Students soar to new heights

By Kelly Goss

HUB Correspondent

Five, four, three, two, one, jump!

Junior Robert Lipman’s stomach dropped as he leaped out of the plane, an instructor right behind him, for his first ever skydiving jump at 16. The wind created ripples in his cheeks and his eyes watered from the acceleration. His fears were soon overcome, though, as he scanned the earth below him and studied the tiny landmarks of Pleasanton.

“Google Maps could never give you the idea of what it’s like to see all that from above,” he said. “It’s one of those experiences that you just can’t mimic.”

More than three million people every year face their fears and take their first skydiving jump, according to the United States Parachute Association (USPA) website. And more than 10,000 of these individuals jump at Davis’ Skydance Skydiving facility, one third of them under 20 years of age, according to skydiving instructor Neal Wathen.

Wathen encourages students, who must be 18 or older to jump at Skydance, to not be nervous if they want to skydive. “Once you get over the initial fear of jumping out the plane, you won’t feel scared anymore. You’re not increasing acceleration so you just have an elated feeling,” he said.

DHS graduate Alex Willoughby, who skydived in Fiji in August of 2010, agrees that jumping isn’t so much of an adrenaline rush as it is overcoming the initial jump.

“The one fear I hadn’t been thinking of before I went ended probably being the most terrifying part of the whole excursion, which was when the door opens and your instructor tells you to put your feet outside the window,” she said. “You would never expect the wind to be that loud and that fast when you’re on the ground, but once you’re in the plane you don’t really have time for fear because you have no choice at that point; whether you like it or not, you’re jumping.”

Both Willoughby and Lipman shared the common fear that their parachute might not open. Lipman feels that new jumpers should go tandem skydiving with an instructor to make sure they have an extra sense of safety and a backup parachute if something were to go wrong.

Lipman vividly remembers pulling the parachute on his first jump. “The instructor yelled to me, ‘I want you to count to ten and then pull the blue cord like we talked about’ and I was just falling and falling and falling until I felt a jerk and the parachute went up,” he said.

Like any intensive sport, Wathen notes that there is always going to be a risk of injury or fatality in skydiving.

“We monitor safety as much as possible, but we are not bulletproof,” he said. “The only thing that is 100 percent is gravity.”

All of the instructors at Skydance are USPA certified, and students must take a one hour ground course on safety with an instructor before jumping.

While there is always a risk of fatality, USPA proves that the safety of skydiving has improved over the years.

Out of 32,931 USPA members who jumped in 2010, 21 jumpers died, equaling 0.64 fatalities per thousand jumpers. This number is much smaller than the 2.17 deaths per thousand of the 1990s and the 0.80 deaths per thousand of the 2000s.

Regardless of the numbers, Lipman and Willoughby feel that their fears were instantly calmed once they were in mid-air, and Lipman hopes to be skydiving again.