A US woman's 80th birthday nearly ended in tragedy when she slipped out of her harness during a parachute jump.
Laverne Everett decided to mark her birthday by fulfilling her longheld ambition to go sky-diving.
But once in the plane, above Lodi, California,she found she was no longer so keen to jump.
Her instructor, jumping in tandem with her, freed her hands from the doorway and appeared to almost force her out of the plane.
But something went terribly wrong. Mrs Everett nearly fell out of the harness, and her partner had to hang on to her for dear life.
"The upper harness came off, you know," she later told CBS Sacramento. "Just slipped down, it was just the lower harness, is all I had."
Fortunately, the instructor managed to cling on to Mrs Everett as the parachute opened and the pair managed to land, extremely shaken but unhurt.
A video of the jump, uploaded to YouTube by Mrs Everett's sister has been viewed by more than 350,000 people in just three days. |
Print
Woman, 80, in sky-dive near disaster