So, I’ve finally tried my wings, or at least the carrying capacity of the parachute.
The training I took part of was a couple of sessions of theory, some jumping off a ladder, muscle memory of pulling the secondary parachute if the first one failed, folding a parachute under supervision, working my way up to the day of the jump, which was going to be in solitude - with nobody else to depend on getting me safely back on ground other than my own knowledge and senses.
We entered the old USSR propeller plane in Eslöv, long benches on each side along the hull, face to face with the other rookies, squeezed tight. Too noisy to speak so when reaching the target altitude of about 1500 meters the jump leader pointed at person after person to jump. Before I knew it, the finger was pointing straight in my face.
With a cord connecting the sprint of the parachute to the airplane I found myself standing at the edge of the hatch, holding the handles, wind blowing hard in my face, looking down at the ground where I’d been standing just moments ago. It felt surreal to say the least.
Cliché thoughts like “This is not normal, what the hell am I doing?” passed through my head, countered by reasoning that the test leader wouldn’t allow me to be in this position if there was a high probability that I would die.
As I felt a clap on my back, I took the leap.
It’s a very non-intuitive thing to do. A couple of million years ago our ancestors climbed down the trees, and the vast majority of us have remained fairly close to ground ever since. The most rational reason to leave an airplane in this manner would be if it was going to crash, explode or some other horrible outcome. Yet here I was, leaning 45 degrees out of a perfectly functioning airplane, hands in the middle of the air - grasping the nothingness, feet barely touching the closest thing to safety for just a fraction of a second longer.
What happened next is both easy and hard to explain. The sprint of the backpack was attached to the airplane via a short cord. The length of the cords connecting the harness to the parachute cloth is about 10 meters, which, given gravity and the length of the auto-deploy cord, results in a bit over a second long free fall, and then over to gliding under the parachute.
My recollection is a bit more nuanced. Once my feet had lost contact with the airplane my perception of sensory input radically changed. It felt as if reality grabbed hold of my face, violently forcing itself into my experience at an extreme pace. My field of vision felt widened as I looked out onto the horizon and the Scanian landscape. From the depths of my throat, an abysmal scream of terrified excitement rushed out - yet I recall an absolute silence. I wouldn’t say time stood still as that would exclude the passage of events, but it was without doubt largest time dilation I had ever perceived. Just as quickly as I had entered this frame of mind, just as quickly I was jolted right back out of it, finding myself hanging safely under the parachute, slowly swinging from one side to the other.
The glide down was probably impressive as well, but for me it got somewhat lost in the shadows of what I had just experienced and it’s not something that I look back to with the same warm feelings as the initial leap. I managed to navigate to the correct landing spot, but it proved difficult to get the forward movement down to a reasonable speed and at the same time matching the downward movement towards the ground. It was a rough landig, but I did so without injury and could enjoy what was left from the afterglow of this extreme experience before the last of it had faded.
There’s nothing quite like it. Rollercoasters don’t stand a chance. Personally I have no wish to try it again - the risk of injury during landing seem a bit too plausible. If it was just the jumping out the airplane over and over again I’d be first in line. Based on this, I think my next experience in this category will be a bungee jump, or perhaps a tandem parachute jump which would increase the free fall to 45 seconds.