Like a child in a grown-up’s chair, your feet dangle freely as you sit in the open bay of the Cessna 206. Between them and the rolling fields below are 2,000 feet of unplumbed sensation.
As a novice skydiver looking before you leap for the first time, your scalp is tingling and your mouth is dry, but you are ready to take the plunge. For one thing, a one-day course at the Albany Skydiving Center in rural Duanesburg revealed parachuting to be the relatively safe pastime of reasonable men and women rather than the foolhardy stunt of the reckless.
“What you’re about to do is safer than your drive out here,“ Bob Rawlins, who runs the center at which 8.000 people have made their first jump, told you. For another, you remember the vicarious thrill you got from the jump you saw on your arrival and want a taste of the exhilaration you are sure it provided. From a small plane droning 9,000 feet overhead, six dots appeared one by one, fell at different rates and drew together into a clump. The dots then separated and assumed human form as they continued downward at what you begin to discern was a breathtaking clip. Suddenly, long streamers shot out from the hurtling skydivers’ backs and burst into technicolor canopies that seemed to totally arrest what had been 120 mph descents. The parachutists then pirouetted to take full advantage of their bird’s-eye views or glided lazily to graceful standup landings. The parachutists were clad in jumpsuits with oversize sleeves and leggings that slow descent and help them fly one foot sideways for each two feet down during freefall and synchronized “relative work” with other skydivers.
During the skydiving course, you familiarized yourself with the necessary equipment and techniques. You saw slides on the principles of parachuting and learned how to properly put the main parachute on your back and attach the reserve parachute across your stomach. You then hung from the ceiling and showed you could deploy your reserve, practiced exits from a mock plane and executed parachute landings from graduated platforms. Now, sitting on the brink of your jump you know your exit point relative to the target downwind and below was determined by the altitude of the plane, the direction and speed of the wind and the type of parachute you wear. Even on a windless day parachutes do not drop straight, but descend on an angle. The military-type parachute has a round canopy 38 feet in diameter with cutouts in its pie slice panels that give it an equivalent ground speed of seven mph. You use the steering lines to put your back to a 10 mph wind, the maximum a student can jump in, and you “run” at 17 mph. Face into a 10 mph wind and “hold” and you glide backward at three mph. Experienced skydivers use high-performance square canopies with forward thrusts of about 25 mph, allowing them to make headway toward a target into strong winds. A parachute’s forward thrust and steerability not only help ensure you land where you want to, but also affect the force of your landing. Depending on your weight and equipment, the landing impact generally equals the jump off a five-foot-high platform. Your equivalent groundspeed, however, can increase the impact. Rawlins uses the analogy of a jump from the bed of a truck. A jump from the bed when the truck is parked is easy enough. It’s a different proposition when the truck is traveling 30 mph. You must, then, be holding against the wind when you land to minimize impact.
Six paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd airborne division stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina were killed and 157 were injured last March during a parachute exercise in California in 40 mph winds. Rawlins, who began jumping while in the Army at Fort Bragg, said the exercise should have been canceled. He said it was much too windy to jump, especially considering that the parachutes used had little forward thrust to negate the winds during flight and on landings. “That was the higher echelon saying, ‘Go ahead and do it,’ and who was to say no?” Rawlins said. “They wanted to put on a show and they did.”
In the five years prior to the March exercise, the Army said only one in 1,000 military jumps had resulted in an injury requiring hospitalization and there were only about 1.5 deaths per 100,000 jumps.
Running from the container holding your parachute is the static line which will pull your ripcord and deploy your main parachute. In your mind you’re going over the litany that reminds you what you do upon exiting. “Arch, look, reach, pull, check, check,“ you say to yourself. When you jump, you have to arch your back, spread your legs and arms out and back into the “stable position,” which makes you fall stomach first and allows your parachute to deploy properly. You then look for the dummy ripcord on your chest, reach in and pull it. The “dummy ripcord pull” is your prelude to freefalling. Your first five jumps will be of the static line variety and others will be, too, unless you pull the dummy ripcord on at least the last three. The next step is to look over each shoulder and check your canopy. Those checks will almost always reveal a properly inflated canopy, but, on rare occasions, you could be staring at a partial or total failure. Some of the training course slides showed various malfunctions from the point of view of a skydiver checking his canopy. Among the partial failures are a “Mae West,” in which a line trapped over the top of the canopy prevents it from inflating fully, and a blown panel or panels, in which holes or rips in the canopy prevent it from sufficiently slowing descent. One slide showed a streamer or total failure in which the parachute runs out of the container but for some reason does not inflate. “Nobody packs of failure,” Rawlins said when you asked why streamers occurred. Another slide showed an expanse of blue, sunlit sky dotted with white clouds. You and the other students wondered what this peaceful looking picture was doing among the others until you realized it was a view of a total failure in which the parachute never left its container. While you’re sure the rare total failure will send your hand immediately to your reserve ripcord, you wonder if you might mistake a good canopy for a problem one or freeze in indecision on a partial failure. An experienced skydiver puts the rule about using the reserve shoot succinctly: “When in doubt, whip it out.“
Now the plane is on “jump run“ and you’ve followed the “Legs out!“ command shouted over the wind and engine noise by your jumpmaster, the skydiver with hundreds of jumps under his belt who has checked your equipment and selected your exit point. “Ready?“ He yells. “Go!“ You push off from the bay and arch, feeling the wind whipping your jumpsuit and looking at the heavy overcast as your head tilts back. Your heart is fluttering as you fall, but the feeling of an unchecked plunge is followed quickly by a tug from behind signaling the static line has pulled your ripcord. As the parachute streams out you hear the crisp “tharrump” of fabric grabbing air and turn over your shoulder to see the pale green canopy blossom evenly to full inflation. The parachute pulls you firmly into an upright position as you noticed the hush and solitude that have replaced the whining plane, roaring wind and the pilot and four skydivers you were just huddled with.
Relaxing at the site of a perfect canopy, you pull your eyes downward and are confronted with a view of a mammoth quilt of green and brown patches bordered by unruly tufts you realize are stands of trees and dotted here and there with ponds the size of dimes. The spectacle is enhanced by the fact that you are floating over it rather than anchored to a mountain summit or looking through an airliner’s portal. Your slow, steady descent and the great distance to earth give the impression you are swaying gently in a swing set at a fixed height and will remain so, barring the unlikely event of someone coming by to pluck you off. This dreamy state continues for a time until you are startled by a nearby voice calling, “Lefft toggle! Left toggle!’ It’s a skydiver standing in the drop zone with a bull horn who wants you to steer to a safe landing. You make a few turns to keep yourself heading toward a large X on the ground and prepare to land as objects below expand in normal size. You bring your legs together—two are stronger than one—bend them slightly and look at the horizon, not the ground, waiting for the impact. Your boots hit the field with a pretty good thud, followed by your backside and shoulder. You pop up as your parachute collapses, feeling the beginnings of a sore knee from a less than perfect fall.
To come are the congratulatory handshakes and “thumbs up” signs of the other skydivers and advice for your next jump, such as remembering to pull the dummy ripcord. Your jumpmaster would cite the “sensory explosion” of a first jump when you asked him how you could’ve left the ripcord snug in your pocket for the 3 1/2-minute trip. But you did execute the most important step in skydiving. Rawlins had told the members of your training class they paid for the instruction, the equipment and the ride up in the airplane. He said the ride back down in the plane was free—should one choose to take it.
‘Not me,” he said.
UPI feature from June 1982