EFL
An Army officer survived falling 3,500 feet from an aircraft after his parachute failed to open properly during a training exercise. Lieut Charlie Williams, a platoon commander in the Irish Guards, escaped serious injury when he crashed through the corrugated iron roof of a house in a shanty town in eastern Kenya. The 25-year-old officer, who was making only his third parachute jump, cracked three vertebrae in the lower part of his back and dislocated a finger, when his fall was broken by the roof. In his first interview since the accident, Lieut Williams said: "I was completely helpless, there was nothing I could do. I said to myself 'this is it' and I prepared to die."
The incident began immediately after Lieut Williams jumped from a Cessna 102 aircraft as it circled above Malindi airport. Instead of making a clean exit, he clipped the side of the door and was sent spinning and tumbling through the air. His feet became entangled in the parachute's rigging lines and he began spiralling downward, head first. All attempts to free himself failed.
"The parachute canopy had partly deployed, but my feet were up above me and were preventing it from deploying fully," said Lieut Williams, who was speaking from his parents' home in Bradford, West Yorkshire. "I was very frightened and I was panicking. My body position meant that it was impossible to deploy my reserve parachute. Everything I tried failed, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was about to die. "Bizarrely, from that point on, everything seemed to slow down and I became strangely calm. I remember thinking of how lonely I felt at the time. "I just tried to keep things as ordered as possible and waited to see what was going to happen when I hit the ground." "The next thing I knew, was that I had smashed through the corrugated iron roof of somebody's home and I was lying on the ground with a crowd of puzzled Kenyans looking at me. My immediate thought was 'Oh my God, I'm alive'. |