The instructor tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she was ready. “Sure,” was all she said. The doors opened, cold air rushed in and most of her thoughts rushed out.
The only thing that University senior Stefanie Chow could think of before her first jump was, “Why am I jumping out of a perfectly good airplane?”
“It didn’t really hit me until the doors opened,” she said.
Chow, a self-titled “adrenaline junkie,” described her jump as a loud roller coaster. She said all she could feel was the wind rushing by, and then she just floated.
However, she wasn’t completely alone; beginners are always strapped to an instructor.
“It was like a massive air conditioning machine,” Chow said. “The weather had been nice and sunny on the ground — maybe 60 degrees — but at 14,000 feet, it’s cold.”
The adrenaline rush was helping her enter a Zen state of calm, so she could look down and experience the moment. It’s hard for her to explain. All she could say is that it was the most unusual meditation she has ever experienced.
“You’re not thinking about anything. You’re falling from the sky. You’re really falling from the sky. It’s the greatest stress reliever,” Chow said.
She has been on three jumps since then, and she said the feeling never changes.
“There are no fears,” Chow said. “You take a leap of faith, and hope for the best.”
More experienced divers have felt the rush Chow speaks of for decades.
John Kirby, a TV producer for the Portland Winterhawks, has jumped 530 times in the last 30 years, and he still goes out in the summer to jump.
Kirby has jumped out of helicopters, Boeing 747s, hot air balloons and C130s. While he’s gotten a little bored with the regular belly flying, he still enjoys vertical (head down) and sit flying. When he and a large group of fellow jumpers launched a rubber raft out of a plane with two people sitting in the raft, the rest of the group had to fly around holding them up.
“The challenge is going in a group who you can trust,” Kirby said.
Chow said she loves to fall. It gives her a natural high, and she can’t get enough of it. She bungee jumps, bridge jumps and cliff dives. Getting her skydiving license would be ideal, she said, but because of the extensiveness of the program, she hasn’t been able to carve out enough time to get it.
A student must have taken at least 25 jumps to get an Accelerated Free Fall Class A license, and seven to nine of those jumps must have been with instructors. After completing several hours of on-the-ground training, the first two jumps are tandem. After that, the student jumps with two instructors, one at each side. The instructors’ job is to make sure that the student is checking the altimeter and pulling the chute at the correct altitude.
An altimeter is a device that’s placed in the jumper’s ear that beeps at 5,000 feet — the height at which one pulls the parachute. At that time, one instructor jumps with the student for four to six jumps, where they practice turns and positions, and then the student is essentially on her own. She still has to be supervised when preparing for the jump. After the student has reached 25 jumps, she earns a license.
However, accidents can occur in the sky, and there is a risk of fatality. At speeds that high — falling head-down, Kirby reaches up to 180 mph — colliding with someone could mean two fatalities.
There’s a widely-believed statistic: every 500 jumps, the parachute fails. When Kirby was on his 499th jump, he heard a weird snap when his parachute was released. He realized half of his parachute was still scrunched up, and that a line had twisted. So he “chopped” off his main chute by pulling a lever, which automatically releases the reserve chute.
“I thought ‘Well, OK, I get to see my reserve chute now!’” he said. It was the first time in 20 years that such a malfunction had happened to him.
Before Chow reaches 500 jumps, her next steps are not only to get her AFF license but also to learn how to fly her own plane. She hopes to be an optometrist, after earning her degrees in biology and pre-med, but she plans to keep skydiving on the side.
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