I was a glider pilot for many years mostly flying in the mountains along the California/Nevada border. It’s not quite as dangerous as hang-gliding, but in a small community of roughly 300 people, we’d lose one or two pilots per year. Some would just misjudge and smack into the side of a mountain. Others were situations like mid-air collisions and structural failures, which they would have survived if they had decided early enough to pass ownership of the glider to the insurance company and step out using the emergency chutes we always carried. I was not convinced I would jump if circumstances required. So, I talked a local parachute center (not Lodi) into letting me make the first jump of as a free-fall course using a round chute (which is what emergency chutes are). It’s not tandem, two instructors jump with you and give you a few seconds to pull you own D-ring or they’ll pull it for you.
All I remember was sitting with my legs dangling out the door, asking myself where I went wrong with my choices in life, then seeing the plane dwindling away in the distance with the instructors heading my way. I pulled the D-ring (they gave it to me as a souvenir) and the next thing I remember is pain as I crunched up my ankle on landing. The instructors ran up and congratulated me, asked me if I wanted to go again, all I could get out was “hell no”. I never did have to use the chute, and quit flying altogether when two long time friends did an unexplained vertical dive into the side of a mountain, in the same kind of two seat glider I then owned (with partners). I wanted to see my daughter grow up, which she did.
It always seemed to me that a large subset of skydivers and pilots are basically adrenaline junkies, they do it because they enjoy danger and cheating death (until they don’t).
