UPDATE 4 (16 Sep '10): Attempt no. 3 ensues on the 1st October with training booked for the 2nd and the jump hopefully on the 3rd.
Thanks for all the donations so far - The response has been fantastic and Graham, Stephen and I are very humbled with the amount of money you've donated to this fantastic charity.
UPDATE 3 (01 May '10): I wouldn't have believed it would be this difficult. Graham, Stephen and I were phoned 48 hours prior to departure, with all the tickets, cars, hotels etc. booked and told that the jump was cancelled. Allegedly the jump pilot had failed to put the requisite paperwork into the FAA to reserve the airspace for the jump and they needed 10 days notice, "But next weekend will be okay".
Obviously it takes us a few months to get the time off, and sort all the tickets, connecting flights etc. out so we have decided to postpone it AGAIN. There is nobody more frustrated than the three of us at the moment. Anyway, we are now looking at September/October to have our 3rd attempt (3rd time lucky??) at this.
Thanks again for all the donations. They are all going to a fantastic charity, and Graham and I are hopeful that the video we produce when we eventually get to jump will go a little way to assisting with the publicity for Dreamflight.
Bear with us.... we'll get there eventually! Regards, James Shepard
UPDATE 2: Director of Flight Operations, Stephen Riley, in a fit of madness, has agreed to come and do a 30,000 Tandem jump with us at the beginning of May.
UPDATE: Having flown all the way out to Memphis, we were TEMPORARILY defeated by the weather. Having had a day of non-stop rain on Sunday we awoke to a solid 1200ft cloudbase on Monday. Hoping that we were going to get a big enough hole in the cloud we kitted up but it was not to be.
SO... not to be defeated, and to say thanks for all the generous donations we've had through from you all so far, Graham and I have rebooked to jump on the 1st and 2nd of May next year. It's enabled me to top the life insurance up so I get less of an ear bashing from the wife which is no bad thing. The gentleman training us, Kevin Ho, also trains SAS, German GSG9, Croatian and Italian Special Forces (Do the Italians have an army then?) as well as US Navy SEALS to name just a few so we're in extremely good hands.
James Shepard Graham Stone and Stephen Riley, in a furious bout of "box ticking" off their respective "bucket lists" have decided to go that one step further and try something new and a bit different in Skydiving.
Both of us have looked out of the window many times are cruise altitude in the Boeing 777's we fly at work and thought "Nice day for Skydiving", and this time we get to do it from 30,000 ft!
Jumping from this altitude is a lot more involved than the standard height of 13,500, with the main problems being physiological. At 30,000 feet, if the oxygen failed, you have 1-3 minutes before being rendered unconcious due to lack of O2. To that end we all breathe pure oxygen from an internal aircraft system on the ground prior to takeoff, on the way to altitude and then switch to a belly mounted portable system for the express route down.
Freefall time from 30,000ft. should be of the order of 2 1/2 minutes to a deployment altitude of approximately 3,000 ft. The temperature when we climb out of the aircraft is around -32 deg C, and our initial freefall speed due to the thin air is around 200mph! Graham and I are planning on wearing head-cams so hopefully we should be able to post some video shortly after the jump.
We are doing the jump in support of Dreamflight. This is a registered UK charity whose purpose is to take seriously ill and disabled children on their "Holiday of a lifetime" to the theme parks of Central Florida. Lots of other charities do some wonderful things like funding research or purchasing medical equipment, but Dreamflight believes that fun and joy are JUST as important - especially for children who perhaps can't wait long enough for the breakthrough they need or whose illnesses and treatments have bought pain, distress and disruption to their lives.
Please give generously to this worthy charity and help some deserving children have the holiday of their dreams at our expense.
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