Skydiving!

Skydiving is something that I wanted to do one time in my life, but also one of the things that is so far on the bottom of the list of things to do that you actually never get to do it. Until Akil convinced me to join him with skydiving. After phoning around a bit, Akil managed to get an appointment for a tandem jump at the airport of Teuge. Perhaps it was a bit of madness, but it certainly was a thrilling experience!


Here is a recorded video of the dive:


It was a tandem jump, so I didn't have to do a thing, except for dropping down and enjoying the ride. Actually, I had to put my body in some banana form and do something with my arms too... Anyway, being able to jump alone would be nicer, but taking sky diving classes is very expensive in terms of time and money, so this is a good alternative.

An airplane took us about three kilometers high. That takes quite a while. The airplane circles up slowly. In the mean time we had a marvellous view of the surroundings, especially due to lots of sun and the little bit of clouds.


The plane levelled (giving a funny feeling in the stomach) and we could jump out of the plane. I originally thought that I actually had to dive out of the plane, but apparently you leave the plane in a sitting position. This is again a funny feeling while accelerating to about 200 km/h, but that only takes a couple of seconds.


During free fall, I grabbed a foot of the camera man and tried to flip him around.


Yes, all this sky diving is really great. Falling in between the clouds, and seeing the ground rushing towards you.


The parachute was opened after thirty seconds without any problems. Given my reputation for attracting problems, it is actually odd that everything went well...

Also an surprise was that the parachute opens slowly. I originally thought that it would open up instantaneously giving rise to some dramatic effects. No, it all happened very gently.


And I landed safely. It may not have been as exciting as I expected, but it was a wonderful experience nonetheless!