It only took me a few minutes to fall 10,000 feet, but I didn’t really come down for another couple of hours. That’s the best way to describe my first time skydiving. That and recognizing it as one of the greatest physiological sensations I’ve ever endeavored.
On a royal blue morning recently, I drove forty minutes south of my home to Skydive the Wasatch in Nephi, Utah. I was greeted by Andrew the drop manager, Jordan my instructor (or more accurately the person I’d strap my life to), and Joel the pilot.
Free snacks, a row of leather sofas, and caffeinated drinks lined the open hanger in an effort to ease or at least distract the nerves of would-be jumpers. Just outside, an old Cessna plane came to life to take a woman in her forties and her friend in her twenties on their first and second respective dives. While waiting for their quick return, I signed and initialed the longest waiver I’ve ever seen without reading a single line of legalese.
“Are you ready?” Jordan asked with a friendly smile. I honestly answered in the affirmative, and then he explained the safety and protocol procedures. “The whole experience takes about 25 minutes,” he said. “Twenty minutes to climb, around half of minute to free-fall, and three or four more to parachute down.”
While donning my jumpsuit, he also addressed many of the questions I was silently asking. If your parachute doesn’t open, for instance, there are two fail-safes: a reserve parachute and automated deployment in the event the skydiver or instructor is unable to pull the chute. Thanks to rigorous FAA requirements for parachutes, participants, and planes, skydiving is significantly safer than driving a car, he added. (More than 99.999% of the 3 million annual jumps happen without incident, I later learned. The ones that do are largely the result of extreme maneuvers—ones commercial drop zones don’t engage in.)
To help withstand the 120 mile per hour (or 200 feet per second) freefall, Jordan concluded, every chute, reserve, and line is frequently rechecked and repacked. And, yes, depending on your state or country’s contestability period—anywhere from a day to a year or two in most cases—life insurance covers death by skydiving, so long as you didn’t lie about any previous skydiving experience.
By then, it was my turn to jump. “Get in the plane,” Jordan instructed. Minus the size, the insides looked like something I would have expected from the guts of a B-52 bomber. Lots of exposed steel. A swaying hula girl on the small dashboard. Instead of seats, we reclined on a padded floor.