The gravity of the situation takes hold immediately

“You’re going sky diving?” an incredulous colleague asked me. “I did it once in Florida and it went OK. But the next day the same pilot turned around too early, caught the last jumper in midair and sheared his legs off!

“He bled to death on the way down.”

It was with this charming little anecdote buzzing around my brain that I set out the following morning to try a tandem jump at Perris Valley Skydiving School, a giant, resort-like sky diving center in western Riverside County.

Upon arriving at the private airfield, however, my gore-incited anxiety turned to real concern when I learned that LASkydiving -- the independent agency that had booked my jump -- had misrepresented the options. The agency had offered to let a Times videographer go up in the plane with me on a $40 “ride-along” ticket when no such option existed. Recalling the fact that LASkydiving had initially misquoted the cost of the jump, and then failed to send a promised confirmation e-mail, I began to wonder if the school would be as error-prone as the booking agent.

Then I met 24-year-old Englishman Adrian “Adi” Blair, an instructor with 3,200 jumps under his belt, “about a thousand” of them tandems. Confident to the point of boredom with the whole affair, Blair suited me up and carefully walked me through every aspect -- from the 18- to 20-minute plane ride up in a twin-engine Otter, to connecting me to the front of his harness at 9,000 feet, to exiting the plane at 12,500 feet, to free-falling to 5,000 feet and then descending the rest of the way beneath the parachute -- of our conjoined fate.

Blair even explained what to do in the event that he should become incapacitated . . . nothing. An onboard computer was set to open the parachute automatically at 5,000 feet.

Seeing I wasn’t content to rely on some altimeter-aided jack-in-the-box, Blair then told me everything I needed to know: Pull the orange rip cord to release the main parachute, the green to detach it should it fail and the red to release the reserve; tug down on the chute’s right steering handle to turn right, left to turn left and down on both to brake.

Thus edified, I actually felt a little cocky walking to the plane with Blair, gregarious Danny Koon -- the school’s helmet-cam-wearing videographer hired to shoot my sky-dive -- and a group of 18 veterans training for a U.S. Parachute Assn. competition. On the short flight up in the cramped jump plane, my only complaint was that my posse would be going last.

Then, finally, it was our turn.

From the blustery doorway of the Otter, cruising along at 100 mph and an actual altitude of 13,000 feet, the ground looked about the way I expected it would: small.

It got bigger.

There are no words to adequately describe the thrill of free-fall. The first 10 seconds, during which a sky diver accelerates to 120 mph, produces a feeling that mutates from terror into something utterly unclassifiable. After achieving terminal velocity, though, the consistency of speed offered enough of an emotional palliative to allow me, at least, to really enjoy the experience, despite the fact that the hurricane-force airflow immediately flattened the plastic goggles against my face, pinning my left eye shut.

I gave Koon a big thumbs up, exclaimed “rad” and “awesome” a few times, and then, less than a minute later, felt the firm jerk of the parachute deploying.

After the initial rush, the next five minutes “under canopy” was a cakewalk. Blair executed a few lateral 360s, lining us up with the landing field. And after slowing us to a crawl a few feet above the earth, we touched down as daintily as a ballerina on pointe.

Standing in the grass a little dizzy but otherwise no worse for wear, I asked myself the one question that makes all the others irrelevant: “Would you do it again?”

Absolutely.

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-- Liam.Gowing@latimes.com

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SKY DIVING

WHERE: Perris Valley Skydiving School, 2091 Goetz Road, Perris

PRICE: Tandem jump $219 weekdays, $239 weekends; solo jump with accelerated free-fall instruction $350; $115 for video and stills

INFO: (800) SKYDIVE; www.skydiveperris.com

ON THE WEB: For videos and photos, go to latimes .com/actionman