The Cessna’s engine is a faint drone in the distance. The plane itself is a tiny speck against the blue sky. Then, so small you’d miss them if you weren’t looking for them, two black flecks separate from the plane.
They’re people, falling at 120 miles per hour. A minute later, and colorful canopies slowly make their way to earth.
David Hughes has been skydiving “for probably longer than you’ve been alive,” he says. He’s run his drop zone, Skydive Santa Barbara, out of the Lompoc airport “officially” since 2000, but his crew has been jumping there since 1997.
Hughes says his first forays into skydiving back in the day were for purely social reasons: He wanted to hang out with other skydivers.
“They were cool people to go drinking with,” he says. “I figured if I jumped once, I could hang out with them.”
The decision to make his first jump came after a few beers, and in the morning, he realized he had to go through with it. So how did Hughes—who’s logged more than 5,000 jumps since then and built up a successful business around the sport—feel about that first tumble through space?
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he says.
In fact, he adds, he jumped about 30 times before he could relax for the ride. And it seems that relaxing paid off for him: As a successful businessman, Hughes’ Skydive Santa Barbara has its own hangar at the Lompoc airport and Hughes owns his own Cessna Caravan, a multi-million-dollar turboprop plane with the tail number N208TS. The TS stands for Tyler and Sean, Hughes’ two sons.
And business, it seems, is booming.
“We haven’t stopped growing,” he says. “In 2006, we had 2,700 tandems. [In] 2007, it was 4,200. Last year, we had over 5,500 tandem jumps.”
Hughes says one of the drawbacks to doing so well in business is that he doesn’t get to skydive as much anymore. But that’s what he has his jumpmasters for.
One of those jumpmasters, Mauro Ravanelli, is getting Kirsten Castillo of Newbury Park ready for her first jump. When asked why she wants to skydive, she shrugs with a laugh.
“Dunno,” she says. “Always wanted to.”
Nervous?
“Yeah.”
Ravanelli has the most jumps of the three instructors interviewed for this story: 10,000 plus, and counting. The Italian doesn’t have to think long at all when asked about his most memorable moment in a career of jumping out of airplanes:
“Proposing to my girlfriend in freefall,” he says.
Ravanelli and his fiancée plan to get married—somewhere above the ground, of course—on April 21.
Skydive Santa Barbara is a regular United Nations: Victor Fernandez (the Spaniard) boasts more than 8,000 jumps. He talks about a 62-way jump over Spain as his most memorable moment.
(Writer’s confession: My last skydive was a static line jump over Anderson, Indiana, more years ago than I care to admit in print. And seeing as I wouldn’t be going skydiving today—I had a good dozen arguments in my head for why my editor just had to pay for me to go skydiving for this story, but figured I would save him the pain of telling me no—it seemed the next best source would be someone who did this on a regular basis.)
So what exactly does it feel like to jump out of a plane from two miles up? Josh Eckl—at 25, the youngest instructor at the drop zone—is more than happy to answer questions about whether or not participants get that “stomach-in-your-throat” feeling when they first jump.
“Some people do, but it’s mainly psychological,” he says. “You’re going from 100 miles an hour [as you jump out of the plane] to 120 miles an hour. Think of it like sitting at a stop sign and stepping on the gas, but it’s not even that bad, because it’s more like when you’re doing 80 on the freeway and speed up to 100.”
Eckl adds that it’s less like falling and more like lying on a waterbed. He cheerfully admits that he won’t get rich doing what he does, but notes: “Hey, I get to throw complete strangers out of airplanes. I like my job.” m
Nicholas Walter likes his job, even though he doesn’t get to lie on a waterbed. Contact him through the executive editor at rmiller@santa mariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 5, 2009.