Four people squeeze inside a Cessna 182, with every seat removed but the pilot’s. The floor feels like it could give way to the ground 10,000 feet below with every bout of turbulence. The jump itself is a blur, but the earlier practice runs on the gutted remains of a decommissioned plane steady my nerves when the door finally swings open and mid-May air hits my face at 120 mph.
All I remember is falling. You know that butterfly feeling you get in your stomach on a rollercoaster? Imagine that feeling throughout your entire body, and for so long that it feels endless. Like a kaleidoscope of butterflies falling infinitely inside your body — that’s what skydiving feels like.
With a decade of experience and over 1,500 jumps under her belt, tandem and accelerated freefall instructor Robin Basalla experiences this feeling nearly every day from May to October.
“Skydiving defies expectations because it’s calm,” she said. “When the canopy opens, it’s just peace and calm and happiness. I just love it.”
Although unassuming from the outside, the WNY Skydiving campus at the Pine Hill Airport in Albion houses a thriving community of habitual skydivers among fields of flowering Honeycrisp and Gala apple trees. Industrial and unpretentious, a collection of signs and spray-painted arrows lead to the front office, where “I survived my first skydive” t-shirts line the walls.
After a brief training session, my instructor and I walk to a massive open hangar where I see them: a collection of young people casually gathered in a graveyard of dismantled planes and dressed in vintage wingsuit garb — they are the objects of my newest fascination: habitual skydivers. It takes a certain type of person to abandon their survival instincts and willingly jump from a plane, and those people also happen to be some of the kindest, most welcoming people I’ve met.
Drop zone owner and skydiving instructor examiner Tim Allen, with over 20 years of experience jumping more than 11,000 times, attributes this phenomenon to the skydiving community itself.
“One of the things I’ve done well is let people be themselves, and that allows them to bolt themselves into the community where they can help develop it,” he said. “This is not a reflection of me; this is a reflection of all the people who are here, who have been here, and who will continue to be here in the future.”
Within 10 yards, you could spy someone packing a multicolored parachute with surgical precision, two dueling beer fridges labeled #1 and #2, a young pilot tending to one of many well-loved aircraft and an experienced skydiver mowing the airport’s expansive lawn. The phrase “It takes a village” comes alive in its truest form here.
Basalla has watched many student-teacher relationships blossom into friendships at the compound.
“When someone ends up loving it as much as I did that first time, and [they] keep coming back like I did, then I get to teach them and keep working with them, then they’re a licensed skydiver and part of the community,” she said. “We jump, and when the sun sets, we have a bonfire and cook some burgers.”
The words “family” and “home” are on the tongues of every employee at WNY Skydiving, and the energy is infectious. You want to get to know these people, pick their brains and spend time with them. Every skydiver has a unique origin story, but a singular string ties them all together.
“They’re people who know themselves better,” Allen said. “A lot of people who come here find themselves when they show up. The criticisms of the world quiet down, and they can really understand who they are.”
What habitual skydivers seek isn’t just adrenaline — it’s clarity. They have an extraordinary connection to life and death, tranquilly facing mortality with every jump. Freefalling necessitates a presence of mind that mutes all worldly thoughts, rivaled only by meditation. For those weighed down by the every day demands of life, skydiving could offer a shift in perspective. wnyskydiving.com
Ten Gardner is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
