skymolar

Flight to altitude. Instructors ask you if you are ready to skydive, and wait for you to shout YES! Door opens, you stand/kneel on the edge, one outside and one inside holding your jump suit straps. Basically they grab you and throw you out of the plane as most won't jump on their first go. After that its a few practice pulls, altitude awareness, following hand signals, and waving and pulling at 5500 foot after watching the altimeter spinning back. Land your parachute following commands hopefully from you instructor when he lands before you.

Whatever you do don't bale out of a perfectly good aircraft Have fun

Im just getting into the sport completing AFF and it seems to me apart from mid air collisions and hook turns while landing both of which Im going to avoid the greatest danger is defective/incompatiple parachute equipment. Claire Barnes died in Oz due to a similar thing and it was attributed to a pilot chute that could't produce sufficient drag , poor gear choice, wrong size main in container, incompatible risers that didnt disconnect and a main reserve entanglement. She was on her 200th jump. If Im staying in the sport Im going to buy a new rig with parts and spare parts from one manufacturer. My life is worth more than the 5000 for the rig(aerodyne). We will never know thankfully if you had cutaway whether the disconnected main would have been jettisoned when the reserve opened due to less container tension etc clearing the reserve allowing it to deploy, Glad your OK and thanks for posting.

Is the cause of this near fatality poor quality equipment? I noticed you have a Parachute de France atom container with a Briz 190? main. Who is the manufacturer of the Briz? and was it designed to fit in the container?