Letting Go : The Nation’s Only Competitive All-Woman Sky-Diving Team Hangs Tough in a Mostly Male Sport

It’s cold in the belly of a DC-3, two miles above California City. Four women, ignoring the temperature, move toward the open fuselage door. Three climb out, fingers grabbing the inside rim of the door, backs to the wind, huddling side by side. The fourth, knees bent, one shoulder forward, faces them.

“Ready . . . set . . . go!” they shout. And they’re gone.

Four bodies shrink to dark pinpoints, plummeting toward a brown-and-green plaid at 120 m.p.h. In fewer than 60 seconds the choreographed free fall is completed. Canopies open; touchdown.

The women make their way to the rigging area to repack their rectangular parachutes. They review a videotape of the jump. They rehearse the next, then go up again. And again. And again.

Quest, a “four-way” (four-member) sky-diving team, was in pursuit of a goal: to win the national parachuting championships last July in Muskogee, Okla. It was the only all-woman group to compete against 62 men’s and mixed teams and finished ninth out of 35 four-way groups (the remaining teams had 8 and 10 members). A victory would have given the team the opportunity to represent the United States in last September’s world competition in Yugoslavia.

In the six-day national competition, sponsored this year by Budweiser, dives were scored against predesignated diagrams provided by the Committee for International Parachuting, governing body of the sport. Formations were judged for precision, execution and time taken from airplane exit to completed pattern. On the ground, two five-person judging teams viewed the choreography on ground-to-air videotapes.

“We were disappointed and have mixed emotions about finishing ninth, even though it’s respectable,” said Sue Barnes, one of Quest’s co-founders. “I guess we just needed more experience, more training and practice.” (The winning four-way team was the Air Bears, an all-male group from Deland, Fla.)

Winning at Muskogee would also have meant a gold medal for three years of sweat and training. But that’s all. Unlike gymnastics or tennis, sky diving creates no household names--no Mary Lou Rettons, no Martina Navratilovas. Though Georgia (Tiny) Broadwick was the first woman to parachute from an airplane more than 70 years ago, sky diving remains male-dominated. The sport is uniquely unforgiving; yet to many, it is seductive.

The precision of the sport and the instantaneous decisions that have to be made attract 35-year-old Barnes, who explains: “I love the challenge of taking in information and responding in split seconds. Sky diving demands total focus. You cannot be negligent. It will kill you.”

A radio-advertising representative living in Manhattan Beach, Barnes began jumping seven years ago to re-create a childhood dream. “I had dreams that I could fly,” she says. “There was never a sensation of falling or fear in my dreams, although I’m scared of falling down while skiing, and of motorcycles--they’re too fast. But if my parachute malfunctions, I have a second one to rely on. Not many high-action sports have two systems. Downhill skiers don’t. So who’s crazy?”

Quest’s other cofounder, Laura Maddock, once said that she would never jump. “The mere thought of jumping out of planes always scared me,” she says. But she had raced motorcycles and off-road bikes--high-speed vehicles that demand split-second timing. Curiosity about reactions and timing in sky diving led to her first jump. Today, at 37, she manages a small firm in Laguna Niguel that manufactures sky-diving equipment. “After completing student status I realized that I didn’t want to pursue the sport at a fun, low-key level,” she says. “I want the whole enchilada--to be competitive, to jump out of planes, to be as good as I possibly can.”

Gloria Durosko, 30, a life-insurance sales / service representative living in Bloomington, Calif., joined the group in 1983. “This is a selfish sport,” she says. “It fills needs and wants. It makes me feel good and has built a tremendous self-confidence. And yet, there’s the feeling of vulnerability--feeling small, yet in control of the situation.”

The newest and youngest member of the team, Sally Wenner, 26, of Los Angeles, works for a loan company. She began sky diving at 19, to fulfill a passion and, as with Barnes, childhood dreams. “I’d dream of running real fast--then one jump and I’d keep going. Flying. Like Superman. It was my fantasy.”

Quest members acknowledge the obvious dangers of their sport, but they prefer to talk about its satisfactions and challenges, their desire to succeed and what they consider to be the ultimate experience of freedom. Hanging onto an airplane and then letting go, they say, produces a “rush” felt in no other sport--not hang gliding, soaring, motorcycle racing, mountain climbing.

To precisely and consistently form a geometric pattern (a star, circle, horizontal line) with human bodies requires near-Olympian training efforts. For a jump to be successful, each individual movement has to be accurate; reactions must be instantaneous. Compounding the difficulty is that midair judgments are made not in relation to a fixed object but to a fellow sky diver. Body angles determine speed during free fall; jump-suit designs equalize height and weight differences--a skintight fit to speed up one woman, a fuller suit, sometimes with armpit fillets--to slow another.

Nine months before the national competition, Quest trained every weekend at the Perris Valley Parachute Center, a sky divers’ Mecca, but the center closed in June. (It reopened in August as Perris Valley Skydiving Society.) With only weeks left before the nationals, the women were forced into long weekend drives to California City’s drop zone to continue practice.

Their social lives are constrained. Boyfriends are fellow sky divers, who understand the mental and physical exhaustion. The schedule is rigid: Practice begins at 7 a.m. Saturday and continues until dark Sunday night.

During practice jumps, team photographer Steve Scott free-falls with Quest and videotapes the performance. The team reviews the tape between jumps. Normal speed. Then slow motion. A missed grip is noted, critiqued. The video is stopped. Played, stopped again. The women discuss the errors, why they occurred, how to avoid them in the next jump. The video is analyzed once more.

The team is hampered by the lack of professional coaches in the sport. “It’s very difficult to learn in a self-evaluation,” Barnes says. “How many learning environments are there with no coach or teacher? I can’t think of any. And yet, that’s our sport.”

Money is also a problem, since the team doesn’t have a major commercial sponsor. Each member spends $580 each month on jumps alone; that doesn’t include the price of transportation, food and accommodations. The equipment that each woman wears costs $2,500, which includes the main canopy (230 square feet of nylon) and a reserve pack, or piggyback. Barnes laments: “Laura and I think we are so damned marketable, and yet, the right person just hasn’t come along. We are the women of the ‘80s doing a different thing. We’re doing something that women never used to even think about.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the group gathers for rehearsal, or dirt dive. Assembling on the ground, standing as they would be in the air, each takes her position.

They all lean forward from the waist, heads meeting in the center of the circle. Following penciled diagrams not unlike those of football formations, they go through the motions. It’s a slow, circling dance. They half-turn, grasping arms to thighs.

Their mime is disrupted with a frustrated “Where am I going?” from Barnes. A movement is miscalculated, a grip not completed; the formation is ruined and everyone knows it. Barnes explains this sky-diving mental block. “When we get this look it’s called brain lock.” She stares ahead, brown eyes wide, mouth agape. “ Clang . That’s when the gates come down--haven’t a clue what happened. It’s also called a bust. In competition, the scoring would stop. We would have to stop and redo that formation. Then the scoring would pick up again. Busts are deadly.”

A loudspeaker announcement interrupts their practice. The plane is ready.

It’s the fourth dive of the day, and the air at ground level is abrasive with dust. The drop zone is crowded with men and women sky divers. It’s a social, easy, laughing atmosphere. But Barnes is serious. Hurrying toward the DC-3, she points out one of the sport’s peculiarities. “Can you imagine learning to fly an airplane when you only get to fly it for five minutes once a week? And for one minute each time. That’s basically what we get each time we go up. That’s never enough.”

The pre-World War II aircraft waits, engines idling, propellers turning. The team climbs on board and the hefty DC-3 taxis down the runway.

It is the last jump of the day, and Quest’s four canopies burst open--red, white and blue rectangles against a chalk-blue sky. The 30-m.p.h. landing is smooth; the airfoils collapse like tired balloons.

It is a good dive, and the team is exhilarated, full of adrenaline.

The video confirms that the jump was nearly perfect. Geometric formations were tight, bodies balanced in a precise pattern, 360-degree turns were flawless, fluid and in control.

On screen, on an impulse, Sally Wenner tracks off from the group. A human missile, arms flat against body, head straight down, she dives toward earth at 190 m.p.h. Watching the video, Sue Barnes grins and turns to her teammates. “Look at Sally,” she says. “She’s having so much fun.”