There are two words that scare me when reading about skydiving and they are “drop zone”.  To be dropped from 9000ft above the ground sounds nothing but terrifying to me. There is a part of me that would love to have the courage to do some thing like this but I think if the freefall doesn’t kill me, my nerves will.

Wikipedia (my trusted source of information) states that skydiving is “the action of exiting an aircraft and returning to earth with the aid of a parachute. It may or may not involve a certain amount of free-fall, a time during which the parachute has not been deployed and the body gradually accelerates to terminal velocity”. Terminal velocity is “when the downward force of gravity equals the upward force of drag”. Pat yourself on the back if that makes sense to you. I am getting dizzy just thinking about this and the word ‘terminal’, in my mind, also means fatal, which is never a good thing.

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Skydiving began in 1797 when Andre-Jacques Garnerin made a parachute jump from a hot air balloon and lived to tell the tale. It soon became a manoeuvre done by military aircrews and in 1930 skydiving competitions became popular. In 1952 it was considered an international sport. It is fascinating to know that this sport has been around for so long, however, this fact provides very little comfort to me.

What does provide me with some comfort is the fact that statistically there is only one death for every 100 000 jumps and in the Unites States of America there are roughly 30 skydivers killed each year. Obviously any death is a tragedy but I was quite amazed to find out these statistics and that skydiving does actually seem to be rather safe.

I won’t say that I will never ever go skydiving (because who knows what the future holds) but for now I am far more comfortable with other flying experiences. Biplanes, microlight flight, helicopters and vintage planes seem like my kind of experience. I often have dreams that I can fly and to say that I am disappointed when I wake up would be a huge understatement. Like anything that we can’t have, we want it even more and for me, flying is one of those things.

Other flying experiences feel safer to me because I am inside an aircraft that is controlled by man-made gadgets and those gadgets are controlled by man. With skydiving, it is just me and the sky and the fast approaching earth and a piece of cloth that is going to shoot out of a backpack. I want to fly but I also want to enjoy it so unless my superman powers kick in tomorrow I will be forced use biplanes as my means of making a dream come true.

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Written an prepared by Klara Loots