Gravity Is Not a Control Measure

The recent District Court outcome in NSW, where $250,000 in combined fines were ordered against a skydiving operator and its sole director following a double fatality, is not a “high-risk industry” curiosity. It is a straight application of duty, risk, and control failure.

The hazard was a modified aircraft step that introduced a snag point. The failure was allowing that condition to exist without engineering assurance, inspection, or an effective control set.

The consequence was fatal.

There is a persistent industry myth that inherent risk changes the legal test. It does not.

The Work Health and Safety legislative framework requires risks to be eliminated or, where elimination is not reasonably practicable, minimised so far as is reasonably practicable (in a super-short explanatory manner that good ol' SJ prefers...). That test applies equally to a warehouse, a quarry, or a drop zone at 10,000 feet. The altitude does not grant exemptions. It just reduces your margin for error to zero.

On the facts reported, the step modification created a predictable entanglement mechanism during egress. That is not an abstract hazard. It is a direct interface between human, equipment, and aircraft structure at the exact moment where stability is compromised by design. In any other setting, we would call it a pinch or snag hazard on a moving interface and engineer it out. In aviation, the expectation is higher, not lower, because the consequence is immediate and irreversible.

As a good Boeing jockey mate of mine once said, "we can't pull over and call roadside assist up there."

A basic control pathway was available:

• Eliminate the hazard by removing the modification or redesigning it to an engineered, tested, and approved configuration.

  • If elimination was not practicable, substitute with an approved, manufacturer or regulator-endorsed step system.

  • Apply engineering controls such as geometry that prevents snagging, smooth radii, guarded edges, and validated clearances under dynamic loading.

  • Then administrative controls, documented inspection regimes, defect reporting that actually triggers removal from service, and competency based checks for staff.

  • PPE is irrelevant at that interface; you are not hi-vizzing a design flaw at 10,000 feet.

The officer duty piece is the part many still underestimate. This case reinforces that directors are not shielded by operational distance or industry norms. Due diligence requires active verification that the business has appropriate resources, processes, and verification in place.

“We have always done it this way” is not a control, and it is not a defence. If anything, it is a flag that the system has not been stress tested. If I hear "we've always done it this "way"-type language, expect a very slow, over-dramatic eye-roll followed by the superannuation hand signal indicating "past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance". I'll then catch up with safety mates that night and chuckle that I came across "one of those again". It's the 21st century, wake up!

There is also a familiar systems pattern here. Late involvement of safety, pressure to commence operations, and reliance on informal knowledge rather than engineered design and documented assurance. Once the asset is in service, normalisation sets in, near misses go unreported or are rationalised, and the system drifts until a low-probability event becomes inevitable. The court outcome is simply the lag indicator catching up.

For operators running high-consequence activities, the practical takeaways are not exotic. Any modification to plant, especially where humans interface during dynamic tasks, requires formal design control. That includes competent design input, hazard analysis, verification against standards, and documented approval before use. Pre-start inspections must be more than a tick box; they need defined rejection criteria and authority to ground the asset. Incident and near miss data must feed back into design, not sit in a register waiting for the next audit.

For those managing contractors or third-party operators, the obligation does not disappear at the gate. You need objective evidence that their controls are effective.

Not a glossy procedure, but proof of design assurance, inspection records, and how defects are identified and removed from service. If you cannot get that evidence, you are accepting the risk.

On a personal note, I will happily leave gravity to physics and keep my risk appetite inside serviceable aircraft (I do enjoy the occasional aerobatical flight to slosh the risk juices around).

The point is not whether you would choose to jump; it is whether the system that enables that jump is engineered to remove foreseeable failure modes.

In this case, it was not, and the law responded exactly as it is designed to.

Stay safe.

SJ