I touched my first parachute in the left seat of a Le Mudry Cap-10. Well, I sat on the chute. My aerobatics instructor, a Frenchman, handed it to me moments before we got inside. It was a seat parachute. "What's this for?" I asked while he strapped it onto me and cinched it, bending me over in sitting position. "Iz in case we have to sell zee airplane," he said.
"Shouldn't we try Trade-A-Plane first?" I said, looking up at him like Frankenstein's Igor. He raised an eyebrow.
We took off and climbed to 4,000 feet over a small nontowered field. "Lez first try zee inverted flight," he said, and he rolled the airplane over onto its back. "Ahh, zis is nice, no?" he said. Dangling from my harness, my feet barely touching the rudder pedals, I looked up, which was actually down, and saw the ground. Realizing I was just a five-point restraint system away from plunging through the canopy and tumbling through the air without ever so much as having used a parachute, I figured I needed just a little practice before I ended up plunging headfirst into the center of some runway numbers.
There are three methods of parachute training, I found. One way is the Army way: static-line jumping. In 2005, roughly 12,000 people made their first jump with a static line, according to the U.S. Parachuting Association. To learn more about it I called my father-in-law, John Collins, who was a 23-year-old second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne right after World War II. The training he described was simple.
His unit went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and had basic classroom introduction to the parachute and the harness. Then the drill instructors taught them the parachute landing fall, or PLF. That's where the men would stand on a 2-foot-high platform and jump off with their feet together, landing on their toes so the shock would be distributed evenly throughout their bodies. Of course, they'd fall over immediately. They could not help it. The next step (off) was the 35-foot tower, where the soldier would put on a harness attached to a cable and then jump off, sliding down the cable for about 250 feet. "It was the scariest thing we encountered," Collins recalled. "Looking down 35 feet you could imagine yourself splattered against the ground easier than you could at 3,000 feet. Some guys washed out. They couldn't bring themselves to do it."
After jumping perhaps a dozen times — toppling over each time — the next great leap forward was a 250-foot tower. Collins described it like the parachute ride they had on Coney Island during the 1939 World's Fair, except it had no seats. The instructors would strap the soldiers into a harness and haul them to the top by rope; then the instructors would drop you for a couple of hundred feet. It was so the soldiers could get accustomed to that sickening sensation of falling.
The men would drop a half-dozen times in the PLF — and still fall over at the end. Then they'd load up inside a Douglas C-47 and take off for that first jump. "You were keyed up — you didn't know how you would react," Collins said. "You had fear in your stomach, and you worried about your equipment. Did your packers do it right? You hoped that no one had a grudge against you."
My father-in-law was in a "stick" — 12 paratroopers, all novices. "It was easier doing it together than alone," he explained. "We hooked up our static lines and as we went out the door every man was on the back of the other guy, doing it quickly almost arm-in-arm. It was like we wanted to be together for the solace and comfort." It took five daylight jumps and one nighttime exit to win the paratrooper wings. "I was puckering those first five jumps, and that one in complete black darkness made you a believer in God if you weren't already," he said.
Well now, that was reassuring. I considered static-line training — for nearly a full three seconds. Too hard. No supportive "stick." Plus I had read The Wild Blue and learned that bomber crewmembers never received any parachute training at all — the higher-ups figured if the crew survived whatever hit their bomber, they'd know what to do if they got out of the plunging airplane. Nah.
I needed to know what to expect.
Then I heard of an outfit that taught the most popular form of parachuting: tandem training, which more than 272,000 people tried in 2005. This operation was based at a small New Jersey airport about an hour from my Manhattan apartment. So I hopped on my motorcycle and hit the Jersey trail. At the trailer that served as the company command post, I laid down my credit card and signed and initialed about 30 forms promising not to sue in case the landing turned me into a meat pizza.
My instructor, a short, 100-pound Brazilian, gave me a brief training session that amounted to "don't touch anything." Then he showed me all the things on the parachute that I wasn't supposed to touch. I guess he'd had a bad experience with someone touching something on a parachute.
We loaded up into a battered Cessna 206 with one seat and no rear door. There was another tandem pair on board — the novice was a 51-year-old woman who wrote her husband a note ("honey, I'm going skydiving — back before dinner") and drove straight to the airport. In the back, another jumper with a camera attached to his helmet had wedged himself against the rear bulkhead. Once the pilot started the airplane's engine, the photographer fell asleep.
The 206 took off and circled and climbed. It circled and climbed some more. At 14,500 feet the pilot leveled off and screamed, "Two minutes!" That roused the photographer. The Brazilian told me that once we cleared the airplane I should raise my arms like I was having an unfriendly meeting with Public Enemy No. 1 — and to not touch anything. Then we scooted toward the door (well, he scooted me), and as the blood drained from my face and body I put my feet out the door.
The Brazilian pushed and we plunged. We tumbled once and he stabilized us and I held up my arms and he tossed out a drogue chute to slow our descent slightly. Then we rocketed Jerseyward with my belly leading the way and my cheeks flapping in the 100-mph-plus wind. It was better than my first solo and my first cross-country combined. After dropping a few thousand feet in one minute, the Brazilian pulled the chute and something cracked overhead. We slowed down right fast, and drifted earthward for another nine minutes. My female companion tandem partner and her photographer also landed. She and I both wanted to go again.
In a couple of months, though, it was winter, so I booked a flight to Florida and showed up on a Saturday morning at a place in Zephyrhills that taught "accelerated free fall," or AFF.
In short, you go out alone on your first jump — oh, OK, you go out with two instructors free-falling next to you. But they're only there to make sure you don't tumble out of control or release the chute before the proper altitude — 5,000 feet agl. Or forget to release the chute at all. AFF — it's only for the bold: Just a little more than 27,000 people trained that way in 2005.
My instructor had a tight smile and no sense of humor; my class consisted of two others: one Florida native and a Russian who knew exactly two words of English ("huh?" and "no"). The instructor spent half the day showing us everything that could go wrong with a parachute. It wouldn't open, lines were twisted, the parachute was twisted, you were twisted. In all those cases you shucked the main chute with a rip cord on your left side, then pulled another rip cord on your right.
The Russian couldn't comprehend these concepts. But we graduated to the next step, which consisted of throwing our arms up and reaching back to this little hackey-sac ball (which modern sport parachutes have instead of a rip cord) and tossing it into the wind. This would bring out the drogue that pulled out the parachute. I did it, the Floridian did it, the Russian just looked confused. The instructor drilled us on steering the open chute with the toggles, and the "dive flow," consisting of the order of events you confront in a dive. Then we took a written test. I passed, the Floridian passed, the Russian left his blank. Needless to say, only the Floridian and I received parachutes. We boarded the de Havilland Twin Otter.
A Twin Otter can climb straight up, like the space shuttle or King Kong on the Empire State Building. In seconds we made 13,500 feet and the first group — the formation folks — headed out the door. Then it was my group's turn. Two instructors took their places on both sides of me, and the one on my left said, "Are you ready to skydive?" I thought about that inverted flight in the Cap-10 and how I needed this, and forced myself to scream, "Yes!" Then — like I was trained — I looked to the instructor on my right and screamed, "Check in!" and to the instructor on my left and screamed, "Check out!" Without hesitating I cried, "Ready, set, go!" and plunged headfirst out the airplane's rear door.
The two instructors must have jumped with me, gripping the little handles on the side of my jumpsuit. At this point I'd forgotten everything I'd learned. The guy on my left signaled me to extend my legs, and the guy on the right bent my right arm to practice touching the hackey sac. Yes! It's there! Tucked safely in its pocket! I had to practice touching it three times, then I just lay there killing time. I daydreamed about bouncing onto the electrical lines crisscrossing the landing zone before slamming into the fields of sharpened stakes surrounding the airport.
The instructor on my left pointed at the altimeter on my wrist, meaning I had fallen below 5,000 feet — the magic time to pop the chute. I waved them off and pulled the hackey sac from its pocket — finally! — and it went into action. It pulled out a drogue chute, which pulled out the main chute, which cracked through the sky like an anti-aircraft shell. Suddenly I shot skyward while they fell away. I'm the Rocketeer!
That was because the chute opened fully and slowed me down considerably. I was still falling, and had bruises over 90 percent of my harnessed body. I forced myself to look up at it and the parachute was completely, perfectly rectangular. Aaahhh. I pulled my left and right toggles and they steered the chute just fine. Slowly it descended, and at about 1,000 feet agl I set up a landing pattern in the clearing used by the jump school. Downwind, base, final...and I floated over the pea gravel where I was supposed to land on my feet, and skidded on the grass with my buttocks. And then I fell over.
And now, I am ready to take zee second lesson in zee aerobatics. N'est-ce pas?
Phil Scott is a freelance writer and pilot living in New York City.
Links to additional information about parachuting may be found on AOPA Online.
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