[silver_pilate]

Hehe....maybe I'm just a sissy, but I hold with Crazy Horse...why jump out of a perfectly good aircraft? Kinda like why jump off a perfectly sound bridge with a itty-bitty stretchy cord wrapped around your ankle?

No, if it came down to a point where I had to do it, say, in military training or in an emergency situation where I just happened to be in a disabled plane with a parachute, I'd do it in a heart beat.

You know, I saw a video once of a guy who had malfunctions with both chutes. He was wearing a helmet cam. His main chute deployed but tangled, so he cut it free. Then he deployed his reserve chute and it tangled. It never fully opened. So he fell for a couple of thousand feet with a giant flappy piece of fabric above him screaming his head off. He hit on the lee of a hill and apparently landed just right to where the angle of the small knoll dissapated enough energy for him not to be injured. In the video, you see him looking up at his chute and back down to he ground, a lot of screaming, and then the ground rushes up to meet him. He hits and the camera skips, and then the picture is still for a moment. Then, it starts to move, the guy realizes he's alive and not seriously injured, and then he starts yelling his head off and jumping around for joy. Crazy video.

Oh, and if I remember correctly, the Gueniss record for surviving a free fall was/is held by a stuardess (or flight attendant, to be politically correct). Her plane blew up in mid-air somewhere in Europe, and she fell around 30,000 feet without a chute. It didn't say how bad she was messed up, but she lived.

Not an experience I really want .

Crashing into a bar-ditch at 80 mph is about as much fun as I want to have in my life.

--nathan