Todays Bimble to Old Sarum Airfield

A sunny start but clouded over on the return. Old Sarum Airfield is only used for tamdem sky diving and does look a little run down. Lots of idiots (people) in the waiting to jump out of a servicable aircraft and lots more people having picknics watching them. Some unusual parts of aircraft on show and a bunch of Triumph motorcars arrived to add interest.

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Tandem jumps on a square parachute? That’s for pussies :rofl: back in the day you were on your own using a 28 foot round one on a static line. Feet and knees together…

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My cousin was in the Paras when I was a kid and on one jump his chute roman candled leading to two smashrd heels and a broken spine. He did recover! His sistdr did a charity parachute jump and landed on a building roof badly damaging her knee ligaments. Needless to say, I will NOT be going anywhere near a parachute.

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That looks pretty interesting, I like going to old airfields.

Wimp :rofl: I did over 30 jumps in the late 70’s early 80’s at Halfpenny green airport. At the time there was a national sponsored charity system where most of the students came from. They’d do the classroom and training on the Saturday and fo their 1st jump on the Sunday with the option of doing 2 more jumps they had to pay for without joining the club.

We used to seecquite a few students just switch off and come down facing downwind like a sack of spuds as they just couldn’t cope mentally. Many got up without any serious injury but there was often at least 1 broken ankle each weekend as we used to be fully booked for weeks ahead. It was mostly ladies that suffered breaks, I guess their bones arn’t as strong? Some did perfect PLFs (parachute landing falls) but still broke a bone. Worst one I saw was one lady who’d switched off and wasn’t responding to commands from the ground team. She landed on a hanger roof, got dragged across it and off the other end. Someone was looking after her that day as she swung like a pendulum, her paractute remained inflated and she landed with just a few bumps and bruises. We all thought she was done for. Happy days, but too expensive for me in the end for me to carry on as I needed to buy a square rig and back then they were all made in the USA and the exchange rate was crap so they cost as much as a car.

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