At 4,000ft, Jordan Hatmaker pulled the string and realised something was very wrong. With the speed of her descent increasing, she braced herself for impact
This is why you do 8-10 hours of jump school before you do your first non-tandem jump, and your first bunch of jumps with main and reserve side coaches. Shit can go really bad, really fast. One thing they drilled into us repeatedly was always always cut away your main canopy if it didn’t deploy correctly, and you couldn’t clear the malfunction fast. Your AAD will deploy your reserve if you’re moving too fast when you get to your minimum altitude, and you don’t want your reserve tangling up in your main canopy. (Which makes a horseshoe especially dangerous, since you can have your cut away canopy still streaming from your foot, and that can get tangled in your reserve; it’s Bad Shit all around.)
I only did a few solo jumps before deciding that it was too expensive for me to get my license. It just wasn’t my thing; I could do it, but I didn’t love it. My ex-wife though… She spent nearly $10k in a year–on a credit card she took out in my name–because she couldn’t get enough.
Horseshoe malfunctions are no joke. She’s lucky to still be alive, for sure.
Today I learned : a parachute may deploy in a distorted, horseshoe-like shape.
Yeah, it’s one of the more dangerous ones because it can lead to exactly what she experienced, which is two parachutes out at the same time.
Or your reserve can get tangled up in the lines from the main, which is also, as we say in skydiving circles, “really fucking bad.”
Skydiving is not like being in your mother’s arms. You’ve aimed yourself at a planet and it is you and only you that will save your sorry ass.
That much is true.
I retract my previous statements.
Actually read the article it’s more a recount of what happened, and some pretty normal emotional responses to hitting the fucking ground at terminal velocity.
Easy, man, shit happens. And this kind of shit is incredibly rare. You don’t know how you’d react (unless you have “bounced” in which case my apologies, carry on talking shit about this poor woman).
