Parachute Jump

Michael writes...

A couple a facts:

1.On average, a little under one in one hundred thousand parachute jumps ends in death. I looked it up. (This is as likely to kill you as running a single marathon; or two scuba dives; or riding 48 miles on a motorbike; or cycling 100 miles. If you share my morbid love of such statistics, you can look them up here.)

2. Jack signed us up for the course well aware that he was scared of heights. He's not the first person to seek such a radical solution.  Ranulph Fiennes conquered his acrophobia by climbing the north face of the Eiger.

So last weekend, having both visited specialist doctors to be certified as fit to hit the ground at 120 mph, we went into Prague for the first day of training, watching videos, listening to lectures and dangling from harnesses to practise what we'd learnt. I had to demonstrate I had understood all of the instruction...which naturally had been in Czech...so whilst Jack almost fell asleep in the harness, I spent all day pumping adrenalin. Fortunately I passed the tests. We were supposed to have the second day of training, culminating in the jump, the very next day but the wind was too strong for beginners...and their plane was broken.

But this weekend the weather has been beautiful, so yesterday found us at a remote airstrip outside Kolín, a central Bohemian town about an hour east of Prague. More training, then a final written test. It helps to sit opposite the examiner when she's marking other students' scripts, so we both passed and were cleared for take-off.

We were scheduled to jump last, so whilst we did have to hang around all afternoon we did benefit from watching all of our classmates jump, in so doing learning
(a) Our flight-path for the day and
(b) That the parachutes we'd been issued really were reliable and idiot-proof. Every time someone jump, the parachute opened! That settled the nerves.

Finally our turn came. Their plane, which first saw action in the Franco-Prussian war, was still broken - but we flew in it anyway. (I'd have been less keen going up in it if I'd not been wearing a parachute.)

In addition to me and Jack, the plane contained four tandem jumpers and their highly-experienced "pilots". Having the two of us there seemed to settle the tandem passengers' nerves once they discovered that we'd be jumping on our own...and that we'd never done it before. Suddenly their trip seemed easy.

I'd hoped Jack could go first, so I'd be there to encourage him to jump - but for technical reasons to do with balancing the plane, I was nearer the door. At 1200m that fateful door was opened, I took up position, felt a tap on the shoulder and jumped. It was easier than expected - we'd trained the routine often enough on the ground, so I just jumped without thinking. The rest of the routine was more erratic as there's rather less turbulence on the ground than there is when you jump out of a moving plane a mile up in the sky. However, once I'd worked out which way was up I found the static line had done its job and a miracle! my chute was fully and cleanly deployed. 

Jack tells me that when he was tapped, he stuck his head out of the plane, thought better of it, stuck his head back in for five seconds, then gathered up his courage and hurled himself into the abyss. When I saw his chute deploy about 100m above me (with just a small twist he promptly corrected) I was awash with both relief and pride.

I looked all the way left. No airstrip. All the way right. No airstrip. Fortunately these parachutes are easily turned, so I did a 180 and there it was, delightfully large beneath me. Ground control helped talk me in. With a little steering and some erratic braking I landed dead centre with a more dramatic roll than some, but nothing broken. A few seconds later Jack did likewise.

So we now both have parachute licenses...which I suspect we'll never use! For him, jumping out of the plane was a dramatic cure for acrophobia but once descending, he felt little fear. For me, jumping was the easy part but spending a few minutes suspended rather high above the ground was a little disconcerting.

However, I have a terrible record when it comes to applying my "Never again!" exclamations. Marathon running, emigration...

Whether or not either of us do ever present our licenses at a remote airfield and buy a one-way plane ticket, at least next time we watch James Bond we'll be able to say, "Parachuting into eastern Europe? I've done that!"