We spoke with Alexandria skydiver Willow Wright about how she fell in love with the sport and what the great plummet feels like.
When did you first skydive?
I’d just moved to Williamsburg as a young adult and started just kind of casually seeing someone that summer. He really wanted to go skydiving, and I had absolutely no interest in doing that.
After you went with your boyfriend, what brought you back to the sport?
I remember thinking, “I’m going to change this experience to something that’s under my terms and not something that I did once because I was dating someone.” I just wanted to change the story.
How many jumps have you done now?
My husband and I got married in 2005; we’d been jumping for about four years then. Then I got pregnant in early 2008, so I stopped jumping just shy of about 500 skydives.
Can you describe the experience in the air?
One thing that people don’t understand is that physics tells us that we are traveling at the same speed that the airplane is traveling. So although you feel like you’re still inside the airplane, you’re already moving as fast as the airplane’s moving. When you jump out of an airplane, you don’t have that acceleration from zero to 120 like you would on a rollercoaster, so you don’t get that stomach feeling that you’re falling.
