Skydiving?

It's not nearly as crazy as it seems.

After training for seven hours, the idea of jumping out of a plane doesn't seem nearly as stupid as it might have previously. You've learned all about what can go wrong, and what you should do about it. You've mastered the knowledge required to recognize a failed chute deployment and pull your reserve, and you've practiced landing at the speed your reserve will be dropping you. You've discussed the approach to the landing field and the day's winds. You know how to smack your radio back to life, and what to do if you have no voice communications with a landing guide. You even know what to do if you find yourself in a body of water.

Now all you have to do is get up there and step out that door.

A pre-jump grin from my second outing, and a post-jump grin from my third.

Matt going out the door for the first time
28 Aug 99 photos: Matt's | John's
25 Sep 99 photos: John's

Jumps to date:

Jump	Date	Instructor	Altitude	Wind	Comments
Training class	24 Apr 99	Rick Soutar and Paul Dhingra	-	-	Grounded by winds
1	17 Jul 99	Paul	4000	20	OK. Arch was sloppy, count was non-existent, but I didn't tumble. Two-footed the landing nicely, 80 feet off target. A great time, great people at TSI.
2	28 Aug 99	Miha	4000	20	Arch and count both good. A little tilted on exit due to insufficient right-foot push-off. Next time, push harder and look up for plane. Line twists were easy to kick out. Ass-landing due to wind, and 120 feet to target. We saw an unhappy twisted ankle on this jump, and the guy stayed lying down for quite a while, talking to some instructors before he limped off the field with assistance. Matt said he hit the ground badly, with his attention elsewhere. Just between you and me, someone had to push Praveen out of the plane. :) He said he liked it. During the wind hold, Karen and Leslie got pulled around on the hood of a car by a big round Canadian military chute. (I think that's what it was.) Flatland toboganning like this could be very useful to kids in Saskatchewan. (See below for picture.) Also saw some far off-field landings thanks to the strong winds, including one several kilometers away in a tree. Jumper was fine, though.
3	25 Sep 99	Paul	4000	<5	Counted OK. Head was up, saw plane recede. Arch was nil, although I didn't tumble. Flared just slightly too early in still air, Judo rolled landing, about 80 ft off target. Paul didn't like my lack of arch :). We saw our first round on this trip, apparently (although not certainly) a panicing student. With no wind, it's easy to flare too early, so all the people who had jumped a few times were thrown off. John's first free fall!
3	23 Jul 00	Boz	4000	5-10	Funny footwork error on exit, managed to fix before I got too badly messed up. Head was up before departure but I didn't look up fast enough to see plane recede. Reached for right wingtip with right hand, which fixed previous over-rotation problem. Count went well. Arch was iffy, no hip thrust to speak of. So according to Boz I get 1 out of 3 for my exit and arch. This is OK, since my previous jumps would be 0/3. Jenn guided me in on radio; I was way too eager to get over the target, I would have gone into the J pattern way too early. Landing was good, 2 footed on the mattresses near the tuffet (so about 20 feet off the bullseye.) Flare was perfect, about 8 feet, with Jenn's advice. Camped at the DZ with Matt and John. John's 20 second freefall, Matt's 10 second. These guys are getting ahead of me. Forgot my logbook (due to moving mess at home.)

Praveen, me, and Bill, enjoying ourselves after my second jump (and before their first, hence the nervous looks.)

There's lots to do during a wind hold, if you use your imagination and an expensive piece of equipment lent by John. I took this picture on the second trip up. The camera did all the work. For some reason, insects keep showing up in interesting ways whenever we go north. On the third trip, we kept seeing pieces of stuff go flying by. In one case, it was a bunch of D-bags that Paul had kicked out of the Cessna as he jumped. (He spent a long time recoverng those little bags.) But in other cases, it just looked like chunks of line dropping slowly from several thousand feet. They were getting bounced around a lot by wind currents... except it was a totally still day. After a while we realized they were actually spider silk lines, and they were only 10 meters away; our sense of scale had deceived us. We were tipped of in this because we saw a spider "ballooning" in this way earlier, outside the McDonald's south of Barrie. The rather sizable arachnid impressed Matt by drifting closer and closer to his face, without any visible means of support or propulsion. Spider "ballooning" looks like fun.

This is the prairie toboganning mentioned above. This is the kind of thing sport parachutists get up to when the wind is too strong to jump. I think they're crazy, as you can tell from my body language. :)

Another fun thing to do during wind holds is fly a kite. Here are John and me with his stylish gyro kite. A gyro kite is to normal kites what a helicopter is to fixed-wing aircraft. It makes a very impressive whirring!

On my third trip, Matt brought his scanner (pictured above) and so we listened to the aircraft radio traffic all day. It's amazing the personal details you can learn about pilots' lives this way! (Kidding!) You do learn about air traffic diverting around the drop zone, though, and you hear the details as the drop point changes in response to winds. The scanner also changes frequencies almost instantly, allowing us to hear the instructions and advice about landing that the instructor is giving the novice jumpers.

We jump at Toronto Skydive Inc. in New Lowell, Ontario. Their safety record is untouchable.
Here's a list of Dropzones in Ontario.

File: http://www.interlog.com/~dwarf/sports/skydive.html
Created: Mon Sep 20 01:29:50 EDT 1999
Updated: 03 Nov 02, 13:27:48