It was 1997 when I did my first tandem jump. My eldest son had just turned 18 and my ex-wife suggested I take him skydiving to celebrate his coming of age. Maybe she figured the odds were good that I might end up face down in the bottom of a smoking crater - I dunno. It sure didn’t turn out that way.
My first jump was a complete adrenaline overdose.
My son Mark was jumping with me, on his own tandem ride. The ride up was intense - I was very nervous in the plane. I kept going over all my training (about 30 minutes of it) that I did prior to the jump… Tuck my legs between the jumpmaster’s. Stick my legs out in front of me when we land. Pull the ripcord when the jumpmaster points to his altimeter. Don’t pull the cutaway handle or the reserve handle. All the stuff you need to do or not do to make the jump more enjoyable and less deadly. 
The nervousness peaked as we climbed into the door.
A half second into freefall and I knew this was the most exciting and fun thing I had ever done, and all the worrying was unnecessary. The experience was definitely worthy of another try. It didn’t feel like falling at all! It felt like flying in a windy airplane during freefall, and under canopy you float like a bird. The ground does NOT rush up at you. When the parachute opens, you are typically half a mile up, so even at that altitude, objects on the ground look pretty small. The parachute opening is was pretty smooth - something on the order of a radical roller coaster ride in G’s - nothing anyone in relatively good health couldn’t handle. After the canopy opened, the tandem instructor let me steer the parachute by pulling on the toggles. It is a lot of fun turning and spinning the parachute while we were still high up. The landing was like sitting down on a soft couch.
Unfortunately the tandem was pretty expensive and not something I could afford to do on a regular basis.
My son Mark had a much different experience. He did marginally OK during freefall, but was looking pretty green when he landed. I think he found out right away that skydiving was not the sport for him.
Fast forward 2 more years - my son Scott and my stepdaughter Shanna both turned 18 years old within a few months of each other. The minimum age for skydiving at most drop zones is 18, although some will let kids jump tandem at age 16. Anyway, I invited them both for tandem jumps (as long as I got to jump too). This was a much different experience for the two kids. Both of them loved it! I knew what to expect, so I wasn’t quite so white-knuckled on the ride up and I really liked it. I knew after my second tandem that I wanted to get into this sport.
At the time I still had misgivings about spending the money it would take to buy the equipment and take the lessons.
My stepdaughter Shanna had no problems with money when she returned home to her dad’s house. She immediately spent most of it on skydiving lessons. She started doing “static line” training up at the Santa Rosa airport near Napa, California.
Static Line jumps are where your jumpmaster hooks your ripcord to the plane, ala WWII paratrooper movies, and you jump out of the plane. Your parachute opens almost immediately and you learn early on to pilot your canopy.
Shanna was about half way through her static line training when she called and told Kathy (her mom and my wife) what a great time she was having. A few days later I called my son Scott and asked him if he was interested in learning to skydive. He was! Since I was working as a software consultant at the time, my work schedule was pretty open. Scott and I headed off to Perris Valley Skydiving to take Accelerated Free Fall (AFF) lessons a couple times a week.
At the time, AFF took about 8 training jumps, with repeat jumps for the ones you failed. I picked up the tab for Scotts training. We both did pretty well, and only had to repeat a few times during the entire AFF training.
Each AFF jump is designed to teach you one or two simple aspects of skydiving and is preceded by a couple hours of ground training. You learn what a good parachute looks like when it is opening, emergency procedures, how to make a bad landing have a better outcome, how to turn in freefall, maintain altitude awareness, do summersaults, pilot your canopy, Etc.
On my 4th jump, I had a little problem. I did a flawless AFF jump with a perfect stand-up landing in the student landing area. The students landing area at Perris is a very large plowed circle, looking like a center-pivot irrigated farm plot from the air. The ground was covered with 6”-8” dirt clods. Anyway, after I landed, the wind caught my parachute canopy and I decided to walk towards it to make it deflate. I wasn’t watching where I put my feet and my left foot came down on a large dirt clod. It crushed under foot and my ankle went over sideways with a loud POP. It hurt like hell, but I was able to gather up my canopy and hobble back to the student building. Luckily, my son Scott can drive my stick-shift car, since it is 120 miles from Perris to my house.
Later I found out I had broken it and had my leg in a cast for a month or two. To retain currency, I had to go back to Perris and do harness training while I still had the cast on. Nothing was going to stop me from jumping!
After my ankle healed and the doctor took the cast off, I was back at Perris almost immediately – even before I had finished my physical therapy. It still hurt to run on it, so when I landed I would slide on my butt instead of running out the last few feet of landing.
I finished up my AFF training pretty quickly and did my required solo jumps. I was ready for my A-license!
Scott on the other hand, finished his AFF jumps a few days after me and then decided that he was just not into jumping and wanted to quit. Grrrrr. I wish he came to that conclusion about $1500 ago…
So, I was on my own from then on. I knew I wasn’t good enough to jump with other people yet, so I signed up for additional classes to make me a better skydiver. This class taught me how to fly my body relative to other people in freefall. I did 10 or 15 jumps with the instructors at Skydive University in their Body Flight class, and I am glad I did. They teach you a lot of techniques for precise turns, sideways and backwards movements, Etc. They also taught me how to swoop down to a formation of people without smacking into them (not a good thing).
During my Skydive U training, I used rental gear, including a jumpsuit, container, helmet and altimeter.
The thing you see skydivers wear on their backs is called a container, which you typically buy separately on a new rig. Inside the container are two canopies: a main and a reserve. If you have the money, you can also add an AAD, or Altitude Activated Deployment device. You also need (at minimum) a wrist altimeter and a helmet. Some skydivers don’t use a helmet, but I’ve been bopped in the head enough by airplane doors and other people to know that it’s not healthy to jump without a brain bucket.
Anyway, about the time I finished the Skydive U classes, I signed up for an equipment trial program at Square One, the skydive “pro shop” at Perris. You put a big chunk of money down and they give you a discount on rental gear (parachute and jumpsuit). When you find the gear you like, you can apply the money you put down on a similar new rig. I tried lots of canopies and containers until I found one that was comfortable, non-scary, and looked good.
Several months later, I got fit for my jumpsuit and ordered a new rig. Since my wife was paying for the whole works, I went first class and bought a nice custom Infinity container, a Performance Design Spectre-190 canopy with colors to match my container and jumpsuit, and a Performance Design 193 square foot reserve canopy. I also added a Cypres AAD that automatically deploys my reserve canopy should I fail to open my main for some reason. I also got a nice wrist altimeter, an open face helmet and some gloves.
For my body weight, a 190 square foot canopy is conservative, and the Spectre model is a baby sitter parachute that is very forgiving of most stupid beginner mistakes.
While at Skydive University, I completed my parachute packing class and got signed off on packing my own main canopy. I then took the written test for my A license and passed. Skydive licenses range from A through D with increasing privileges as you go up through the ranks. Each license has a written test and some have specific jump routines you must do in addition to the written test.
When you first get your skydive license, not many people want to jump with you. Novice jumpers tend to mess things up or do scary things.
Jumping solo is kind of boring. There is not much exciting stuff to do by yourself in freefall. Since you are way up in the sky by yourself, you can’t tell if you are drifting one-way or the other and you can’t practice moving relative to someone else in freefall – the essence of skydiving.
I started doing jumps with other rookie skydivers and then moved on to organized jumps to avoid doing solos. Many drop zones have people on staff that gather groups of people together for jumps. These people are called “load organizers”. They plan the jump according to everyone’s skill level and try to make it fun. I did a lot of jumps with load organizers, working my way up to jumps with 15-20 people in a single jump.
A relative work (RW) load organizer plans a jump by making up the “dance steps” (known as “points”) the jumpers will perform in the 1 minute of freefall. RW jumps are where all the jumpers fall on their bellys. There are hundreds of different formations jumpers can make in the sky, some requiring more skill than others.
There is a great sense of accomplishment when you can do all the steps or “points” that were planned in advance. The organizer typically designs jumps with 3 or 4 points. With a little luck, the group of jumpers can repeat the jump routine from the top, and do more than the original 3 or 4 points. You can typically get more points with smaller groups of people. In my experience, 4 people is optimum for the most points in a single freefall.
The hard part for newbies when doing an RW skydive is remembering all the points, and moving to the right position at the correct time. If you accidentally move to the wrong position, is screws up the formation.
The best way to remember the points is to reherse them in your mind over and over on the ground and while the plane is climbing to altitude. You will see many people on the plane with their eyes shut, moving their hands and arms around, visualizing the jump they are about to do.
The load organizer (LO) will typically puts the newbies in the “base”. This is a small group, usually 4-6 people that don’t have to move around much during the jump. The people in the base usually climb out of the airplane and hang on to the outside until the LO gives the signal to jump.
The people in the base usually hang on to each other as they drop off the plane and continue hanging on throughout most of the jump.
Once in freefall, the load organizer signals everyone to move to the next point by giving a big nod of his/her head or by shaking the grips of the person they are holding on to. The noise of the wind in freefall makes it impossible to talk or even yell at someone, so all queues have to be visual.
Other problems that may decrease the point count are people “falling out” or “going low”. If you don’t position your body correctly and fall a little faster than everyone else, you dip below the formation. It is usually pretty difficult to “get back up” to the formation in time to complete any points. You get back up by “getting big” or increasing your wind resistance. Imagine balancing on top of a 4 foot in diameter ball by wrapping your arms and legs around the top part. This causes you to fall a little slower and sometimes you can float back up to where the formation is. It helps to turn your head sideways, so you can see where the formation is and further increase your wind resistance. If you look up, you fall faster.
Anyway, after lots of LO jumps I got over most of my bad newbie habbits.
After about 8 months of jumping most weekends, I got invited to join a 4-way skydive team, consisting of Bob Ferguson, Nick Effert, Heather Belger and myself. It was a lot of fun and Bob was a good teacher. We never actually competed as a team in the Iron Crank competition (our original goal), but I learned a lot during all the practice sessions. After the team broke up, I started jumping with friends and load organizers at Perris.
I had a chance to do a couple of jumps out of a hovering helicopter. Helicopter jumps are very different than jumping out of a moving plane. For starters, you sit in the doorway with your feet on the helicopter landing skids during takeoff. You have a seatbelt on, but it is pretty weird watching the ground zoom away while you have only about 6-8 inches of seat to sit on. The pilot was hot-dogging it a bit on takeoff, banking and climbing rapidly, making it the wildest rollercoaster ride I have ever been on.
The downdraft from the main rotor is punishing. On takeoff, half your body is outside the aircraft and your helmet is out there too, right under the rotor. It feels like someone rapidly whacking you on top of your helmet with a clenched fist. When the chopper gets to 5000 feet, the pilot hovers over the drop zone landing area. Jumpers climb on to the landing skids on both sides of the aircraft and jump off in pairs to keep it balanced. Unlike jumping from a moving plane, jumping from a stationary helicopter DOES feel like falling. The bottom drops out when you jump and it doesn’t feel like a normal skydive until you really gain some speed. That being said, I liked it enough to try it again.
The next time I tracked over to a friend but did not have enough time to turn any points before we had to break off and deploy our main canopies.
I started some additional required skydiver training, like water training and night jumps.
The water training involves a parachute floating in a swimming pool with the lines dangling down to the bottom. You have to jump in the water wearing a mockup container harness, and remove it while in the water. You then have to swim under the parachute and lines without tangling up and drowning. The only problem was the pool was unheated, it was cold outside and the water was like ice. I borrowed a short sleeve wet suit to do the test, but it was still freezing in the water. Luckily I passed on the first try.
The night jumps were amazing! Most drop zones have them a few times a year, on nights with a full moon. At Perris, they put large coffee cans full of burning fuel on the edges of the skydiver landing area so you can see where you need to land in the dark. They park a truck at one end of the landing area with its headlights on to show which direction you should land in (you always want to land into the wind!). Everyone wears cyanalumes (light sticks) or strobe lights so that pilots of aircraft in the local vicinity can see you. You wear a miniature light stick taped to your wrist altimeter so you can check your altitude in the dark. The city lights are beautiful from 12,500 feet! My first night jump I did solo, since that’s the rules. The second jump I did with a couple friends and we did 5 or 6 points in freefall. There was some sort of temperature inversion going on, so the night sky at altitude was at about 75 or 80 degrees, cooling as freefall progressed and our altitude decreased. It was very surreal. Landing in moonlight is difficult, since it is hard to see how high up you are a second or two before you land. Stubbed toes and grass stained pants seats are pretty common.
One of my skydiver friends told me about this drop zone up in Davis, California that specializes in High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jumps. They put an oxygen mask on you, fly you up to 30,000 feet, you jump out and enjoy 2+ minutes of freefall. Most skydives are 50-70 seconds of freefall. I was intrigued! I made some calls and did some research on the web.
The folks at Skydance Skydiving in Davis told me I needed a flight physical certificate, a high altitude chamber training-certificate and a D-license if I wanted to make a HALO jump. I went ahead and put a down payment on the HALO jump, to provide a little incentive to myself to complete all the training in a timely manner.
I got started right away on the D-license, since the United States Parachute Association (USPA) was about to increase the minimum number of jumps to qualify for a “D” from 200 to 500. I only had about 150 or so when I decided to do the HALO jump, so I knew I had to hustle. 500 jumps was a long way off from 150, even at 5-7 jumps a weekend.
I started studying for my C & D license written tests and practicing my landing accuracy. You need to be able to land in a 2-meter (about 6 feet wide) circle 25 times. I did a lot of hop and pops - jumps from 5000 feet where you deploy your main canopy a few seconds after leaving the plane - to finish up my accuracy jumps. You do hop and pops because they are cheaper. It is less money per jump if you don’t ride the plane all the way up to 12,500 feet. Its also less distracting if you jump solo in a relatively empty sky, allowing you to line up on your target and concentrate on landing right on the bulls eye. Last, you can do a lot more hop and pops than regular jumps in a day, since it only takes a few minutes to get up to altitude.
I found a local flight physician that would sign off the flight physical for me. He was very interested in the HALO jump and asked a million questions as he checked my heart rate and blood pressure. I could have gotten a certificate for just the jump, but the doctor talked me into getting a pilots certificate good if I ever want to get a pilots license. Maybe someday – right now I like jumping out of planes more than flying them.
The next item on my list of things to do for the HALO jump was to get my high altitude chamber ride out of the way. That took a lot of phone calls and emails. The US Air Force was in the process of closing down many of their high altitude chambers in a cost cutting move. The one out at Edwards Air Force Base (very close to me) had just closed, so the nearest one was up near Sacramento at Beal AFB. Beal is a good 400 miles from my house, so it made things more difficult than a day trip to Edwards would have been. The other problem was that since there were only a few operational altitude chambers in the US, they are frequently booked up with active duty military personnel that need their certification. I kept bugging the folks in charge of the Beal chamber and finally got a reservation.
I drove up in my car and spent the night in at the Beal AFB Visiting Officers Quarters – a fancy name for little ‘60s bungalows where the USAF typically puts up junior officers when they visit Beal. Civilians can stay there (or in nicer hotel rooms on base if there are vacancies) if they have official business on base. I did, according to my military orders for the chamber ride.
The high altitude training was a lot of fun. It was an all day class with about half military and half civilian students. In the morning we studied the effects of high altitude on the human body, explosive decompression, and the use of military oxygen masks and systems.
The last part of the class was the chamber ride. We all got fitted with oxygen masks and helmets. The gear is the same military pilots use. They teach you how to pop your ears while wearing the mask, recover from hypoxia, and what the knobs, buttons and dials on the oxygen control panel do.
Next, everyone piles into the chamber and they close the door. The chamber is a big heavy box that seats 8 to 10 people. It has heavy glass windows and small seats for the students. A deflated surgical glove hangs from the ceiling on a string.
Each seat has a small console on it. You hook your oxygen hose to the little console and plug in your earphone and mask microphone jacks in. The instructor talks to you over the intercom system and you can talk back to them. They start pumping the air out of the chamber after everyone has tested their mask. I don’t remember the exact sequence, but they take you up to the equivalent of 25,000 feet. At about this time, the glove hanging from the ceiling is fully inflated due to the lack of air pressure in the chamber.
They have you take off the mask and do some tests to show you the effect of high altitude. It is different for everyone – I got tunnel vision and felt like I’d done a shot too many of Jack Daniels. I could still function, but I knew it would not be healthy for me to be operating heavy machinery J. Some people passed out or got pretty silly. Putting the mask back on sobers you up in a few seconds.
Breathing pure oxygen is fantastic! Its an instant headache cure, but it really dries you out.
I passed the high altitude chamber test and was on my way to doing my HALO jump!
A few weeks later I booked a hotel room near the Skydance drop zone (DZ), jumped in my car and drove up on a Friday night. The next morning I drove over to the DZ and met Tad, the HALO organizer and the other folks that were going to do high altitude jumps. We had to get fitted once again with oxygen masks and helmets. They come in different sizes and if the mask doesn’t fit right you don’t get a good pressure seal. If outside air leaks in, it can contaminate your bloodstream with nitrogen (air is 70% nitrogen) and cause the bends at high altitudes.
We practiced using the oxygen system found on Skydance’s Cessna Caravan and did 2 training jumps from 13,000 feet. The lower altitude jumps were to show us how a bailout oxygen bottle, mask, strange helmet and multiple layers of heavy clothes affect our body flight characteristics. I also had time to do a fun jump with one of the guys out of a Cessna 182. This was my first jump out of a small plane, believe it or not. I was used to jumping out of multi-engine turboprop planes. I think I’ll stick to larger planes.
The next day we all arrived at the DZ at 5:30 AM. We had to get there early for last minute training, putting on equipment, and oxygen pre-breathe time. You can’t just put on an oxygen mask, zoom up to 30K and jump. First you have to purge all the nitrogen from your blood, and that takes 45 minutes to an hour on the ground.
The first load of skydivers put on multiple layers of clothes, their rigs, masks and helmets, climbed into the plane at Oh-dark-thirty, climbed into the plane and started soaking up pure oxygen. This included the pilot, since the plane is un-pressurized. The people on the plane read books or tried to nap during this time. It started to get pretty warm, so the Skydance folks set up an electric fan to blow into the plane’s open door to cool off all the jumpers. Don’t forget, they were all dressed up in ski clothes on a hot California morning. Finally the pre-breathe time was over and the plane took off, leaving the second load on the ground, watching them in envy.
It seemed like an eternity before we got word from manifest that the plane was on “jump run”, flying over the drop zone, ready for the jumpers to exit. A second eternity later and we heard the rumble of opening canopies over the drop zone. One by one they all made perfect landings on the grass.
The first load was special, since British jumper Alan Thompson was there to break the world altitude record for deaf skydivers. That day he set record for the world’s first deaf person ever to perform a jump from 32,000 feet. At the same time he also set the record for the longest freefall time for a deaf person, at 3 minutes 24 seconds. I had the pleasure of going out for pizza with Alan the night before. We burned up a lot of scratch paper and pencil stubs since I don’t know how to sign.
Now that all the other jumpers were safely down, it was time for the second load to go! We got dressed in our warm clothes and put on our gear. We climbed into the plane and hooked up our oxygen masks. By now it was really hot. I was wearing my rig, long johns, Levis and a warm shirt. Over the top of my clothes I was wearing my jumpsuit with a small oxygen bottle strapped to my leg. Around my neck I had a skiers wind break thingy. Last, I had ski gloves with warm inserts. We hooked up to the plane’s oxygen system, which consisted of a large welding tank sized O2 bottle on the ground outside the plane. The outside bottle was used so that the one on the plane did not get used up. We sat on the plane for 45 minutes or so, reading books or snoozing. Finally the pilot started the big turbine engine and we took off. The climb to altitude took forever, especially from about 25,000 to 30,000. The pilot was making big circles in the sky, making precious little additional altitude in each circuit. I watched the rate of climb meter on the plane’s dashboard – it was reading just a little above zero for the last part of the flight.
It was VERY cold in the plane. The pilot said it was –20F outside. Since there was no cabin heat, or much air to get warm, the inside temp of the plane was about the same as the outside.
There was ice on the metal parts of the cabin, on our oxygen hoses and on the windows. The cold was made worse by all the sweating we had done on the ground. You can’t really move around in the plane, with hoses running everywhere and a big parachute container on your back. You sit on bench seats running along the sides of the cabin, with a big oxygen bottle running down the center of the floor.
So you sit, you freeze, you wait. Oh, did I mention you can’t talk to anyone? Unlike the gear in the altitude chamber, there is no intercom system.
Tad, the jumpmaster checked us every few minutes to make sure we were getting enough oxygen. One of the guys pulled too hard on his O2 line and it came un-hooked. He didn’t notice until Tad asked him if everything was OK. He wasn’t, and Tad quickly hooked him back up again. The guy was back to normal in a minute or two, but it really gives you an idea of just how dangerous high altitude can be if you don’t pay attention.
Finally we got to 30,000 feet and started our jump run. Tad opened the Plexiglas door and checked that we were over the DZ. One by one, we disconnected from the airplane oxygen system and switched over to our personal bailout bottles. On Tad’s signal, we did a diving exit out of the plane with wide separation. Tad strongly advised against group jumps, since most of us were first timers. It is also difficult for the pilot to keep the plane flying straight and level if more than one person jumps out at a time. You could tell that the pilot was having an interesting time keeping the pointy end of the plane going forward in the thin atmosphere.
When it was my turn, I checked the spot and jumped out. I did a sort of sitfly exit for fun (the skydiver’s equivalent of a cannonball), and quickly accelerated to 170 MPH (according to my Protrack). I watched the plane zoom away, then flipped over on my belly. I did a slow turn and could see the San Francisco Bridge, many miles away on one side and the city of Sacramento on the other. The two cities are pretty far apart, so you don’t get too many opportunities to see them both at the same time. At first it was pretty cold outside too, but as soon as the sweat evaporated, I started to warm up. Freefall was much longer than normal; even with the sitfly time, which really speeds up your fallrate over belly flying, I clocked 2 minutes of freefall. Maybe next time I will “get big” and see how long I can make the freefall last.
At 30K the DZ looks about the size of a 25-cent piece held at arms length. I tried to keep myself centered over the DZ and avoid a very long walk. In a full track, many skydivers can cover one foot of ground horizontally for every foot of vertical freefall altitude. I could easily end up 4 or 5 miles away from the DZ if I put my mind to it. J
On the ground we were warned to not fly over the shooting range located about 200 yards from the landing area. I sure didn’t want to land in there – they were banging away at the range when we took off.
I finally got down to 4000 feet and my Protrack audible altitude alarm went off. I checked for other nearby jumpers, waved off and opened my main canopy. I saw John Lewis’ canopy open and I decided to follow him. He had done numerous HALO jumps and was familiar with the winds and landing pattern at Skydance, so I decided to follow him. I guess he saw me coming and turned to let me go by. I didn’t realize and followed him anyway. We both ended up landing a couple hundred yards from the normal landing area, but well away from the shooting range. It was a little bit of a walk back to the DZ, but not too bad.
I was sure glad to get out of all the warm clothes. By then it was about 85 or 90 degrees outside!
After the jump, all the HALO folks signed each other’s logbooks, took lots of pictures and repacked parachutes. All of us were ready to do it again – but that is another adventure that has yet to be started.
Kevin
I’ll have to get my reserve repacked soon and I think it only has 2-3 jumps on it since the last time it was packed.