Benjamin Bazylak, a charge nurse at the TDCJ Joe Kegans Unit in Houston, got over his fear of heights when he jumped out of a plane.
“I want to do it again,” he told the skydiver who took him on the tandem jump three years ago.
Bazylak, 52, has worked at UTMB for about three years and now is a skydiver with 530 jumps and counting.
At first, it was the adrenaline rush of jumping out of the airplane that kept Bazylak coming back. Then he wanted to improve by jumping with more experienced skydivers. He goes to the drop zone about twice a week and makes about six to eight jumps a week.
“We have what's called a tracking formation where you are pretty much as parallel as you can get to the earth,” Bazylak said. “And you know you're moving at about 190 miles an hour. You try to get two miles in, and you know it takes a lot of skill to stay in your slot.”
Bazylak’s home drop zone is in Rosharon, and he belongs
to the Rosharon Belly Group with about 100 other Houston-area skydivers.
“We jump from two different distances,” Bazylak said. “We jump from 4,000 feet, which is basically you jump out and then you get stable and then you need to pull your parachute right away. Or we go up to 14,000 feet. That's about two and a half miles up. And once we are there, we get about 60 seconds of freefall before we break off and pull our parachute.” Learning to land challenged him quite a bit.
“You're coming down at about 30 miles an hour,” Bazylak said. “You don't want to hit the ground at 30 miles per hour. You need to time for what we call a flare: You pull your parachute cords down, and it kind of curls it up and it slows you down.”
But timing is everything, and that’s a skill he has mastered as a licensed skydiver with the United States Parachute Association, a requirement from the Federal Aviation Administration. Bazylak is also a coach. He offers to take photos of first-time tandem jumpers on the way down to earth.
“I love that when you jump out of the plane, you don't think of anything else in your entire mind but your jump,” he said. “Any problems, any stress, any issues, even good things, bad things–it just all goes away for that 60 seconds. It puts you in a good place.”