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Tuesday, July 17, 2012

My Last Jump School Jump

This is Steven Petrick posting:

It has been a few years since I posted of my experiences in Jump School, but I am going to take today to finally tell some of the tale of my final jump.

I was about the fifth person to go out the door. I was jumping from a C-141. The first eight or so jumpers (since we were jumping from both sides of the aircraft) were females, and I was the first male on my side of the plane (left side I believe).

The actual exiting of the aircraft was (accounting for the greater airspeed and thus wind blast in jumping from a jet) normal. Stuff started happening after that point.

With my chute opened and checked, I began looking around for fellow jumpers.

None were at "eye level." Not the female students who had jumped before me (being lighter than guys, they normally descended a little slower), not the guys who jumped after me.

I was "higher" than everyone else.

In fact, I continued to get higher.

I had exited the aircraft into a freak updraft, and instead of descending I was actually rising.

This continued long enough that I was actually still in the air, and higher than the jump aircraft when it came to lay its next stick of jumpers. I actually saw one of the flight crew tap his fellow crew-member on the shoulder and point at me through the cockpit window.

Not really knowing what else to do, I waved at them.

Once the aircraft had passed, I started trying to rectify the situation. I did this by first pulling two-riser slips in all four directions. This did not seem to accomplish anything, so I switched to one riser slips, again with no apparent affect. I could see, however, that I was moving towards the Chattahoochee river. It was still a good distance away, but it was the direction in which I was moving. I would have to cross a barrier of trees before I reached it, but as I did not wish to do either a "tree landing" or a "water landing" (both of which had been covered in the training, but were still not something I wanted to actually do), I went with another part of the training. You can pull a little extra riser in one riser slip, but it is D A N G E R O U S.

I did.

This actually had immediate effect (or maybe it just coincided with my finally exiting the updraft, I do no know). I went from "floating" to "moving down" . . . down at a noticeably accelerated rate faster than I had ever gone down in a parachute any previous time.

Okay, I am going down. Now the problem is that I have to s l o w l y release the riser I have pulled down into my chest. The object being not to create "oscillation." Oscillation, you see, is fun. You swing back and forth in your parachute harness until you hit the earth. The problem is that you may reach the point of hitting the earth while at the top of an oscillation, which then swings your whole body slam into the ground with no control. (You might reach the ground closer to the mid point of the swing in which case you may be able to do a proper parachute landing fall, but you may not really be able to control direction).

This was perhaps the one time training failed me. Avoiding oscillation was not something you really got to practice (at least I did not) before it happened (truthfully, a lot of things were taught that you did not get to practice, you were just told what to do). Despite my effort to slowly release the riser, I found myself oscillating after I had fully released.

Even though that part of the training had failed me, the part of the training on how to fight oscillation when it happened did not (grab the risers in the direction of a given Oscillation movement, pull them towards you, then slowly release them as you swing back, then alternate to the other side until the swinging stops).

I was so focused on cancelling my oscillation I was no longer really looking around. Just as I finished cancelling the Oscillation, I looked ahead (not down, just straight ahead), and saw "the tops of trees." This did not mean that I was about to crash land into the trees, but that my sight level was even with the tops of the trees an thus that "landing is imminent," i.e., I was about to hit the ground.

Having no idea which way was my direction of movement, I did not know which set of risers to grab for the "prepare to land" maneuver, and did not think I had time to look a the ground and determine my direction of movement, so I simply grabbed a set of risers and pulled them into my chest and otherwise adopted the "prepare to land" position. Then I waited, and waited, and waited.

After what seemed a minor eternity, I felt the toes of my boots brush the earth. Then, a few seconds, it seemed to me, afterwards the heels of my boots settled on Terra Firma. There I was, in a tight "prepare to land" position, standing upright on the Drop Zone.

One of the things the Black Hats tell jump students is that if you do a "Hollywood landing" during jump school (that is land standing up without doing a parachute landing fall), even if it is your last jump, they will wash you out of jump school and you will not get your parachute badge. With this in mind, I promptly hurled myself to the ground and executed a parachute landing fall in case any of them were looking.

Okay, that is over, right?

Well, no.

I still have to unhook from my parachute, pack it all up in a kit bag, and "double time off the drop zone."

So I jumped up and looked around for my parachute.

No parachute on the ground.

I was, however, surrounded by suspension line/parachute cord. This caused me to look up and discover that my parachute was still fully inflated and floating over me like a giant amoeba. Not wanting it to descend on me, I hustled out from under it and it laid down behind me neatly, making it easy to roll up and put in my kit bag.

As this was my last jump, I had just decided, after flipping the kit bag onto my back, that I would not "double time off the drop zone" (there was no threat of being failed out of jump school for that). Just at that moment I heard a loud "thung," and as I spun around I saw a steel pot coming down for its second bounce about 10 feet from where I was standing. Another stick of jumpers had been laid, and a female jumper (the helmet had a "W" on it) had lost her helmet which had impacted the drop zone near where I was standing.

With an image of being killed on the drop zone after completing the last formal action needed to graduate racing through my head, I moved to the edge of the drop zone near the bleachers with considerable alacrity.

With that, there was just collecting my parachute badge, orders, and personal property, and I left Fort Benning for the first time on my way back to school.

I would return to Fort Benning less than ten months later to attend the Infantry Officer's Basic Course.