I was told there's no such thing as a perfectly good airplane...
Did it once; It was a huge pain. Pay a lot of money. Drive 4 hours, take an 8 hour class and get told it's too windy to jump, drive 4 hours home. Drive 4 hours back again, take the follow-up refresher class, wait all day; get told it's too windy to jump. Get fed up with waiting and take the tandem jump and drive the four hours home again.
I will say it was a blast. IIRC, we went up to about 12,000 feet to jump. It was in September (100 degree weather in Texas) but the air up there was in the 40s and felt great. Jump was easy but they have you trained through your routine so you don't have time to enjoy the view during free-fall. Once the chute opened, it was nice; nothing but air between my feet and the ground for a mile! Hit the ground hard (same thing, didn't help pull the lines on landing) but it was a neat experience overall. I didn't get the rush people talk about but I tend to be a fairly laid-back person and can take things like this without much effect. :
I would do it again if they would just give me a chute and put me in the plane but all of the procedure makes it frustrating. We did see a pretty bad accident while we were waiting. Two other jumpers were coming down but one ran into the other and got their chutes tangled up. The both cut away and one deployed his backup but the other stayed in free-fall and was very close to the ground when her chute opened... It turns out, when they hit, her arm got broken by the impact and she was unable to deploy the backup manually. The automatic deployment of the backup chute is all that saved her life...
