Is Skydiving Scary

If you’ve never been skydiving before, you might be wondering whether or not it’s scary. When you exit an airplane at 10,000 feet and freefall for 45 seconds at speeds of up to 120 mph, any normal person would tell you of course, it’s scary. And our experienced staff and instructors do everything we can to ensure that you have a safe and enjoyable experience, not a scary one. While you’ll probably experience nerves and even some fear from the time you book with us, all of that disappears the moment you exit our airplane and those fears turn into pure bliss. We want to address the fears that keep many people on the ground instead of enjoying a once in a lifetime experience.

People are often afraid of what they might have to do during their skydive and whether someone can do it for them so they can just enjoy the experience. Skydive St. Louis specializes in tandem skydiving so you can rest assured that you’ll be getting the ultimate tandem skydiving experience when you jump with us! You will be securely attached to one of our highly experienced USPA certified instructors throughout the whole jump and your instructor will be with you every step of your skydive. He/she is trained in operating all of the equipment. You will also have some safety responsibilities during the jump, which will be covered in our 15-minute ground training when you arrive. You’ll learn the proper body position for exiting the aircraft and freefall. Your instructor will steer the parachute and you can assist if you want! You will also learn how and why it is important to lift your legs for landing.

You may have heard that people can have a hard time breathing in freefall, which definitely sounds scary. However, the freefall and parachute environments do not cause any difficulty in breathing; some students have commented that it was awkward to breathe during the first few seconds after they exited the plane. This is caused not by lack of oxygen but by the surge of adrenaline and excitement of making your first skydive! When you exit the airplane, you can breathe in and out normally, or you can scream with excitement!

Lastly, one of the more common fears that many people are afraid of is what happens if their chute doesn’t work. This is a myth that is perpetuated by the media, movies, etc. The good news is that parachutes are designed to inflate without much help at all. And even better news – all of our tandem rigs (that backpack you’ve probably seen people wearing) have two parachutes. So in the unlikely chance that there is an issue with the main parachute, there is a reserve parachute to serve as a backup. Our rigs are also equipped with a computer that should deploy your parachute if it hasn’t already been done so by a certain pre-set altitude.

After landing from a tandem skydive, we’ve heard people say that they don’t know why they were so scared and many even want to go again. If you have additional fears or even just questions you want to address before taking the big leap from our airplane, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to help dissuade your fears so you can have the experience of a lifetime with us!