How to Skydive When You're Too Chicken Sh*t to Jump Out of a Plane

By Ryan Katchmar - James Hare, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63154076

When I write, I like to write it from a place of knowledge. But, and this is a very important "but," there are some times when I'm just going to take a hard pass.

I write action adventure - suspense, thriller, mysteries. A little psychic thrown in. A little love. Often a lot of BOOM! Screech! POW! And some of that onomatopoeia, I've experienced first hand. 

Many of the things I write, I simply can't experience as a true-life event. My go-to in these situations is a simulation. I have written past articles about how I've played a victim in a mock shooting event, mock bombing event, mock plane crash and so forth. 

I can't be a police officer, but I did take the Citizen's Police Academy and tried on a ghillie suit and went on a drive along. I took the Citizens Fire Academy and crawled through a smoke-filled building and experienced the roll over when a fire got too hot. 

My newest simulated event was to discover what it felt like to jump out of a plane without the fear factor.

To do this, I went to IFly in Orlando, Florida and the very capable hands of my friend Angel. There, I got to experience a wind tunnel.

Now, when I write the scene I'm envisioning, I can do it with a better idea of what I'm saying without having to jump out of an actual plane. 

If you want to read about the experience of my friend Rebecca who actually had the cahones to jump, here's that article.

So without further ado, here's a short video of me and my attempt at flying. I'm the blue jumpsuit, and my friend Angel is the professional in the red jumpsuit (which is abundantly apparent).

One of the first things they ask you about is if you have a back or shoulder injury. And there's a good reason those 160 mph winds push you around. As you can see in the video, my back bowed, my shoulders were pressed back. (Good thing for yoga!) Afterward, I could feel the effects of the relatively short time that I was in the tunnel. I went in for three different opportunities. Each time I was in was as short as that video, someone jumping from a plane would not have rest periods. So if you want to mess up your character's ability to function to get their shot, to look slick on the ballroom floor, a back or shoulder stress injury could confound things a bit.

Keeping my legs from either flying out wide or coming too close together took some concentration. 

Keeping my hands cupped and fingers wide without clawing the air took concentration. 

It was a little disorienting especially as I spun around, so keeping a sense of direction, including up and down, took concentration.

If your character should smile, (like I did) it was hard to get my lips back together, as you can plainly see in the video. This cause the skin of my cheeks to flap about like wet laundry on a windy day. And that just felt strange. Trying to stop smiling took concentration.

I was prepared for the physical exertion. I was surprised by the mental exertion of trying to be aware of just those few things I listed.

On my first experience, I wasn't trying to do anything more fancy than get a feel for the air against my body. Before my time in the tunnel, there was a group of military who were there practicing more advanced moves. 

Training in the wind tunnel makes so much sense. They can get trainer feedback, refine their skill sets, and gain comfort with the sensations without the expense and risk of jumping out of a plane.

The military, I was told, sometimes come in fully kitted up. That day they were just wearing their uniforms. They practiced shifting their bodies around to maneuver. What I saw was that they bent their legs to descend and straightened them to rise. They lifted a hand slightly up and this turned them. They could thus maneuver to go under then over each other. 

The military men and women also practiced joining up in the air and doing some simple geometric positions. 

In your novel, this might be necessary if someone needed help for some reason, lines getting tangled, or what have you. With practice they could fly to each other and maneuver themselves into place. 

If you want to know more there's a short article here that I thought was interesting and includes the physics.

If you want to know more about the parts of a parachute and how that all works try this article: HowStuffWorks Skydiving.

Having had this experience, I totally want to go again. But more importantly, I have a much better means of imagining my scene.

As I recently wrote for a friend's blog, there's a hierarchy for me of gaining the information. I try to experience it first hand or as close as I deem safe and possible. If not, I try to find someone with the experience and interview them and have them read over that section of writing, then comes videos and first-person written descriptions, and all of this includes background information from non-fiction resources. 

Research is one of my favorite parts of writing. I hope you're having fun with your research, too! 

Cheers,
Fiona