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Comment by jaipilot747 | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine how hard it would be to force myself to take that one step between life and death. Bravo!

Would it matter if it's 30 kilometer or 3? If anything goes wrong you're dead. I found it surprisingly easy to jump out of a plane at 3000 meters (3 km) after just a 5 minute training on the ground. The feeling of falling is super! The chute deploying? Not so much! (If you're ever planning this do not wear jeans).

"The chute deploying? Not so much! (If you're ever planning this do not wear jeans)." Why not?

I've done a few skydives so I can speak from experience - the rig that your canopy / emergency reserve is attached to resembles a giant backpack with a chest strap, and two straps that go around your thighs, and when you deploy the main canopy, you will feel the rig exerting a braking force on your chest, shoulders, and thighs. It's a lot like slamming on the brakes in your car at 60mph+. If your jeans are too tight-fitting you may get a rash, or it may just be really uncomfortable.

You're right. When the parachute deployed the jerk was unlike anything I ever experienced. The straps around my thighs rammed the loose-fit jeans against my thighs and the thicker stiched part of the jeans made for a few blue "souveneers" on my skin.

I can tell you that's not the usual experience. I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps and I'm still yet to experience a hard opening. Much more like coming to a slow, graceful stop in the car. People sometimes have a "slammer" but they're rare and can usually be attributed to some reason (bad packing, bad body position at deploy time etc).

At 13 jumps I have even less experience :)

The parent may have been doing a tandem jump; in my experience, the openings on those first few were much harder than most solo jumps I've done.

Edit: from reading the parent's other posts, perhaps not. Maybe it was a hard opening on a day he/she happened to be wearing denim. Who knows :)

Yes I did! I'm the guy with he black hair. Jumping with the No1 jumper from Holland. http://i.imgur.com/3beyM.jpg Everybody should do it at least once! It is incredibly cool.

Yep, and if not tandem could have been rental gear. Although I've never had a hard opening on any gear, the rental gear I jumped as a student was a lot less comfortable than my rig that's sized perfectly for me.

Congrats on the 13 jumps! Where do you jump at?

Sorry, I just saw your post! HN really needs a notification system a la Reddit :)

I jump out of Crosskeys in Williamstown, NJ, USA. The airport code is 17N. How about yourself?

"I don't have a whole lot of experience, but I do have nearly 300 jumps"

300? I take my hat of for you sir! I must of had a bad day. It was very cloudy and the plane we jumped from ended up above the wrong island. We found out in time, corrected, found a hole in the clouds and went for it.

Opening speeds vary a lot, some are very hard and some are very soft. It's dependent on a lot of variables, with a lot of randomness thrown in. You probably just had the fortune of having a hard one. :)

Hell with the whole idea of getting out of the gondola, its getting in the damn thing in the first place that would have stopped me.

Fair point. But when I jump from 3 km, I bask in the knowledge that plenty of people have done it in the past and landed alive (not that it says anything about how _my_ jump will go). But jumping from 30km, I know that no one else has done it.

No idea how many people died when skydiving began, but I'm guessing there were a few deaths, and I would hate to be part of a similar statistic. Having said that, skydiving is definitely on my list of things to do before 2014.

The fatality rate per participant is a lot lower now than it was in the beginning "It used to be referred to as sport death", but it's still about 13 - 30 a year. Mostly due to accidents involving landing and other entirely preventable things.

I almost ended up in those statistics. The ropes of my chute got tangled up when it deployed. Thankfully they untangled in time :-) Got in on video too, ha ha.

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