Taking the Plunge – the story of skydiving

There’s a long-standing myth that states that anyone who goes skydiving is either mad, has no concept of death or is emotionally-blackmailed into doing it because their mum bought them a voucher for their birthday. What I discovered was a group of inspiring, friendly people who engage in an activity with one of the best safety records of any extreme sport.

I did my ground training in October 2013, having just started my first year at Imperial. Around that time I kind of happened upon the idea of learning to skydive. I hadn’t really ever thought about it before. In fact, I don’t think I ever really thought anyone learned to skydive.

Of course, I had the odd friend who had taken the plunge and done a charity skydive or gone just one time, but they were always tandem skydives – that is, they were strapped to an instructor and didn’t have to do anything except look like they were having a good time and resist the urge to maul the person who was DRAGGING THEM OUT OF AN AIRPLANE.

So anyway, having never really considered myself a daredevil or adrenaline-junkie, I found myself standing at the ‘Imperial College Skydiving’ stall at Freshers’ Fair. There I was, talking to someone with more than a hundred solo jumps under their belt, an Imperial student just like me – but I could never do that, right? I mean, this guy must secretly jump motorbikes over buses and set himself on fire and fight sharks with his bare hands.

But he looks normal, and I overhear him complaining about how he hates his landlord and how his lab report is overdue, at which point I realise that not only is he normal, he is in fact completely unremarkable. Oh right, yeah, apart from the hundred plus skydives. Ok, well I guess I’ll sign up to the mailing list, I thought. Who knows, maybe I could try it, and impress people in the future.

The next thing I know, it’s 09:00 on a cold but sunny October morning, and I’m standing in a field in Kent. Such is the glamorous lifestyle of a skydiver, I suppose. The week before, I had signed myself up for an Imperial trip to a ground-training day, and now here I was.

This training was all that I needed to do my first solo skydive, as per the British Parachuting Association regulations. I must say, to the instructor’s credit, it was during this 10-hour, intensive training, that I realised that I really, really wanted to skydive. Call it Stockholm syndrome if you want to, but if you find yourself doing nothing but exit drills, landing practice and canopy-control technique for an entire day, it starts to grow on you.

I started to realise that what sets a skydiver apart from a non-skydiver has nothing to do with genetics, or personality, or a reckless disregard for personal safety. Nope, it’s much simpler than that. A skydiver is – wait for it – someone who has jumped out of a plane. Yep. Nothing gets past me. But what I mean when I say that is that the only reason anyone ever became a skydiver, whether solo or tandem, is that they told themselves that they had it in them to do it, and then actually did it!

Anyone that can do these two steps is a skydiver. Easy, right? Well, by enrolling in the ground training, I had done the first step. I owed it to myself to prove to everyone that I could manage the second step.

Only a couple of days after my ground training, I did it, my first jump. I can’t tell you much about it, as it was all a bit of a blur. What I can say though, is that it wasn’t scary. It was surreal, like an out of body experience, but the whole situation was so foreign to my hyper-reacting brain that I didn’t even get a chance to be scared. My training had prepared me more than adequately for what was about to happen, and I was sitting opposite my instructor on the plane, which was very reassuring.

I would say the oddest thing I remember was the sensation of having nothing but 3,500 feet of empty air between your feet and the ground when sitting at the door of the plane, ready to perform your exit – that is to say, to fling yourself desperately at the ground.

For my first jump the parachute deployed itself via an attachment to the airplane so, aside from the initial couple of seconds shock, it mainly consisted of a parachute ride. There aren’t many things in life that I would say are breathtaking, but given that this article is so far lacking in clichés, I feel that it is a very appropriate description. It’s not a long ride – maybe 5 minutes – but it was long enough for me to realise that I was now a skydiver.

I also realised that this sport would become a big part of my life. I’ve since gained my skydiving A-licence after a year of training and done more than 20 solo jumps from 12000 feet, with up to a minute of freefall each time – but I still have a lot to learn! Along with 3 other members of the Imperial Skydiving club, I’m hoping to set up a formation skydiving team for the first time in the club’s history, later this academic year.

Imperial College Parachute and Skydiving Club organises training trips throughout the year for anyone wishing to experience solo skydiving. They also run frequent tandem and windtunnel trips for those who want to try things out before being left to their own devices in the sky. For more information visit their website at https://union.ic.ac.uk/rcc/parachute/ or email parachute1@ic.ac.uk.