Posted on 03/28/2023 5:30:06 AM PDT by V_TWIN
A member of a skydiving group was making her first jump with her own parachute system when she became tangled in high-tension power lines in western Riverside County.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbclosangeles.com ...
Ballsy, but apparently needs more R&D.
I finally realized a lifelong dream of skydiving last summer. I did two tandem jumps. What a blast!
My instructor had several thousand jumps at the same drop zone but I’d think spatial disorientation isn’t hard on your first jump, especially if she’s fixated on another hazard.
I hope she jumps again.
There’s a podcast called ‘Cleared Hot’ (Andy Stumpf). He interviews mostly military, but is an experienced sky diver, tandem instructor etc. & he talks about it a lot. He & some friends just did a big trip, skydiving in something like 7 countries. I think you would enjoy hearing him talk about it - I do (and I don’t even fly!).
It was actually her first jump with her own rig. Not a lot of real information but most likely she had an A license which requires a minimum of 25 jumps. Most people don’t get their own rig until they have enough jumps to get an idea as to what they want as far as canopy, container and reserve. There is a large range of canopy types, from docile student to much smaller, high performance types which should only be flown by experienced jumpers, and are involved in a high percentage of skydiving fatalities.
Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
That being said I would have tried it in my youth.
I would parachute any day over bungee jumping. I like controlling my destiny and current sky diving gives one that
I went thru Accelerated Free Fall training . You jump from 12,500 . Two instructors jump at the same time. No static lines, not tied to anyone.
Takes 10 jumps to finish the course.
I finished the course, and jumped 2 times after that.
The parachute ride was fun, but the free fall was nothing special.
I owned a 172 at that time and could buy quite a bit of fuel for the cost of a jump.
We were getting ready to go up one day and this fellow kept yammering on about how this was the most exciting thing a person could do.
I just said to him,” Buddy, you have never strapped your ass to a bull have you.”
Pics at link show the parachute tangled around a power pole with transformers. That’s plenty dangerous, but I had pictured 100,000 volt transmission wires and giant towers, rather than local distribution on wood poles. I find it odd that a skydive drop zone would have that many buildings and obstructions to fall on. Is that normal?
It does seem to be a bit crowded for a parachute drop zone......the ones where I am are in the wide open spaces.
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