A man who fell 5,000 feet to earth and survived, when his parachute failed to open, yesterday said he was the luckiest man alive. Mr Bren Jones (56), a businessman from Leeds, escaped virtually unscathed after the jump in Lincolnshire on Sunday. Safety experts said the veteran of 3,500 parachute jumps was probably saved from serious injury by falling into a ploughed field.
He is recovering in Lincoln County Hospital from minor scratches and bruising. He said he did not have time to panic when he realised, at about 2,500 feet, that his chute had become entangled with another parachutist.
"I realised I had a very serious problem on my hands and I had a limited amount of time to sort it out." The two men had a brief conversation and decided the other man would pull a "cut-away" handle - to free him from the tangled chutes. When they "realised there was something wrong, we had gone down a long way".
The other parachutist went on to land safely. Mr Jones said releasing the other man had given both of them the best chance of survival. "I pulled my reserve when we were very low, but unfortunately it did not inflate.
"All that stuff about your life coming back to you is wrong. I was thinking about what I would miss in the future." Mr Jones desperately tried to pull the reserve chute again - but he was spinning so fast he could not get hold of it properly and "then I blacked out".
He woke up in an air-ambulance. Onlookers had told him he carried on making jokes, quipping that he would not be parachuting into the hospital. "I felt I was very lucky to have my friends all around me," he said.
Mr Jones is due to have more tests and a body scan but so far doctors have found nothing wrong other than broken teeth and bad bruising. The keen parachutist and skier was close to tears as he described the thought of not seeing his family again. Asked what he would do when he got out of hospital, he said: "I will probably go to the pub."
Mr Jones revealed that once before in his 3,500 jumps he had to rely on a reserve chute. "But this sort of thing is extremely rare. I will be leaving parachuting for a while . . . If I am still jumping when Megan (his granddaughter) is old enough, I would take her as I do not regard it as dangerous."