Some of the youtube comments are pretty great. I especially liked
HERO of the day, we need more people like this guy!!! By the way, I want to ask you people does anyone of you know where I can find site which has all newest leaked movies (the same hacker's group which hacked Sony, too). I've heared that there are movies like Fifty Shades of Grey, Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, Ted 2 and many others, but I can't find it. If anyone knows, please reply! Thanks in advance :)
This is the second comment that shows up for me, and it has fifty two replies.
Sucks to pay all that money for a skydive and then black out for the whole thing. I wonder if he asked for a refund.
They better not give it to them or else everyone will be doing it.
Oh my god why would anyone ever.
From how the guy describes it (briefly) it doesn't sound like this happened, but often seizures can cause memory loss so that you come out of it with little to no memory of the last few hours. Waking up that way and discovering that you're four thousand feet above the surface of the earth would really have been an experience.
I went skydiving once. It was an 18th birthday present from my stepdad. It was very fun and exciting, but then afterwards I was kind of motion sick for a while which took most of the fun out of the champagne they were serving everyone.
I didn't have to make a video, probably because it was in Montana.
Everyone focuses on the guy having a seizure (understandably, sure), but the instructor is really incredible. We can't see it, since he's the one wearing the camera, but he basically missiles himself to the guy, somehow snags him at speed, and manages to grab and pull the rip cord. He could have tried and missed twenty different ways, killing them both, but he did it perfectly.
It was also probably unnecessary, right?
He could have just let the guy go splat. Probably a higher expected number of lives saved.
No, the guy was wearing a thing that would auto-trigger at a certain altitude. The parachute would have deployed in time regardless.
As long as what it triggered was a parachute.
They talk about the automatic device here.
Didn't know that. Of course, you can understand why the instructor wouldn't feel right thinking, "Ah, he'll be fine."
Then my own abilities along those lines may be great enough to qualify as a super power.
16: "ooh, let's see if that thing works!"
I did enjoy the skydiving section of Fandango.
Waking up that way and discovering that you're four thousand feet above the surface of the earth
It certainly might take a while to figure out just what the hell was happening to you.
20 reminds me of the passage from, I think, Life, The Universe, and Everything about the thoughts of the whale that is suddenly called into existence plummeting toward the earth or maybe it's another planet:
And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
The whole exercise just seems like such an unnecessary risk.
On the veldt, we used to have to hunt tigers. Nowadays, we are so bored in our well-appointed chef's kitchens with stainless steel appliances and 18,000 BTUs, we are willing to actually pay good money for non-essential (frivolous), "bucket-list" adventures that will make us feel alive, even at the risk of serious injury, or perhaps even of actual death.
Nice catch by the instructor, though.
That's some cutting-edge Kulturkritik.
In skydiving MOOCs, the parachute can be triggered from the cloud.
I went skydiving. Do I get an 18,000 BTUs too?
It was for a friend's bachelor party. I told Mrs. K-sky that we were just going to be "hanging out." Then when I got home I showed her the photograph and she shrieked and then hit me a bunch.
Every time I read the thread title I think "what's the secret to your success?" and wonder if everyone knows this perhaps not funny joke.
Waking up that way and discovering that you're four thousand feet above the surface of the earth
It certainly might take a while to figure out just what the hell was happening to you.
Ooooh! I've been raptured!
On the veldt, we used to have to hunt tigers.
There are no tigers on the veldt. The veldt is in Africa.
Also, we had to hunt them? No. They hunted us.
Nowadays, we are so bored in our well-appointed chef's kitchens with stainless steel appliances and 18,000 BTUs, we are willing to actually pay good money for non-essential (frivolous), "bucket-list" adventures that will make us feel alive, even at the risk of serious injury, or perhaps even of actual death.
Haha! Yeah, you'd never catch members of a Stone Age culture doing something as pointless and dangerous as bungee jumping.
...or surfing. Or trophy hunting. Or cliff diving.
Seriously, as long as young human men have existed, they have been doing stupid dangerous pointless shit because it was fun. What kind of joyless society do you live in that you haven't noticed this happening?
What kind of joyless society do you live in that you haven't noticed this happening?
I believe it's called "Canada."
Oh my god why would anyone ever.
Because it's awesome.
29ff: and flight, and seeing the blue curve of the horizon.
Waking up that way and discovering that you're four thousand feet above the surface of the earth
"Oh no, not again."
"Oh no, not again."
What are you, a bowl of petunias?
What kind of joyless society do you live in that you haven't noticed this happening?
A society that produces this sort of thing? [NSFW]
I've been para-sailing in tandem with a pilot. I thought of it as relaxing. It did not feel like it was dangerous.
Yeah, you'd never catch members of a Stone Age culture doing something as pointless and dangerous as bungee jumping.
Well, you've got me there, ajay. I had completely forgotten about the ritual performances of the men of the southern part of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu.
You forgot Vanuatu. I represented Vanuatu at Model UN. Never forget Vanuatu.
27 was in fact what I was thinking of when I titled the post.
Never forget Vanuatu.
Never again!
My impression had been that the Vanuatu jumps were the direct inspiration for the oxford dangerous sports club's invention of bungee jumping. Can't find a cite, though.
Traditionally, were they drunk when they jumped? Because that would make a lot more sense.
41 was my impression too. David Attenborough did a show about the Vanuatu jumpers in the 1960s and that made them fairly well known in the UK and I wouldn't be surprised if the guys who saw the show grew up and went to Oxford and decided to try it themselves.
37: skydiving is very relaxing once your canopy opens. Before that point, not so much. After was always my favourite bit.
"So, if the main chute fails to open, how long do I have to get the reserve open?"
"The rest of your life."
An Idiot Abroad also had a bit about Vanuatu jumpers, which was probably less informative than Attenborough but also probably a great deal funnier.
44: Yup. Freefall is fun, but it's also loud and relatively short, even if you're jumping from 10-14,000 feet, as was standard even for beginners in the AFF course I took back in the late '90s. Once your canopy opens, though, you have several wonderfully quiet minutes to savor the rest of the drift down.
HAHO jumps must be terrific from that point of view. Never done one (obviously) but still.
Yeah, I can only imagine. I've made a total of five AFF jumps--I stopped before finishing the whole course because I couldn't shake the feeling that I was pushing my luck--and I think the highest altitude at which I ever pulled was during my first, at around 5000 feet. Even at that relatively modest height, I ended up in a cornfield a quarter-mile away from my intended landing area because of a combination of inexperience and inevitable drift.
Much of my life story is due to a combination of inexperience and inevitable drift.
Ha! You and me both, brother.