BASE jumping is the recreational sport of jumping from fixed objects, using a parachute

to descend safely to the ground. "BASE" is an acronym that stands for four categories
of fixed objects from which one can jump: building, antenna, span, and earth
(cliff).[1][2] Participants exit from a fixed object such as a cliff, and after an optional
freefall delay, deploy a parachute to slow their descent and land. A popular form of
BASE jumping is wingsuit BASE jumping.
In contrast to other forms of parachuting, such as skydiving from airplanes, BASE jumps
are performed from fixed objects which are generally much lower altitude, and BASE
jumpers typically carry only one parachute. BASE jumping is significantly more
hazardous than other forms of parachuting, and is widely considered to be one of the
most dangerous extreme sports.
Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have been the first person to build and test a
parachute,[4] by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice in 1617 when over sixty-
five years old.[5] However, these and other sporadic incidents were one-time
experiments, not the systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting.

BASE jumping appears to hold a five- to eightfold increased risk of injury or death
compared with that of skydiving. The number of accidents and helicopter activation
increases with the annual number of jumps. Further analysis into the injury severity
spectrum and associated hospital burden is required.

[Left]: BASE jumping exit point and cause of fatality infographic and statistics.
To date almost 200 BASE jumpers have been killed during the modern activity from
between 1981 and 2012, of whom 50 have died whilst flying a wingsuit. Wingsuiting
from a plane by contrast does contribute some added risks to regular skydiving but its
injury and fatality rates are likely to be in line with average skydiving statistics [see
bottom of page].
Around 80 BASE deaths have been caused by failure to deploy a parachute, 60 from
body strikes, 19 from canopy strikes and 17 from line twists. Many expect this number
to be higher due to the level of press coverage surrounding incidents (compared to fatal
car crashes for instance). Whilst it is useful to see which exit point was linked to a
fatality (71.5% cliffs), this figure would be more useful if we knew the non-fatal total of
BASE jumps from each BASE platform.

The fatality rate for skydiving is around 1 death per 100,000 jumps and the average is
skewed by experienced jumpers misjudging high-performance landings (swooping).
Ignoring these competency-based breakdowns for a moment, performing 17 skydives
in a year poses around the same average risk of fatality as driving a car 10,000 miles
in a year. For BASE jumping it is closer to a roughly estimated 1 death per 500-1000
jumps so is, roughly, more than a hundred times more fatally prone to risk than
skydiving.
It should be noted however that a blanket average of risk is rarely helpful as each
participant in the sport will have his/her own perception of acceptable risk for a given
facet of the sport, some DISCIPLINES being inherently more risky than others. For
example: each year in the US around 3,500,000 skydives are completed, of which
500,000 are tandem skydives. There are around 35,000 active participants annually
(not including tandem students) of whom, on average, nearly 25 per year are fatally
injured. By breaking down these figures we can work out that a tandem skydive carries
a fatal risk of 1/500,000 jumps accounting for an average of 4% of skydiving deaths in
the USA over a 10 year period. By contrast high performance landing has accounted for
an average of 34% of annual skydiving deaths over a 10 year period in the US (and far
less than 500,000 high performance landings have been performed). From this
breakdown, we can suggest that high performance landing carries at least eight times
more fatal risk than tandem skydiving. Similar breakdowns also apply to aspects of
wingsuit-BASE and BASE jumping, however a lack of regulation in BASE means that
non-fatal jump data is not logged, and thus unavailable.