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billvon

Updates from Thailand

By billvon, in General Skydiving Discussions

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billvon    2,475

billvon
Day 1 -

Me and about a dozen other people came into Bangkok in the early hours of January 23rd, the first "official" day of the attempt. We got a few hours of sleep before we met for the mass-jump briefing. This would be the first record we would set here - a 672 person mass freefall jump, not an FAI-recognized record but good for the Guiness folks at least. We would use five C130's and a handful of other aircraft to put 672 people into into Sanam Luang, the parade grounds just outside the Royal Palace in downtown Bangkok. About half would be World Team people and the other half would be Thai jumpers.

BJ Worth and Roger Ponce spent about an hour going over details of the jump, including which way to land (north only) what the outs were (a soccer field and the river, period) and the sequencing (aircraft six minutes apart, 2000 foot spread in pull altitudes on each load.)

A load of about 30 of us then set off for the landing area, taking the newly completed skytrain to near the parade grounds. Then we loaded into tuk-tuks, these amazingly unstable three-wheeled open frame vehicles that somehow got us to the palace alive. Four of us spent the rest of the day looking at the landing area, checking out various outs, and taking river ferries at random just to see where they went.

Day 2 -

We got on the buses around 6am for the Thai Air Force base, about half an hour from the hotel. Once there we spent several hours milling around, getting speeches from various military types, hearing a prayer or two from a monk, and taking a bunch of pictures. Finally we loaded into the C130's. For about ten minutes we sat there, sweating rivers in the interior of the plane, until they started the engines and turned on the A/C. It was so humid that the A/C outlets were spewing clouds of mist from every nozzle, like the effects in a bad sci-fi movie.

We finally took off and got in sequence for the jump over Bangkok. At the exit signal we exited as tightly as we could; although there were 118 people in our plane, our exit speed was such (130kts) that we needed to hustle to get everyone out on target. I was supposed to take it down to 4000 feet before pulling, but the previous load still had a lot of canopies open around 4000 so I ended up pulling a bit high. (It's creepy to have to set up for gaps in the canopies below you.)

We had gotten warnings that the winds had picked up a bit; from what my canopy was doing (barely holding into the wind) it was clear they had picked up a bit more. I held upwind for a while then started the pattern, passing big parafoils while staying in a pack of four Sabre2's.

On the base leg I didn't want to risk going downwind at all on my lightly loaded demo canopy (a Silhouette 170) so I turned into the wind at the treeline. It was a good thing I did, since I just about had enough drive to make it to the center of the field and turn north. By this time the wind was almost directly out of the east, and almost everyone was landing into it. I split the difference between what we were supposed to do and what the wind was doing, planning to flare turn into the wind before I stopped.

At about 10 feet I got a tremendous amount of lift from a rotor. This was bad; rotors invariably have two sides. I went another 10 feet up, then got dropped hard. I flared and managed to slow down the canopy quite a bit before I hit, and a PLF kept the damage to a scraped knee. Behind me, Thai jumpers under their parafoils were landing in trees and on temple roofs.

We regrouped in the center of the field and assessed the damage. A bunch of scrapes and bruises. Several people had landed in the soccer field, a place we thought was a last-ditch, would-never-need-it option. At least one Italian jumper had gone in the river. She was fine but lost her cypres. Val T-S broke her leg after dealing with a particulary nasty rotor, and Kathy Leslie was injured as well. Rumors at first were pretty grim, but she turned out to have nothing more serious than a broken nose, dislocated hip and a knock on the head. She was fortunately wearing a hard helmet.

Afterwards we all assembled for an awards ceremony near the royal palace, where TV cameras rolled as various dignitaries gave speeches and sang songs. We then piled back on the buses and headed to a local military base where the Thai military provided lunch and a live band. It was a little surreal to sit and eat Thai food on a gorgeous military base in Thailand while a band played disco hits of the 70's, but then again, we'd just taken nearly 700 people into a tiny park in one of the bigger cities in Asia.

Tomorrow we leave for Korat, where we will start working on the practice dives for the 372 way.

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