It sounds like a nightmare: breaking your arm at a height of two kilometers and then making an emergency landing with one arm. Yet Perry van Caspel is very sober about his ‘horror jump’ two weeks ago. The 50-year-old paratrooper became entangled in the lines of his parachute and broke his arm in five places: “I felt my arm snap.”
Paratrooper Perry tells about emergency landing – NH Nieuws
It was Perry’s twelfth jump, who fell under the spell of skydiving after a tandem jump on Texel. He started taking lessons at Skydive Hilversum and this was his first jump where he was allowed to fall free for ten seconds. “I had to count to ten and then open my parachute myself,” he explains. The previous times, the parachute opened automatically when it jumped out of the plane.
“In the air, I quickly turned onto my back and managed to turn back onto my stomach.” Yet Perry is not yet in full control, because moments later he was on his back again. “In principle it doesn’t matter if you lie on your back and open your parachute and I had lost count by now, so that means opening immediately.”
arm snaps
When it opens, however, things go terribly wrong: his right arm gets entangled in the rope of the parachute. “It opens at 180 kilometers per hour and at that moment I felt my arm snap. I didn’t feel my arm, but I did: it hurt a lot.”
“Your body is going to react and I felt the white spots before my eyes”
Yet Perry manages to keep thinking in solutions. “I had to swear very hard for thirty seconds, only to be able to think: how am I going to get out of here?” And that while the pain in his right arm certainly affects him. “Your body is going to react, I felt the white spots coming in front of my eyes. If you surrender to that, you will just pass out. But that shouldn’t happen, because then it will be an outcome that you can’t influence.”
Emergency landing
Perry sees the residential area below him fast approaching. He searches for a suitable spot for an emergency landing, and steers there with only his left arm. “In the very last phase, about 250 meters above the ground, I thought for a split second: what is the solution, should I brace myself now? But then I finally saw the basketball court with a grass field next to it.”
“I had to make a solemn promise to my home front that I would never go skydiving again”
With all his might he hangs with his left arm on his steering line to get there. With any luck, Perry first hits a tree, which brings him to a stop fairly immediately. “Otherwise I would have had to do a so-called ‘pararoll’ to break my fall, but I don’t know how that ended with my right arm.”
In the end, help arrives quickly: the trainers of the skydive center have tried to follow him in the air as best they can. His injury is not that bad, except of course to his right arm. “My right upper arm was split into four, five pieces.”
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“I had to make a solemn promise to my home front that I would never parachute again,” says Perry with a small smile. “I don’t know if I can solve such a situation again, no idea.”