Skydiving: Fill & Download for Free

When skydiving, I have both fallen and then parachuted through rain. And let me tell ya’, the novelty wears off quickly.First of all, it is painful to skydive in rain. Literally.To understand why this is, you have to realise that your body freefalls faster than raindrops. It’s sort of like that ol’ Russian reversal joke, except that it’s true. When skydiving, rain doesn’t fall on you; you fall on rain.In fact, you fall on rain much harder than rain would fall on you when you’re not skydiving.The average terminal velocity of a raindrop is 14mph. The average terminal velocity of a skydiver is somewhere around 140mph. This means that the rain drops are hitting your body (from below) at 126mph. That is way harder than the heaviest downpour. It’s like being hit by paintball pellets.It gets better once you deploy your parachute, but now you’re wet and subjected to the howling wind 3000 feet in the air. It gets cold. You better hope you’ve got some gloves on.Falling through ice? Or hail? Nope, never done that. Not sure if I would live to tell the tale even if I did.

I used to skydive in my younger days. Totally loved it. One time at a skydiving festival I made it onto a load on a larger plane. About 50 skydivers were on board. It’s important to know that in skydiving planes the door has been removed for a quick and easy exit. The cockpit was separate from the cabin with just a small door. The plane took off and was slowly climbing to altitude. We were just about there when the plane gave a couple of bucks and shudders. Next thing we know the pilot comes out of the cockpit screaming and running and jumped out the door. Everyone started to scramble up and head for the door to jump when we noticed there was another pilot at the controls. A few people had already jumped but the rest of us had a good laugh and waited to get to altitude and over the drop zone. Best prank ever!

I’ve done it once. I paid for classes to learn to do it. Then I climbed in a rickety plane with about half a dozen other people. We climbed up in circles above the drop zone. The skydiving instructor told us it was time to go. I stood in the door looking down at the yawning emptiness beneath me, jumped, and it was……meh.It was totally meh. The first thing I thought on reaching the ground was “I paid how much for that?”I did it because I thought it would be awesome. I love new experiences. I was convinced, when I was doing the classes, that I would be hooked.The reality was totally underwhelming. A little bit of wind in your face, then a longer bit of hanging under the canopy going “Well, here I am, doot doot doot…yep, that’s the ground down there, doobie doobie doo…”Eh. Whatever.