Sunday, September 7th, 2008

The longest leap

Drop in the drop zone and feel the freedom of falling fast and far

By Nathan Gill

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

On a cold October day, Emily Reimer jumped out of a plane. After about 45 seconds of freefall, she pulled the chord of her parachute, but was falling blind. Condensation from her breath had frozen hard on her helmet’s visor and the earth was a blue and brown blob. Though her hands were too frozen to remove the visor, she orchestrated a safe landing in a field.

Most of Reimer’s 150-plus skydiving jumps have not been that precarious. She says skydiving isn’t dangerous, if you’re safe, and that its participants are not the stereotypical adrenaline junkies. She says it can be an exciting sport as much as a peaceful float from earthly troubles and cares.

“It’s how I relax,” says Reimer, president of the KU Skydiving Club and Wichita junior. “You have a hard week, it’s like, I need some air.”

Skydiving doesn’t intimidate Reimer. She got her “A” license, which allows her to jump without supervision, only six weeks after she began jumping in July 2006. She says it takes most people six months to complete. She also has a “B” license and a coach rating, all through the United States Parachute Association.

She says a typical skydive lasts less than ten minutes, with most of the time spent floating under a parachute. For Reimer, the excitement of skydiving comes in the approximately 45 seconds of freefall, when you can do all kinds of aeronautical stunts. Her favorite technique is to fall straight down, head first.

“It’s incredibly freeing,” she says. “You don’t think about anything else except your body and the wind.”

Jeremy Struemph, the skydiving club’s adviser and a University grant writer, says there are three basic ways to fall from an airplane: relative work, free flying or with wing suits. Relative work is when a group of skydivers make formations, like circles or diamonds, together in the air. Free flying is a technique where skydivers orient themselves to fall head or feet first, which makes them fall faster. Wing suits are special full-body jumpsuits that perform like human hang gliders.

Struemph, who recently surpassed 600 jumps, skydives about every weekend at Skydive Kansas, a skydiving company in Osage City., just south of Topeka. He earns money at Skydive Kansas by recording or photographing other people’s jumps.

“The majority of people who I meet doing this aren’t adrenaline junkies,” Struemph says of the skydiving clientele, which includes professionals like doctors and lawyers, students and average Janes and Joes.

Both Struemph and Reimer say that skydiving doesn’t feel like falling. Because the airplane a skydiver rides up in is cruising at around 120 mph, and a belly-to-earth freefall happens at about the same speed, you don’t get that stomach-in-your-throat feeling people get when, say, riding a roller coaster. The most jolting experience in a typical skydive happens when you open your parachute, decelerating you to about 30 mph, or when you hit the ground upon landing.

This fact has made skydiving possible for Julia Brandes, Hannover, Germany, graduate student, who has a fear of heights.

“Yes, I had a fear of heights, but when I stepped out of the plane I had something else to worry about,” she says.

Brandes went skydiving just once, with Reimer, her roommate. She said the view from thousands of feet above the ground was different than looking precariously down from a tall building. She said that though you feel and hear the loud, constant whooshing of air against your body and face, the vast expanse of earth below doesn’t seem to approach you with alarming speed. She says you don’t feel the height.

Though Brandes suffered some motion sickness upon landing, she said the experience was a good one overall and that it helps that first time fliers go tandem with an instructor and receive training prior to the jump.

Bill Hubbell is a tandem skydiving instructor at Skydive Kansas who’s logged more than 1,600 jumps. He says that at Skydive Kansas, first-time skydivers get training from an instructional video (see it here: ww.skydivekansas.com/tandemclass/tandemclass) and from instructors before their jump.

He said that motion sickness isn’t common, unless you’re prone to it, and that two of the most important things to remember on your first jump are to arch your body during freefall, like a badminton birdie, and to keep your feet up upon landing.

“The landings are generally pretty soft,” he says. “It’s kind of like sliding into home plate.”

Hebbell says there are a million reasons to go skydiving, whether you do it for the adrenaline, comradery or a sense of accomplishment.

There are several dropzones, or skydiving businesses, in Kansas and around Kansas City. Most offer first-time tandem skydives at about $200, and some offer seasonal, student, scheduling or other discounts. Some quick Googling will help you find the best prices and locations.

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