I mentioned somewhere on the forum that at one time I had a desire to learn to jump out of a plane but that I got over it. Here's how.
A co-worker and friend with whom I had gone to grad school decided that he would learn to jump and I went to watch his first jump. All went well and Tom jumped, his chute opened. and he was floating down. A young lady jumped out after he did, her chute didn't open, she froze and didn't pull the reserve. Tom said she passed him like a rocket. The mess on the ground exceeded the worse that I had ever seen, and I had been on a voluntary fire dept for years. Up to then the worst I had ever seen was the result of a race between a train and a group of 6 teenies in a Pontiac convertible in which the teenies lost.
I decided then and there that I didn't want to jump outa planes after all.
Oh come on Harry, you could have gotten by that experience if you had given it the old college try. Here is an example. I made my first jump and then one week later I was out at the drop zone to make my second jump. This was in the days before skydiving altimeters so we determined when it was the right time to pull our ripcords by counting seconds, "one thousand one...one thousand two...," for short delays or with a stopwatch for longer delayed free falls. We also had chest mounted reserve parachutes and they had an instrument panel mounted on them to hold the stopwatch.
We were standing around, waiting for our lift and watching the jumpers on the prior lifts make their jumps. We watched this one guy come out of the plane at 5500 feet to make a 20 second delayed free fall. We kept watching him, watching him, watching him until he hit the ground about 75 yards from where we were standing. He hit the ground face first, bounced up into the air about six feet and came down on his side about six feet from where he first hit the ground. We all ran over to him, he had hit the ground in the perfect, stable, standard "frog position" so the reserve chute pack hit the ground first and left a dent in the ground about six inches deep while the impression from the rest of his body was only about one or two inches deep. We rolled him over and his stopwatch, mounted on his reserve and which had hit the ground first and penetrated about six inches, was still ticking! That would have been one for John Cameron Swayze and his Timex commercials, "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking," except that this was a Heuer stopwatch. When we rolled him over I remember thinking that he was very flexible because none of his bones were longer than a couple of inches.
One week later I was at the drop zone to finally make my second jump. As part of my training, I had to pack my parachute for that jump, the very first parachute I had ever packed. So now I am in the plane at three thousand feet about to jump the first parachute I had ever packed, I was a little nervous. The winds were the same as the last time I was at the drop zone so the "spot" (the place, upwind of the planned landing place, were you exit the plane so that the wind will drift you to the drop zone) was in the same place. I'm out on the step looking down and I can clearly see that body shaped indentation in the ground three thousand below me, then I jumped.
See, Harry it's not that hard, you should have kept at it.
Oh, the young guy was in boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, he was in trouble for stealing from others in his barracks, he didn't pull his ripcord, he left a note.
gl