I've never done it.
My oldest brother is way older than me. We're talking dirt old. But he's got one of those charismatic, dimple cheeked, teethy grins. Too darn good looking for his age. When he enters a room, no matter how large, people want to know who he is and they generally have no problem asking him.
He's been jumping out of perfectly good airplanes for quite some time. Loves it.
I've got some really cool photos, posters and videos of his antics. He never got into the aerobatic stuff too much. He did it though. Still does, but I'm not supposed to tell Mom he sometimes wraps his arms around himself and dives head first at 100 + miles per hour toward the landscape.
Early on he liked the accuracy competitions. Apparently he was and still is good at that. Touch your feet closest to a target in a sandpit and you win. Looks scary to me. Bores him. He really likes the relativity stuff, though. You know, formations of crazy people falling through the sky that relate in proximity to one another, gravity, the earth and sanity. Nutcases they are, I tells ya. They sometimes do this at night with cyalume sticks, headlights, LEDS and/or strobes strapped to them. He's got some stories.
He jumps in events all over the country and is based out of North Carolina.
One thing he does sounds wonderful to me. He likes to do high altitude drop-and-pops. I'm not allowed to say how high but it's higher than you might estimate. He likes to ride the last load up. It's early evening and the sunset has long since passed toward California. It's dark. At many thousands of feet in the sky he will drop out of the plane and free fall for a moment or two then he pops his square (chute). He'll drive it around and face east looking for the moon. Though he's a many miles from the coast, if there is a strong moon out, he can see the Atlantic ocean. The reflection of the moon trails across the water toward him and ends at the coastline. He tells me he then likes to stall the chute by delicately applying the brakes (control cords).
He likes to sit there, a couple of miles up, under his canopy enjoying the quite, the somewhat rarified air, the moonlit world and something else he has yet to been able to describe.
I guess he has been in some groups that broke a few records for number of participants. I can't remember the figures. Here is a pic of a small and fairly casual relative jump. He's about 3:30 to 4:00. Blue suit. Red stripes. Brown helmet.
October 2002 he made his 3,000th jump. He's still jumping. He will be 62 this summer.
