The thought of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane may sound like something that no sane person would think of doing but the fact is, skydiving has increasingly become popular with more than 3 million jumps per year in the United States alone.
But a trio of skydivers decided to take things to the next level by performing a jump that involved hold each other’s ankles to form a rolling tube in the air.
Watch the amazing performance below.
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Video credit: Rumble
Joe Saunders along with his friends Ellie and Aaron Bramer-Doy was going to jump with Skydive London but they decided at the start that they were going to spice it up a bit.
The jump happened back in August 2017 and involved them holding onto each other’s ankles to form a loop of people while still in the plane. They then performed the jump and started spinning and tumbling in this unique tube formation.
The successfully let each other go and finish the adrenaline-filled maneuver.
Joe said: “It was awesome.
“While and were able to get back together after it broke was really cool.
“I’ve done over 300 skydives and I do things like this a lot.
“A tube is a known type of skydive that we do quite often and we decided to film it.”
Skydiving is not just something you tick off on your bucket list. A lot of people have actually gotten into it as a sport and do it every weekend.
Nancy Koreen, director of sports promotion at the United States Parachute Association, explains: “People think that with skydiving, you just go do one jump. They don’t realize that it’s a whole sport that people do every week as a hobby and a lifestyle.”
And the thing is, anyone 18 years old and above can skydive. The only restrictions are for pregnant women, those with heart problems, and being above a certain weight. “There are ways to take people who are paralyzed, disabled, even who have lost limbs, just with special precautions and adjustments to the equipment,” Koreen says.
The fear of a parachute not opening is what stops most people from trying it out. But your chances of getting hurt or killed are higher driving a car than in skydiving.
“Every skydiver has two parachutes,” Koreen explains. “If the first one malfunctions, there’s a backup, and skydivers go through a lot of training to learn how to handle emergency procedures. Ninety-nine percent of skydiving accidents are human error, where the skydiver does something wrong. It’s not necessarily an equipment failure.”
Plus, the extensive training and certifications that tandem instructors go through make jumping very safe.
“It is in such a controlled environment with such close supervision,” she says. “Your chances of getting hurt or killed are way higher driving to the drop zone than they are jumping out of a plane.”
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