Skydiving Accident Leaves Security Guru Cedric 'Sid' Blancher Dead At 37 332
An anonymous reader points out The Register's report that Wi-Fi security expert Cédric 'Sid' Blancher has died as the result of a skydiving accident. "Among other things, the 37-year-old Blancher was a sought-after speaker on WiFi security, and in 2005 published a Python-based WiFi traffic injection tool called Wifitap. In 2006, while working for the EADS Corporate Research centre, he also put together a paper on how to exploit Skype to act as a botnet." Some of Blancher's skydiving videos are posted to Vimeo; clearly, it's something he was passionate about.
Re: Security 101 (Score:5, Informative)
Skydiving is 7 micromorts per jump. That's equivalent to travlling 1600 miles by car.
Source [wikipedia.org]
Re: That's a shame (Score:4, Informative)
People don't understand that most fatalities from skydiving involve stunts of some sort: hook turns, base jumping, wingsuits. The translation from the French article isn't all that great, but it looks like he was attempting a hook turn and didn't judge the distance well.
People who just jump out of a plane, open their chute, and drift to the ground rarely perish.
Re:Accident? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.skydivekansas.com/upjumpers/hookturns.shtml
Re:That's a shame (Score:4, Informative)
This is a troll? I don't know the circumstances of his death
As far as I recall, this is exactly what killed him.
Hook turn maneuver (Score:5, Informative)
From the report, it sounds like Cédric performed a maneuver called "hook turn" -- it's a high speed turn in your final approach, 100' or less from the ground, considered deadly and stupid by USPA, the French Federation of Parachutism, and pretty much anyone who's been jumping for a while.
The rate of descent increased as a parachute (square, ram air canopy) banks. The sharper the turn, the faster the descent. The hook turn swings the jumper fast, like a pendulum, and an experienced jumper will guesstimate ending the swing at about the same time as his or her feet would touch the ground. The margin of error for a hook turn, by an experienced jumper riding a small canopy (the more experience the smaller the canopy), is between 5' and 10'.
Start the turn too soon, and you'll end up 3' to 10' above the ground, with a stalled parachute, falling straight down. On a good day, a few bruises or a parachute landing fall, a dirty jump suit, and teasing from your pals. On a bad day, a twisted or broken ankle, yet survivable.
Start the turn too late, and you'll slam the ground with enough force to kill you. And remember: too late is a difference of only about 5'.
Even if the turn starts fine, and the jumper is the king of experienced up jumpers, other factors may come into play. A little thermal near the ground may force the canopy up or sideways near the ground. Or a cold air pocket (e.g. flying over a small puddle, or a dark patch on the ground) may drop the canopy a few feet faster.
Most if not all drop zones since at least 1994 ban people caught doing hook turns because of the danger they present to the jumpers doing them and others around them. Every once in a while some hot shot with a few thousand jumps thinks he's above physics and chance, and does a bandit turn if nobody is watching.
Maybe Cédric ran out of air on final and thought that hooking the turn would help him land into the wind. Maybe he was just hot dogging. Regardless, if he was an up jumper and he did a hook turn, he should've known better and performed a different maneuver. Sad to loose him, but not feeling sorry about the accident itself. Stuff like this is what gives a bad reputation to skydiving in the eyes of people with little or no knowledge of the sport.
Cheers!
Re: That's a shame (Score:5, Informative)
In all that time, he has had to use his reserve chute 4 times, however all 4 uses were in the first 4,000 jumps, he hadn't had to use it in almost 20 years.
His comment was that due to modern chute designs and modern safety practices, if you're just "jumping out of the plane, opening the chute, and landing", the odds of dying are very low. If you do stunts, formations, or fly a sport chute, your risk goes way up.
He showed us a video of a reserve being used, we also carried an AAD (automatic activation device) and frankly, they have saved a lot of lives in skydiving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_activation_device [wikipedia.org]
In short, depending on the model of course, but for a student, if you're falling more than 29 feet per second when you pass through 750 feet above the ground, it fires a wedge cutter that cuts the closing loop to the reserve chute, which is spring loaded so it will deploy even if you're upside down, tumbling, or whatever...
It takes no more than 250 feet beyond that to fully open a student chute and 250 feet beyond that to fully arrest your sink rate to just a few feet per second, so even if you're completely passed out, you'll live.
Over 1,000 people have had their lives saved via an AAD, and most jump zones require them for all jumpers.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hook turn maneuver: Apparently wrong (Score:2, Informative)
From the report, it sounds like Cédric performed a maneuver called "hook turn"
According to some source on linuxfr.org who claims he was a friend of Cedric as well as a fellow skydiver and was there with him the very day he died, he did not attempt said jump but something went wrong, possibly because of the day's high winds (but within the limit of acceptable speed). While Cedric had been learning about hook turns or whatever they are called, he apparently did not attempt it that day and was extremely square on security in general.
Source: http://linuxfr.org/nodes/100355/comments/1500621