The First Jump Essay -- Personal Narrative Sky Diving Essays

The First Jump My first jump out of an airplane on December 17, 1999 was the most exciting experience of my life. I had been anticipating this day since some point when I was a little kid and saw a skydiver on TV for the first time, at which time I promised myself that I would let nothing stop me from jumping out of a plane sometime before I die. It was the first time I had been in a small airplane since I was a young child. From shortly after I was born until I was seven years old, I had flown in my father's Cessna 150 countless times, so I have always felt comfortable flying in airplanes, but I always had a small fear of heights; the kind of heights where there is nothing around you to keep you from falling off. The aircraft that we were to jump out of was a Cessna 182- a commonly used five-person, high-wing, single engine airplane. The interior of this particular plane was not much to speak of. All of the upholstery had been removed, as were all the seats (except for the pilot's seat, of course). That was okay though. This plane is used for skydiving, not first-class passenger transportation. As we were climbing to 3,500 feet, I was experiencing the most exciting yet nervous point in my life. I had been looking forward to this day for a long time and there I was sitting in the back of that small aircraft, waiting to take the plunge of my life while nervously taking turns looking at the little needle on my wrist altimeter and glancing out the window, looking at everything on the ground getting smaller, anxiously reviewing the jump routine over and over in my head, â€Å"arch one-thousand, look one-thousand, reach one-thousand, pull one-thousand.† Since this was going to be a static-line jump, there was not a real ripcord to pull because the canopy would deploy automatically, but we were equipped with a dummy ripcord so that we would learn the proper free-fall technique. At about three-thousand three-hundred feet, the jumpmaster hollered â€Å"one minute to jump,† and opened the cabin door. It was me and two other beginners on board, Jennifer and Susan. Since Jennifer was the first to go, she was already sitting by the door, facing aft of the aircraft. When the door flung open and the air came rushing in, Jennifer took a quick glance at the ground and her eyes grew huge. At this time, I was going over the exit routine in my head. â€Å"Wait for the ju... ...went out the window and was replaced with "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!" Instead of arching my back with my arms and legs spread out like I was supposed to do, I instinctively tried to "swim" back to the aircraft. With my arms and legs flailing all over the place, I flipped and flopped through the thin air until my chute opened about five seconds after leaving the airplane. The momentum of my spinning body caused my lines to twist when my canopy deployed. Not a big deal. They taught us how to deal with this during ground instruction. I pulled my lines apart and kicked my way out of it. Having successfully left the plane with my chute open and my lines untwisted, I breathed the biggest sigh of relief that I had ever breathed in my entire life. The ride down was extraordinary. The only problem was that I had gotten so caught up in the moment that I had pretty much forgotten to steer the chute toward the airport until I was about two-hundred feet above the ground. Luckily, I barely made it back into the airport, but landed in some mud about three-hundred yards from the X that I was supposed to be aiming for. Oh, well. I knew that next time, I'd make it a lot closer to that X.