Viewers were gripped by the dramatic ESPN video on Saturday: A skydiver with a giant American flag came in for a landing at Virginia Tech’s spring football game, suddenly veered into the scoreboard, gets stuck on the letter C and dangles precariously.
The man who jumped was Pasha Palanker, and he told WTOP that from the plane, everything looked fine and the wind was blowing at 7 knots, within regulation of a normal skydive. So he jumped, but he soon realized there was a problem: “When I saw the first jumper land, it did not look right.”
But at the time, Palanker was not too concerned because as he came in for his final approach, “at six, 700 feet, I was exactly where I was supposed to be,” he said.
But that’s exactly when things started to go wrong. “As I started to approach the stadium, the wind picked up and was a lot stronger than forecast, and I stopped moving forward.”
At this point, he said he was more concerned with protecting the crowd below than with protecting himself. He saw he was going to come up short of the field and land in the stands, which “was the same as if the flag had been anchored down by a 26-pound weight, moving about 20 to 25 miles an hour landing into a crowd of people.” That, Palanker said, would have been pretty dangerous.
“So I looked for a way out,” he said.
As he steered away from the crowd, he was carried away by a gust of wind that was later determined to be 27 knots — nearly twice the safety limit for such jumps. The wind then smashed him into the scoreboard.
“The wind got knocked out of me, and I couldn’t breathe, I don’t know for how long, and obviously, I hit that sign hard, the corner of it at the top,” Palanker said.
So what does a skydiver think about while he hangs from a sign in front of tens of thousands of people? “That it was not that big a deal. I know, I know, that’s what people focus on. But I’ve been hurt in combat a few times, and in moments like that, you’re just, it’s not about what could happen. It’s, ‘What do I do now to make sure that I protect myself as much as I can?'”
He said that as he dangled from the sign, he was focused on keeping the flag from getting picked up by wind gusts, and then on keeping the parachute canopy from inflating until the Blacksburg Fire Department rescued him 20 minutes later.
It’s that combat experience that is partly why he does skydiving. Palanker spent 17 years in the Army, much of it in Special Operations. He had multiple combat deployments and many missions, earning two Purple Hearts.
Now, jumping from airplanes is a vital part of his post-military life. “I struggled pretty badly with mental health and PTSD and actually jumping was one of those things that kept me going after I retired from the service,” he said. “Then when I found this Parachute Team, it brought meaning and the challenge (veterans) all miss into my life.”
And there’s another aspect to Palanker’s jumps: pride. “Me being an immigrant, I feel a tremendous sense of pride flying our flag into large events like football stadiums,” he said.
Palanker said his injuries from Saturday’s crash aren’t bad, just a hurt shoulder and back, “soft tissue damage, nothing structural.”
And once he heals, he said he has no intention to stop skydiving.
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