![]() ![]() The next few jumps passed without incident, each one bringing its own set of new challenges. According to the stats, more people bite it with a good canopy deployed above them than auger straight into the dirt at a buck twenty. Flying the canopy requires as much of a data dump as freefall in many respects, there’s a lot more to learn and more ways to die, as the wind affects them every bit as much as a rifle bullet in flight. All the considerations of winged aircraft come into play, apart from the absence of the “up” control - there’s only degrees of down. Freefall rigs are square, offering the user much more maneuverability due to their aerofoil shape, which generates considerable lift when passing through air. At 6,500 feet, I locked onto my altimeter and watched the needle creep down - at 5,500 I reached back to find the handle and flung it sideways, and for the first time in my life, wound up under a parachute.įellow RECOIL staffer Tom Marshall wrote of his experiences in Florida, where he underwent a law enforcement jump school, deploying from a Quest Kodiak using round, military static line parachutes. ![]() Flanked by my instructors, I went through the checklist we’d previously discussed in the calm and safe environment of the hangar, forcing myself to ignore the fact we were hurtling toward the ground at 120 miles per hour and would impact it in less than 30 seconds if I didn’t get my head out of my ass. On getting the thumbs-up from Rhett, I made a small sideways hop and began accelerating at 10 m/s/s, which is like being on a high-octane rollercoaster when it goes down the long drop. As humans, we’re hardwired to avoid situations in which we might fall to our deaths, and yet, here we were, about to trust our lives to a few square feet of thin nylon and some string. As I looked at the assorted feed lots and roads below, every fiber of my being was telling me that this was a particularly bad idea. At the designated altitude, the door slid open and we moved into position. Students are expected to wear fashion-crime, ’80s-style polyester jump suits, along with goggles and piss-pot lids, no doubt as an added incentive to pass their exams and become qualified skydivers, so they can then trade up for less cringey gear.Īfter rehearsing how to actually exit the aircraft and what to do in the dive, the three of us clambered into a Pilatus PC-6 and began our ascent over the brown desert. My instructors, who between them had well into five digits worth of descents in their logbooks, rocked full-face helmets and jumped in the clothes they arrived in. Running through equipment checks and getting suited up came next, and as with most human endeavors, there’s a certain style hierarchy when it comes to equipment. Fear has a way of concentrating the mind, and despite feeling like drinking from a fire hose, at least some of the huge quantity of information somehow found its way into my gray matter. Inevitably, this information had come by way of someone experiencing those failures in a first-hand, fatal-ish way, so it found an attentive audience. Pelon very diligently ran through all the ways in which the parachute system might fail, and how to address those failures so as to mitigate the risk of becoming a small, moist divot in the earth’s crust. Ground school was conducted over beers in a local microbrewery, and then all three reunited the next morning at a local drop zone, west of town. And then you slam face first into the wall. Without the necessity or risk of falling to earth, a giant fan pushes a huge volume of air into a 12-foot-diameter, vertical polycarbonate tube, into which the student and instructor prostrate themselves while a windstorm whistles past - as fan speed increases, the miracle of weightlessness manifests itself. I’d signed up for a few expensive minutes in a wind tunnel, to mimic the effects of airflow over the human form. ![]() After exchanging texts, Rob Pelon and Marty Rhett met me in a parking lot in a suburban retail development two dudes I didn’t know from Adam quickly talked through what was about to happen next. ![]() My journey to terminal velocity began on a Friday in Phoenix, Arizona. So I signed up to learn how to freefall parachute, from scratch. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |