terminal

Terminal Velocity

Skydiving is not just a sport, it's a lifestyle (not to be confused with bungee jumping which is just a sport).

rec.skydiving FAQ

I call it Spermboy Falls to Earth. It is the ten-minute videotape of my Arizona skydive. The "falls to earth" part should be obvious. "Spermboy," because we wore pointy leather helmets with padded ribs that made us look like a cartoonist's version of animated sperm. Think of Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask).

I was with my family for Thanksgiving. My nephews live in Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, and we convened there for the holiday week. After six days of family togetherness, jumping out of a plane seemed like a good idea. If everything went wrong I might plummet, screaming, to my death. Worse things have happened. To me.

That's how it was I came to find myself among the Lotus Eaters. The skydivers I met that day were cliquish and self-absorbed. As a group they were thin, mostly small people. If you saw them out of their Flash Gordon jumpsuits you might think they were landlocked surfers. Aside from desultory chat about the arcane points of dropping from the sky, their conversation wasn't much, nor was their attention span.

Skydiving is the Supermodel of sports: all it requires is that you be relatively thin and, seemingly, physically attractive. The skydivers I met were mostly in their twenties, toned and (modestly) muscular, but you wouldn't confuse them with athletes. To be fair, hitting the landing area (the drop zone or "DZ") requires some skill at steering the rectangular parachutes, as do acrobatics. Between drops, the regulars lounged in the shade sucking on water bottles, their jumpsuits peeled down around their waits. (The jumpsuit is a nylon shell that strongly resembles a ski suit without the insulation.) It could have been a Calvin Klein advertisement.

The Skydive Arizona drop zone is in the Sonoran Desert, just outside the town of Eloy, about fifty miles south of Phoenix as the buzzard flies. At the time I was there, the drop zone consisted of a couple of cinderblock buildings, a Quonset hut, a single runway, and a set of rickety wooden bleachers adjacent to the sand pit drop zone. The plane that took us to 11,000 feet—two miles above the earth—was a venerable DC-3, a two-engine, propeller-driven aircraft famous in its World War II incarnation as the C-47 Transport.

A falling human has a terminal velocity of about 54 meters per second, or approximately 121 miles an hour. Slightly faster if the human is falling head first. It only takes a few seconds to accelerate to that speed, and from there down you lose the sensation of falling. If you hit the Sonoran hardpan at 120 mph, you'd probably bounce six feet into the air and be dead before you hit the ground a second time.

My jump instructor was a bantam of a man: trim and pulled together in the way that's sometimes referred to as military bearing. He came up to my chin and had a precisely trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. The first surprise of the day was that we were going to be strapped together for my jump. Many skydiving operations now have first-timers jump "tandem" with a Tandem Master. Both master and student wear one-piece web harnesses made from the same material as a fighter pilot's seatbelt/shoulder harness rig. The master wears the parachutes on the back of his harness, and is attached front-to-back to the student by means of steel snap-links that connect the harnesses.

Aside from ten minutes or so of familiarization on the ground, the master and student don't link up until just before they're ready to jump from the airplane. The parachutes, or canopies, of sport skydivers are large rectangles that allow a skilled jumper to touch down gently enough to remain standing. Some instructor/student pairs managed upright landing the day I was there, but more common were seat-of-the-pants landings, as if instructor and student were coming down a playground slide. Because I was much bigger and heavier than my instructor, there was no doubt that ours was going to be a sliding landing.

The instructor took me to an aluminum mock-up of an airplane fuselage and had me practice jumping out the door several times. This in no way required any special technique, and I have to assume it was merely to prepare me psychologically for actually leaping out into space when the time came. Once I was wearing my harness over the blue coveralls, I looked like a window washer for hi-rise buildings. On the videotape, the desert sun was so strong that you can clearly see my eyes through my dark sunglasses. The first few minutes of the tape (after the stock footage and advertisement for the skydiving school) are taken up with ground preparations and shots of me chatting with the instructor. I don't recall any fear or nervousness at that point, and looking at the video doesn't lend any clue to my emotional state.

Soon enough we all boarded the DC-3 for the short trip to 11,000 feet. My brother, Bill, was making his first skydive that day, and boarding the plane was the first I saw of him since we'd left the cinderblock classroom where we had our brief introduction to the theory of skydiving ("This is the plane; this is the ground. You use a parachute to get from the plane to the ground..."). Bill was talking to his instructor, and we barely made eye contact. The next time I saw him would be on the ground.

The vast majority of high-altitude falls without a parachute (or with a faulty one) are fatal. But freak accidents happen. As the quip goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. The distance over which you stop determines how much force your body is going to absorb from the fall. The stopping distance is determined by how compliant the surface is. If you're lucky enough to fall into a nice muddy bog—stopping distance just under a foot—you could survive a fall from two miles up. You'll probably be hospitalized for a month, and you'll certainly have tequila sunrise-colored bruises all over your body. If you fall off the roof of your six-story apartment building and onto the concrete pavement below—stopping distance a fiftieth of an inch or less—you'll need to be scooped into a body bag. None of this was on my mind in the plane. I don't know whether I was in deep denial, or I just genuinely didn't think skydiving was all that dangerous, but I had been much more nervous on my first ski trip than preparing to jump out of a plane two miles over the desert.

When we were at the correct altitude, the pilot looped around to put us where we would most easily find our way onto the drop zone. We all stood up and those of us jumping tandem hooked up to our instructors. My instructor and I were at the middle of the plane, and we shuffled in lockstep with the rest of the line until we were next up. If I had felt no fear before, now that I was looking out into space, my hands braced on the doorframe, I was in sheer terror. It wasn't that I didn't want to jump; I was just absolutely frozen in place. In the few seconds that I stood in the door I had not one coherent thought. Not "Oh, shit," which has served me well in a few tight spots; not "This is a bad idea," or even "I don't want to die." My mind went as blank as Dan Quayle's face.

Then my instructor heaved us out into space and we were falling like rocks. Once we were falling everything was okay again. In the videotape I'm wearing a huge shit-eating grin, which didn't go away for the rest of the trip down. I'm also giving the cameraman the thumbs-up sign, as I'd been instructed to do. I'm embarrassed to say it, but exhilarated as I was, I probably would have made the same cheezy gesture had we not been told to mug for the camera.

Overall, having the whole adventure videotaped wasn't such a great idea. I didn't need the videotape to prove I'd jumped out of a plane; anyone who knows me well enough knows that I'm dumb enough to try anything once. And at the moment when I should have been enjoying the experience, and the view, my attention was instead focussed on the cameraman falling along with us. During the drop you're falling spread-eagled and belly-first to present the maximum cross-section to the air. You fall slower that way, making the jump last longer, and giving you more control over your movements.

If you're being taped, you're not supposed to look down because the top of your pointy helmet makes for dull footage. So instead of getting a good look at the Picacho Mountains to the east, and the Sand Tank and Santa Rosa Mountains to the south and west, I was looking at a skinny guy in a silver coverall with a camera strapped to his helmet. When I watched the tape, I saw that my instructor, riding me piggy-back to the desert floor, was blowing kisses to the camera with exuberant arm gestures. Maybe he had a crush on the cameraman, I don't know. But between the eccentric outfits, my silly grin, and my instructor's loopy gestures, we look on tape like a pair of escaping mental patients.

After too short a time I was supposed to pull the rip cord (though I'm not sure it was called that by the instructor). He put my hand on the handle and gave me the signal, and I pulled. Nothing happened.

Just kidding. The canopy opened just like it was supposed to, and the cameraman fell away from us as if he'd jumped off a building (he would open his canopy a few seconds later to avoid getting tangled with us). After a minute of free-fall, coming down under the canopy seemed pretty slow. Then we were close to the ground, and it seemed entirely too fast. At the right moment, the instructor told me to pull on the control lines, "flaring" the canopy. The parachute is shaped like a wing, and it gives the skydiver considerable forward motion. Flaring the canopy just before you hit the ground trades forward motion for lift, reducing both forward and vertical speed. It is exactly the same thing a Boeing 747 does as it reaches the beginning of the runway. I pulled the control lines down to my waist, and we slowed abruptly. At the last second we both held our legs out in front of us and skidded to a stop on our asses. I've had harder falls off barstools.

Skydiving was fun. Once. It is an awful lot of trouble to go through for a few minutes (ten if you're lucky) of excitement. And it is expensive. Even if you own your own equipment and pack your own parachute, you still have to pay someone with an airplane to take you up to a couple of miles above the earth and drop you over some reasonably flat place. There is also the very real chance of dying. I don't know what the per-capita death rate is among skydivers, but a few "go in" every year, and a few more are permanently injured. I've heard it's not as dangerous as skiing, and my gut reaction, having done both, is to believe it. On the other hand, skiing takes practice. Falling is easy.

My nephew Erik, who has done enough skydiving to qualify for solo jumps, tells me that there are a lot of drop zone hippies who live to do nothing but skydive and party. And my sense of skydiving is that it is a sport of style, rather than substance. There's also a whiff of nihilism about the sport, despite its adherents' claims of comparative safety. Every time you jump, after all, you're gambling that your canopy will open in time to keep you from smashing into the earth like a baggie full of raspberry preserves. For me, there are enough legitimate risks in life without putting myself in harms way for the sake of a transient thrill, or an adolescent pursuit of style.

Originally Published February 8, 1999.