What the hell is a DZO?
Drop Zone Owner.
What the hell is a Drop Zone?
It's a place, usually an airport or an airstrip, where people pay to jump out of airplanes. It has a different connotation in the military.

I've been skydiving for over 7 years and I have 926 jumps. My husband and I opened a DZ in the southeast about 4 years ago. I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea; there's an age-old joke in the skydiving community: How do you make a small fortune in skydiving? Start with a large fortune and open a drop zone.

Oh, my sides. Here's another skydiving joke for you (bad language ahoy!): A guy had gone to do his first jump one day and was telling a friend about it afterwards. "Yeah, I was real nervous", he said, "The jumpmaster told me to climb out and I told him no. So he told me again to climb out and I said, 'no'. He then got all in my face and said 'Goddammit, if you don't climb out I'm going to fuck you up the ass!'"
His friend said, "So, did you jump?"
"A little, at first."

Oh, my sides!
Anyway, what I kind of hoped would peter out has turned from a Cessna operation (a Cessna is an airplane that holds 4 skydivers) to a King Air (holds 12 -14).

So, do we make our living off of the drop zone? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, sorry. No, my husband runs the dz full time but I have a day job. I am a software analyst (A software analyst does what a developer does, but doesn't get paid as much). I'm not really gritching, the company I work for hired me even though my degree is in Anthropology (you want fries with that?).

As a dzo, the worst thing I can think of is to have someone die. You know what? It's going to happen. Most non-skydivers think that we are playing a wierd game of Russian Roulette. The truth is people get injured or die skydiving for the same reason people get injured or die doing anything, especially anything high-risk: they fail to follow proper procedure. Or, if an emergency situation occurs, they fail to follow proper emergency procedures. Anybody can greatly reduce (but not eliminate) their risks of injury or death by knowing and practicing proper procedures.

Have I seen people get hurt? Yes. We had one injury last year and we thought we were going to lose him. He landed on his head, on the tarmac. He's alive, and he might get to the point where he can have a normal life. God, I hope so. He's a good guy.

Have I seen anybody die? No, and I hope I never will. Do I know anybody who has died? Two. One was a bit of a spaz, a good kid who for some reason only known to him, walked into the spinning prop of an airplane. Another *dove* into the spinning prop of an airplane. You know, there aren't that many Cuisinart deaths in skydiving. They are intensely rare as compared to hook-turn/low turn deaths. Just one of those statistical anomalies.


Once upon a time, skydivers used modified surplus military equipment. Thanks to the Great God Bill Booth and some other innovators, modern skydiving equipment is safer and more reliable and deaths due to malfunctioning equipment have decreased dramatically. Most skydivers nowadays die under perfectly good canopies (one way you can tell a skydiver from a whuffo. We call parachutes canopies) because they make some radical turn too close to the ground and they smack into the dirt. Some do it deliberately (a hook-turn. It looks kewl), some do it because they panic and are trying to avoid landing down-wind or to avoid an obstacle. Some just jump canopies that are too small for their skill level. The latter reason has put three or four people in the hospital at our drop zone. We're tired of it so now we have to play safety nazi on the people who jump because they are too fucking stupid to realize that jumping a handkerchief can kill them.

Hey, it's my blog and I'll vent if I want to.

Oh, yeah; whuffo: a non-skydiver. Someone who says "whuffo you jump outta that aeroplane?"

I realize I made it sound bad. Most skydiving injuries involve a busted limb. It happened to me - I came in for a landing on a bumpy day, knew I was going to have a hard landing, and instead of keeping my feet and knees together, I pulled my feet up underneath me and literally sat on my ankle. I heard a crunching noise and I had two thoughts: "Oh, shit, I broke it!" and "I'm never gonna hear the end of this at work!"

It turned out to be a sprain and I was jumping again in two weeks. As for work, a co-worker had been thrown from her horse and punctured a lung that same weekend so that took the heat off me.

There's a proper procedure for landing and everyone is taught it. People bust things because they fail to do a proper Parachute Landing Fall. What am I getting at? When people die/get hurt in skydiving, it's their fault 99.9% of the time. The woman who died diving into a prop - it wasn't her fault.

Do you feel like skydiving now? You either want to or you don't - nothing I write here is going to sway you one way or the other. Just do yourself a favor - if you are a skydiver and/or you feel like opening a drop zone, for the love of God, man! Are you out of your mind?