As I drove to work this morning, I noticed something odd: a person attached to a parachute slowly drifting over the city. This was somewhat alarming because for a little while it seemed as though he was going to land on a busy street, but eventually he wandered off towards Target and looked poised to land behind it by the time I drove by.
I’m not sure what happened to cause this - he was still a good 5 or 6 miles from the nearest airfield - but it did get me wondering what would have happened if he’d actually landed on Target’s flat roof.
The building has probably has roof access but that stair case up to the roof wouldn’t do him any good if it was locked, which it surely would be. These days I guess he could call the store on his cell phone (if they believed him), but what if part of the person’s predicament damaged their phone as well as caused them to make a poorly planned landing? Or they didn’t have a phone, or hell, if it was 1980.
Lacking the ability to call the store for help off the roof, what would their options be to get off it? Stomp and hope someone investigated? Try to shout and get the attention of someone in the parking lot? Would a store have a fire escape to climb down?
Realistically, how would our phoneless ill-fated parachuter marooned on a business’s roof get rescued?
If it was the top of a Target in a mall, as said, just shout to people in the parking lot.
But the much scarier and more intriguing scenario is landing on top of a tall skyscraper. It’s plausible that the access door might be locked from both sides, though it’s hard to see why it would be locked from the outside except for fear of invading aliens, but something tells me that that’s the way the bureaucracy would want it, just because you never know.
The tall-skyscraper scenario is an interesting one. Pounding on the door is probably useless because it’s probably separated from any occupied area by a service floor. My first thought would be to find some way to write some notes and fling them off the edge of the building – you’d have to be able to write quite a few of them. Failing that, just randomly throw things so you get noticed down below. If you throw enough stuff, cops will show up and you get to wave your arms.
Or you might see if there are A/C units or such up there and disable one, say by flinging your parachute into the fan blades. Sit and wait for maintenance to show up. If it’s winter in a northern clime your options are more limited!
Back in the pre-cell phone Eighties I worked in a gas station situated on the corner of a busy intersection. The story told to me supposedly took place a few years earlier and involved an early morning collision resulting in the immediate death of one driver and the DOA of the other, who, though intoxicated, kept asking the ambulance attendant if his friend was okay. By the time the police arrived at the hospital to get a statement, the drunk driver was dead and the story about his friend was dismissed as delirium since no other injuries or witnesses were reported at the scene. The noises from the roof of the gas station were also dismissed (as birds or vermin) and forgotten about as soon as they ceased several days after the crash. The body of the drunk’s passenger (apparently thrown through the windshield and traveling in an arc 30 feet in length and 20 feet in height) wasn’t discovered until several months after the crash when it was spotted by someone in a bucket truck doing maintenance on one of the traffic lights. I never bought it, but it was a great story to tell the new guys working the graveyard shift.
If there’s some wind you’d secure your chute to something solid and let the air pick it up, someone should notice soon. You also have a lot of parachute cord and material you could make a rope from to descend. If you’re on something tall enough you can attempt a base jump.
Do you honestly think that no one would notice a very large canopy with a person hanging off of it drifting into a populated area? You did after all and you were fairly far away. Skydivers are very visible from long distances. Someone would simply call the fire department to help get them down if there was no other way.
A bigger worry is jumping into a much more remote area and getting stuck in trees or powerlines. In that case, the jump plane pilot or ground crew (if any) is generally going to know that the jumper didn’t land as expected and initiate a search and rescue effort. Parachutes are big, bright and not that hard to spot.
In semi-related news, I witnessed a skydiving accident when I was a teenager. It was during a small town festival and the town paid to have three skilled skydivers jump and land on a smallish river bank area in front of a crowd. You could see the skydivers thousands of feet in the air as soon as their canopy deployed. The first two sailed over the wooded area into the landing zone perfectly. The third came in too low, clipped the top of a very large oak tree, and fell straight down through the branches. He somehow survived the fall but broke his neck and back in the process. The last I heard was that he was expected to live because there was a medical crew right there when it happened.
I heard a similar story about a crash involving a motorcycle on a rural highway in the 70’s. The driver mentioned a passenger when he came to in the hospital. The passenger was eventually found a few feet into the bush on the other side of the ditch, hidden by underbrush.
Being trapped on the roof or terrace of a tall building after the access door closed on you is, I think, a staple of sitcoms.
And then there are stories of people getting trapped in chimneys. I remember one from a fraternity at Cornell about 20-30 years ago. As I remember, the people in the house heard noises but the person wasn’t discovered until it was too late.
That’s because the scenario in the OP has the person on the roof of a Target store. I don’t think that a typical Target store roof is nearly high enough to parachute off. Unless you’re imagining one at the top of a fifty-story building.
Even a 50 story building is way too low to jump safely from with a standard parachute. That is called BASE jumping and it is an extremely dangerous, extreme sport that requires tons of experience, special equipment and even then, plenty of them still manage to kill themselves doing it. The most likely result is that you will hit something (probably the side of the building you just jumped off of or another nearby), your parachute will fold and you will splat almost as well as if you didn’t have a parachute at all.
I jumped off a building at over 800 feet (the Las Vegas Stratosphere SkyJump). That is a vertical zip-line and designed to be safe but there is no way I would try the same thing with any parachute.
That is nothing more dumb than surviving a near worse case scenario and then decide it is a good idea to take a much larger risk because you don’t feel like waiting around for the rescue crew. There are plenty of ways to get attention even in the extremely unlikely event that hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see a giant piece of fabric with a person dangling from it land off target.
My understanding is that packing a parachute isn’t exactly self-evident … I’ve known people who were professional 'chute packers … all day long they pack the 'chutes for the next set of jumpers.
Is this something that any jumper has to learn, or is it a skilled profession?
If you tried to jump off the Targets I’ve seen, you’d find yourself in the parking lot with a broken leg, and the top of your chute might still be lying on the roof.
On the other hand, I expect you could wind the chute and its traces into a kind of rope and climb down it.
How about tie a few shroud lines to the building somehow and dangle the rest of the parachute over the side of the building near the doors.
Having this giant flag/kite thingy flapping in the breeze will be noticed by at least one of the first 10 people in/out that door, even if not a soul on Earth saw you land up there. When they look up, you lean over the edge and wave “Hi” then shout for help.
I’m surprised somebody thought this was hard.
Ref Shagnasty: In USAF we had training for dealing with landing in powerlines, tall trees, or against cliff faces. We also had what amounts to rappelling gear included in the parachute rig for just that reason. Self-rescue was the assumed scenario. If the parachute hung up with you high off the ground, you’d “just” treat it as a belay and rappel down to the ground. Still dicey, but better than freezing or starving up in that tree.
I would not want to tangle with those landings with a sport parachute. OTOH, if I’m using a sport parachute there’s probably a fire department and a hospital nearby instead of locals with pitchforks that want to skewer my ass.
Yes, it’s something student skydivers are taught early on in their training. It helps them learn the components of the gear and their function, and lowers the cost of a somewhat expensive hobby.
There are professional packers and some experienced jumpers drop their gear off with the packers after every jump. I very rarely paid anyone to pack for me for a couple of reasons- I wanted to keep the cost down, and since I never had to use my reserve parachute in all my years of jumping, I figured I must be doing something right. I had soft, on-heading openings the great majority of the time. Why mess with that?
Most packers aren’t really professionals, they’re skydivers who don’t have a lot of money so they pay for their jumps by packing for other people.* Pack a few parachutes and earn enough for a jump.
Most experienced skydivers own their own gear but most skydiving centers keep rental gear on hand for students so someone has to pack them. Most skydiving centers also own the tandem rigs- some tandem instructors own their rig and pack for themselves but they are in the minority.
*I guess that makes them professionals since they’re getting paid.
Why repack it? Face into the wind, let the chute fill up with air and run off the side. I bet you could jump off a very low building this way if you needed to.
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Is this something that any jumper has to learn, or is it a skilled profession?
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Sport parachutists nearly always jump with 2 parachutes: main (deployed every time) and reserve (deployed when main malfunctions - which should be quite rare). Regulations (in the US at least) allow sport jumpers to pack their own main parachute - which nearly all of them do - but require that the reserve be packed by a licensed rigger (who is indeed skilled and usually professional).
It is not hard to pack a parachute properly - you can learn to do it in an afternoon. By contrast, a licensed rigger requires a decent amount of training which covers such things as how to deal with the many small (and large) variations in canopies and harnesses, how to test for problems, how to do repairs, etc.
This can work, and it’s a more or less standard way that paragliders get airborne. But it’s a skill in its own right, and would be both difficult and dangerous to attempt off a building without a lot of practice and careful judgment.