It was a lovely day, i had done 3 tandems, i was packing my rig in preparation for whatever Joe threw at me next… and then he threw it, “Jerm, you’re on a 10 min call.” I looked down at my only-half-packed rig and considered the fact that not only did i need to finish packing and get my gear back on, i also had to meet, train and suit-up my student on that amount of time, a daunting list of tasks to say the least.

So i grabbed another rig, turned on the CYPRES, checked all the pins and handles and trotted over to meet my student.
Turns out (my student) Joe had jumped a few times before. “GREAT” i’m thinking to myself, this’ll be easy. So I get his harness fitting properly, get myself geared up and head out to the plane with the rig that i’ve never jumped before.

Joe wants to do backflips out of the plane. Now, i’ve done backflips out of the plane on numerous occasions, sometimes even intentionally, and i’ve seen tandem guys do tons of them. Problem is, i’m still a relatively young tandem guy, and am not feeling entirely comfortable about doing an exit that isn’t completely stable. See, although i have a decent number of jumps and am quite good at keeping myself stable, and getting unstable and back again, it’s a lot tougher when you have 200 pounds of stupid strapped to the front of you. Nothing against joe, mind you, but even with a couple of tandems under his belt he has no clue about stable body flight and how to recover from nasty situations. “BUT”, i think to myself, “he HAS done this before, and knows how to arch, and will surely do so when i tell him to, so… as students go, he’s probably the ideal non-skydiver person to try this with.” I’m not entirely sure how i talked myself into it, i guess i wanted to please the customer. Really though, i was nervous, i just didn’t feel right about this jump. I briefed him several times on the plane ride up to altitude as to what we were going to do. We got to the door, exited, flip, flip, ARCH, came out of it, kinda sideways, still spinning a bit… kinda tough to control, ahh.. fuck. I got relatively under control and tossed the drogue. Probably wasn’t as stable as i should have been, but we weren’t flippy or anything, and i was worried about the torque and the momentum that we already had. Everything went fine for the rest of the freefall.. his body position was so-so, but it didn’t matter at that point.

So, pulltime came. He was heads-up on the altitude, but a little slow on the pull so i pulled for us… *WHACK* the canopy slammed open and i looked up to check that everything was ok. Except that everything wasn’t ok. I looked up to see a bow-tie shaped canopy above my head that was beginning to spin. Seems one of the brake lines of the canopy had gotten around front of the parachute and, well, that’s bad. I tried to fix it but ended up getting us into even more violent of a spin. Nearly 1600 jumps i’ve gone without a canopy malfunction, and there i was, reaching for my emergency handles. Everything went as it should, i released the main parachute, and almost immediately the reserve came out perfectly. We landed w/o further incident.

I’ve been told by tandem masters more experience than myself that students are almost never aware that anything odd even happened when they have malfunctions, but my student, having done jumps previously, know something was up. I told him what had happened, and once we landed, he rolled over — still attached to me — and embraced me as much as he could, thanking me profusely.

A profound experience it was on many levels… scary, exhilarating, reassuring, gratifying.. a weird mix of emotions. There was certainly a lot of adrenaline.

Once i got to the packing area i was quickly questioned about what had happened, and told i was scheduled to be on another plane in 20 mins. I finished packing for myself, and went about my business.

This, dear friends, is why i pack for myself. For all the goofy stuff that i do when i pack that scares experienced onlookers, it all works. I’m in no hurry to jump someone else’s packjobs any time soon.