A short story by BW Derge about a skydiving accident that is told in three parts, each one featuring one of the components of tandem skydiving equipment. Tragedy strikes as equipment malfunction dooms a troubled instructor’s first jump with a customer.
Tragedy at the Sky Lovers Skydiving Center
Part One: The Drogue Parachute
For the record, Jake did not want to partake in the jump. He had reluctantly participated in similar activities with his group of friends, the rollercoasters came to mind, but that was nothing like this. Jumping out of a plane? He hated heights. He hated flying, The boy preferred a good book but at the same time, was easily persuadable when his pals got to teasing him for being a wimp.
A week or so before they would make their trip to the skydiving center, Jake had agreed to go. There would be four of them and he would be the youngest at 19. He took the week to diligently study the likelihood of an accident. The odds were very low. He couldn’t find a statistic that would be palpable enough to convince the entire group that jumping out of an airplane was a bad idea, or not safe. In front of his computer the night before, Jake sighed. “I don’t want to do this,” he said out loud to an empty room.
“The drogue parachute,” said the instructor. A picture flashed on the classroom wall of a typical drogue chute used in a tandem skydiving suit.
This was months ago at the parachuting professional training academy. “This is to be inflated practically instantly after vacating the aircraft. It slows the speed for the tandem jumpers and allows for more control while plummeting through the atmosphere. If this fails to deploy, you’ll end up falling 200 miles per hour as opposed to 120…”
Back to Jake, now on his way to the facility, he sat quiet a squished in the backseat of a beat-up sedan. The other 3 boys were hollering and joking around with each other, excited with frazzled nerves and the hope for a good thrill. The driver was most excited, having wanted to skydive since he was small kid. But Jake’s nervous system was excited with tightening anxiety and a reluctance to proceed. He wanted to jump out of the car, not a plane. The anticipation was unbearable. He suffered silently, trying to distract thoughts with the plot of a fantasy novel he recently started and not the impending jump.
Instructor Dick stopped going over the drogue when he heard someone snicker in the back of the classroom. “Is something funny, Chad?” His loud voice reverberated around the dusty desks occupied by bored kids of college age hoping to become certified skydiving instructors.
One of the wilder candidates cleared his throat. “No, sir.”
"That's what I thought."
Unlike his buddies, Jake paid intense attention during the mandated hour-long training, but it all boiled down to two things – the customer was at the hands of the instructor and their instructors had been certified and trained to avoid any errors or mishaps. His life was to be put in the hands of…
“Hey Jake, name’s Chad. Nice to meet you. You ready for this, bro?”
The young man grumbled in response, unable to display any artificial excitement. He was but a dense rock composed of worrisome thoughts reeking of death and fear. The two strangers latched onto each other, hopped in the little plane, and as Jake’s heart flittered, the gaggle of young Americans were in the sky. The other boys cheered, but Jake’s eyes were tight shut and his stomach churned like the currents of stormy seas.
“You ready, bro?” Chad yelled before propelling the pair of men out of the aircraft. The wind smacked Jake’s face and then he heard the instructor try to pull something. “Ah, shit!”
Part Two: The Main Chute
Instructor Dick strutted about the class following the pupil Chad’s response. “So maybe you would like to tell me what is deployed after the drogue parachute?”
“That’s the main chute. The fun chute, sir.”
“Why do you call it that?” the teacher asked, obviously amused by the response. “What makes it fun?”
Although hesitant, Chad was confident in responding. “I’ve always heard… the main chute is for the fun and the reserve is to save lives. So if the main chute’s out and the reserve stays packed… then it’s all about the fun, baby.” A murmur of laughter rippled lightly through the hot dim classroom.
The class lasted a few more weeks, and finally – after passing the stupid tests and doing some test jumps with some fellow trainees and instructors – Chad was given a certificate from, and a full-time job at, the skydiving facility owned and managed by Instructor Dick. He proceeded to party hard after receiving the barely passing grade. To be honest, he wanted to be a professional skydiver more than anything and getting through that training course was by far harder on his brain and mental state than anything he cared about in high school.
At a house party the night after he completed his training fully, he drank heavy and knowing his first jump wasn’t for a couple days, decided to smoke a little meth when a pipe was offered to him in private by a mutual acquaintance. He had never done anything like before except a little speed so it might not be a shock to you, dear reader, but Chad did not expect that he would stay awake for that whole night and into the next night as well. Drinking beer the whole time, he was shocked he still stayed awake and felt like he had finally found paradise, cloud nine reached. ‘It wasn’t in the sky,’ he thought at one point of the high, ‘it was in a pipe the whole time… ‘
He did eventually sleep and when he awoke on the morning of his first jump, he couldn’t ignore that his blood was fuming with inexplicable anger and his perception of the world seemed to be zapping. His brain went zap, zap, zap causing a horrible headache as he packed up the tandem parachute equipment, mistakenly confident that he had followed the correct safety procedures.
In the long run, maybe it would’ve better for all involved if Chad had decided to follow his strong desire to chase the dragon, but instead he shook his head and refused to become a tweaker. Skydiving was the boy’s dream – all else be damned.
With Jacob attached tightly to the young man, the two of them were descending much faster through the air then they were supposed to be since the drogue didn’t deploy properly. “Ah shit, dude. Oh fuck,” he kept crying. The pair were beginning to spin too fast to take any coherence into account.
“Would you shut up and focus?” Jacob shrieked. “Please?”
“Embrace the end, bro, I don’t know.”
“What the fuck do you mean you don’t know?!” Jacobs adrenaline was shooting through veins. Diarrhea exploded in the teenager’s pants.
“Ah sick, bro!” Chad could feel the goopy warmth around his own crotch. “What the fuck? I don’t want to die covered in shit!”
“I don’t want to die, you motherfucker! Pull the parachute!”
Chad was responding in the radio, “Malfunction! Malfunction! Mayday!” The rapid deceleration propelled the hungover instructor into unconsciousness thereafter. The main chute did not deploy, nothing pulled. Their only hope was that the reserve chute would automatically deploy as a safety precaution at 1000 feet above ground.
‘Jesus,’ Jacob thought. ‘I’m going to die tied to a douchebag…’
Before going unconscious, Jacob heard Chad’s last words, which were, “It’s really disappointing, dude, that you’re not embracing death, bro. This is our chance to transcend into the spirit world!”
“Fuck you!”
Part Three: The Reserve
“As Chad so succinctly put,” Instructor Dick continued, “the reserve chute saves lives. The most important thing you can do before every jump is ensure, an annoyingly unnecessary amount of times, that the reserve is packed correctly and the automatic activation device – your AAD, not ADD – is set to deploy at 1000 feet altitude if the main chute has not been pulled.” Per usual, the ADD joke a few laughs from the prospects, who were eventually given the mandated exam and days later, they were ready to begin with live jumps to train before being trusted with clients. “You need a buddy to check your equipment before taking off.” (Chad didn’t hear that last part but guessed on the test and got it right.)
Dick had owned and operated this facility for almost three decades at this point and unfortunately, his pompousness had prevented him from seeing the declining quality of both the training he personally offered and the subsequent behavior of the young adults who he trained to assist in getting people safely from a plane 10,000 feet in the air back to the ground.
The day of Chad’s first jump, Instructor Dick didn’t think it was needed to check on the first-time jumpers. He was more concerned with flirting with one of the new girls working at the center’s front desk. She was trying to enjoy her coffee and get a day’s work done, but humored her boss as he droned on. “You know I stopped drinking coffee.”
“Oh really? Wow. That’s hard to do.”
“Yeah,” he gloated. “Gave up sugar and caffeine, you know. Got to keep this head clear.”
“Well I like my coffee,” she said when the phone rang. “Oh, got to get this. I’ll see you around, Mr. Stewart.”
“I’ll leave you to it. And call me Dick, please.” A desperate chortle leaked from his throat.
She picked up the phone quickly, giving the older man a faux smile. “Thank you for calling the Sky Lovers Skydiving Center. How can I help you?”
Dick wandered off into the back offices near the classroom, repressing thoughts that secretly craved for both a cup of coffee and getting up the new girl’s skirt. He grumbled and retreated to his stuffy workstation, resisting another urge to get a soda. Moments later, while wallowing in ineptitude, the older man heard a gut-curdling scream outside. He ran to peek through the blinds and his gut sunk. He could see a dot plummeting to the Earth, knowing full well it was one of his divers attached to a client. Dick knew it was Chad right away somehow, but out loud said, “Maybe it was the client’s fault.”
When he saw the reserve shoot into an uninflated drogue and no main chute to be seen, Dick ran out of the building, startling the new employee at the desk, who was still on the phone. “Can you hold please?”
In horror, the man watched them fall. As the world said goodbye, the ground said hello. SPLAT! Another scream unleashed from a bystander. Dick ran inside to call the ambulances, and for some reason, chose not to stop the remaining jumps for the day. He didn’t notify the paying customers of the day’s accident. His future would be filled with court cases and legal jargon, his facility was decertified and closed, his dream ruined. Investigations proved Chad was put through training too fast and allowed to jump with clients too early. A reserve parachute deploying into an uninflated drogue is one of the simplest errors to avoid in this business, but one of the deadliest.
And to think, Jacob just wanted to stay home and read his stupid little sci-fi books…
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was a short story composed in 2024 called "Tragedy at the Sky Lovers Skydiving Center"
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