Location: A Whilom nimble brain. With 31 million posts.
Age: 73
Posts: 3,378
It was on my bucket list, but now, with a hurty back and malfunction warning lights coming on from other aging components, I'll probably give it a miss.
A mate made one jump when he was in his twenties. His enduring memory is of his feet, gliding along over the green fields, with nowt under them but the shoe leather.
My son decided to undertake a jump when he was in his twenties. He was thwarted by inclement weather on the several days when he reported for the jump. Eventually his basic training qualification expired and he never got around to renewing this so he didn't get to jump.
Now that he has two dependents (and a wife) I don't suppose he will apply again.
He's had one narrow escape (Kings Cross 7th July 2005).
He was in the next carriage to the one that the bomber chose to get in . . .
The most impressive one I recall was a bloke jumped and his chute failed then his spare failed, he had his camera running all the time with a open mic,the impressive thing was the silence, just the sound of him breathing rather heavily as he plummeted groundward sans chute,had it been me you would have heard me shrieks in the Orkneys, Amazingly he landed in some bushes and survived with only a limb or two Broken. One has never been tempted.
The only time to ever jump out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane is when it is on fire. ( which is also the only time that one has too much fuel )
In my NATO sponsored RAF training, one of the students was of the French Air Force, an ex-3rd mate off a Marseilles tanker, and built accordingly.
One night, flying a Harvard, he got himself lost over snow covered terrain in Canada, and decided that the only answer was to bale out. ( not the brightest of decisions, but he was still a student ) He undid his straps, opened the canopy, and with a skill that I doubt I could emulate, managed to climb out on to the wing whilst still holding the control column with some semblance of control. He then looked down at the dark, snow covered landscape - and climbed back in !!
He eventually saw some lights, which proved to be our home airfield.
( so he told us, obviously as a solo student there was no witness to the story - we believed him )
The only time to ever jump out of a perfectly serviceable aeroplane is when it is on fire.
Ah yes, the old 'perfectly serviceable' line. Speaking as an ex-jump pilot, jump planes are never perfectly serviceable. For one thing, they tend to be retired freighters. Then, the operator removes all remaining interior paneling to save weight, and covers all the sharp corners with duct tape. Thus, the aircraft appears to be held together with tape. It was frequently harder to get the customers in than out!
Nah, not for me either. Don't like heights, I have no problem flying a small single, or travelling in anything that flies. Jumping out of it just seems daft IMHO.
As an aside, when mini was in the military, he decided that because of his distaste of dangling on ropes at great height, (part of basic training...) he would apply to become a combat diver... He was after all a civvy Diving Instructer (PADI)
Yeah. After the toughest 9 months of my life, our selection having been screwed down to eight of 75, I'd got there... so I thought. Our last day should have been a jolly... bugger that, we were lined up on a bridge and told to jump... 60 bloody feet!
I did.
Anyway, I still don't like jumping from anything...
I have taken off one more time than landing in an aircraft. I enjoyed it, static line jump though so no brainer really...unless the main chute had not deployed then pulling the reserve would have been fun. I still remember the training to this day and would know what to do! That's 30 years later...
A late colleague flew bombers in WW II, aerial photography in Indonesia afterwards, and had never had to use a parachute. Many years later, he was flying a glider when the wing literally broke off. Because it was at the world championships he was wearing a 'chute, and used it. He said his biggest worry was bits of glider coming past him after it opened. On the way down he tried to remember all the things he'd learned 30 years before about landing. All he could remember was to spit out his false teeth!
Another colleague, on his first (recreational) solo jump, had a problem and had to use his reserve. Fortunately, all went well. It didn't put him off, and he did many more jumps, eventually instructing. He said that when things went wrong, time seemed to slow down, and he seemed to have plenty of time to think and do things. Guess adrenaline can do that.
i) a reluctance to exit on the part of the passenger; after the second refusal the tandem-master should have remained with his passenger inside the aircraft and returned to earth without proceeding with the jump.
ii) a very poorly-adjusted tandem-passenger harness, clearly visible during the exit. Slack shoulder and leg-straps, as if they were never adjusted at all.
The responsibility for that goes straight to the tandem-master. I've seen the entire video (from gearing up onwards) and the tandem-master simply fails to ensure the passenger is correctly secured in the harness.
(I am a veteran of over 2000 skydives, and video'd several hundred tandem-jumps before retiring from skydiving. Every tandem-master I ever worked with was very attentive to the passenger being correctly harnessesd and fully-briefed as to what was expected of them. I made sure I had the full briefing on both audio and video in case there was an issue.)
A Googoo search reveals that it isn't a unique occurrence (failing to survive a parachute jump).
My local dropzone is one of the largest in Europe, the Christmas Boogie attracts thousands. We who live here knows there are quite a few fatalities each year and most don't get reported as it is bad for business. Last year had a suicide of an instructor who came straight in, canopy unopened.
Talking to the jumpers is quite an education in how to ignore any information they should know such as meteorology - we get winds here that can peak well over 100 mph and come up in ten minutes. But say the word "Tramontana" to these guys and you mostly get a blank look.
I'm another in the serviceable aircraft no jump camp. My brother did a jump for charity once, but at some point on the way down fainted. He woke up uninjured face down in a field - presumably being totally limp is a good way to land!
Then, the operator removes all remaining interior paneling to save weight, and covers all the sharp corners with duct tape. Thus, the aircraft appears to be held together with tape. It was frequently harder to get the customers in than out! 
