Facilitates BASE jump categorization, enabling jumpers to progress safely through different risk levels. Supports incident analysis, recurrency protocols, and site-specific guidelines, ensuring informed risk management.
Make it easy for jumpers to find the slowest possible progression from less risky flights to more advanced flights with the possibility of never doing the advanced flights at all
Provide categorization that allows for fine-grained, objective analysis of incident data
Provide categorization that allows for assessing hypotheses on BASE incident data
Provide categorization that allows for the development of higher specificity recurrency and training protocols
Provide categorization that allows for effective advocacy of our activity, namely that there are gradations of risk-taking within the activity and we have a pool of senior citizen jumpers who stick to greens and blues.
Provide categorization that enables the creation of practical guidelines from local BASE groups (FBA, SBA, BASE Access, SBK)
Provide categorization that forces self-honesty about one's risk taking
Non-goals
Provide fine-grained distinction on the more advanced end of exit points.
Sensitive sites
In the past there has been an instinct to tell folks that sensitive jumps are worse than they actually are
We instead propose that exits where site access is threatened be labeled 'sensitive' and local regulating bodies issue guidelines that set higher standards for jumping at those locations even if they are technically labeled green or blue flights
Hypotheses
Flyers who have proven some base line of skill and follow recurrency protocols can sustainably repeat green and blue jumps for a lifetime
Flights that offer lower margin yield a higher incident rate per jump.
Guiding principles for categorization
The first version of code was written to allow for finer grain distinctions within blue and black categorizations. But we feel it is important to first get the algo working at a higher level with respect to the below prescriptions before iterating on finer grained distinctions
Green
This is the ideal exit for someone's first jumps, or for someone looking to regain currency
Must have a clean, solid ledge
Feet are on level left to right
Large gear-up area that is mostly flat and allows one to walk up to put feet over the ledge without much balance
Must have soft landing (ie not rock/road) landing that is at least 20m x 20m
Blue
A jumper should be able to safely recover from a minor mistake on any jump that is either green or blue
a slip
an offheading
linetwists
partial canopy collapse
tailwing bucked on exit
tension knot
Black
A black jump should be able to be safely completed in any low wind conditions regardless of wind direction or thermic activity.
Black jumps require consistent performance; falling below the intermedian quartile of performance may result in severe injury or death.
Red
A red jump will result in severe injury or death if not completed with environmental conditions that need to be timed precisely
Browsing code
Code is implemented in pure kotlin that can be run on any platform
