“Quick get the video camera!” Tina laughed and I reached over for it and pressed record.

“No!” but Alice could not fight me.

“Too late!” I grinned cheekily at my girlfriend as I pointed the camera in her direction.

Alice

I had been fully briefed on what I would be expected to do in the plane and when we jumped out but I still felt nervous. My tandem partner and I climbed into the fairly big plane, which was difficult as we were attached to each other. I looked back to see Dana and all of my friends watching me and smiling from behind the wooden fence and I returned the smile nervously.

The plane started and we were soon up in the air. We climbed and climbed for what seemed like hours, the plane tilting up at a steep angle while I sat awkwardly, half on my partners lap and half on the hard wooden bench. My tandem partner was called Mike and he seemed nice, he had told a few jokes and this relaxed me a bit and I felt safe knowing that I would be attached to him. Sitting in front of us was Barry, the guy that would be clinging to the side of the plane as we jumped out and filming us as we descended.

Finally, the plane began to level out and Mike ran through what I needed to do for the third time, which wasn’t really that much, he did all the hard work. Before I knew it Mike was shimmying along the bench, with me attached to his front, towards the wide open door of the aircraft. He positioned himself in the doorway and told me to relax my body so that I was lying between his legs, my feet up behind me so that they weren’t touching the floor. As I did this all I could see in front of me was the vast views from the plane, there was hundreds and hundreds of miles of green fields and the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA in the distance. We were now 13,000 feet in the air so obviously everything looked tiny and a few wispy clouds floated just below us.