getting ready to head up again and joking from behind the camera with his next passenger scott. ready to go? i m set. did you see my last one? no. good. good because it hadn t been perfect. that was when thuma got the first surprise of the day. his main parachute developed a tension knot in the lines. so the lines have slack in some stage. so they went through themselves and created a knot like this. you re always prepared for your main parachute to go wrong. about one every thousand jump that happens. thuma cut away the main parachute and used his reserve. i landed on the ground thinking i had my bad luck for the day. but the day isn t over yet. less than an hour after his first parachute problem, theuma
so we just sort of braced for impact. theuma and scott come crashing through the tree and smack into the ground. somehow scott escapes injury. but theuma isn t as lucky. he fractures his back and hurts his tailbone. six months later he s back jumping out of planes and buildings. despite the accident that could have claimed his life. it was a freak occurrence. sort of treat it like that. treat it with respect, but it s not going to stop me doing what i love. coming up, a fisherman becomes shark bait. i didn t think i d ever see the boat again. and later, danger on the road. it actually was coming directly through the center of my chest. when caught on camera: surprise! continues. i love having a free checked bag
big trouble. the knots are on one side causing the parachute to go off kilter and keeping it from inflating properly. i was really trying with everything i could to fix the problem. theuma tries to pulling to break the knots. but parachute enters a dangerous spin. the pair is hurdling toward the ground now less than 3,000 feet below. theuma pulls on the opposite brake line hoping to stop the spin. i did everything i knew how to do and we re still spinning the other way. i had a moment of going, i think this is it. you know? theuma instructs scott who doesn t know anything has gone wrong with the reserve to hold the brake lines to try to balance out the spin. to try to help me adjust the
less than an hour after his first parachute problem, theuma and scott head to the drop zone at 14,000 feet. then they jump. it s captured on a video camera attached to his left hand. we fall perfectly. at 5,000 feet he releases the main parachute. for the second jump in a row, surprise. there s a problem. again, there are tension knots in his lines. he tries unsuccessfully to clear them. after falling for over a thousand more feet. he knows he has to turn to his reserve. sort of looked fine coming out of the bag. it sort of comes off and looks like a streamer almost. but as the parachute starts to open up, theuma sees he has a nightmare situation on his hand. there are tension knots on the line of his reserve, his last
balance out the spin. i had to have him help me adjust the line. the plan works. it was above our heads, so i knew that we were in a lot better shape than what we were spinning. this was as good as it was going to get. but theuma has no control over the parachute and they re traveling at a high rate of speed. no matter where they land, it won t be pretty. i thought you got to be joking. the train tracks. if he doesn t change the course, they will land on the train tracks or caught on the power lines alongside them. but the only way to steer the parachute is to let it spin again. theuma decides it s worth the risk. they re now just a thousand feet above the ground with only seconds before impact. i managed to get it to stop spinning again within 800 feet. i looked down and now we re going to land in a backyard. i didn t have much say in that. so we just sort of braced for