I Almost Died While Skydiving, But It Wasn't Because Of The Skydiving

I nearly died last Saturday while making a skydive. Now, this technically isn't anything new -- When you think about it, every time I skydive, I have to actively take a role in preventing that from happening. It's no different than looking both ways before you cross the street to avoid being mowed down by a bus. In fact, it wasn't skydiving that nearly killed me. It was complacency.

Some brief background: When a parachute deploys after a freefall, it slows the skydiver from 120 miles per hour to approximately five miles per hour in, on average, three to five seconds. To do this without breaking several bones in the skydiver's body, a piece of fabric called a "slider" comes off your back first, "pushing against" the air you're falling through to slow down the opening of the parachute. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's not important to this story.) Anyhow, the end result is that your parachute opens nice and calmly, and you gently float to the ground.

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