An uncommon finding of subtle Simon’s bleedings in a fatally injured skydiver

Excerpt

A 36-year-old male skydiver with 10 years of sky-diving experience was found dead at a local airport after having performed a jump. The aviation inspectors’ investigation showed that it was his third jump of the day, from a height of approximately 1,500 m, which he had made from a Cessna 182 sports airplane. For the jump he used an “Icarus Crossfire 2-119” parachute. He was carrying a digital instrument for height measurement (among other items) and wearing a camera attached to his helmet during the jump. Thus, his altitude and jump were recorded. He jumped from the plane at a measured altitude of 1,480 m, and the parachute activated successfully at an altitude of 780 m, 18 s after commencing the jump. The landing maneuver (called a “swoop”) proved problematic as it included pulling back the edges of the parachute’s “risers” in order to level its dome horizontally. Unfortunately, as seen from the the helmet camera recording, his left hand slipped from the riser (Fig. 1a, b), causing the right hand to sharply deactivate the parachute only 10 m above the ground (Fig. 1c), leading to sharp acceleration. Consequently, the skydiver impacted the ground almost horizontally while leaning to the right (Fig. 1d). Due to the extremely high speed of impact he died at the scene of the accident.

…