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September 22, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
6F
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| FREQUENT FLIER: Mark Meltzer in freefall. “I started because I wanted to ride in classic planes, but I came to totally love freefall.”. MARK MELTZER PHOTO
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Destination drop zone
EECS alum achieves his own nirvana by freefalling from the heavens
Mark Meltzer (B.S.’72 EECS) started skydiving in 1968 as a freshman at Berkeley. A love of classic planes, not adolescent thrills, lured him. “I’ve always been fascinated by aviation,” he says. “I wanted to fly, but the cost for flight lessons was beyond my means. One day I was down at the Oakland Airport looking at derelict DC-6s and Stratocruisers. A sign on an old shack caught my attention. For $50, they’d teach you how to jump from a plane. I went in and asked what kind of aircraft they had because I was far more interested in the planes. They said Cessnas, but once you got better, you could jump out of bigger planes. I said sign me up.”
“I was definitely nervous that first time. Back then, we had nightly lessons. It was grueling. The instructors would scream at you. It was more like a military operation. The purpose, I think, was to get you used to stressful situations so you didn’t panic. On that first jump, we were attached to a static line, which is a cord that deploys the chute as you fall away from the plane. There was a girl in front of me, and she froze. We were in a single-engine aircraft where you had to go out on the wing strut. She was hanging onto the strut and screaming, and the instructor couldn’t get her back in safely so he pried her hands off. It was an evening jump, and all I could hear was her scream disappearing downward. (She broke her ankle on landing, but completed the jump.) I was next. But after landing, I couldn’t wait to do it again.”
Meltzer, vice president general counsel of a medical device company in Silicon Valley, hasn’t stopped jumping since that memorable night. In his 38 years of skydiving, he’s completed hundreds of jumps. “Every jump is as exciting as the last one,” he says. “Once you accelerate to terminal velocity, you have no inertial clues that you’re falling after that. You can feel the sky around you. It’s a very soulful, contemplative experience. It’s a perfect illusion of floating because, in reality, you’re falling quite fast.”
Meltzer says he’s never been injured, but he has had two close calls when his main canopy malfunctioned and he had about seven seconds to release the main chute and deploy his reserve. His ability to execute emergency procedures under stress gave him a lot of confidence, he says.
Then again, Meltzer is no extremist. He carries two visual altimeters, two audible altimeters, a miniature “black box” digital flight recorder and a device that will automatically deploy his reserve if he falls below 700 feet at freefall velocities. He doesn’t jump from buildings nor does he perform risky high-speed landings, which are now the leading cause of death in the sport. “Engineering has helped me become a better and safer jumper because I know statics, dynamics and vectors. And as an engineer, I know there is no perfect system. You always need a plan B.”
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