Anniversary

It’s been a year since my first jump, a thrilling if disconcerting ride that opened my eyes to something entirely different. My first jump log is reproduced in it’s entirety here…

A work buddy and I decide to go skydiving…I’ll skip the part about signing/initializing about 40 waiver statements.

The plane that the 20 of us jumpers pile into looks like an old workhorse. There’s no hatch, just a 6 ft wide by 4 ft high doorway that’s open to the elements. The pilot cranks the throttle and we are soon climbing about about 1500 ft per minute. After ten minutes the plane flattens out and the pilot notifies everyone we are at jump altitude of 13,000 feet via a green light at the back of the plane near the doorway.

All the experienced skydivers begin to line up at the door and jump in groups or individually at about 5 second intervals. You can feel the plane lurch as large groups exit the plane. Soon the two other tandem beginners like me have jumped and I’m the last one to go. I have somehow managed not to be terrified to this point even getting ready to jump with an instructor on my back. As walk get up to the edge of the door I’m looking down at the desert 13,000 feet straight below and inside I’m going holy f*ck there is nothing to stop this fall straight into space. The air is only about 50 degrees so somewhat cool up here.

And so we jump and there’s this sense of utter helplessness and hope that it all works out. Then within a few seconds the air is rushing smack into my body and face and this is somehow more disconcerting than the initial jump but at least the sense of weightlessness is gone since the wind is supporting us. So I’m looking straight down at the ground that is strangely so far away in a way that you can’t really process it, and the wind is so fast and violent. We fall one mile in 30 seconds during which the instructor makes us do a few spins left and right and sticks a thumbs up in front of me to see if I think it’s okay, and I thumbs up back, but I’m not really sure about it. Then he shows me the altimeter on his wrist and it shows 6500 ft, already halfway down. As we are falling I notice the air temp increase from 50 to maybe 75 and it’s wild that you can feel the temperature gradient change in the matter of a minute.

Then I feel this gut wrenching sense of acceleration again, but he’s pulled the parachute and the rushing of air stops and its utterly silent as we swing into a sitting position. It takes my brain a few seconds to process this and that it’s all okay. Now I’m looking out and seeing the distant mountains and even the layer of humidity above the ground. Not to be boring my instructor says let’s try some turns, so he pulls on the right cord and we proceed to swing right but he holds it and we go faster and faster and start diving in the turn, falling as the parachute is pointing down. Then he swings it the other way and I’m not sure that I’m enjoying the experience but it’s what I’m here for. So he asks if I want to do it and I say sure so we do a few more, and I’m getting dizzy but trying to be a man about it. Soon we are about 1000 ft from the ground and I can see the earlier jumpers landing on what looks like a small grass area. So we do a few more swooping turns to line up for landing and we seem to be coming down really fast. He tells me to lift my feet as we are about 20 ft above the ground and we come in about 20 mph and slide to a stop. Total trip time 5 minutes.

So it’s done and I’m on the ground, and I feel elated and somehow like it went way too fast. My friend echos the sentiment, and we are smiling and speechless. And I feel like I need to go up again since it went so fast. We get our certificate and commemorative t-shirt, and that’s it.

As we’re driving back to Phoenix, I tell my friend “now what do I do with my day?” and my friend says “yeah the high point of our day happened too early.”

So I dedicate this compilation video to my skydive buddies, Angela, Matt, Kyle, Mark, and Yigal. Thanks to them I don’t have to jump alone. It’s been a cool ride… [use fullscreen for best viewing]

Birthday Jumps

My dad, trying out my new suit    

For my birthday I fly home to Virginia to visit my parents. They never blink an eye at driving two hours to Richmond to pick me up. Their house on the Great Wicomico River affords a relaxing vacation especially with temperatures in the low 80s. As part of the trip they’ve agreed to going to a drop zone in Virginia so I can check out a totally different scene. Saturday we head about one hour to Skydive The Point in West Point, Virginia. It’s a small drop zone with a fraction of the capacity of Skydive Arizona, and the crowd seems very friendly and laidback. The triangular airport sports a huge grass landing area.

I get on the second load of the day on a small single-engine Cessna. The ride up to altitude is beautiful. My fellow jumpers are a tandem student attached to a giant Austrian along with their photographer. Being small, I was shoved in the back of the tiny plane. But from my vantage though I could see clouds, trees, farmland, and water, all part of the West Point delta of the York River which flows into the Chesapeake Bay.

View from canopy    

At 10,500 ft, the door is opened, and I’m given the go ahead to jump. I have to climb over the camera guy’s legs to step out onto the little platform under the wing. I don’t dally and dive out in a cannonball which is one of my favorite ways to exit. The triangular airport and the York River are below me. The view is astounding and all mine.

I do another solo jump still enthralled with the view. Afterwards, I befriend another fun jumper, Lonnie, and ask him if he’d like to jump with me. He’s worried about “messing up” my jump but I assure him I’m no expert and just want to have fun. The jump goes well and he is very happy with it. We decide to do one more which will be Lonnie’s 200th. Clint, a veteran jumper who used to run the drop zone, goes with us. Also, another woman goes with us with her new video camera. During the jump while attempting to dock with Lonnie I accidentally fly over Lonnie and break up our formation. I’m embarrassed. The video below captures my foible.

My folks had been hanging out under a shade reading. We decide to visit a winery in Williamsburg and taste some good wines and get dinner. All in all, a really cool day.

Video of one of the jumps:

New Duds

Nothing in skydiving is cheap, not even the clothes you wear. Nonetheless, my wind tunnel coach Brianne recommended I get a jumpsuit with all the options. I put in my order with 21 body measurements for a custom-fitted navy blue and gray suit. With a double rush, my suit was ready in three weeks. I awaited delivery with anticipation and received it last week, just in time for my scheduled wind tunnel time with Brianne on the weekend.

Exit with new suit      

7:30 am I arrive at the wind tunnel for my 15 minute coaching session with Brianne along with  Houssam and Kristen who  formed a coach-student team with Brianne to compete at the National Skydiving Championships in October. They’re relatively new jumpers, but their skills are well beyond mine due to hours and hours of tunnel time. I’m not into the competitive aspect of skydiving, but simply want to be proficient enough to have fun (and avoid too much embarrassment).

I don my suit, almost skin tight and complete with “booties” that hook over your shoes to give your lower legs a lot more surface area to fly with. I feel like a kid in brand new school clothes/pajamas, kind of ridiculous, but kind of cool. Like most of my sessions, I practice moving up and down the tunnel, turning, sliding left and right. I also practice trying to be stable while putting one hand on my back, then two, then one handed turns etc. I follow Brianne around the tunnel and “dock” with her. She tries to de-stabilize me by flying below me or pulling on me to simulate less than ideal dockings. My session goes much better than previous ones, and Brianne asks if I did any tunnel time in between and I swear I haven’t. I can only attribute it to the suit.  (Video coming).

After my session I meet up to jump with Matt and Angela who are always up for something fun. We do some formations that require some flying  like stars and accordions. There are a bunch of possible formations, but we’re just doing simple 3-ways. We meet up both Saturday and Sunday and manage to get in some pretty cool jumps.

More fun than sitting on the couch          

Back flips         

Matt and I tracking away (Angela’s view)      

Saturday’s video:

Sunday’s video:

100th: Lettuce Jump

I didn’t know it, but the 100-jump milestone calls for something special, not just a fun jump. My friends Angela and Matt were brainstorming ideas for the occasion.

“What about being pied?” Matt asks with anticipation. He means in the face. To this I give my best noncommittal look.

“How about mustaches?” Matt offers next. “It’s more of a jump 97 thing, but we could do it.” Again, I respond lukewarmly, but I’m guessing this is the least I need to do to coronate my 100th.

In the meantime, Angela’s poking around a box of lettuce left in the hanger for some odd reason. “Hey, there’s all this lettuce. Let’s do a lettuce jump!” I actually kind of take to this idea. The thing is, the lettuce is kind of rotting with that dark green slime forming on it.

“This will be first lettuce jump in the history of skydiving!” exclaims Angela as if it will be a real achievement.

Matt concurs, “I’m sure no one has jumped with lettuce.”

And to me it feels like, yes, we might actually be the first to do it. It somehow seems significant, if utterly insignificant.

We each grab a handful of slimy lettuce, wrapped in paper like a bouquet of flowers. We check with the drop zone’s “S&TA” (Safety and Training Advisor) regarding safety procedures for our stunt. Quite seriously he tells us we should exit first so no lettuce lands on a car or a house. A little later, he stops by and tells us we could have a special jump run pass just for our lettuce jump. We all tell him no, really, that’s okay. After he’s gone I tell Matt and Angela, “yeah, like this event is worth burning 20 gallons of fuel for our own pass.”

In the plane we get some odd looks, but eventually people are clued in to the occasion, and one typically serious competitive jumper eats some of the turned lettuce and plays with it in the wind of the open door. Approaching altitude, we don our mustaches. I put mine on as a uni-brow which brings laughs, but I’m disappointed to realize my goggles will block my brow-stache. So I move it to my lip. Angela says I look like Hitler, and we all salute.

We do a “gorilla exit” locking legs together in the center and letting the air fling us around on our backs. After a few seconds we release our lettuce and the leaves fly up and away like huge green confetti. It’s strangely satisfying. Next, Angela and I hook up so that Matt can hang below us in a hybrid “belly-freefly” formation. He grabs our chest straps and swings underneath us. I feel pulled down from his weight. My altimeter logged us going 172 mph.

At this point my mustache is flapping vigorously on my face. Matt and Angela are pointing at me and my mustache. We break away, and as I pull, my mustache flies off to the sky gods. A fitting end to my 100th.

Video:

Canopy Course (Part 2)

After taking the first canopy course with Brianne and Nik I was curious about the next step, flying with a canopy coach.  Flying canopies together is called canopy relative work or “CRW” and is a competitive discipline all to itself. It looks pretty cool…

World record 100-way CRW formation

To get more canopy flying time, we do high-altitude hop and pops from 13,000 ft to get about 12 minutes under canopy. Nik talks me through how he will exit after me and come meet me. Then he’ll show me going up, down, backwards, forwards relative to me pulling on the front or rear risers or brakes. Then I’ll try to follow suit. We’ll bump our canopies together. He’ll give me hand signals for most tasks.

It’s difficult to convey the awe of flying next to someone and being able to play around in flight. When I’m by myself, there is little sense of movement, just some headwind and the sound of the air in the canopy. Only during landing pattern do you see that you are moving reasonably quickly. But flying next to another canopy–even though the relative movement between you is small–you start to notice that you are really flying through the air. You can see the air rushing underneath and into the canopy cells keeping the “ram-air” parachute inflated as a semi-rigid wing. Several times we touch our canopies together side-by-side. As the parachutes approach, the vortices on each side create low pressure and cause them to suck in together like magnets.

Video taken by Nik says so much more than I can (click the full screen icon at bottom right to maximize the video to full screen). So far this has been the coolest skydive thing I’ve experienced.

Canopy Course (Part 1)

The sky is brown

I’m approaching the 100-jump mark. However, by all accounts, I’m still a novice. In fact, skydivers with up to 200-300 jumps can still be considered novices.

Learning in this sport is challenging. A typical jump consists of one minute of free fall and three minutes hanging under a canopy. While in most sports you can practice hours at a time on any given day, in skydiving the majority of time is preparation and waiting: packing the parachute, gear checks, gearing up, rehearsing the exit and dive (called “dirt diving”), taking the tram to the plane, boarding, and flying up to altitude. Factoring all this in, I can do about one jump an hour, though some jumpers double this by having two rigs. Jumping normally ends by one o’clock due to growing gusty 15-20 mph winds or dust devils (heat generated whirlwinds) that can cause heart stopping altitude changes or turns. Some braver souls continue to jump, but I concede to mother nature.

Taking several weekends off can feel like a long time, almost like you lose some progress. For this reason, the US Parachute Association requires that licensed skydiver keep “current” by jumping every 60 days. If you go longer than that you need to do a “check jump” with a qualified evaluator.

After nine months at this, I only have 1.2 hours and 150 miles of free fall. If you do the math my average speed is 125 mph.

But free fall is play time. Flying the parachute skillfully is more challenging and more critical because of wind, air traffic (other jumpers), obstacles, and that it’s your only tool to touch down lightly. With so much to still learn about canopy flight, I decided to take a canopy course from Axis Flight School at Skydive Arizona.

The two coaches Niklas and Brianne recently relocated their school to Arizona. They’re high-level professional skydivers who really know their stuff. Brianne is the heart and cheerleader. She’ll say things like “you guys are awesome” or “we’re turning you into badasses.” But she’s also on the US 4-way team medaling at world events. Niklas is the “brawn” and master technician of many disciplines as well as photographer/videographer for high-level teams and events.

Class starts at 8:30am with the sun already bright in the sky. Seven students, most recently licensed with under 100 jumps like me, crowd into the cozy classroom where we are asked what size and type of canopy we have and how much we weight with all our gear. I tell them “Sabre2 150, 155 pounds.” This means my parachute is 150 square feet and my exit weight is 155. With this simple data the coaches calculate our wing loading. Mine is 155 lbs/150 ft = 1.03 pounds per square foot. This is about right for a novice. When I was a student I was flying much bigger canopies and my wing loading was lighter at 0.7. This allowed slower decent rates and more forgiveness during landing. Novices like me who have a little more experience can be in the 0.8-1.1 range, while the most experienced can be in the 1.5-2.5 range. These parachutes fall more like a rock than my docile floater and travel at 30-40 mph in normal flight.

Hop and Pop exit

Once they determined our wing loadings, we are assigned an exit order and asked to memorize it. I’m third in the order. As a class we each do five “hop and pops” where we jump from 5000 ft and within a few seconds of exiting, we pull our chute and have four minutes to play with your canopy. This eliminates free fall and the time it takes the plane to go higher. Each of the five jumps concentrate on a different canopy control skill.

The parachute harness has two “front risers” that connect to the front canopy support lines, two “rear risers” that go the the rear support lines, and two brake lines that connect to the tail of the parachute to turn and slow the canopy. Pulling on one or two of these control lines results in changing the shape of the parachute and its flight behavior.

Braking (rear canopy edge pulled down)

Armed with knowledge from the ground school between each jump, we practice on our own such as braking,  flattening or steepening the glide angle, or diving down in an arc.  Turns can be done by pulling on any of the control lines on one side but the angle of attack or “dive” is radically different pulling on a front riser compared to a rear riser or the brake line. Each has it’s time and place.

Rear riser turn

After five jumps of pulling on different parts of the canopy control lines and a full day of sun, we’re all beat. Nik and Brianne mention the next part of the course in which they accompany you while flying the parachute. A seed is planted.

Bourne Again

Don’t let his well-articulated Travel Blog about his new job in South Sudan fool you. My brother is Jason Bourne.

We really only know “Tim” through his off-duty disguise in which he plays the loving family man, holed up on an unlikely subtropical island, close to nowhere, and far from the international conflicts that formed him years ago. The minor local Cuban incidents do not make his radar but add a little color to his margarita paradise.

Tim May? Peter May? Regardless, as an upstanding citizen, advocate for children, proponent of green living, and creator of community gardens, and local hero as reported in the the hard-nosed reporting Key West Citizen, who would suspect his true identity?

I would.

His previous commission in Pakistan is a period in his life neither I nor my parents can account for. Ostensibly working for “USAID,” he was trained and brought in to clean up a mess made by the CIA. His Afghan high school buddies were not merely his best friends, but trained him, developed him, and tested his mettle for that mission.

At the same time he was creating an identity of a feathered-haired soccer player and slightly rebellious kid who got caught drinking in the high school parking lot. Followed by a liberal arts education at William and Mary, a coveted journalism degree from Columbia University, jobs as a journalist (one on the mean streets of LA), and subsequently an advocate for kids in Key West. This was all above board and made to look that way.

We were all duped.

So what happened in Pakistan? My sources tell of an anonymous U.S. agent who entered a village on one of the key drug and arms trade routes, wiped out the command chain there and armed the local villagers to take back their homes. Hunted by multiple factions, the agent simply melted into the background. He was never found. We can’t confirm conclusively who this agent was, but the dates correspond to my brother’s time in Pakistan.

And why has he returned for another tour of duty for USAID purportedly to contribute to “humanitarian” aims?

I can only speculate that while living the good life as a normal citizen, he recently got that fated call for return to duty. Or perhaps after almost a decade of the quiet life he simply needed another hit of harrowing adventure and heroism. Then he masterfully made it look like his job in Key West was less and less satisfying–but this was all part of the ruse meant to throw us of his trail. Whatever his reasons, the pay is good for these high-risk, off-the-books operations our government is so fond of.

So we can rest safe ‘n sound knowing that an agent like Tim “re-Bourne” May is serving our country again for humanitarian or “other” aims.