Ninety-year-olds make tandem skydives all the time–and they often remark that they wish they’d started skydiving long before. YOUR GRANDMA CAN DO IT (AND LOTS OF GRANDMAS DO–REGULARLY–BY THEMSELVES!)
You won’t even get to bite your nails at the ground rush, as the ride in under the parachute is surprisingly gentle. 120mph on a highway feels screamingly brisk, but 120mph in freefall subtracts relative motion, so it’s all remarkably peaceful. Interestingly, also absent is any sense of speed. Even though you’ll be moving downward at 120mph, the pressure of relative wind in freefall makes it feel for all the world like you’re riding a cushion of air, not falling. IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE YOU’RE FALLING.Īfraid that your stomach is going to drop to your feet like it does on the world’s puckeriest roller coaster? If you actually like that feeling, hats off to you–but you’re going to be out of luck looking for it on a skydive. For perspective: that’s safer than driving to work, walking around in a lightning storm or hanging out with cattle, which are, like, terrifying dread beasts from the pit. Tandem skydiving boasts an even stronger safety record, with 0.003 student fatalities per 1,000 tandem jumps over the past decade. That’s 0.0075 fatalities per 1,000 skydives–the lowest rate in the sport’s history. In the U.S., the United States Parachute Association recorded just 24 fatal sport skydiving accidents out of roughly 3.2 million jumps made in 2014. The modern sport of skydiving has an excellent safety record, and those numbers just keep getting better. TANDEM SKYDIVING IS SAFER THAN IT’S EVER BEEN. Once they were out and freefallin’, they tend to heartily agree the experience was one of pure joy. Over the course of many years we’ve been taking new jumpers for their first freefall experience, the vast majority insist that the scariest couple of seconds were the moments in the door. That said: the anticipation of freefall is much scarier than the jump itself. Believe us when we say that everyone is scared to skydive the first time. Plenty of new skydivers have trouble sleeping the night before and spend their time in the waiting area in a cold sweat. THE ACTUAL SKYDIVE IS A LOT LESS SCARY THAN THE RUN-UP. Is skydiving scary, sure! But, it’s a lot less scary than you think it is. While we could always use another hand and we quite like dragons, the fact remains: we’re telling the actual, factual truth. When we tell first-time skydivers that skydiving is way more fun than it is scary, they sometimes look at us like we’ve grown another arm and started speaking Dothraki.
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