MIRACLE skydiver Holly Wiffen said she cannot wait to go up in a plane and jump again — despite nearly being killed in a terrifying freefall accident.
The 35-year-old is recovering at home on crutches after a group dive last month went horrifyingly wrong.
She says she is lucky to be alive after being accidentally kicked in the head by a fellow jumper soon after leaping out of a plane, knocking her out cold.
She then hurtled 10,000ft to the ground before hitting a conifer tree, which slowed her descent and almost certainly saved her life.
The dental therapist, who has been on 425 jumps, said: “If I hadn’t hit the tree I would have hit the ground and would have been soup. Most people don’t survive skydiving accidents like that.”
But, incredibly, it has not put her off the extreme sport, as she said: “I want to get back to skydiving as soon as I can.
“Although, knowing what happened and that I could have died also makes me a little nervous.”
Holly had been taking part in a group skydive known as “tracking” where experienced jumpers freefall horizontally to build up speed.
She had just leapt from the plane at around 12,000ft and was manoeuvring into position when another jumper in the group appeared to misjudge his own area and crashed into her.
Terrifying GoPro camera footage showed the moment of the 100mph mid-air collision, above a festival at Langar airfield near Nottingham.
It appears to show the male parachutist’s shin slam into the back of Holly’s helmet, knocking her unconscious and smashing her own camera off her helmet.
She can then be seen plummeting towards the ground at 150mph, passed out and completely helpless with no parachute.
Another jumper attempts to catch up with her as she spins out of control, reaching out to her desperately with his hand.
But he could not grab hold of her in time before he was forced to deploy his own parachute when he reached 3,000ft.
Meanwhile, Holly then disappears from the footage into the patchwork of fields below.
She said of her fellow skydivers: “They thought I was dead.”
Despite having no memory of her fall, Holly was at some point able to pull her ripcord.
She estimates this would have happened at 1,000ft — five seconds before deadly impact.
Her secondary emergency chute then also deployed because it registered she was going too fast and was too low.
But the combination of both chutes together created a “downplane” effect, resulting in a dangerously rapid descent.
It sped her up to around 40mph or 50mph before she crashed into the conifer tree.
Crucially, it cushioned the impact when she eventually hit the ground, just yards from a main road, and close to power lines.
Holly, who had landed hundreds of feet away from the field where she was supposed to touch down, said: “I came down amidst caravans, buildings, trees, roads, all sorts. It was just an absolute mess of a place to land.
“There’s also power lines all around that area as well, so I was very lucky not to hit any of those.”
Holly, who had already completed three jumps on the day of the incident, went on: “I was just tumbling but I felt like I was dreaming about skydiving and falling.
“I didn’t come around until I was lying on the ground.
“My helmet had come off and I looked down at my leg and it was pointing in a different direction.”
She recalled: “I looked up and saw the reserve in the tree and realised something had gone wrong.
“People had to fight through brambles to find me. They saw me disappear and wanted to get to me as fast as they could — they were just assuming they were picking up a dead person. People started arriving and the first thing I said is, ‘Help me get my kit off’, before the paramedics cut it off me.”
Against all odds, Holly, from Okehampton, Devon, survived with just a badly broken left leg, fractured spine and bruising following the crash on August 7.
She was put on a stretcher and dashed to hospital in Nottingham, where she was operated on six days later to place a metal rod in her leg.
Holly is now hobbling around on crutches while she recovers at her parents’ farm.
Since leaving hospital, she has also received an apology from the other skydiver who crashed into her, sparking the horror fall.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16958826/skydiver-survives-10000-ft-fall-unconscious/
