Skydiver Falls 15,000 Feet & Lives To Tell The Tale
Posted February 12, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Michael Holmes jumps out of airplanes the way you get in your car. It’s just an every day experience for the veteran parachutist.
But something happened to the New Zealand native in the city of Taupo that may have him thinking twice next time he’s flying high.
Holmes experienced the nightmare every enthusiast dreads during a recent leap into the wild blue yonder. At 4,000 feet, his chute failed to open and as he struggled desperately to fix it while in a death defying free fall, the ground came closer and closer.
He tried the reserve, but it failed, too.
Eventually the inevitable happened – gravity took over and dropped the stunned daredevil like a stone. He wound up falling a jaw dropping 15,000 feet before hitting the ground.
And incredibly, he survived.
How is that possible? He improbably hit a thorn bush that broke his fall. And while he was injured, he wasn’t killed.
He was found by a fellow jumper who watched in horror from above while his friend plummeted to what appeared to be a certain death below.
“You O.K?” Jonathan King is heard asking Holmes, in what most certainly must be the strangest question of his life.
“No,” comes the inevitable reply.
.
“When I first saw him up there I thought right, this is not good,” remembers King. “And when it carried on for so long you realize – ok – he done everything that he can.”
How close was it? Consider this – four or five feet either way and Holmes would have hit either a tree stump or a parking lot.
He’s still stunned by the twist of fate and grateful for it.
“Everyone says your life flashes before your eyes,” he recalls of that incredible moment of terror. “But for me it didn’t really happen. I was just frustrated that this was the way I was gonna die and that was it.”
But as fate would have it, it wasn’t.
Reports indicate Holmes plans to resume his skydiving hobby as soon as he recovers from his wounds, which include a broken leg.
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