I did 3 static line jumps back in the early 80’s when I was at university. These were old-school round parachutes that steered, but slowly. We had no radios but there was a jumpmaster on the ground and there was an enormous arrow on a pivot. You just had to point yourself in the direction the arrow pointed and they would guide you in.
At the beginning of the training there was a presentation about how safe the equipment was. It was about how strong each line and buckle was, how it would deploy if badly packed, etc. Then we went out onto the airfield and the instuctor said something like “Here is where you are aiming for. Don’t land in the trees over there, the power lines over there, or that pond. And if you land in that farmer’s field he’ll shoot at you.”
Like others have said, the 2nd time is scarier than the 1st because you know what’s going to happen. And a comment about jumping from a “perfectly good plane”. Ours sure didn’t look it. The story was that it was rebuilt from two planes that had been tossed around in a tornado. The color on the wing didn’t match the fuselage. There were several holes in the instrument panel where gauges were missing. It didn’t look all too safe.
On my 3rd and final jump I was going to be the last out so I was the first into the plane. With all the squirming around to get to the back of the plane and back to the front I managed (unknown to me at the time) to get my left testicle trapped under the harness. So exit the plane, the chute opens, and WHAM I’m floating down from 3000 feet with most of my bodyweight on my left nut. Trying to shift around in the harness just made it worse. I hit the target perfectly and the jumpmaster on the ground asked me if I wanted to go to a competition with the club the following week but I declined, in a rather high pitched voice.
2008, in Las Vegas. I was a teensy bit over the weight limit, but they let me do it anyway, and paradoxically assigned me the largest instructor as my tandem partner. It was really, really fun – I still remember how amazing it was to look around and see so far, and so much… hard to describe, really. I highly recommend it for anyone curious.
A friend of mine tried to convince me to do this once. Not just No, but Hell No. “You probably won’t die” is not the kind of marketing that appeals to me.
I don’t get this. You’re the second person in this thread to state that they had a ball crushed by the harness. I was strapped in so tight that I literally couldn’t stand upright. It was explained to me that when you’re in freefall & that chute opens, it’s like the brakes being slammed on & that you’re body will slide down in the harness & it will hurt your crotch if it wasn’t uncomfortably tight beforehand, just like you’ll hit the steering wheel/dashboard/back of front seat if you’re in a car accident w/o wearing a seat belt. Yes, the seatbelt will leave a bruise (& that’s how PD can tell who was sitting where, by looking at the bruise line on one’s chest) but it’s a lot better than the alternative.
This is a long post, so TLDR: read the first few paragraphs for some general advice, and the rest are my stories of someone who started and then abandoned skydiving as a hobby.
I have 7 jumps.
The first thing to ask yourself is if you just want to try it once as an experience, or if you are thinking of taking it up as a hobby.
If you just want to experience once, do a tandem. The training required is minimal, the risk is very low, and you get to experience freefall with some assurance that the person strapped to your back has done it thousands of times, so you don’t need to stress about the likelihood that you’ll live.
If you think it might be a new hobby, I still recommend a tandem first. Keep in mind that certification, where you can jump without an instructor, will take at least 25 jumps, so having the first be tandem shouldn’t be a big deal. I understand why people want to do their first jump solo, but I think it’s usually pride overriding prudence. If you do want your first jump to be solo you can probably find a dropzone (DZ) that will allow you to static line your first jump, but then you don’t get any freefall. Many DZs also offer Accelerated Free Fall (AFF) training as a first jump. The DZ I went to did, but it was more expensive than a tandem because they had two instructors jump with you. They hold onto you during freefall to steady you, and would deploy the chute if you had difficulty.
If you want to get certified I highly recommend Instructor-Assisted Deployment (IAD) to start, which is where instead of a static line you have a normal rig. It might be difficult finding a DZ that offers it, though. A static line has a shorter deployment time, and a very hard jolt, so it isn’t the same feeling as you’ll have when you progress to deploying yourself. After doing IAD, then trying a static line, I hated the static line.
That was probably a KingAir, which is sometimes referred to in the skydiving community as a “turbine". That’s the type of plane I did my first, tandem jump out of. The benches and big door were really, really nice for a tandem. If you can find a DZ using one, go there. Most DZs are using Cessnas, which are a lot (and I mean a lot) more cramped.
My first attempt at skydiving was with a group when I was in my mid-twenties. We arrived at the DZ early in the morning, and then sat around all day waiting for the clouds to clear. As the joke goes, you don’t want to jump through clouds because all the raindrops are pointy-side up. When evening was approaching they offered us three choices: jump from 8,000 feet with little freefall; get a partial refund; or come back another day and jump from the planned 15,000 feet. Half the group chose to jump, but I and some others decided to come back later. I didn’t end up going back, so it was wasted money.
The vast majority of my time skydiving was spent sitting in an airport hanger waiting for clouds to clear. You get to know a lot of interesting people, but it can be annoying.
Years later, in my early thirties, my younger brother wanted to do a tandem jump, and I agreed to go with him. It was a blast. I wasn’t very nervous going up. I rock climbed in my youth which cured me of any fear of heights and gave me trust of safety equipment and procedures. I still hesitated briefly at the door. Many people, myself included, experience sensory overload for the first few jumps. There’s rushing wind, the feeling that you just did something really stupid, the ground way down there that you know you’re falling towards at an insane speed but still seems very static, and so much adrenaline. I remember the emotions of freefall, and the impressions, but it seemed to go by in an eyeblink.
Then the chute deployed. I’ll echo the sentiment that you should tighten up your harness on the ground until it’s almost uncomfortable. I didn’t, and then it was very uncomfortable while hanging thousands of feet in the air. It was still fun, hanging up there, but when the guy strapped to my back gave me the option of a “rollercoaster" ride down, or a slow descent, I chose the quicker option. With a lot of tight loops and swinging around, we were on the ground I was extremely excited and happy to have done it.
A few years later my brother decided to take up skydiving as a hobby, and again I agreed to go with him. We did the 4 hour or so solo jump course, and up we went. The ride up wasn’t bad, but we were crammed into a Cessna 182 which was much different that the KingAir of the tandem jump. Think of four people practically sitting on each other in the back of a rinky-dink plane with no seats. Then they open the door, and you have to climb out. That’s the most scared I’ve been in my life. Not just scared, but locked-up panic. You have to sit in the door and grab the strut under the wing, then you have to step off and hang from the strut with nothing under your feet. Thousands of feet in the air. Once I was hanging there I regretted it, it seemed like such a stupid thing to do, but there’s no way back into the plane. Then the instructor signaled to let go, so I did.
My arch was horrible. The instructor later said instead of an arch it was more of a fetal position, and he was worried I would go through my risers. The deployment went fine, though, other than some line twists. Once I was confident my canopy was good, and did a few test turns, it was utterly amazing. It’s hard to describe how it feels to be flying through the sky. As others have said, it’s quiet, and you’re just floating along in the air with the earth spread out under you. I had a radio with an instructor telling me to turn this way and that. It was great.
Then my radio fell off. They had attached it with rubber bands to my harness, and one rubber band came loose, then the other, and down went the radio. This was probably due to my poor position when my chute deployed. If I’d had more experience I might have grabbed it before it fell, but I didn’t want to let go of my handles.
The ground training assumed I would have someone on the radio to guide me down, so while they covered the mechanics of operating the chute and how to recover from emergencies, they barely touched on how to position for landing. It’s somewhat like a plane with an engine failure: you get one chance, and you’re going to hit the ground one way or the other, so you better get it right the first time. Experienced skydivers seem to take it for granted, but while it’s not complicated, it’s not easy. The parachute is basically a wing, with a horrible glide slope. If you face upwind you can have virtually no ground speed, and if you face downwind you can end up with high groundspeed. I found out that it’s very hard to judge one from the other when you have no experience.
During training the experienced people on the ground direct the student to fly in directions that will eventually line you up for landing. Without a radio, and having no experience, I had no idea which direction to go. I tried to signal to the ground that I wasn’t in radio contact, with what probably seemed like random thrashing, but I was trying to point to my chest, where the radio was supposed to be, and making cutting gestures and such to let them know the radio was gone. Apparently they didn’t understand my signals, and once on the ground they told my they were getting very annoyed and thought I was an idiot, because they kept yelling in the radio that I shouldn’t be doing what I did. I ended up way out of position, on the wrong side of the airport, over industrial parks with no good landing outs, but what I was doing was trying to figure out which way the wind was going and how that would affect my position.
Luckily I had watched a few YouTube videos about landing beforehand, and had asked for the ground instructor to go over the landing pattern, showing it on a map of the airport. They hadn’t covered it in training, but I had memorized that each turn cost about 100 feet of altitude, so the first turn in the pattern to come perpendicular to your landing should be at 600 feet, then the final turn to approach should be at 300 feet, lining up at 200 to 150 feet. I landed way long, but still at the airport, so I consider it a success.
That first landing was very bad, though. If I had a radio they were supposed to tell me when to flare to slow down my descent and forward momentum. I flared too early, which dropped my right out of the sky from 10 or 20 feet. Both my knees were messed up for weeks.
Skydivers will joke that the drive to the airport is more dangerous than the jumps. The statistics of deaths from skydiving versus driving backs this up, but what they leave out is that while few die skydiving there are few skydivers who haven’t been seriously injured. Sprained or broken ankles are common. One guy I talked to dislocated his shoulder because he hit an updraft on landing and was flipped over. You’re less likely to die skydiving than driving, but much more likely to be injured.
I’ll skip the stories of my other jumps, other than to say in my limited number of jumps I never got the hang of landing. None were as bad as my first solo, and I had one that was nearly perfect except I kept my legs up for some reason and came down gently on my butt, but most of them were a mess of a tumble. Flare too early and you hit too hard vertically, flare too late and you hit with too much forward velocity. I’m sure some people have the instinctual feel for it on their first jump, but it seems I’m not one of those people.
I managed to have all my seven jumps with my brother, on the same plane. My last jump, personally, was uneventful, but my brother could have died.
Our first five jumps, after the tandem, were at a DZ where the instructor and owner was a grizzled old guy with over 3,000 jumps under his belt. He could be fun, with some good dry humor, but when it came to instruction he took things very seriously. I have a lot of respect for him. Unfortunately he up and retired to Hawaii partway through the season, and there weren’t any other qualified instructors at that DZ. We decided to switch to another DZ which only offered static line instead of IAD. I didn’t know it beforehand, but the DZ we switched to was new, and was the remnants of a DZ that had shut down because they killed a kid. I don’t say that lightly, but the facts seem to be that the reserve wasn’t properly packed, as the Automatic Activation Device (AAD) wasn’t installed correctly. I was aware of this incident, but didn’t know the new DZ had any connection. To be fair, the new owner was a young guy who probably didn’t have anything do with that, but the instructor had worked there previously, and while I don’t know if that instructor had anything to do with that incident, I wouldn’t be surprised, because what happened to my brother seems to me to be the same packing failure.
My brother jumped first, so I didn’t even know anything had gone wrong until I had jumped and was on the ground.
The jumps at our previous DZ were from 5,000, and as I said were Instructor Assisted Deployment. This DZ didn’t offer IAD, only static line, and the instructor wanted to jump at 2,000 feet. My brother didn’t feel comfortable with that low of a deployment so they agreed to 3,000. I’ll also say that the instructor, while he did go over safety procedures, didn’t seem to take it very seriously.
My brother jumped, and upon deployment started spinning. He had experienced line twists on previous jumps, so he started trying to clear the line twist. Static line jumps are notorious for causing twists, so it was expected. What was unexpected is that he was experiencing toggle fire, which is a condition where one toggle, or handle/brake, comes loose during deployment and causes a spin. Google toggle fire if you want to see some scary skydiving moments. My brother and I were never instructed on this type of failure, and he didn’t know what was going on. Jumping from a lower altitude, and not making the connection that he was losing altitude much faster than he was used to due to the spin, he fought the line twist nearly all the way down. The guy on the ground was yelling, over and over, to pull the red handle (cut away and deploy the reserve), but my brother was concentrating so much on his situation that he says he never heard him.
He finally checked his altitude at about 1,000 feet. That’s way below when you are supposed to give up and deploy the reserve. He estimates he pulled the handle at 700 feet, which is about the minimum where it’s even expected to fully deploy. He did get under canopy but was over the airport hangers, and just barely, by feet, made it to grass instead of tarmac. He literally made a foot-deep divot in the grass with his ass, about six feet long, and he thinks if he hadn’t lifted his legs up he would have broken something. He had a bruised tailbone and sprained hand (it was impressively swollen the next day) to show for it.
The instructor was annoyed that my brother had deployed the reserve, especially since the AAD had fired, which costs hundreds of dollars to replace, and only highly trained packers can pack a reserve, so that’s even more money. I think the instructor is lucky we didn’t sue him, because toggle fire is usually a packing error.
My brother actually wanted to go back up one more time that day, because, as he said, if he didn’t get back on the horse immediately he never would. I talked him out of it because I had no trust with that DZ at that point. He hasn’t jumped since, and instead took up scuba diving. When I asked him a few years later if he wanted to jump again he said he could only afford one extreme hobby at a time. I don’t blame him.
Every spring I think I might try again and finish my certification, but I also haven’t jumped since. Maybe one of these years.
I don’t tell these stories to discourage anyone from trying it. Skydiving has been one of the great thrills of my life. Do a tandem, the risks are very low, and you’ll have an experience you can reflect back on for a lifetime. If you are inclined, take it up as a hobby. Many people I talked to have hundreds or thousands of jumps and never had to deploy their reserve. That said, as with any extreme sport, the best defense against the risks is to be as educated as possible.
I did a tandem jump in 1990. When the chute opened, it broke my C2 vertebra wide open. I now have a nice long surgical scar from the back of my head to my lower neck.
I have never done this, but wouldn’t mind giving it a try some day. I suspect we have a number of latent daredevils in the family. Back when I was visiting my family at Christmas, we were playing “The Game of Things” one night, and one of the questions was “Things you’d like to do before you die.” I think with one exception, everyone around the table wrote some variation of “skydiving”.
I have no personal skydiving experience. I turned down an offer to go Airborne Ranger in the 1970’s. I figured that while getting shot at, and jumping from a plane, were both unpleasant prospects, being shot at after jumping from a plane was too risky for me.
And I recall the story of an Airborne parachute class. The instructor finished and asked for questions. A recruit piped up. “But Sarge, suppose my main 'chute don’t deploy, and then my backup 'chute don’t deploy - what do I do then, Sarge? What do I do then?” The instructor looked him in the eye and said, “Why, you just ride it on out, soldier!”
I do have a family story about accidental skydiving. An ancestor was an early balloonist, was even married while aloft. He and his bride were off soaring one day when alas, the bag started leaking. Uncle Icarus climbed the ropes to sit atop the bag and apply a patch. He finished, and stood… and a gust of wind blew him off the bag. Fortunately, it blew the basket in the same direction, and that’s where he landed. A very brief flight. Whew.
I envisage the image of a chic young damsel musing, “I shall marry a skydiver. I look so good in black.”
