No matter how many times they freefall, these skydiving
instructors from Hollister can’t get enough
Kevin Love seems like a nice, sane guy, but he’s thrown himself out of a perfectly good airplane close to 10,000 times over the last 17 years.
Love is a skydiving instructor at Adventure Center Skydiving in Hollister, and he’s been hooked on skydiving ever since his first jump as a sophomore in high school.
“A good friend of mine did it when we were in high school, and since we had a friendly competition kind of going between us, I had to do it, too,” said Love, 32. “I got a job on the same day I did that first jump so I could pay for the (accelerated freefall program) and I could get my ‘A’ license and start jumping on my own.”
Now Love makes a living giving strangers the thrill he experienced for the first time back then. About half of his total skydives have been tandem dives, meaning he had another person harnessed to the front of his body. All first-time skydivers are required to do a tandem dive.
“I love doing this, and I like having the ability to be an ambassador for this sport,” said Mike “Friday” Friedman, another instructor who has worked at Adventure Center Skydiving for the last year and a half. “I like to show people why I love to do this. I like to show them that it seems so fast, but it can be so serene at the same time.”
To take people on tandem dives, Love and Friedman had to go through a tandem certification course. Before taking the course, skydivers must have at least three years of experience in the sport, earn their “D” license – which puts them at an expert level – and they must have completed more than 500 jumps, Love said. The course, which lasts about two weeks, puts skydivers through rigorous simulations. Instructors that jump with the trainees test their reactions to a multitude of scenarios that can occur during a dive.
“The instructors simulate having someone that freaks out during the jump and grabs your arms, or someone who freaks out in the plane,” Love said. “Plus, you have to learn how to fly with someone attached to you. That can be pretty tricky, especially if they keep putting themselves in a bad body position. It can make flying really hard, and you have to know how to deal with that.”
Tall, lanky people have a lot of surface area when spread out in the freefall stance, Love explained, and that affects how they fall. Smaller people are generally easier because they have less surface area. Some skydiving outlets also have a weight limit of 220 pounds for people who want to do a tandem dive. At the Hollister facility, people weighing more than 220 pounds can jump at the instructors’ discretion and must pay an additional $2 for every pound over 220.
“The biggest person I ever took was a guy who worked as a prison guard and was 292 pounds and about 6’2″,” Love said. “It makes a big difference. You have to be able to control the canopy with your arms, and when you’ve got that much weight, plus your own weight, it can be hard to do. Landing softly and safely is the main concern for us, so we need to make sure we can do that.”
PREPPED TO FLY
Before taking the plunge, instructors go over how a jump will go step by step with people on the ground. They even have a small wooden mock-up of a plane’s door so they can show people exactly how things will work once they’re in the air.
“I was surprised at how relaxed I was on the ground, and when they started explaining everything, it actually made me even more relaxed,” said Curtis Haley, 23, from Pennsylvania. Hayley recently visited Adventure Center Skydiving with a co-worker while they were in the Bay Area for a business conference. This was his first jump. “When you realize how much effort the instructors go through to make each jump safe, it really puts your mind at ease.”
Instructors give customers the jump suits they’ll wear for the flight and assist them in getting a harness on. They explain that in the plane, the customer will sit straddling a bench with the instructor behind them. When it comes time to jump, the pair will swing their legs over the bench in unison and take baby steps together in a crouched position toward the door.
Once at the door, Love tells his customers to cross their arms across their chest and just wait for him to tip them out into the wild blue yonder. Once the freefall begins, Love explains, the customer should keep their arms crossed and arch their backs. When he’s ready, Love will tap the customer’s shoulders, indicating they should spread their arms open in an “I surrender” fashion.
Around 5,000 feet, Love will deploy the parachute. He explains he’ll yell out “one, two, three” before pulling the rip cord. Love also explains to the customer adjustments he’ll make to the harness during the descent so it’s more comfortable, how the landing works, and where he wants their legs in the final moments before touching the ground.
LEAP OF FAITH
In the plane, Love does his best to put customers at ease by talking to them about the scenery, asking them general chit-chat questions, and making sure to check, double-check and triple-check the harness holding them together.
Instructors also talk to the other passengers in the plane, encouraging them to put aside their nervousness and emphasize their excitement.
“It’s always funny to watch people’s reactions when the door opens,” said Friedman, 27. “There are the people who you can tell are really excited, and then there are the people who grab hold of your legs and you can see they’re not 100 percent sure they can do this, but they really want to.”
Having the door open didn’t affect Haley’s nerves too much, he said, but seeing his co-worker jump out the door and realizing it was his turn did.
“That moment that I was standing at the edge of the plane, looking down and thinking that I’m about to jump at 18,000 feet, had to be one of the most surreal moments of my life,” said Haley, who did his tandem jump with Friedman. “Jumping was the biggest release. There was a lot of sensory overload, but I tried to really take everything in. And once the chute was deployed, it was one of the most beautiful things in the entire world to sit back, relax and look at the world from up there. There was no fear at all.”
During the freefall, Love makes the most of the view. If it’s a clear day, he’ll turn in the air to see snow on the Sierras, then turn to face the ocean spreading out from Monterey and Santa Cruz. If he feels the customer is spending too much time looking straight down, he’ll gently use their forehead to pull their head up.
After the parachute is deployed, Love talks to customers in the same even tones he uses on the ground, as if it’s a perfectly normal thing to be dangling from a parachute, thousands of feet in the air. And to him, it is.
BACK ON SOLID GROUND
“After the landing, it’s always interesting to see people’s reactions,” said Friedman. “One time, I had a guy go plunk down the money for the whole (accelerated freefall program) right after we landed. I also took a woman on her 82nd birthday, and when we landed, she cried, which was really special and really fulfilling.”
Friedman also joked that he had customers kiss him after landing at least once a week. Love said some people with bad cases of motion sickness have thrown up on him after landing, and he’s had to land with a few customers who had passed out. In the 17 years he’s been skydiving and the thousands of jumps he’s made, Love said he’s only had to use his reserve parachute 24 times.
Over the years Love has spent as a skydiving instructor, he’s jumped with octogenarians, a blind man, a man with a prosthetic leg and many other customers with special needs. He’s also competed in the World Cup of skydiving, national and regional competitions in canopy piloting, and in swooping, a form of skydiving that tests the distance parachute pilots can fly while hovering only inches above the ground. Right now, the Olympic committee is deciding whether to include canopy piloting in future games, and Love said he’ll try to make the Olympic team if it should make the games’ roster.
“It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve jumped out of a plane, I still get excited about it,” Love said. “I don’t think that excitement will ever go away.”
