Why is skydiving centre where 28 people have died over the years still open?

California’s Lodi Parachute centre has seen 28 people fall to their deaths over the past 40 years and has been hailed as America’s most dangerous skydiving centre.

However, it remains open. Why?

In 2016, 18-year-old Tyler Turner plummeted to his death after the parachute he shared with his instructor failed to open.

The teenagers’ tragic death prompted the passing of ‘Tyler’s law’, signed by the governor of California, which makes skydiving operations responsible for ensuring their instructors are fully qualified, after an investigation into the incident proved this was not the case with Tyler’s instructor.

Before Tyler’s death, 21 people had died at the centre, according to the Sacramento Bee newspaper. Five people have died since.

His mother, Francine Turner, assumed they would shut it down, and could not understand how the establishment remained open: ‘So many things had happened out there, you would think the authorities would come in and shut it down because it’s unsafe.

‘I mean, what do you need more than a death to prove that it’s unsafe? Multiple deaths prove that even more,’ she told The Times.

Turner is campaigning for greater regulations when it comes to skydiving.

Currently, The Federal Aviation Authority has some specific certification requirements, but the voluntary United States Parachute Association and it ‘rely on self-regulation from within the skydiving community for most training and operational requirements.’

There is a database of fatal skydiving incidents recorded by the association, however as they are self-reported and on a voluntary basis, some may go unrecorded.

Because of this, there are no official figure that record how many people die in parachute accidents in the United States.

The former owner of the Lodi centre, Bill Dause, said that some accidents were inevitable as skydiving is an inherently dangerous activity: ‘We’ve had many tragic accidents out here and all of them could have been prevented if someone just stayed home and did something else.’

Fran said that an hour after her son’s death, she walked into the centre which was ‘business as usual.’

‘I’m walking around completely dumbfounded, wondering, ‘Do you not know that my son just died an hour ago outside? Do you not realise this?’

Dause compared the death of Tyler to a car accident that could happen on the road: ‘If you’re driving down the freeway and you see this big car wreck in front of you, you don’t get out of your car and get a horse and go home, you keep going.

‘And that’s what we do, it’s part of the sport. People get hurt but you just keep going.’

Dause said that closing the centre would have harmed his business, and accused Tyler’s mother of ‘contacting every news source about the tragedy and ‘stirring the pot because she thinks I could bring someone back or it was my fault and this wasn’t done right’, report Mail Online.

In 2021, Turner won her legal battle against Dause, with a judge ruling that he was personally responsible for a $40 million settlement.

The 81-year-old is yet to pay the grieving mother, and claims he only lost the case as he could not afford an attorney.

Fran said the money was not the reason she had confronted him in court, and rather wanted to let as many people as she could know about the dangers of the centre.

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