Oops. Name one essential piece of equipment for skydiving.

OK, one of my standard jokes is that the first time I go skydiving I don’t want to wear a parachute. I don’t want to take the chance it won’t open. As for reality…

Man jumps out of plane without parachute

So, uh, maybe a static line…

SSG Schwartz

What will those performance artists think of next?

The standard line, “Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane?” isn’t even appropriate.

I dunno. I’d say a plane is more essential than a parachute. You can go skydiving without a parachute. Once.

Usually, it’s the 29 year old women I know who consider jumping w/o a parachute.

Who the hell, encumbered with terminal velocity, bounces off a roof?

:points down: Apparently… that guy.

I wonder if he got some nice photos.

Wait. There was a skydiving *instructor *with him? The hell?

“Oh, don’t bother with that pesky parachute! Just flap your arms really hard, you’ll be fine!”

(Stolen from this page.)

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Before you go skydiving without a parachute, its probably a good idea to scout out the locations of the closest marshmallow factories.

It seems that the guy who jumped was there as an observer, and snuck out the door of the plane after everyone had jumped, just before the pilot closed it. The skydiving instructor had no reason to think he was going to jump.

Had he carried a GPS he could have avoided the roof.

>Had he carried a GPS he could have avoided the roof.

I think a GPS tells you where you are. Not the other way around.

I don’t see it on Youtube anymore, but there was a similar incident about ten years back in (I seem to recall) North Carolina. An experienced diver went up just to shoot video in the plane and without thinking followed the divers out the door when they jumped.

In the video (from his helmet cam), you see him filming everyone free-falling as if nothing was wrong. Only after the others pull their cords (and he presumably reaches for where his cord would be) do you see him suddenly look down at himself and start whipping around in a panic. He didn’t survive the fall, although the tape did.

I thought the key was to become distracted before you hit the ground. Then you can fly.

Bet he won’t do that again…

He doesn’t have the guts.

That’s depressing. In that case you have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, by realizing your mistake soon enough you could have held on to one of your friends with a parachute, but the acceleration from free fall to having a parachute seems pretty extreme from the videos I’ve seen.

As they say, it’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.