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There are 35,000 American jumpers, including 17,000 addicts who belong to the U.S. Parachute Association. The number of jumpers has stayed about the same in the '70s. "When jumping started, there was a period of meteoric growth," says USPA Executive Director Bill Ottley. "Then all the kooky experimenters went into hang gliding and rock climbing."
Jumpers range in age from 16 to well into the 70s. George McCulloch of Syracuse is 73; he has 875 jumps and still does eight-man team work. Eleven percent of USPA members are women. They fly on many of the teams here at the turkey meet. At first, in the years after World War II, most sport jumpers were ex-paratroopers. Now they are your neighbors, your sons and daughters, you and I.
Jumping is status blind. The sport includes bankers and physicians, lawyers, grocery clerks, house painters, schoolteachers, coal miners and college students. Jock Covey, Henry Kissinger's ex-aide and now chief of the State Department's Israel desk, has 725 jumps. Wolfgang Halbig, 31, a University of Dusseldorf urologist, with 1,200 jumps, is one of 15 Germans here. "When you freefall, it doesn't matter whether you clean the road or you're a doctor," he says. "You just fly."
Today the sport of competitive parachuting is based on forming intricate patterns of falling bodies in the sky. At Zephyrhills, teams of four, eight, ten, 16 and 20 jumpers go through from one to six formations in sequence during their 55 sec. of free fall from 12,500 ft. They perform a kind of aerial ballet, creating doughnuts and diamonds, wedges and stars. The jumpers carefully rehearse their maneuvers, choreographing the sequences on paper, then running through them over and over on the ground, in what are called "dirt dives."
For those on the ground, the jumpers are hard to see at first as they pour from the plane, but within three or four seconds you can spot them, the sun reflecting off their jumpsuits as they cluster. They become larger, better defined as they fall closer—8,000 ft., 6,000, 4,000. Then the star bursts apart as each person turns by banking his body against the onrushing wind and tracks away from the others.
Crack, crack, crack! The chutes snap open, blossoming in the sky like popcorn. They are a far cry from the old rounded canopies of World War II. Brightly colored, they are designed to allow the jumpers to maneuver on the way to earth. They float downward for two, maybe 2% minutes. Then they are upon you, the suspended jumpers emitting war whoops because it went well, they have made a good dive, and maybe because they are high on their own adrenaline and they feel so good. "We're all adrenaline junkies," says a jumper.
What is the attraction? Most jumpers tell you they made the first leap to see what it was like or to prove something to themselves, to overcome that perfectly sensible fear of diving from an airplane into a void above the hard ground. If they stay with it, and perhaps only 10% do after the first scary jump or two, they develop what Kim Adams, 31, a graduate student in anthropology at Rutgers, calls "parachuting personalities, incredibly independent, uninhibited." Sky diving becomes a way of life, infinitely challenging, indescribably energizing.