See Dangling Skydiver Lose Only a Pant Leg After 30-Minute Ordeal
Fernando Gava cut himself out after hanging upside down at 10,000 feet.
— -- A skydiver had quite the scare while jumping out of an airplane in Peru, but the problem wasn’t with the parachute, it was with his jumpsuit.
Fernando Gava, an experienced skydiver who has completed more than 1,000 jumps, was getting ready to free-fall out of a plane in Lima when his jumpsuit got caught on the exit step, Gava’s friend Maurice Mathey, who posted the video to Vimeo, told “Good Morning America” today.
Gava dangled upside down while his pant leg remained stuck to the plane as friends and family watched from the ground. The plane continued to circle as Gava hung 10,000 feet in the air for about 30 minutes before he managed to cut his pant leg off from his jumpsuit with a hook knife, something Mathey said skydivers always carry.
“He then deployed his reserve [chute] and landed safely,” Mathey wrote on Vimeo.
After Gava landed safely on the ground, friends and family rushed to his aid.
The skydiver came out of the incident with only one minor injury: a cut on his hand from the knife he used to free himself.
Related Stories
ABC News Live