Jordan Hatmaker speaks on surviving a harrowing skydiving accident. "I just went into survival mode when it wrapped around my leg and the main parachute wasn't out. How can I get myself out of this situation? I have got to get this off of my leg."
Jordan Hatmaker was on her 16th solo skydiving jump when she suffered a malfunction with her parachute. As a result, she hurtled toward the ground and crash-landed in an accident that left her fighting for her life. This is a first-person account of the accident and what followed, as told to Inside Edition Digital.
My name is Jordan Hatmaker, and I survived a skydiving accident.
In the beginning, I started skydiving just as a thrill, as a rush to get away from the mundane, normal day to day of life. But once I started skydiving, it became a lot more. I loved the community of skydivers, and also it gave me a huge sense of confidence and achievement. Not everyone will jump out of a plane by themselves. And then once I got to the ground, I just felt like this overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment for what I had just done.
In 2020, that's when I decided to get my skydiving license, and this was my 16th solo jump. And in the skydiving world, that's like super new. You're probably not really experienced until you reach about 100 jumps.
The day of the accident, I was actually jumping with a new coach. I had never jumped with her before and she was a newly-trained coach as well. It was Nov. 14, 2021. The jump was in Suffolk, Virginia. It was a really nice day, partly cloudy. I got there and I did a first jump and it went really well. Once I got back down, I was actually going to leave because it was getting later in the day. But she asked if I wanted to do another jump, and I thought, "Why not?" The first one went well.
That's when I did my next jump, when the accident happened.
We went up in the plane. Everything was fine. Everything was great. I am always anxious and nervous going up, on the way up. Everyone's really excited and we all give high-fives and fist bumps and do all of that. I do the drills that we had talked about on the ground. I did those during three fall and then about 4,500-feet in altitude we tracked away from each other, which just means you zoom away from each other because you don't want to pull your parachutes anywhere near one another so they don't get tangled. And when I pulled my parachute, the pilot chute, which is the small chute that comes out before the main canopy, it wrapped completely around my right leg multiple times. So my main parachute didn't come out.
I just went into survival mode when it wrapped around my leg and the main parachute wasn't out. "How can I get myself out of this situation? I have got to get this off of my leg."
Well, hindsight's 20/20. I should have pulled my reserve parachute. However, I thought that I had a lot more time than I did. I miscalculated that and because I was new, I didn't pull my reserve parachute like I should have, but I tried to get it off of my leg by just pulling it off my leg or trying to unwrap it. But by the time I was finished trying to do that, the automated reserve parachute fired.
The reserve canopy did work for a few seconds. I had control of it, and I steered away from the runway because I was headed straight for the asphalt. I had enough time to just steer it away from the runway and into the grass.
However, the force from the reserve parachute coming out actually made the main canopy come out of its bag where it was stuck this whole time. And then the two canopies dragged away from each other and then started spiraling. So it's called a down plane when that happens.
It all happened really quickly. So when I was headed towards the ground, I was just thinking, "This is really going to hurt." But I didn't think that I would sustain the injuries that I had. I had this optimistic view pretty much the whole way down. "This isn't going to be too bad. I might break a bone."
I couldn't feel anything or move anything below my waist. Everything above my waist was just on fire, burning. It was a very intense pain. Other skydivers came running over, and then the people that were in the hangar that managed the place, they all came running over, too. I couldn't really do anything. Obviously I was on the ground and I could just hear and see buzzing above my head, like people a little frantic trying to figure out what to do.
Obviously they called 911 and it felt like forever. But I think it was probably 30 minutes until the paramedics arrived, because we were in the middle of nowhere. A helicopter ended up coming to get me because the paramedics, the ambulance, they knew it was more serious than expected, than just a leg break.
I was at Norfolk General for a month. Besides breaking my back and my leg, the spinal cord injury was the worst injury. The doctors weren't sure what my prognosis would be and doctors are a little hesitant to say exactly what your recovery is going to be. They just said, "We are not sure if you're going to walk again, but you can move your toes a little bit now and so we're thinking that this is great progress. You might regain some feeling in your legs and your lower body, but it's going to take time."
I did some inpatient physical therapy and occupational therapy at the hospital as much as I could do with the level of paralysis that I had. But I was regaining a little bit of strength after the first couple weeks. So we really tried to work on it in the hospital at the very end. And then once I got out of the hospital, I had healthcare professionals coming to the house to help me shower and do all of that of daily.
I was super optimistic I would recover. I didn't ever see a chance that I wouldn't.
Two and a half years later, I still have some side effects from the spinal cord injury. There's some internal organ dysfunction that normally happens, and I'm still dealing with that. I'm still going ... for physical therapy almost every week to try to work on that and regain some activity there.
I've been to Mount Everest since then. I went a year after the accident. I've done lots of hikes. I did a tandem skydive this past fall and just going about my normal life and just trying to continue to live it to the fullest. I'm not sure if I'll go skydiving alone ever again. It's not out of the realm of possibilities for me, though.
I've always been an open book, and the more I talk about something, the easier it gets for me. I've just had people reach out after sharing my story, and it makes me want to continue to share my story just to help people going through injuries or whatever the case may be, a hard time in their life.
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