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Platial | Who and What's Nearby
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Dillingham Airfield is mostly used for recreational flying: Gliders and skydiving. When I went there in 2005, we'd come for one, and ended up doing the other.
A friend of mine at the hostel was turning 21, and rather than have his friends spend money on gifts for him, he wanted us to join him in doing something dangerous, thrilling and expensive with him.
He decided on a shark cage adventure in Hale'iwa ("holly-eeva"). So three of us paid $125 and rented a ridiculous red sportscar (which I got to drive), and drove to the North Shore at 8 in the morning.
We were met by a guy at the dock, who told us it was too windy for the shark cage thing. The wind made the water choppy, which would make the boat ride suck and the visibility bad. But if we still wanted to do something expensive and adventurous, he told us, we could go to the Airfield and go for a glider ride.
None of us were that enthusiastic about gliders, but we had the car, and we'd paid $125 that we were going to get refunded anyway, so I drove us to the Airfield.
And along the way, we got behind a van for Skydive Hawai'i. 'Hmm,' we thought. 'Skydiving...'
At the Airfield I passed the van and turned the car around. "You here to skydive?" the van's driver asked us?" Actually, we're just turning around, we told him. "Because if you are here to skydive, I'll make it half price. $120. But you need to make up your minds, because the plane takes off in 10 minutes!"
The next 10 minutes were spent initialing waivers. In 2005, 27 people around the world would die skydiving; that works out to about one every 160,000 jumps, but it's still a huge liability.
After that, we got in the plane, which had no door, and flew up to 17,000 feet.
"It was supposed to be a nice, relaxing morning," my friend Wisconsin remarked at one point, "in a cage, surrounded by sharks!"
(Read my blog entry about the jump itself, and the effect it had on me.)
Dillingham Airfield is mostly used for recreational flying: Gliders and skydiving. When I went there in 2005, we'd come for one, and ended up doing the other.
A friend of mine at the hostel was turning 21, and rather than have his friends spend money on gifts for him, he wanted us to join him in doing something dangerous, thrilling and expensive with him.
He decided on a shark cage adventure in Hale'iwa ("holly-eeva"). So three of us paid $125 and rented a ridiculous red sportscar (which I got to drive), and drove to the North Shore at 8 in the morning.
We were met by a guy at the dock, who told us it was too windy for the shark cage thing. The wind made the water choppy, which would make the boat ride suck and the visibility bad. But if we still wanted to do something expensive and adventurous, he told us, we could go to the Airfield and go for a glider ride.
None of us were that enthusiastic about gliders, but we had the car, and we'd paid $125 that we were going to get refunded anyway, so I drove us to the Airfield.
And along the way, we got behind a van for Skydive Hawai'i. 'Hmm,' we thought. 'Skydiving...'
At the Airfield I passed the van and turned the car around. "You here to skydive?" the van's driver asked us?" Actually, we're just turning around, we told him. "Because if you are here to skydive, I'll make it half price. $120. But you need to make up your minds, because the plane takes off in 10 minutes!"
The next 10 minutes were spent initialing waivers. In 2005, 27 people around the world would die skydiving; that works out to about one every 160,000 jumps, but it's still a huge liability.
After that, we got in the plane, which had no door, and flew up to 17,000 feet.
"It was supposed to be a nice, relaxing morning," my friend Wisconsin remarked at one point, "in a cage, surrounded by sharks!"
(Read my blog entry about the jump itself, and the effect it had on me.)
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