suits Combined" into filtering options on the list so now you can easily see how many records fits those criteria. Regarding analytics and all the graphs, I'll reconstruct it to allow more options. Now all the numbers are coming from backend api and I'll need to redesign the page to make it calculated client side. Much more will be possible then but it will take some time to do it as I'll be quite busy this weekend and next week. I'll probably add page with updates so you and others can easily find out what we changed and what to look for within new features.

Seeing as we are throwing up ideas for search parameters, can we get some sort of graph (scatter plot?) that compares Skydiving experience and BASE experience in each fatality (jump numbers). I think it will highlight low skydive experience/currency and low BASE experience/currency in the majority of fatalities.
I am actually kinda interested in the benefits that continued skydiving gives to BASE jumpers, or to see the learning curve BASE jumpers need to survive and then what currency (in the BASE environment) needs to be maintained.
I always hear things like recommended minimum jump numbers and "relative" experience but if we have the data available we can easily prove/highlight what is statistically taking place.

We don't have any currency data though.

Even experience data is not very well reported/recorded on the bfl.

Thanks Fledgling for your response buddy,

I am hoping opening up this new format will increase the jumping community to share more details so we can have a great database of fatalitys but also in the long term have an accident database as well.. I think the times have changed these days and the community can start sharing incidents and accidents.

Over the years I have slowly been adding more and more information on blinc (BFL) and as the new jumpers approach the sport I am hoping they will send in all that information as a new norm.

I have been thinking about this for a while now after listening to one quite experienced WS proximity flyer tell me about how he didn't consider a WS proximity flight to be just a BASE jump - it's a BASE jump at first but the actual activity of WS proximity flight is something new and different to BASE jumping.

It would be interesting to be able to isolate just the 'proximity flying' incidents regardless of clothing, and also including the BASE-related incidents too.

Much has been said about the increase in wingsuit fatalities over the years but I think the increase is not so much because of the wingsuits themselves, it is the increase in proximity flying behaviour regardless of suit type.

I think the fatalities more directly related to wingsuit use are the inexplicable no pulls and botched exits, whereas many of the wingsuit fatalities are to do with proximity flying, so they share more in common with the proximity flying trackers that went in (e.g. 168, 298) and other incidents like Dwain Weston than they do with some other wingsuit fatalities like Micah Couch.

Also regarding #48 and #310 - the COD is listed as 'no pull find' - this should read 'no pull'. The 'no pull find' is where you are about to have a 'no pull' and then suddenly find it - as coined by Douggs.

It will be possible at some point to filter for 'Possible Factor: Proximity Flying'.
You can already filter for WS+Impact in terminal FF and probably get mostly proxy fatalities.


Okay, I see. I'm happy to rename the COD-category. 'Not able to locate PC in time' seems a bit too long. Do you have a suggestion? 'No pull' doesn't emphasize the inability to locate the PC.

Deployment failure?

Sounds like a malfunction, no?
I mean if Douggs had impacted on that 2010 jump, we wouldn't have the term 'no pull find' but the COD would have been exactly what he is describing with the term, don't you think?
Maybe 'Pull problems'?

How about 'unable to find PC'?

I had thought it was just called a 'no pull' with the relevant details in the report.

I called it 'unable to pull' now. Is that okay?

'No pull' would include basically every impact in freefall - also some of the 'unable to pull' cases did eventually pull, eg. #258, #223, so are not exactly 'no pull'.

Seems fine to me.

As far as classifying the different type of wingsuit fatalities, I made an attempt to categorize fatalities based on what stage of wingsuit flight: start, flight, or deployment. Sometimes it's not totally clear, especially in the case of low emergency deploys. But this is what I got:



Happy to share data for BFL page.

This is something I tried to recategorize a little. An emergency pull is not really a cause of a fatality when the went in despite the emergency pull and not because of it. They made a mistake during flight that put them in a situation where not even pulling could save them. To me, as COD is concerned, this not significantly different to a nothing-out fatality under otherwise similar circumstances.

In contrast to low pulls: Loss of altitude awareness. Pulling 1-2sec earlier would have been fine.
And unable to pull, formerly known as no pull find.

I tried to get away from the old classification of nothing-out, pc out, line stretch etc. since this doesn't seem that relevant to me as far as the statistics go. You can still find it in the reports of course and emergency pull is a possible factor on the new bfl-page.

Check out the new analytics page. You can now make custom charts.
Great work Michal!

Example: COD of WS fatalities in the past 5 years.

http://bfl.baseaddict.com/analytics

Thanks, nicely done !

Thank you for the hard work, this is very useful.

We read the list to learn from fatalities, no matter our experience. For learning from injuries, new jumpers have nothing to read and haven't spent enough time with other jumpers to get that knowledge through osmosis when they need it most.

Further down the track, maybe add a seperate section with a simple voluntary anonymous online form that drops into a database to give an overview of injuries in the sport.

It would need to gather popularity and momentum to catch on, but as this improved hosting and format of the list gains popularity, it is a perfect time to capture that traffic and get even more useful knowledge out there.

Many years ago Dwain Weston wanted a database for accidents, I am hoping that with the ease of the internet and the webpage we will have a accident database where any base jumper when they have an accident can fill out the form with or without the actual place/name and also anonymously and over the next few years we may actually see some good data.



Hopefully the community has started to evolve nowadays and it is greeted with open arms.

That would be nice !
Also an incident page maybe to have a better overview on the things like tension knots, misspulls in wingsuit, ...

Amazing work...thank you!