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Skydiver cheats death after chute malfunctions

By adminon - Read 3585 times

Years from now, when Tonguc Yaman recounts his adventure to his children, it may go something like this:

Drove the Harley to Sussex Airport. Strapped on the parachute. Jumped out of a Cessna. Went home. Slept.

Forgive him if he fails to mention the part about the chute collapsing in a freak wind, the freefall to the ground, and the helicopter ride to the trauma center. Because for Yaman, the thrill of sky diving and the memories of 99 previous leaps from airplanes far outweigh his brush with disaster Saturday.

"I want to do it again," a slightly beat-up Yaman, 34, said from his home in Tenafly on Sunday. "Whenever my leg stops aching."

It's an attitude that his trainer, Bud Mazeiko of Skydive Sussex, explained like this: "Just because you have a car accident doesn't mean you're never going to drive again."

It's hard to believe that less than a day earlier, Yaman fell the final 30 of 10,000 feet near Sussex County Airport -- and that mere hours after he was admitted as a top-priority patient to Morristown Memorial Hospital, he headed home with little to show but some heavy-duty bruises.

The bruises will fade, for sure, but the tale will last a lifetime.

A veteran jumper for four years -- since his wife, Ute, gave him lessons as a birthday gift -- Yaman, a finance specialist, wanted to mark his 100th jump in style. On Saturday morning, he hopped on his Harley and headed to Sussex with plans to meet up with his wife and two children to celebrate afterward with a barbecue feast at a friend's house.

The 100th leap was to be his second of the day, and it started like any other. In the Cessna, Yaman and three other divers reached 10,000 feet and jumped, each with a plan to join hands, then break apart and activate their chutes.

"I approached them slowly and connected with them," Yaman recalled. "It was beautiful. I was thinking, 'Yeah! This is nice -- my 100th jump!' "

At 5,000 feet, the divers broke off as planned. Yaman dropped another 2,000 feet, getting ready to ride upwind, crosswind, and downwind to a safe landing. He pulled the cord to activate the chute.

Then came what Yaman called "a crazy wind," a freak draft from the side that struck his parachute.

"It just folded and closed. I tried to open it, tried to make it full again."

One side of the parachute ballooned, but the other remained limp. Thirty feet from the landing zone, the chute waved above him like a handkerchief, and it was far too late to deploy the backup.

As he zoomed toward earth, did he think about death?

"I wasn't thinking about emotions," Yaman said. "There is no time for those things. It is a second or a split-second, and you better get a parachute over your head."

He smacked into the landing zone, a grassy target made soft by recent rains.

"I wasn't dead, but I knew I was hurt," he recalled. "The ambulance guys came. They tried to close my mouth but I told them, 'I want to have fresh air.' "

When he next saw his wife, it was in the trauma center at Morristown, after a Medevac flight. An MRI and X-rays showed no internal injuries, and Yaman insisted on going home.

For the pain, he took exactly one aspirin.

Yaman credited his survival with hours of training with Mazeiko and the staff at Skydive Sussex, who taught him to head for a grass landing zone, and who never fly over buildings, cars, or asphalt.

All of which will be on his mind for the 101st leap.

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