I'm an experienced skydiver - one death per year is an insanely low bar for any drop zone. Lodi is notorious for incidents and I would never jump there.

Skydiving seems insanely risky because it's scary but it's statistically not particularly risky [0], especially for conscientious skydivers at well-run drop zones. The calculation on "calculated risk" changes dramatically once you start blowing off safety protocol, which are what keep the sport relatively safe.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9859333/

This. I used to jump at a DZ in the Midwest that has been in operation for like thirty years and had, I think, only one fatality. But we had great safety people in charge and were really careful with students.

My first jump there was a static line solo and they gave an hour long classroom session followed by time in a hanging harness practicing emergency procedures and malfunction recognition.

If a drop zone had anywhere near one death per year, I'd find somewhere else to jump. Skydiving isn't that dangerous.

That still seems high given the industry-wide stats unless they're doing a crazy number of jumps per year

https://www.uspa.org/discover/faqs/safety

Skydiving nationally is less risky than rock climbing (even in the gym) but a factor of like 5-7 iirc. If my local gym had this high fatality rate they'd probably have to shutdown because they wouldn't be able to obtain insurance.

Pretty sure when you join a gym you sign a waiver of liability. At least if the gym owners have any sense at all.

Gross negligence or harmful intent can not be waived at least here in CA

The risk I took was calculated,

but man, am I bad at math.