GLH Systems

The Organisational Side of Skydiving Accidents

Most skydivers are taught to recognise equipment malfunctions and emergency procedures. Far fewer are taught how to recognise organisational malfunction.
Over the years, skydiving has become significantly safer. Equipment has improved, training has evolved, and the sport has gained an enormous amount of operational knowledge.
Yet serious injuries still occur where the technical cause is only part of the story.
Sometimes the biggest hazard is not the canopy, the aircraft, the weather or the procedure.
Sometimes the hazard is organisational.
Around fifteen years ago, I suffered fractured vertebrae during a hard opening as a tandem instructor. Another instructor was injured under similar circumstances. Before those incidents, experienced instructors had repeatedly raised concerns about equipment and operational issues that had the potential to injure both instructors and tandem passengers.

Those concerns were largely ignored.

After the injury, I landed and drove myself to hospital. What stayed with me longer than the injury itself was the organisational response. At the time, some of the frustration expressed was not that an instructor may have suffered a serious spinal injury, but that customers were still waiting.
Even conversations about recovery became uncomfortable because concern itself seemed to be viewed through the lens of organisational liability rather than human wellbeing or operational learning.

Years later, after more than a decade, I was injured again—this time in a completely different operational setting involving ground crew during a tandem landing.
Technically, the two incidents had nothing in common.
Organisationally, they felt disturbingly familiar.
Before the second incident, experienced instructors had again raised concerns about ground crew competency and training. Rather than being treated as valuable operational feedback, those concerns were justified, minimised or filtered through management structures that had become increasingly disconnected from the realities of day-to-day skydiving operations.
After the injury, the focus again appeared to shift quickly toward administration, liability management and maintaining operations, rather than examining the underlying safety issues or supporting recovery and learning.
The incidents themselves were different.

The organisational dynamics were not.

Skydiving discussions often focus on the individual.

- Did the instructor make the right decision?
- Was the landing technique correct?
- Was the emergency procedure followed?
Those are important questions.
But accidents rarely result from one mistake alone. More often, they are the end result of small problems that have been accepted over time—concerns that were ignored, standards that slowly drifted, or experienced people who gradually stopped feeling comfortable speaking up.
Every drop zone needs good management. Good management is essential. But operational safety decisions should always be guided by operational competence. When commercial priorities or people with limited operational experience begin influencing operational safety decisions, the gap between paperwork and reality starts to grow.
Most experienced skydivers have seen it happen.
Small shortcuts become normal.

Safety concerns are dismissed as overthinking.

Experienced operational voices gradually carry less weight than organisational convenience.
None of these changes seems significant on its own.
Together, they create an environment where accidents become more likely.
Formal reporting systems are important, but they are only one source of safety information. Many hazards are recognised long before they appear in an incident report. Sometimes they are raised in conversations on the packing mat, during the ride to altitude or after a day’s jumping.
Good safety organisations listen to those conversations just as carefully as they read formal reports.
One of the greatest risks in any high-risk activity is when authority becomes separated from operational competence. Instructors, riggers, pilots and ground crew are often the first to recognise developing hazards. If their concerns are ignored, dismissed or quietly discouraged, the organisation loses one of its most valuable safety tools.

Many experienced skydivers recognise these patterns but rarely discuss them openly. Sometimes they simply want to avoid conflict. Sometimes they fear reputational consequences or exclusion. Sometimes the culture itself discourages operational dissent in the name of keeping things running smoothly.

But organisational hazards are no different from weather hazards or equipment hazards.

If they are left unaddressed, they eventually stop being discussions.

They become injuries.

And sometimes worse.

If skydiving is to become even safer, we need to look beyond equipment and emergency procedures. We need organisations where operational competence is respected, concerns are welcomed, and lessons are acted upon before someone gets hurt.

Reserve slider placement matters.

The slider should be positioned so it can inflate immediately during deployment. Its job is to separate the four line groups, stabilise the system under the reserve, and promote an orderly canopy inflation—helping reduce the risk of tension knots.

This is especially important with RSL and MARD deployments, where body position is often far less ideal than a stable.

A small detail in the pack job can make a big difference.

A good example here on the importance of thorough inspection when maintaining your gear. This damage on the cutaway cables can cause hard cutaway pull!
Understand your gear!

How do we make decisions under pressure?
In skydiving we spend thousands of hours teaching procedures.
Pull priorities.
Emergency procedures.
Canopy patterns.
Landing priorities.

But a question I have been researching for several years is:
Why do trained people sometimes fail to execute the correct procedure when they need it most?
The answer may not simply be a lack of knowledge or discipline.
Under stress, humans experience:
- reduced information processing,
- narrowing of attention,
- time pressure,
- sensory overload.
The real challenge is not only teaching people what to do — it is preparing the brain to recognise the situation quickly enough to make the right decision.

Interested to hear thoughts from jumpers and instructors:

What situations have you experienced where the decision was harder than the procedure?

Thank you for the opportunity to support the competition!
GLH Systems is proud to contribute a little something back to the skydiving community and support the pilots pushing their skills in Intermediate and Advanced classes.
Good luck to everyone competing this weekend at West Tennessee Skydiving — fly smart, fly safe, and enjoy every jump!
Looking forward to seeing some great performances

Big thanks to GLH Systems for donating some PRIZES for the comp this weekend at West Tennessee Skydiving!!! If you are in the Intermediate and Advanced classes you will be able to win these with a podium finish!