Skydiving "or" Who Would Jump Out Of A Perfectly Good Airplane?

I did it once in college when I arranged a trip for lessons with some of the rest of the folks in the dorms. I loved it and would have done it again if I had more money at the time. However it wasn't enough of a draw for me to earn the money to do it again so that's how important it was to me.

When we went up I made sure I was the last one in the plane meaning that I would be the first to jump. That way I was less likely to not jump because it would have kept the rest of the people from jumping.

I have no visual memory of the jump from the time I left the plane until the time the parachute opened. I do however remember hearing myself yelling one thousand! two thousand! three thousand! and the wind rushing past me. Then the chute opened, I looked up made sure it was working properly and then just enjoyed drifting down to earth until it got close enough that I had to think about landing. It was a pretty amazing experience.

When I went the didn't do tandem jumps yet and the new parasail style chutes were still relatively new. We used what they called the old Mae West style chutes that one sees in world war 2 pictures. We did what's called a static line jump which means there was a line attached to the plane that pulled your chute out after you jumped out of the plane.

We had great training about what to do if something goes wrong. I was almost a little disappointed that everything went smoothly because I didn't have to use any of my new skills.

Later a friend of a friend who was a sky diver said that the first three jumps he did he had to pull the reserve chute every time. I was surprised he kept going back for more. When I met him he'd already done over 100 jumps.
 
Me !! I am scared of heights but my whole life I've wanted to sky -dive, but never have. My daughter however has, several times..

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Me !! I am scared of heights but my whole life I've wanted to sky -dive, but never have. My daughter however has, several times..

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Does it seem that many of our daughters are more adventurous than our sons?
My son was a rescue swimmer when he was in the Navy, but my daughter loves the wild stuff even more. My son did participate in two rescues off the USS Kennedy and one of them was a rough one at night in heavy seas when a fighter jet went down in the Eastern Med.
 
Jump Out Of A Perfectly Good Airplane?

Uh, no
I have plenty of fun falling off roofs

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My wife laid down the law about me going up on the roof, this was in the same general discussion about giving up my Vespa. Sometimes a guy had just better not "fight city hall."

So far I have no restrictions about crawling under the house on my belly with the spiders and snakes, but then she already knows how much I hate doing that.

One of my neighbors fell off his roof in his late 60's, and it was a long time before he fully recovered.

So Gary O, you be careful. We need you around here!
 
I jumped while in the Marines and I thought that I was pretty brave at the time. Saturday, on TV, I saw a segment about the guy who used to wash windows at the WTC above the 100th floor. I think he was an Italian immigrant. His son was on TV telling stories about how much his dad loved and would sing while cleaning the windows while on scaffolding. I thought that was really an amazing and brave thing he did.

 

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