Rating Corner | Safety Day Activities

By Ron Bell

As a Safety and Training Advisor, it’s important to take a leadership role during your drop zone’s Safety Day activities. USPA has made it easy for you by uploading tons of Safety Day tools to our website. We’ve also updated some of our older resources to make them easier to use. You can find PowerPoint presentations, handouts and much more at uspa.org/safetyday.

It’s not too late to encourage your top instructors to put together seminars in their areas of expertise. We’ve already done much of the preparation! Here is what you will find:

The 2019 U.S. Skydiving Fatality Summary PowerPoint presentation. In it, you’ll find a breakdown of the causes of last year’s 15 fatalities and information to share with your jumpers on prevention. Drop zones tell us that seminars using this presentation are both well attended and very valuable.

A revamped Canopy Collisions PowerPoint presentation that has a new look and feel, as well as updated content. It includes a Canopy Collision Cone handout for you to print out and distribute to participants.

A webpage featuring the popular and useful Canopy Risk Quotient quiz, which was previously a handout. Now, you can have attendees fill out their quizzes on a tablet computer and calculate their risk, paper-free!

Resources for jump pilots and drop zone owners, including a PowerPoint presentation with suggested discussion starters that your DZ’s pilot can use to run a seminar for jumpers. (Don’t forget to have pilots sign up for the USPA Professional e-newsletter so they get monthly tips on flying jumpers safely.)

The ever-popular skydiving safety Jeopardy! game. USPA has updated this game—available in PowerPoint—with new questions. For a twist on the usual, divide participants into four groups and see which group scores the highest. Report your results to USPA at safety@uspa.org, and the drop zone with the best performance will receive a surprise.

New tools to help drop zone staff standardize the teaching, coaching and debriefing of emergencies below 2,000 feet. This includes information on teaching jumpers about the difference between the decision altitude and hard deck, the canopy collisions cone, obstacle avoidance techniques, two-stage flare and the all-powerful, ankle-saving parachute landing fall.

New tools to get the word out on the importance of incident reporting so we can continue lowering our fatality index rate.

In addition to seminars, don’t forget to have your tandem instructors drill their emergency procedures, which USPA requires them to do biannually. This Safety Day will help DZ staff and sport jumpers get ready for the next decade, which, if trends continue, will see a record low number of injuries and fatalities. It all starts with this year’s Safety Day, so let’s make it a good one and let the Roaring ’20s begin! 

Ron Bell | D-26863
USPA Director of Safety and Training