Jay Beckman wrote:
"kontiki" wrote in message
One of my flight students went up to a major jumping get-together up in
West Virginia last week (he is also a parachute jumper). One guy died,
and two others were injured during the "event". I asked him tonight
about it and he seemed fairly matter-of-fact about it.

This was a B.A.S.E. jumping event, was it not?

Yes. "Bridge Day" at the New River Gorge bridge, held approximately on
the anniversary of the completion of the bridge. For six hours, once a
year, it's legal to BASE jump from that bridge. It's kind of a community
festival as well; the BASE jumping is not the only thing going on.

To give some idea of the numbers involved (in the US), there are about
30,000 skydivers, and for the past several years, there have been about
30 fatalities annually. I am not sure how many BASE jumpers there are;
if you have made one BASE jump from each type of object (anywhere in the
world) you can apply for a BASE number and those are up to a bit over
1000 now. Since 1981, there have been 104 known BASE fatalities
worldwide.

Personally, I'd want a lot more altitude than one gets just jumping
off a bridge.

In my admittedly limited experience, many pilots think it's a little nuts
to jump out of a working airplane. Many skydivers think that jumping out
of a working airplane is just fine but that it's a little nuts to BASE
jump. I don't know what activity BASE jumpers consider to be a little
nuts.

Matt Roberds