"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

I kept my eyes fixed on the tailgate and watched the instructor exit a
split second behind me. A,gap of orfe second between jumpers equated to in
excess of sixty feet, so he was jumping virtually on top of me. The
slipstream created a natural gap.
For the first couple of jumps we had to be stable on heading" -as we
jumped, we didn't turn left or right, or tumble.
I came out; I didn't tumble.
I kept looking ahead. We were supposed to pick a point on the ground
and make sure that we were not moving left or right of it or going forward
or back-just stable on heading, falling straight until the altimeter read
thirty-five hundred feet and it was time to pull the cord. I was moving
slowly around to the left, and I didn't correct it.
The altimeter reached thirty-five hundred feet, and I pulled.
There was a rumbling sensation as the chute unfurled, then flapping and
a fearsome jerk.
I felt as if I had come to a complete stop.
I looked up, checking the canopy. Everything was where it should have
been. I reached for the steering toggles and looked down and around to make
sure there were no other canopies near me.
I watched the main dual carriageway going into Oxford, then the
vehicles, huts, and people at the DZ (drop zone). There was total silence.
It felt as if I was suspended in the sky, but before I knew it, the ground
was rushing up to meet me. I hit, rolled, and controlled the canopy. And
that was it, straight into a vehicle for the half hour drive back to the
airfield and the waiting C130.
The first couple of jumps were rather cumbersome, as we just thought
about how to move and control ourselves in the sky. We were in "clean
fatigue"-just the parachute, no equipment, no weapons, no oxygen kit.
Once we could fall stable on heading we had to turn left and right
through 360 degrees, then do a somersault. To get used to handling an
unstable exit, we next had to force ourselves to fall out unstable. It was
quite strange.
Only a week before we hadn't had to practice at all; it just happened.
If we got unstable, we "banged ourselves out"stretching our limbs out
into a big star. Like the concave surface of a saucer falling toward the
earth, you instantly level out. It was no big problem at all-until we jumped
with our kit on.
We learned how to prepare and pack our equipment and to rig it onto our
parachutes. We would only find out a bit later, when we got to the
squadrons, that what they were teaching us on the course wasn't that
realistic; they were teaching us to release our equipment once we were under
the canopy and let it dangle on a nine-foot rope. If we had sensitive
equipment in the bergen, this method would damage it. So what we would
eventually learn to do was release it and then gradually bring it down our
legs so that the shoulder straps were on our toes and we were holding it.
just as we landed, we'd gently let it tap onto the ground and we'd flare the
canOPY.
We then started learning about the oxygen equipment that we would be
jumping with. When we went onto an aircraft, we had our oxygen bottle on,
but we didn't use it. There was only a certain amount of gas in the bottle,