Catch a Falling Snowflake

For parachutists, fun is forming patterns in the sky

A dozing World War II fighter training base at Zephyrhills, Fla., came alive last week with a roar of airplane engines and a rainbow of shimmering parachutes. Some 600 sky divers convened on the field for eight days of serious contests in the air and not-so-serious games on the ground. Among the jumpers was TIME Correspondent Don Sider, who sent this report:

We are in a sort of reverie as the ancient DC-3 climbs to 12,500 ft. Like all jump planes, it has no seats. We sit on the floor in three long rows, 35 of us, facing to the rear, our legs supporting the backs of the jumpers in front of us. There is an occasional attempt at conversation over the engines' throb, but mostly we sit, eyes closed or staring vacantly, catching someone's glance, exchanging a vague smile or nod. The adrenaline is just beginning to flow now, just beginning to lift us. We look at the altimeters on our wrists or chest bands the way commuters look at their watches while waiting for a bus. As the needle climbs, the adrenaline begins to flow faster. We fuss with our equipment, checking again the closures on jumpsuits, the buckles on parachute harnesses, the positions of rip cords on the pilot chutes that will deploy canopies and break our headlong fall to earth.

Then the call: "Jump run." We line up at the door. The first two members of our 16-man team are hanging out of the plane, grabbing the fuselage so we can go together. I stand, back to the open door, the balls of my feet balanced on the frame, feeling the surge of wind across my back. "Ready!" yells the team captain. "Ready!" we reply. "Go!"

We explode out the door into the clear, cool sky. Caught in the rushing wind, I do two lazy back loops before settling into a stable, face-to-ground position. My job is easy: merely to float while seven others "fly" to me, the first gripping my wrists, the next two docking between us, breaking our grip and seizing their own. The others come into the circle, one by one, until we are a round, eight-man "star," falling at 120 m.p.h. We hold this for 5 sec., then the eight others fly in, attempting to dock with their hands gripping our ankles, turning the star into a "snowflake." I look about and cannot help grinning at the wonder of it: all of us up here hurtling through the sky together. Jonathan Livingston Seagull in his wildest imaginings could not have conceived of it. At 4,000 ft. we break apart, "dump" our parachutes and float to the airport below.

The competition, known as the "turkey meet" because it used to occur around Thanksgiving, is perhaps the most popular of the 120 formal contests held every year in the U.S. The meet started in 1969 when parachuting was just beginning to take hold in this country, and it has managed to maintain a special appeal while jumping has become a highly organized international sport, one now dominated by Americans. Part of the lure of the meet is simply the Florida weather: only the hardest of the hard core like to jump in northern climes when winter is coming on and the temperature at 12,000 ft. may hover at 0DEGF. This year some 100 competitors from around the world joined more than 500 Americans to perform in the sunshine at Zephyrhills.

There are 35,000 American jumpers, including 17,000 addicts who belong to the U.S. Parachute Association. The number of jumpers has stayed about the same in the '70s. "When jumping started, there was a period of meteoric growth," says USPA Executive Director Bill Ottley. "Then all the kooky experimenters went into hang gliding and rock climbing."

Jumpers range in age from 16 to well into the 70s. George McCulloch of Syracuse is 73; he has 875 jumps and still does eight-man team work. Eleven percent of USPA members are women. They fly on many of the teams here at the turkey meet. At first, in the years after World War II, most sport jumpers were ex-paratroopers. Now they are your neighbors, your sons and daughters, you and I.

Jumping is status blind. The sport includes bankers and physicians, lawyers, grocery clerks, house painters, schoolteachers, coal miners and college students. Jock Covey, Henry Kissinger's ex-aide and now chief of the State Department's Israel desk, has 725 jumps. Wolfgang Halbig, 31, a University of Dusseldorf urologist, with 1,200 jumps, is one of 15 Germans here. "When you freefall, it doesn't matter whether you clean the road or you're a doctor," he says. "You just fly."

Today the sport of competitive parachuting is based on forming intricate patterns of falling bodies in the sky. At Zephyrhills, teams of four, eight, ten, 16 and 20 jumpers go through from one to six formations in sequence during their 55 sec. of free fall from 12,500 ft. They perform a kind of aerial ballet, creating doughnuts and diamonds, wedges and stars. The jumpers carefully rehearse their maneuvers, choreographing the sequences on paper, then running through them over and over on the ground, in what are called "dirt dives."

For those on the ground, the jumpers are hard to see at first as they pour from the plane, but within three or four seconds you can spot them, the sun reflecting off their jumpsuits as they cluster. They become larger, better defined as they fall closer--8,000 ft., 6,000, 4,000. Then the star bursts apart as each person turns by banking his body against the onrushing wind and tracks away from the others.

Crack, crack, crack! The chutes snap open, blossoming in the sky like popcorn. They are a far cry from the old rounded canopies of World War II. Brightly colored, they are designed to allow the jumpers to maneuver on the way to earth. They float downward for two, maybe 2% minutes. Then they are upon you, the suspended jumpers emitting war whoops because it went well, they have made a good dive, and maybe because they are high on their own adrenaline and they feel so good. "We're all adrenaline junkies," says a jumper.

What is the attraction? Most jumpers tell you they made the first leap to see what it was like or to prove something to themselves, to overcome that perfectly sensible fear of diving from an airplane into a void above the hard ground. If they stay with it, and perhaps only 10% do after the first scary jump or two, they develop what Kim Adams, 31, a graduate student in anthropology at Rutgers, calls "parachuting personalities, incredibly independent, uninhibited." Sky diving becomes a way of life, infinitely challenging, indescribably energizing.

"Don't ask people why they keep jumping," says Jeff Poulliot, 25, a Delaware laboratory technician with almost 400 jumps. "Everybody gets his own thing out of it."

Can it be the danger? Perhaps. Thirty-three jumpers died last year, and one was killed last week at Zephyrhills when he collided with another jumper and failed to open his chute. The casualty rate in parachuting is high compared with some other potentially dangerous sports, such as scuba diving and skiing. Jumpers kid each other all the time about augering in. But no one really thinks that way. "It's a sport," says the USPA's Ottley. "It's not a brush with death."

To maintain it that way, the USPA and the Federal Aviation Administration keep a tight grip on equipment and procedures. Every experienced jumper packs his own parachute, and every chute is inspected and tagged. When three jumpers held off opening their chutes until they were well below 2,000 ft., the safe minimum opening altitude, Meet Director Jim Hooper grounded them for the rest of the meet. "Jumpers," he announced on the p.a. system, "I know you're here for a good time, but 'smoking it in' is not part of having a good time."

No need to cheat death in a plunge to earth. Just be the last person out the door at 10,000 ft., and while the first jumpers are 1,000 ft. or so below you, falling flat and stable at 120 m.p.h., you are diving to catch them at 150 or 160 m.p.h. You are John Wayne piloting your own body in a movie dogfight. Reach the star and dock yourself neatly and smoothly. Or do a series of back and front loops a mile in the sky on a trampoline with no bottom. That's thrill enough.

After dark, when the jumping is done at Zephyrhills, you hear the sound of a thousand pop tops being ripped from a thousand beer cans, and the sweet smell of pot fills the air around the campgrounds. In the morning, many of the jumpers look wiped out. But later, with a whiff of the chill, clear air at 12,500 ft., they come alive again.

Sky diving makes us all feel more alive. It does something else for us too. No matter what our ages, no matter what our jobs, no matter what our responsibilities in the real world, as long as we can jump out of airplanes, we know we will never have to grow up. -

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