Parachuting from a low height 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
Parachuting from a low height can seriously damage your health
A few years ago a local businessman wanted to sell some special parachutes to the army and in, order to promote his product, he decided to make a promotional film.
Rather than hire a plane and making his film during a proper parachute drop from the correct height using highly skilled parachutists, which would have been costly, he decided to make his film cheaply. He decided to hire a crane, the tallest he could find, and get someone to jump from a cage suspended beneath the crane on some land waiting to be built on in the middle of Taipei. He placed an advert in the newspaper looking for ex-army paratroopers to jump and be filmed for a fee of NT$5000 each.
Two men, one in his early 20s and the other middle-aged, both ex-army paratroopers, but both without recent parachute jump experience, agreed to jump. It was arranged that they would show up at an area of open ground near the Taipei World Trade Center on a certain day.
On the day, the men arrived at the jump site as arranged. The camera crew was ready and they were hoisted up into the sky in a cage.
Even though the filmmaker had found the tallest crane he could, the height the cage reached was still was only about 60 meters high. Too high for anyone with vertigo, but nothing to someone accustomed to heights. The younger man did not have vertigo but judged, wisely, that they were not high enough and, despite encouragement and the fact that he would lose NT$5000 if he didnˇ¦t jump, he absolutely refused to jump.
Then it was the older manˇ¦s turn.The older one, maybe thinking that he would show the younger guy how tough paratroopers were in the old days, didnˇ¦t hesitate and ˇ§stepped up to the plateˇ¨. He said ˇ§This is how itˇ¦s doneˇ¨ and jumped straight off.
Unfortunately, the low height meant that his parachute did not have time to open at all. He fell like a stone, smashed into the floor below at full speed was killed instantly.
Parachuting, because of the nature of the activity can never be 100% safe but if you jump from only 60 meters with a parachute that requires at least 100 meters of height to open, it is equivalent to suicide. This parachute fatality is probably the only parachute death in the center of Taipei ever.
This case deserves entry into the Darwin Awards. This is a compilation of incidents where peopleˇ¦s recklessness or stupidity has resulted in their deaths. They are so called because Charles Darwin, the eminent naturalist, formulated the theory that only the fittest (or cleverest) of any species survive and that ˇ¨natural selectionˇ¨ weeds out the inferior.
Submitted on 10/17/2003
Submitted by:
kev lax
Reference:
Taipei, ROC, main papers, 1997
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