Extreme Tales: Falling from the sky

How does it feel to fall from the sky without a parachute?

Skydiving is a popular sport with thrill-seekers all over the world. Travellers are taking it up as a must-do stunt to take home as a memory after months away and many people use skydiving as their weekly sport of choice. It comes with low risks and, as long as the parachute is intact, the fall has little room for random error. Most fatalities and accidents come down to human mistakes.

We hear in the news about skydiving fatalities, parachutes getting tangled, cut cords or freak accidents where chutes will not release. We imagine the fear and confusion these people must feel in their final few moments when they realise that for them, it’s game over. But what if they survive? What if, after falling thousands of feet, they are lucky enough to walk away?

The world's luckiest skydiver

Scott Lutz, dubbed “The world’s luckiest skydiver” last year jumped from 12,000 feet with a parachute that failed him, and after freefalling at 125mph towards earth, lived to tell the tale. He was plunging toward the ground with only a 1,000 ft to go when he pulled his cord and the chute deployed successfully - but it ripped entirely from his backpack. One of his instructors finally caught up with him and pointed to the reserve release. He deployed the chute knowing that it was his final chance of survival and it opened and steadied his speed.

Unfortunately for Lutz, the wind had blown him off course and he headed straight into power cables. “The power lines were just everywhere and I could hear them crackling. I knew if I hit the pole I would be electrocuted.” He was air-lifted to hospital with third degree burns to his legs and feet and needed two skin-grafts. They train you for all kinds of different problems, such as chutes being tangled or half deployed but Scott said “I don’t think they ever train you for what would happen if your entire chute disappears. I’m never going to jump again. You have only seconds between doing something that will make you live or kill you.”

[Watch Lutz’s descent here]

Emergency on first solo

Shayna Richardson is another skydiver whose life flashed before her eyes as she plunged thousands of feet towards certain death. Shayna was taking her 10th dive and first solo jump two months after her 21st birthday. She spiralled out of control after her main chute and her reserve failed to open properly and she fell towards earth at a terrifying speed.

Richardson landed face first in a car park at an estimated 50mph and amazingly survived to tell the tale. Several things flashed through her mind, the first one being: “This is going to be a death. It's going to be a fatality. There is no fixing this.? Of course, as high up as I was (still about 3,000 feet off the ground) I was going to give it a try. I was doing everything I knew to correct the malfunction but, ultimately, I was prepared for it to be a fatal accident."

She does not remember a thing about hitting the ground. “I told God, 'Alright, I know I'm going home now. Just please don't make it hurt.' I don't know how your brain can process that so quickly in the 3,000 feet that I fell."

Richardson’s instructor claims she sat up straight away, began talking to him and tried to get up and walk around. She had four operations to have 15 plates put in her face for fractures and suffered two breaks in her pelvis, as well as a broken right fibula.

But her survival isn’t the only miracle of her story. Richardson was told in the emergency room that she was two weeks pregnant and the baby had survived not just the jump and the impact, but the surgeries as well. "You can't imagine how blessed I feel to be alive, and then to have my baby be healthy is just more than I could ever have imagined or expected. I prepared for the worst and I got the best."

[Watch Richardson’s descent here]

15,000 feet of terror

Last December, champion skydiver Michael Holmes jumped from 15,000 feet out of a plane as he had done almost 7,000 times before. After freefalling for a minute to 5,000 ft, he attempted to release his main canopy. "When I pulled the ripcord, I realised there was a problem almost instantly. The parachute hadn't opened: “I didn't think that was a big deal. That's why you open at 5,000ft - it gives you time to sort these things out, untwist the lines or whatever." A helmet video shows Holmes trying to free his main parachute for 46 seconds before reaching behind him to un-snag the fine cords between the harness and canopy.

He had successfully completed this manoeuvre several times before. This time he couldn't do it but still wasn’t worried because of his reserve ‘chute cord. "It's happened to me seven times before in 7,000 jumps and countless times to others around the world. The system is very safe. I had complete faith in it. Actually it's just a bit of fun, because going back into freefall is a nice feeling and then you open your reserve chute.”

Holmes pulled the cutaway at 3,500ft but nothing happened. “It was in that second that all hell broke loose in my mind.” Holmes could not reach his knife to cut the parachute line and was being spun around so violently that he almost passed out from the G-force. He had a choice. He could either open his reserve chute, to slow down the descent but risk it wrapping around the main chute, reducing the drag and making descent speed up – or fall to earth without a parachute and risk the inevitably fatal impact. At 700ft - just seven seconds before impact - Holmes pulled the reserve cable. It didn’t work. At 550ft - five and a half seconds from the ground - he waved what he thought was his final goodbye.

Holmes landed in a 6ft-high thicket of brambles and wild shrubbery which were enough to reduce impact and save his life, although his right lung collapsed and his left ankle shattered. "I didn't have time to think about anything," he insists. "Friends ask if I was scared but really I was just angry that I'd done everything exactly as I should and it hadn't worked. I was very focused on what I was doing and I remember everything. Nothing's a blur."

Holmes recalls, "I was convinced I was dead. It was only when I fully regained consciousness that I realised that I had survived and was able to accept that what I remembered had actually happened.?"I'll continue making my living teaching skydiving. I've gone through everything that happened a thousand times in my head. It was a million-to-one chance. I'm prepared to stake my life on the likelihood that it will never happen again."

[Watch Holmes’s descent here]

So in Holmes’s words, "It nearly always comes down to human error. It's the amateur, the weekend warrior, doing the wrong procedure or in the wrong order.”  About 350,000 people complete more than three million jumps in a typical year and of those less than 100 end in fatality. Our lucky jumpers prove that there is life after “certain death” and it’s certainly not over when the ‘chute cord fails.