Tag: skydiving

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“Today You Get To Be the Wind Dummy”

I’ve written before about a skydiving misadventure where a friend and I ended up landing at the bottom of a quarry rather than the wide open terrain of the airport. As it turns out, my very next jump had a memorable landing, too.

As you might expect, skydiving is a very weather-dependent activity. In order to have a successful jump, you need to plan the jump from the ground up, and a lot of the planning is dependent on wind. You almost always want to land into the wind, so the direction the wind is blowing at the surface determines your final approach. The wind commonly blows different directions at different altitudes, though, so that complicates things. Going further up in altitude, you need to be aware of the direction the wind is blowing at the altitude you plan to open the chute, so you allow enough time and space to move into position for your final approach. Likewise, it’s nice to know which way the wind is blowing at the altitudes where you’re experiencing freefall, because even though it has a smaller effect on your spatial orientation, it does play a part. Putting all these details together determines the desired flight path of the jump plane and the location along that path where you want to exit the plane.

The problem is that, especially for the first planeload of the day, we don’t always know which way the wind is blowing, and how hard. That’s where some guessing comes in.

At the drop zone where I learned to skydive, we had tiny planes where you could only fit four or five jumpers. On most flights there was somebody that did a “hop ‘n pop” jump. This is where a jumper exits the aircraft at a relatively low altitude, skips the freefall, and almost immediately opens the chute. (It adds to your jump count, but doesn’t add much to your freefall time.) Once that jumper got out, it made the cabin roomier and the plane lighter, enabling it to climb faster for the rest of the jumpers.

To get your first-level skydiving certification (your “A license”), you had to successfully demonstrate the ability to perform a hop ‘n pop. It just so happened that doing a hop ‘n pop was next on my list of objectives on my way to earning my A license. It also just so happened that I made the plane roster for the very first flight of the day. Since I was going to be getting out early, it meant I was going to be the very first jumper out of a plane that day. The person with that distinction is affectionately known as the “wind dummy.” They’re the ones that get to go out and see what the actual conditions are, deal with whatever the reality happens to be, and correct or confirm the planning assumptions for future planeloads of jumpers.

All the people there that day collectively had tens of thousands of jumps under their belt. I think this was my 24th jump. Naturally I deferred to their planning experience and trusted them to plan the best route using the information and experience they had. They walked me through the flight and exit plan, and I was set. We did our safety checks, got in the plane, and took off.

As we lined up for me to exit the aircraft, I got out right where I was supposed to, jumping out at 4,000 feet. The chute opened and all my gear functioned the way it was supposed to. The problem was that the winds were a lot stronger than all of us expected. The headwind was stronger than my parachute’s forward velocity. Rather than heading toward our bulls-eye near the skydiving hangar, I was pushed backwards toward the fence line. It quickly became apparent there wasn’t any chance of having a short walk back, and for a long time it looked like I wasn’t even going to land inside the fence. I did whatever I could to make things work out. I skipped some of the safety maneuvers (doing turns to make sure the steering worked) because: 1. spending even a little time not flying forward increased my chances of landing in the scrub outside the airport, and 2. I was flying straight ahead and didn’t need to do any turns. I hung on my front risers to try to get the canopy to dive faster to get below the worst of the headwind.

In the end, the winds mellowed as I got closer to the ground, and God must’ve given me a little push. I made it inside the fence, but not by much. I still landed pretty far away, near the end of the runway. Airports look nice when you’re looking at overhead images of them, but you really lose the sense of scale and how long of a walk it is from one spot to another, especially when carrying a bundle of 190 square feet of canopy, string, and canvas over one shoulder while wearing a jumpsuit and harness that aren’t comfortable for walking long distances. It was probably close to half a mile. The other people that stayed in the plane made it all the way up to their planned exit altitude, jumped, landed, and made it back to the hangar and got their gear off before I reached the hangar on foot.

Sometimes you can plan well (or think you’re planning well) and still be surprised by things you didn’t see coming. You can get mad about it if you want to, but most of the time, you’re not getting back to that hangar until you make the trek. You can go ahead and grumble, but make sure you don’t do it until after you pick up your stuff and start walking. Sure, you can blow off some steam, but make sure you put more effort into the solution than the complaining. (And don’t forget to learn from the mistakes. Maybe next time let someone else be the wind dummy!)

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Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture

About 7 months after joining the Air Force, I washed out of SERE Specialist training. My knees couldn’t cope with the physical rigors of the job, and I wasn’t allowed to continue to the next level of training. I’m not gonna lie, it was a rough time for me. It was probably the first real time in my life that I failed to achieve something I’d set out to do.

Fast forward through all the self pity, and I decided to stay in the Air Force but train to do something else. I decided on a role in intelligence. After the paperwork came through, I transferred from Fairchild Air Force Base (AFB) in Washington State to Goodfellow AFB, Texas.

It was a tough adjustment. Everything about the change was difficult. I went from an environment where I had been given a lot of freedom, trust, and responsibility to an environment where I was given virtually none of that. Most of the students at this base were fresh out of Basic Training, and needed a high degree of supervision, whereas I did not. The water in the area (and as a result, everything cooked in or prepared with the water) tasted gross. We were in the middle of two wars at the time, and in order to maintain sufficient student throughput the training programs involved multiple shifts of teaching each day. The base’s population seemed like it was maxed out. There weren’t enough dorms to put all the bodies, so they had to re-open old ones or put off shutting down dorms that were scheduled to be shuttered. Chow halls were open at midnight to accommodate those in class at night (or preparing for class to start). Students were sleeping, exercising, and attending classes at all hours of the day to try to maximize the facilities available.

I eventually adjusted, but it wasn’t a fun place to be. Goodfellow AFB is in a town called San Angelo. This place is about three hours from any big city. It’s a fantastic place to live if you’re raising a young family or enjoy a slower pace of life. Like, no kidding, people just pull out camp chairs and hang out in the Walmart parking lot on Friday nights (or at least they did when I was stationed there). The locals there love the military, and are truly wonderful folks. Most of the Airmen that came to Goodfellow, however, came there because the Air Force sent them there to learn a new job, and most of those people were young, single, and got bored easily. When young single people get bored, it usually leads to trouble. We had people get in trouble for underage drinking, breaking curfew, “inappropriate relations,” leaving base when they weren’t supposed to, and just about anything else you could imagine. One of my classmates even attempted suicide.

Between my time spent in college and the time I’d already chalked up elsewhere in the military, this was about year number five of dorm life for me, so you can imagine how it was getting old by this time. I figured out early in my stay at San Angelo that my sole purpose, the only reason in the world that Uncle Sam had sent me to this place, was to learn the core skills and knowledge I’d need for doing my job once I got to subsequent duty stations. As far as I was concerned, it was in my own best interest to hunker down, do well in class, and graduate on time. All else was secondary, and graduating was the fastest way to get out of there. I had already done a lot of the growing up that many of my fellow students still needed to do, so I saw things differently than many of them did.

Since the weeks were spent in an oppressive military environment, I spent a lot of time on weekends away from the base, at the nearest skydiving drop zone I could find. The drop zone was about an hour and a half away. Since there wasn’t much else to do except hang out with someone that would probably end up getting in trouble, the long trips weren’t such a bad thing. It would have been easy to just sneak away and not tell anybody what I was doing, but I had seen so many people get in trouble over stupid stuff that I decided it was better to just play by the rules. I went and got permission from our squadron commander to go skydiving. Every Friday before my weekend excursions I would go and get the same stupid safety brief from people that had no idea what kind of safety tips to brief me on when it came to skydiving. I got the dumb paperwork saying that I had received the brief and kept it on file. I did it right.

By the end of my time at Goodfellow, I had numerous classmates that had gotten themselves into some kind of trouble. One had some kind of security violation. Another one got administratively punished for violating something or other. One got pregnant and wasn’t sure for awhile who the father was. Because of my mindset that I was only going to be here for a short time and that the best course of action was to focus on my purpose for being there, I managed to avoid a lot of the headaches and hassles that a lot of other people got caught up in. I forfeited a lot of the “good times” that others took part in, but in hindsight, I really didn’t miss out on much. There was plenty of time for fun stuff after moving on from there.

A lot of Christians remind me of my former classmates in certain ways. They forget why they’re here and start focusing on things that don’t have lasting impact. Being a Christian isn’t just a Sunday morning proposition. After getting saved, we’ve really only got one objective in our lives: glorify God by taking part in the purpose He’s placed us here for and equipped us to do. I know that task often lacks clarity. It usually ends up being a question that takes patience to receive an answer to. That’s why many stop asking.

There are a lot of rules in the Bible (do this, don’t do that, strive for this, etc.), but they’re there for a reason. I’m not advocating for legalism, but if you live according to the way scripture says you should live, you usually lead a life that isn’t full of complications, which enables you to focus on your objective better. It would have been easier for me to just drive off base on Saturday mornings and go skydiving without having to jump through all those administrative hoops, and I probably would’ve gotten away with it most of the time. All it would’ve taken was one time getting caught, and it could have resulted in restriction to base or other privileges being revoked. Those hoops were a headache, but they weren’t hard. Doing the right thing was worth it, because it allowed me to pursue my goals while staying out of trouble.

This life is a flash in the pan. It’s over so fast. I’m not saying you should stay home in a corner praying or only wearing clothes made from camel hair your whole life. Quite the opposite, our joy in Christ is supposed to be evident to all. What I’m saying is that God arranged for your life to be powerful and meaningful in its ability to bring glory to His name, and that it’s up to you how much of that potential you want to fulfill. Use the gifts and talents God’s blessed you with. If you ditch the distractions, you can run your race well and “graduate on time” (hopefully, “with honors”). There will be time for lots of fun and celebration, but that comes after passing the tests and doing the hard work. Don’t be distracted from doing what you were put here to do.

God, it is absolutely unbelievable how You’ve interwoven our lives and how the faithful use of our gifts can impact each other and the world. I know that the vast majority of us won’t live up to our full potential for Christian obedience to Your call, please forgive us for that. Help us be sensitive to the opportunities we still have left to honor Your name, and give us the clarity, wisdom, and boldness to pursue what You’d have us do. I ask these things in Your name, Amen.

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When Something Takes the hit for you

Easter is a little more than a week away. To help prepare for the season, I’d like to revisit a story I’ve told before, but it’s been a few years, so I can probably get away with it.

In the years after college I took up skydiving. It was lots of fun and a whole new type of experience. When you’re early in your skydiving career, there’s a lot of stress, thought, and mental preparation that goes into each freefall jump. It’s important to stay mentally calm so your body stays physically relaxed. If you tense up, it makes it difficult to control yourself in the airstream, and your body doesn’t maneuver the way you want it to.

One day I did a jump, and I don’t remember what the objectives were, but the freefall portion of the jump didn’t go well. Nobody got hurt or anything, but I was unable to achieve the goals I’d set for myself. For whatever reason, I had either raised my own expectations too high or I tensed up and started losing control of my ability to maneuver how I wanted to. When it came time, I opened my parachute and descended under canopy, fuming the whole time I floated to the ground.

When I finally touched down safely, I let that anger out. Draped in thousands of dollars worth of gear that had repeatedly saved my life, I couldn’t go too crazy on the chute or the rig, so I ripped off my helmet, yelling as I slammed it on the ground, then kicked it in frustration. Man, I was just seething with rage over something that I don’t even recall today.

Around Easter time, we sometimes hear the word “propitiation” in church. It’s usually referring to the idea that since God and sin are incompatible, and His holy wrath toward sin must be satisfied before we experience lasting peace, there has to be some kind of reckoning.

In my case, on that skydive, I took out my wrath on that poor, innocent helmet. After expending my rage, I stood there with gritted teeth, red face, and heaving shoulders. As I began getting myself under control, the wrath was spent, and the helmet had served as the object that took the punishment.

In God’s case, He had a choice. He could either demand ongoing sacrifices of unblemished animals from His followers, or He could implement a permanent solution. Back in Bible times, sacrifices were the means of satisfying God’s wrath against our sin…those sacrifices took our punishment on our behalf. Thankfully for us, He opted to go the second route. He sent Jesus Christ, His only son, to live among us. Living a spotless life without sin (the equivalent of an unblemished sacrificial animal), Christ died on our behalf, an innocent man dying the death of a criminal. Then, in what has to be one of the most indescribable emotions in the whole Bible, God turned His back on His own son, who then experienced our due punishment in our place.

Christ died on a Friday. That Sunday, He rose from the dead in victory, having satisfied God’s wrath and forever changing our relationship with God for the better. This is propitiation. Christ took our punishment for us so we could be spared from it.

So the next time you feel the urge to either punch a wall, punt the stupid playground ball that kid’s been bouncing, or throw your golf clubs into the water hazard, just imagine how much greater God’s wrath is, and be thankful that He’s enacted a plan that offers you a way to exempt yourself from it.

Dear Lord, thank you from the bottom of my heart for dying on the cross on my behalf. This Easter season, please help me remember the importance of what You’ve done not just for me, but for everyone, whether they accept Your gift or now. Please help me to live the way You want me to live, and share this good news with those around me. I pray in Your name, Amen.

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When You Depend on Your Equipment To Save Your Life, Use it the Right Way

It’s obviously very important to be safety-conscious when skydiving, because it’s an endeavor where you purposely insert yourself into a scenario where certain death will occur unless something extracts you from that eventuality. Some activities have equipment that’s designed for high performance and dependability during emergency usage, but in skydiving you actually go into it intending to use life-saving equipment to pull you out of an emergency situation on every single jump. A bad day in skydiving is not even in the same league as a bad day in tennis.

The absolute minimum safety inspection a jumper should perform after putting on their equipment is known as a “six-point check.” A six-point check includes: (1 and 2) making sure each leg loop on the harness is buckled completely, (3) ensuring the chest buckle running between the shoulder straps is fully secured, (4) making sure you can easily access the mechanism that deploys your main chute, and double-checking to see that the handles for (5) cutting away your malfunctioning main chute and (6) deploying your reserve chute haven’t become tangled, twisted, or obstructed and are easily accessible. This can be done before getting into the plane, and it should be done again right before jumping out.

On one plane ride up several of us were stuffed into a tiny plane, just waiting until we reached our jump altitude. On these flights you’re often crammed into some awkward position and there isn’t much to do while you wait. The engine is loud, and you have to yell to be heard, so conversations don’t normally last long. That means when someone starts talking, it’s usually worth listening to. The most experienced jumper on this load spoke up, and he was talking to me. He had trained himself to sweep his eyes over the equipment of his fellow jumpers. He said to me “would you please fasten your chest strap.” Sure enough, I looked down, and it was not secured properly. I had somehow missed it before getting in the plane. That’s when a feeling that was a cross between embarrassment and horror came over me. A skydiving harness, in addition to leg loops, has a strap that goes across your chest and connects the two shoulder straps. It’s there so that as you deploy your chute and you decelerate quickly, the harness doesn’t get ripped off your body. The leg loops are still there, but if they’re the only thing connecting you to the rig, you’d flip upside down and probably slide out of them. A parachute won’t do you any good unless you’re connected to it somehow.

The chest strap prevents the shoulder straps from separating too far apart

In many skydiving circles, the popular currency is expressed in terms of cases of beer. When you first get your skydiving license, you owe the drop zone a case of beer. If you surpass some milestone or perform some new formation during a big jump, you might celebrate by supplying a case of beer. If you mess up, you usually owe someone a case of beer. Seeing the look on my face, he said “I just saved your life. You owe me a case of beer.”

Christians deal with vital safety equipment of a different sort. Think about the armor of God. This is equipment that’s meant to protect your saved soul! Many of our helmets are dinged because they’ve taken repeated blows from the enemy’s weapons. Our shields have varying degrees of pockmarks and burn marks from where flaming arrows struck, only to burn themselves out. Due to an infinite number of variables, some Christians are more battle-weary  or have taken more hits than others. Some are still fresh and are swinging that sword like tomorrow’s not coming, but others are barely standing, reeling and about to start dropping vital equipment that will leave them more exposed to danger.

If there are Christians around you, there are people nearby that are using this equipment to varying degrees on a daily basis. Some will have more experience as a Christian than you, and sometimes you’ll be the “senior Christian” in the group. If you see someone who’s not using the equipment correctly, or it doesn’t “fit” properly, don’t be afraid to help them out. There are pitfalls and traps everywhere for Christians, we often need help from one another to walk through this life intact.

The guy that helped me out on the plane was experienced enough to be on the lookout for problematic equipment not only on himself, but on others. We should try to do the same. I don’t know if he actually saved my life that day, but I’m sure glad he spoke up when he did. Who’s out there, waiting for you to notice a problem and say something about it?

Lord Jesus, You know exactly what I’m going to encounter today, and You’ve charted my path through it long before I was even born. Please help me recognize opportunities You place in front of me to tighten up my own spiritual armor, along with that of others. Help me speak up not out of arrogance, but of a genuine desire to mitigate fellow believers’ vulnerabilities, and be humble enough to listen when others do the same for me. Amen

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Time To Get Back on the Horse

September is a gorgeous month for skydiving. The summer heat has lost its oppressive force, but you can still be comfortable either in shorts and a tee shirt or with a jumpsuit on top of that. It’s noticeably cooler up top when you get out of the plane, but it’s not cold enough to need gloves or extra layers yet.

Now, for those of you that don’t know me, I’m ordinarily a pretty laid back guy. If you see me lose my temper, something like, huge has probably happened. For some reason though, skydiving was a parallel universe for me. I was driven. I wanted badly to be good at freefall skills so I’d be able to turn formations deftly and be able to zip around the sky with other jumpers. When I tried learning certain maneuvers though, I’d try too hard, and I’d be more likely to lose my cool when something didn’t go the way I planned.

Goofing off with a buddy while waiting for our ride to altitude. It’s important to keep the mood light!

Early on I would jump out of the plane and my body tensed up. I’d go rigid not because I was nervous about plummeting toward the ground, but because I was overthinking the instructions and was too focused on trying to get it right. In freefall though, to get your body to do what you want it to do, you need to have your muscles very relaxed. Tensing your muscles causes all different kinds of problems for you. This wasn’t like kayaking, weightlifting, or skiing, where adrenaline or extra power can be a big help; this was an entirely new type of physical challenge…you had to stay chill when the wind is so loud you can’t even hear what someone six inches away from your face is screaming at you.

On one jump, I don’t even remember what happened…I just remember that even though I landed safely I was furious at myself for not getting the freefall objectives right. I mean like, livid. Before my canopy had even completely settled onto the grass, I ripped off my helmet and threw it on the ground, then started kicking it around for good measure. Oh, man, was I ticked! I was ready to get in my car and leave.

There was one instructor at the drop zone, Darlene, who really understood people and what makes them tick. She saw my little tantrum and talked with me about what happened on the jump. After our impromptu debrief she said something surprising. She told me that I needed to get one more jump in that day before I left.

It was surprising because on busy days you had to get in line to get a ride up to altitude; if people wanted to leave early, that was only good news for everyone else. I didn’t want any part of it, I was just feeling sour and wanted to take my ball and go home. She took a look at the schedule of remaining flights and found a way to get me another jump before I left that day. I jumped again, and it went much better than my helmet-kicker.

Darlene knew that if I left on the heels of a bad jump, it was quite possible that I might never come back. She understood that in order for me to flip the script in my own mind, I needed to walk out of there with success more fresh in my memory than failure. It didn’t need to be a stellar jump. It didn’t even need to be a great jump. It just had to be enough, in my mind, to crowd out the memory of a horrible jump.

It may not be skydiving, but you might be in the same boat today. You could be about to turn your back on the thing you thought you were meant to do.

Maybe you already walked away from it. You started walking and you didn’t even turn around to look back, because you want to convince yourself that this isn’t for you.

Well, even if you stepped away, what if you gave it another try? Do you have more to lose than you have to gain? It might just be worth another shot.

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Life Lessons From…Skydiving?

Exiting an aircraft with Tony and his very recognizable jumpsuit

I’m certainly no skydiving guru. While I was a skydiving student, though, I had a few memorable jumps. I’m not sure what the requirement is now, but when I was working on getting my A License (the most basic jumping certification), the rule was that you had to accumulate at least 25 jumps and meet certain milestones along the way.

I was in the plane on the way up for my 23rd jump. The weather was turning sour, so this was the drop zone’s last load of jumpers for at least a few hours. We saw the cloud bank rolling in, and we were trying to rush up to altitude so we could jump out and land before the clouds obscured our view of the ground.

Another student named Jeremy and I were going to jump with our coach Tony. Tony was pretty familiar with us and we had all jumped together before. He wore a neon orange jumpsuit that was so bright it looked like it ran on batteries.

On a jump with Tony as my coach

I don’t remember what the freefall objectives of the jump were, but once we arrived at altitude we hopped out together and began going through our freefall plan. We fell through our predetermined “time to separate” altitude, so we broke apart to get some distance between us before we opened our parachutes. All three of us opened the chutes without a problem, but much to our surprise, the cloud cover had blown in much faster than we anticipated. We couldn’t see the ground anywhere. The only thing we had were our altimeters; we knew how high we were off the ground, but we didn’t know where we were in relation to the airport, so we couldn’t line up in our landing pattern. Since the wind was pushing us the whole time, the longer we floated aimlessly, the further off course we drifted, leaving us less margin of error for a safe landing at the airport.

Since Jeremy and I were still students, each of us had a one-way radio in our jumpsuit shoulder pockets. There was a guy on the ground with a walkie talkie that was waiting to spot us, and he would radio instructions about which way to turn and when to do it. Until we popped through the clouds though, it was useless for all of us.

Tony took the lead; he was the lowest jumper “under canopy,” so I followed him, and Jeremy followed me. I was glad Tony’s jumpsuit was so bright. It was eerie and unsettling to drift without direction in a thick fog. The last time we saw the airport, we were right over it, but the wind can be a lot stronger than you realize when you don’t have any visible references.

Suddenly we popped through the bottom of the clouds at a low altitude. The airport was impossibly far away! We had bled off so much altitude in the fog that there was no way we could make it back. Tony’s canopy had a much higher performance capability, so he made a break for the airport and was able to make it back. With our “vanilla” student rigs and oversized canopies, though, Jeremy and I had no chance of reaching the airport.

The dropzone where I learned to jump was home to the Guinness World Record holder of sport parachute jumps. Don Kellner, who just recently completed his 45,000th jump, was on the radio giving instructions to Jeremy and I. Don’s a funny guy; he doesn’t pull any punches, so he says it like it is and doesn’t sugar coat it.

“Well…find a place to land” came through the radio. Thanks Don.

We had blown way off course. We were now downwind not just of the runway, but of the entire airport complex, and we had a choice: land somewhere in a neighborhood, land somewhere in a wooded area, or land in a big rock quarry. Don advised us to shoot for the quarry.

When you’re a novice jumper, you usually have a flat patch of grass that’s as big as a football field to land on, and there’s usually plenty of other open space nearby (runways and the grassy areas next to them are usually pretty long). All of a sudden, a hilly rock quarry that didn’t have any wind indicators seemed like a pretty hostile place to land. It was the best of our bad options though, so we went for it.

With Tony out of the picture, I was now the lead in the flight pattern. I made a series of turns to get us lined up for what looked like the longest stretch of the flattest ground at the bottom of the quarry. We floated below the horizon and became committed to our flight path.

We both stumbled and took a few bumps and bruises as we tried running out our landings on the side of a hill. We made it safely to the ground without any blood or major injuries. After the canopies fell to the ground, we excitedly checked in with each other and exaggerated to each other just how truly awesome we were with lots of laughs, wild gestures to help relive the experience, and congratulatory slaps on the back. As we took a deep breath and looked around the bottom of this hole, we realized that we didn’t even know which way we should start climbing up out of the quarry. With all the midair turns we did, we lost all sense of direction and couldn’t even point to the airport or the nearest road.

Something tells me that we weren’t the first wayward skydivers to land in this quarry. Before we could even decide what to do, two of our other instructors, in their goofy neon jumpsuits, appeared on the rim of the quarry, shouting and waving to us. We were rescued!

Some general perspective on living: Life isn’t always going to go the way you planned. There are going to be times you find yourself traveling through a disorienting fog. Sometimes you’ll feel abandoned by the people you depended on (or you simply can’t keep up with them). In those times, when you’re at the bottom of a hole, someone might just show up to help you. They may not be what you expected, but it’s still an opportunity to find out which way to climb out of the hole.

We’re passing through strange times; it might not be a bad idea to accept a hand up when it’s offered. Keep your chin up; brighter days are coming.