Jake Gordon

I Can Fly!

7 July 2001

I am now, officially, allowed to jump out of planes by myself and fly through the air for about a minute before opening a parachute. Yahoo! That’s right - I just completed a skydiving course - a total of 14 jumps with about 40 seconds of freefall on each of them. By the end of it, I was doing rolls and turns in the air and having a blast. Totally awesome - what a rush! See some photos of my first tandem jump (all the rest were solo).

Let me just take you through a typical jump… You’re going up in the plane to 10,000ft and that takes about fifteen minutes. During that time, you’re crapping yourself thinking if the parachute’s going to work or not - it always does! Then, you get to your height and the door swings open, air whooshing around everywhere. You’ve then gotta’ climb out onto the wheels and hold onto the wing strut before letting go and accelerating through the air to terminal velocity. Bloody A! Half a minute later, you’re checking your height and when you’re down to about 3,000ft you pull the ripcord and hope to sweet Jesus that the parachute opens. Then, suddendly, there’s the sound of silence as your canopy opens up and you drift gently towards the ground. Hopefully you land in the right field five minutes later (unless the winds are too strong and you’re too stupid - like me - and end up in the wrong field!).

Now it’s homeward bound for me. I’ll be back in ol’ blighty within a couple of weeks, stopping off at Singapore on the way back to get some hi-tech gadgetry.


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by Jake Gordon, some rights reserved