Look up,
wey p>.
ltsa
bind, it’s
a solani
No. It’s
Somme:
crazy
bastard
falling
out of an

auplane!

Have You
Ever WANTED

TO Fry?

JOHN MoraAsH

 

hat’s what one may be
thinking from the ground
at Pitt Meadows airport,
but rest assured the crazy
bastard did not fall, he jumped,
willfully, out of a perfectly good
airplane. The next question is, why?
What could possibly make someone
deliberately seek such high anxiety?

In my case, it was my buddy
Darrell’s stag party. Most stag parties
are typified by a good drunk, a flirta-
tious stripper and all your drunk pals
making bets on who will be first to
puke from the next round of shoot-
ers. Darrell didn’t want the average
stag; he wanted us to jump out of a
plane with him. And so, we did.

Like many people, I had always
wanted to jump, but always found
some way of putting it off. My
friends and J would pledge our par-
ticipation, announcing our bravery
and adventuresome spirit, and then
back out when we sobered up. We
came up with every excuse in the
book to avoid jump day: money,
work, health, girlfriends. Darrell’s stag
was our chance to redeem ourselves.

(In the end, we still only got three

out of a possible twelve to jump.)

I climbed aboard the Cessna 185
thinking I would be happy if this toy
plane could make it off the
ground—lI wasn't even considering
jumping yet. There was room for the
pilot and four jumpers to cram them-
selves into the hollowed-out gut of
the plane and find some space on the
floor for the thirty minute ascent.
That's right—it takes a half-hour to
get up to 11,000 feet, plenty of time
to think.

I had decided to jump tandem,
strapped to an instructor or tandem
master. By going tandem I could
jump from 11000 feet on my first
jump and free-fall for 45 seconds, as
opposed to jumping from 3000 feet
with no free-fall, by myself. Don
Kennedy was the tandem master I was
strapped to. I had to rely on his 25
years of skydiving experience to guide
me from sky to ground. Don has
jumped thousands of times safely. He °
has a wife and kids, but what put my
mind most at ease was when he
“T don't want to die either.” Well,
that we were both in agreement on
that, it was time ta think back on
Don's ground sch ining.

     
 
  
 

 

Things to remem

May 1998 Pa: