Skydiving

Skydiving
By: Joe Rivet


Ever wonder what it’s like too be falling at 100 miles per hour? One LSC student is about to find out.
I’m going skydiving this Saturday in Addison Vermont at a place called Vermont Skydiving. They have been in business for 15 years. The worst injury Vermont Skydiving has ever had was a sprained ankle. They also use special types of parachutes that open automatically after a minute if you are not able to do it yourself. These were the reason I choose them over others in the area.
I will be doing a Tandem jump. That means I will have an instructor tied to my back when I jump out of the airplane. Tandem jumping requires only 20 minutes of training before you are allowed to go up in the plane. It is not required that a first time jumper choose to jump this way, but the alternative, Accelerated Free Fall, requires a full day of training and is far more dangerous.
For a tandem jump, the diver and the instructor are flown two miles into the air before they jump out. After that, they will be in free fall for 45 seconds before they have to use the parachute. The jump itself will last around 3 minutes.
I’m only a little afraid to go skydiving, I have always enjoyed taking risks, but I have never taken any risk as big as this one. I suppose that’s a good thing though, because one skydiving instructor told me he would never take anybody up who was not scared at all. “They are the ones who are always the most cocky, crazy, or stupid and they are the ones who end up dead. He had even heard a story about one of those crazy people who jumped out of a plane with no parachute on to film someone else go skydiving.
I’m a lot more excited than I first expected though. I can’t wait to see what the ground looks like while it’s rushing up at you from two miles away. Every other skydiver I have talked to told me they had a blast the first time they were thrown out a perfectly good airplane.