SKY DIVING
FACTS ABOUT SKY DIVING
1. The highest parachute jump occurred in August 1960 by Captain Kittinger from nearly 102,800 feet. The free fall lasted more than 4 minutes in which Kittinger’s free fall speed was almost 715 mph. It was at 18,000 feet when his parachute opened. That mean he was in free fall mode for almost 85,000 feet.
2. There have been instances in which military planes have gone down in bodies of water and pilots have used their parachutes to save their lives. They have deployed their parachutes underwater and been pulled up by the parachute in addition to activating their life vests.
3. To show that anyone from any age can sky dive, a 92 year old man sporting artificial knees did a solo jump in Cleveland, Ohio. He weighed a mere 105 pounds, had fake knees, and a hearing aid. He leaped at 3,500 feet. The oldest tandem skydiving jumper was a 100 year old in October 1999. A woman at the age of 90 wanted to dive for her birthday to prove that age is just a number. She jumped from 12,000 feet.
4. The youngest sky diver was four years old. Again, this shows that any age individual can jump. The jump was a tandem jump, of course and the jump was made at 10,000 feet.
Skydiving has an interesting history that can take up a whole volume,
but this article will attempt to give a brief synopsis of that history.
Most people consider skydiving a product of the twentieth century, but
its history actually goes further back than that. The Chinese attempted
parachuting in the 10th century, a thousand years before we did. Of
course, there were no airplanes, so the Chinese did what we would today
call base diving; that is, they jumped off outcroppings or other
formations that would allow them to float from a height to the ground.
And then, of course, we have the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who
illustrated a pyramid shaped parachute on a wood frame.
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