Why parachute jump - Charles Lindbergh

From: GW Galloway
Subject: Charles Lindberg on Parachute Jumping
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 23:21:27 -0500
Organization: Precision Aerodynamics, Inc.

Charles Lindberg on Parachute Jumping

[This is a quotation by Charles Lindberg, the first person to fly from
New York to Paris, solo, non-stop.]

"I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit
and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet
above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him
flowered out into the delicate wavering muslim of a parachute -- a few
gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible
threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had
made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.

"A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the
experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort
of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and
wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that
tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of
anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of
courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life?
How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would
have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no
crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific
objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump,
a desire I could not explain. It was that quality that led me into
aviation in the first place -- it was a love of the air and sky and
flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond
the descriptive words of man -- where immortality is touched through
danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than
man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant."

     Charles A. Lindberg


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"If you can pack all of those parachutes, then you can fold your own
shirts and make up your own bed"! [What Mom told me when I was still
living at home at age 23, absolutely obsessed with skydiving] c.1972

George Galloway  http://precision.aerodynamics.com
Precision Aerodynamics 423-949-4688   Parachute Industry Assn V Pres
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Why? - Charles Lindbergh
