Woman shares her story of how she fell 15,000 feet out of a plane and still survived
A woman has shared her amazing story of how she fell a whopping 15,000 feet out of a plane and still survived.
Em Carey was 20 years old when she decided to go travelling around Europe in 2013.
Just five days into her trip, the Aussie decided to do a skydive with her best mate Gemma.
And while she was terrified, Em ‘forced her’ to do it with her for an incredible memory. Although the memory she’s left with certainly isn’t the one she envisioned.
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“It sounds so silly now but there was not even an ounce of nerves,” she explained on the Darling, Shine! podcast. “I didn’t register that it was dangerous.”
Em explained how much she was ‘loving it’ and was even thinking she’d become a professional skydiver while she was in the free fall, but things soon went wrong.
Having received the ‘tap on her shoulder’ to prepare for the parachute pull, she was confused when there wasn’t a ‘big jolt’ and it felt like her hair was ‘being ripped backwards’.
With nothing to compare it to, Em didn’t initially know something was wrong but soon realised.
“I was calling out to the instructor and he wasn’t responding,” she said, explaining she thought he couldn’t hear her over the wind and was sure he was doing everything he could.
“But then the moment I really realised was I saw a scrunched up parachute in front of us instead of above us and open.
“And I thought ‘100 percent this is it’, I didn’t think it’d be possible to survive that.”
She began to question if perhaps she’d fallen off from her instructor but they soon ‘hit the ground’.
“Somehow I wasn’t knocked unconscious at all, I was completely awake the entire time,” Em recalled. “I was like, ‘Surely I’ve died, surely this is it,’ and then the next feeling I had was just the most intense pain throughout my whole legs and I was like ‘I’ve gone to hell’.”
She then found herself in the ‘middle of the Swiss Alps’ with no one around and her instructor unconscious on her back. And at this point, she realised she was ‘completely paralysed from the waist down’. Thankfully, she only had to wait a few minutes until help came.
But with a witness report saying Em and the instructor had been seen ‘spinning really fast, dropping to the ground’, people are amazed she’s still alive.
It was found from investigations that her instructor had forgot to wear his altimeter which tells you how high you are so the parachute can be pulled.
So he reportedly pulled it too late, at the ‘exact same second the emergency one was coming out on its own’ and so they got tangled, with the cords wrapping around his neck and making him unconscious.
The instructor did survive the ordeal and Em was eventually able to walk again after a lot of time in hospital doing physiotherapy.
Jess Battison