Blind Sky Diver Doesn’t Need Any Directions on His Free-Fall Journey

The cornfields and woodlands extend in an intricate patchwork to the hazy horizon, but Mike Conway can’t appreciate the view.

As he stands in the open door of a plane 12,000 feet above the Schohari Valley, he hears the roar of the wind and feels its bluster, but he sees only blackness--and he hurls himself into it with an exultant “Ya-hoo!”

Sky diving is risky business for anyone, but for a blind person there are special problems--such as knowing when you’re about to reach the ground. Conway, however, is not one to shy away from a challenge.

Six years ago, at age 22, Conway started to lose his sight to a complication of diabetes. Several laser and microsurgical operations failed to repair his eyes, and he was left blind.

“It was tough,” he said in a recent interview. “I had to relearn the simplest things, like pouring liquid into a glass. I had always been very independent, and suddenly I had to ask for help from people.”

Changed Career Plan

Conway, who lives on Long Island, had to abandon his fire science major and his dream of being a firefighter. Now he is working on a master’s degree in sociology at Adelphi University, and plans to teach.

Slouched on a raggedy couch in the clubhouse of the Albany Skydiving Center, the blue-eyed, red-haired and bearded Conway talked about how he refused to let his handicap stop him from doing what he always had done--hiking, bicycling, rock-climbing--or from trying something he always dreamed of doing: sky diving.

He says he quickly lost patience with rehabilitation counselors whose paper work and protocol slowed him down. Two months after he lost his sight, Conway got a friend to cut him a makeshift cane from a length of electrical conduit pipe so that he could teach himself to tap around town.

He thought he was doing fine until one day, when he asked another man to walk him across a busy intersection. The man took his elbow, walked across with him, thanked him and walked away--to the telltale tick of a blindman’s cane. Conway realized with horror that the man had thought he was offering assistance, not asking for it. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind.

Guide Dog Helps

Eventually, he got a guide dog. “Tessie allowed me far greater freedom and mobility than the cane,” he says. “So I started thinking about taking a hike, maybe 10 days.”

That 10-day hike turned into a 100-day trek from New Jersey to Maine, along the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 1983. Conway, Tessie and a sighted friend, Noel Seminario, raised about $30,000 for the Guide Dog Foundation of Smithtown from sponsors of their walk.

Last summer, Conway rode across Iowa on a tandem bicycle. He is planning an eight-day tandem bike tour of Holland for visually impaired riders next spring.

“And next summer,” he says, “I plan to do a jump-a-thon to raise money for the Guide Dog Foundation--maybe call it a Dive for Dogs.”

When he decided two years ago to try sky diving, Conway’s first obstacle was finding someone willing to give lessons to a blind man. He was turned down at seven places before Bob Rollins, owner of Albany Skydiving in rural Duanesburg, said he would let him try.

Began Novice Jumps

Jump masters Mike Clark and Ted Langenbahn started him with tandem jumps, in which the student is buckled to the instructor’s harness, and static-line dives, in which the parachute is opened by a line to the airplane. A blind teen-ager earlier had made novice jumps like that at Albany Skydiving.

After a few jumps, Conway wanted to try accelerated free fall, a more advanced technique that had never, to Rollins’ knowledge, been tried by a blind person.

“My jump masters said they’d train me, but they said they would never be able to fully release their hold on me,” said Conway, who always jumps with a partner. After five dives, however, Conway was doing so well that the jump masters did take their hands away.

Because the roar of the wind drowns out voices and Conway can’t see the usual hand signals, the instructors developed tactile signals. “Two firm squeezes anywhere on my body means pull the rip cord,” Conway said. “I also have an audible altimeter in my helmet that chirps if I haven’t released the chute by the time I get to 4,000 feet.”

With 22 jumps behind him, he has learned the feeling of correct form during free fall: “When you’re stable, you feel the wind just evenly sliding around you.” He has advanced to free-fall back flips and sequential formations with four or six divers.

Landing Is Tricky

“Landing is one of the scariest parts of the dive for me, since I can’t see the ground,” Conway says. “I’ve tried to sense it through facial vision--when I’m walking, I can feel things through differences in pressure, wind, sound--but it doesn’t work for landings.”

Conway suffered three compression fractures in his back when he landed hard and fast on his fourth jump. The signal from a radio taped to his helmet was breaking up, and because the tape covered his ears, he couldn’t hear the instructors calling to him on a bullhorn. Now, he gets landing instructions over a radio that is attached to the shoulder of his jump suit.

Although he is unable to enjoy the spectacular view of the rolling farmland as he plummets from a plane, Conway says there are other sensations that make sky diving an irresistible thrill for him.

“The moment you step off, you start to accelerate to 120 m.p.h. The wind is roaring past you,” he says. “There’s a really intense feeling of freedom--just boogie-ing through the air.”

“Then, when you’re under the canopy, everything’s suddenly real quiet, just the sound of the canopy rippling in the breeze. You’re just cruising down, maybe doing some spirals,” he says. “Because I used to see, and I’ve seen aerial photography, I can visualize how things look, where the horizon is.

Likes Open Space

“Down here, there’s always something I can run into--the sink, a telephone pole. Up in the air you’re free from earthly obstructions.”

When he is not jumping from planes, hiking or biking, Conway devotes time to helping others overcome physical limitations and advocating opportunities for the handicapped.

He writes for Pyramid, an advocacy newspaper for the handicapped, and lectures young people on the philosophy of “creative risk-taking” activities such as sky diving and mountaineering.

“There’s an old saying, that minds are like parachutes: they only work when they’re open,” Conway said. “Most people think that because you’re blind, your arms and legs don’t work right, either. The main obstacle I faced in learning to sky-dive was finding a place where people had open minds and were willing to work with me.”