I made the first jump one week before my fiftieth birthday. It was an AFF (Accelerated Free Fall) from 12,500 feet. Talk about adrenaline rush. The video shows me completely out of control. I passed the level one AFF on the next jump, followed by levels two and threee on subsequent jumps. I needed two jumps to pass level four and missed again on my first attempt at level five. Oh well, if it was easy everybody would do it.
UPDATE: Missed level five on the second attempt because I couldn't complete the 360 degree turn. Then I had a line twist on opening which created a few seconds of excitement, expecially since the twist was right on top of my helmet and I couldn't raise my head to see how bad it was. But, it untwisted. The next day, I passed level five with no problems.
I took two attempts to pass level VI and two to pass level VII, but finally, on August 2, I completed the course.
The current total is thirty-sx jumps, 24 minutes 38 seconds accumulated time in freefall.
"I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a while streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslim of a parachute -- a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and spending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.
"A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place -- it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man -- where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant."
¬ Charles A. Lindberg