Other People's Bucket-List Items You Find Strange

Jump out of an airplane. Do these people have a fucking death wish? At least make it the last item on your bucket list.
 
There are several things, but some of them involve exterminating a huge load of people, but besides that retire in a farm, some cattle, some horses, and some other stuff, something like what Thruth has. Go ride a motorcycle through vietnam or something similar. Also get to certain parts of the middle east and go to lake baikal in russia.
 
Allez Allez said:
Jump out of an airplane. Do these people have a fucking death wish? At least make it the last item on your bucket list.
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I've jumped out of an aeroplane, twice. Thankfully, both times were voluntary.

The first time was with a 75-year-old Japanese man who needed an interpreter and who was working his way through - yes - a retirement bucket list. He'd already been scuba-diving, jet-boating and bungee-jumping and he really wanted to leap out of a plane.

When I agreed to do it, I envisaged quite a large plane, of the kind used by the air force, where there is a large door in the side or back of the plane and you can walk up to it and simply step out.

What we got, however, was a small plane with room for four people, including the pilot. When the time came to jump out, a small door was propped open near the pilot and the instructor told me to reach out and to hold on to the wing strut. Helpfully, the strut had two handprints stencilled on to it to show where I should hold it. Well, I assume they were painted on to it, but perhaps they'd been etched into it by the terror-sweat of previous skydivers. Having gained a firm hold on the wing-strut, I then had to carefully, one at a time, manoeuvre my feet out of the plane and place them on the wheel strut, so that I was hunched over, frantically holding onto the outside of a plane, some 13 000 feet above the earth.

The skydiving instructor, shouting at me through the wind screaming past the plane, told me to arch my back, let go and hurl myself backwards down and away from the plane. After a moment of pure terror in which I thought that I wouldn't be able to do it and that the plane would have to land with me still holding on to the outside, I managed to convince myself to let go and I dropped into the void.

After a brief moment of terror when I realised that I was plummeting towards the earth, it was actually a lot of fun. The septuagenarian Japanese retiree really enjoyed it, too, and thankfully managed to avoid having a heart attack while climbing out of the plane.

I did it once more, a few months later, in a plane of similar size. That time, we jumped out over the sea and drifted back in and landed on the beach. Our mood of jubilation was somewhat damaged, though, when on reaching the skydiving HQ, we turned on the radio and heard that, just a few kilometres south of where we were, there'd been a fatal skydiving accident as a man's chute hadn't opened and he'd slammed into the ground at terminal velocity. We realised that the victim had been in another plane that had taken off at the same time as we did.

I decided then and there that I really didn't want to go skydiving again.
 
Tandem skydiving is super safe. Solo less so. It's a hell of a lot of fun though. Same as diving with sharks, seems dangerous but is actually very safe. Anyways, life isn't much fun without taking any risks.
 
Journeyman said:
At least with tandem sky-diving, you can be pretty sure that the instructor's packed the parachute really well.
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You can have an instructor pack your chute as well if you go solo. Probably the best thing to do if you aren't jumping and packing it regularly.
 
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