1st Time Skydiving
What an exhilarating experience (and best birthday present so far I think. Thanks Dad). Having never done this before - I went straight for a static line jump. If you're not familiar - a static line jump is where you jump from the plane with a line attached to the plane, maybe 25 feet long or so, that pulls your main parachute out for you. This allows less experienced jumpers to go without an instructor in a tandem jump and have full control, but also requires more training.
We arrived at 9am for training which covered everything like obstacles, maneuvers, speed & altitude, and malfunctions - more on the last part later. After completing the training course, we practiced procedures in a hanging suit. Following this we waited... and waited... and waited... while the clouds were too low to jump (cause you're not allowed to jump through them) and then the wind was too strong. After waiting for almost 4 hours, we finally suited up and went out.
It's hard to describe the feeling of jumping from a plane, but, on so many levels it just feels wrong. Free-falling, loud noises from the plane, things moving very fast, and being high up. Just a lot of things the human body is not usually acclimated to. The jump itself is the scariest part - the rest is just hanging in there (literally) and following verbal commands over the radio - very easily doable for me.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
Almost immediately after jumping - I realized my parachute did not launch correctly. After reviewing videos from the cockpit, it appears this could have been due to a handful of things from a bad jump, to a twisted line, or the chute could have been packed wrong for all I know (important - I don't fault the company as there is no evidence they did anything wrong).
With this being my first time, I was (and am) very impressed with how I handled this - I never once panicked or felt like I didn't know what I was doing. I was trained for this and knew how to react to the situation.
Back to the story. I wasn't able to grab the controls because one of them was missing - turned out later it was stuck in my backpack the entire time. This event caused me to spiral out of control, unable to recover my main parachute. After fumbling around for a bit while free-falling, trading valuable altitude for dangerous speed (~300ft/second), I made the decision to breakaway my main parachute and pull the cord for my reserve chute. The reserve chute deployed and I landed safely as expected.
For context, I jumped at about 4,000 feet and pulled my reserve chute around 2,800 feet, a safe distance from the ground - we were trained with a "decision altitude" of 2,500 feet, meaning at that altitude you either decided that your chute was good to go or you ditched it.
Over the radio, I heard the guy on the ground telling me to "pull the brake PULL THE BRAKE" several times but I couldn't, and without a way to respond it appeared that I didn't hear him. Right before he was going to tell me to pull the reserve chute - my training already kicked in and I was one steps ahead.
