Real Survival Stories - Tangled Parachute: Hurtling to Earth

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Two skydivers sign up to perform a complex mid-air routine. But on their practice run, Craig Stapleton and his diving partner Katie are thrust into chaos when one small error leads to a domino effect of crises. With his lines tangled and his parachute malfunctioning, Craig must scramble to fix the situation. But as each emergency measure fails one by one, the ground gets closer and closer. He is spiralling towards a crunching, high-speed collision with the Earth… A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Joe Viner | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound Supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Jacob Booth | Assembly edit by Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is Sunday, March the 10th, 2013. As the sun rises over Central California, the mist blanketing San Joaquin County slowly lifts, revealing a checkerboard landscape of lush green fields, vineyards and orange groves. The sky is a wash of cornflower blue, vast and spotlessly clear, save for one or two fluffy white clouds

and the occasional darting shape of a swallow. Looking closer, however, something else catches the eye. It's hard to tell what it is at first, an object, rapidly descending from the clear blue, trailing something in its wake. Whatever it is, the object is hurtling towards the earth at an alarming speed. As it gets closer, it becomes possible to make out the details. The tangled parachute courts, the twisted canopy, the desperate, flailing limbs.

It is a person falling from the sky. I was stuck with my equipment twisted, my parachutes not flying, and it was about all the things I could imagine going wrong. You know, if I had a cockpit light system in front of me, they would have all turned red. 51-year-old Craig Stapleton fumbles with his parachute harness as the California farmland searches up towards him. In the last few moments, he has tried to be. tried every countermeasure he could think of, every Hail Mary in the book.

But nothing has worked. With the wind, a deafening roar in his ears, Craig looks up at the tangled, knotty mess above him. I realize that those two parachutes tied up together is what a dead man sees. I am not going to survive what I have got now. There is only one way this will end. All Craig can do is hope that something breaks his fall, a body of water perhaps or a tree canopy.

But as these spirals ever lower, fleeting glimpses of the ground reveal something far less forgiving. And I am thinking, well, maybe I'm over something soft, maybe some water, and I am over a vineyard. It is iron spikes with these scraggly plants and concertina wire across everything. And I realize I am in deep trouble. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations.

People suddenly forced a fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet 51-year-old Craig Stapleton. Craig is a dentist from Sacramento, California. He is also one of the most skilled professional skydivers in America. One Sunday in March 2013, Craig and his skydiving partner Katie are practicing a complex mid-air routine when one small error leads to a domino effect of escalating crises. With his lines tangled and his parachute malfunctioning, Craig will start scrambling to fix the situation, frantically grappling with his equipment as he hurtled towards the earth.

I'm pulling this thing and I get to the point where I'm actually trying to hold it my teeth so I can use both hands to release this mechanism. And that doesn't work. As each emergency measure fails one by one, the ground gets closer and closer. Craig is spiraling towards a crunching, high-speed collision with the earth. I see my altimeter's getting lower and lower and eventually, even while I'm playing with all this, I realize I'm probably going to die, that I'm a dead man. I'm John Hopkins.

From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is real survival stories. It's March the 10th, 2013. Just outside the town of Lodi in California's Central Valley, a car pulls into the parking lot of a small private airfield. Craig Stapleton steps out of his vehicle and breathes in a crisp morning air. A 51-year-old dentist looks up at the sky and notes with satisfaction that today it is blue and cloudly. and cloudless, ideal conditions. He grabs a duffel bag from the back seat and heads towards the hangar.

There are more than 200,000 dentists in the United States, but very few can claim to hold a skydiving world championship medal among their accomplishments. Craig Stapleton Can. With more than 7,000 jumps under his belt, he is one of the most experienced skydivers in America. Recently, Craig and one of his friends, Katie Hansen, were commissioned by, magazine to be photographed skydiving while holding an American flag. It's a complex routine, and the plan for this morning is to do a few practice jumps to figure out how to get the best shot. They wanted it for a cover of a magazine, and they were willing to write us a check, which if you want to motivate skydivers, that's really how you do it.

My teammate and I, Katie, were going to go do this jump, and our camera guy, TJ, who's going to video. just to give it some ideas of how this is going to work and, you know, what he can set up for a nice shot. So it was for us, it was like, let's just get out, we'll get in the plane, we'll go do what we need to do, and kind of learn some things on this job. Craig, Katie, and cameraman T.J. get changed into their skydiving gear inside the hangar. Once they're all dressed and ready, they start heading across the runway to the waiting plane. But as they make their way across the tarmac, Katie suddenly realizes something. She's forgotten her knife.

An important, if rarely used tool in a skydivers jump kit, only ever called upon in emergencies. Katie considers running back inside the hangar to grab the knife, but Craig intervenes. Where we jump, the plane doesn't wait for you. If you aren't there when the plane pulls up and everybody gets on board, it's just going to go off. it's just going to go off without you. So she was going to run back in and get her knife. And I was like, oh, look, I'll give you mine. Craig always carries two knives in his jumpsuit,

and he gives one of them to Katie. It's highly unlikely either of them will need to be used, but in this sport, it's better not to take any chances. Katie stows Craig's knife inside her jumpsuit, and the trio continue towards the plane. Craig is a native Californian, born and raised in nearby Sacramento. His mother and father were both school teachers, and he recalls fond memories of an active, adventurous childhood.

We lived a pretty idyllic lifestyle. My parents, you know, loved to teach us things and take us places and do things. And we kind of had this Brady Bunch life of, you know, doing things and our parents were always around and lots of support. So we were very fortunate. We got a great background to kind of grow up. with. After high school, Craig went to college to study dentistry. It was a career that seemed well suited to this quiet, studious, sensible young man. At 18, the road ahead looked pretty clear for Craig. He would graduate and go on to get his dental license before eventually opening his own practice. Then one day, something happened that altered this trajectory. It was his freshman year at college, the morning after a heavy night. Craig was woken up by his roommate and a friend,

who presented him with a distinctly unwelcome invitation to join them on an impromptu skydiving excursion. I had been out at a fraternity party rather late and had not been in bed for very long when they started waking me up to go do this with them. And I kept saying, no, let me sleep. I don't want to do something stupid like that. But eventually I got to the point where they kept waking me up.

They weren't going to let me sleep in. So I finally was like, if you let me sleep in the car, out to this place, I'll go with you. This October on the Noiser podcast network, Real Dictators Returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On short history of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On real survival stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica, vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind all alone

at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews, and in Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in the sign of four. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus. The idea of hurling himself out of a plane at 10,000 feet did not appeal to Craig. Doing so with a hangover was even less inviting. But before he knew it, he was in the backseat of his roommate's car, head slumped against the window, as they trundled out to a nearby skydiving center.

You don't know what things in life change what's going to happen in your life. You know, you don't wake up and like in the morning, oh, I'm going to do something that's going to change my life today. Those days are very rare. And so I was barely conscious, not very sober, and being marched through the sign-in process and the payment process and into a classroom. And the next thing I know, I'm in a jumpsuit

rolling around in the dirt, practicing our landings. And I was just like, I don't remember really signing up for this. It just kind of rolled through, and the momentum of the day took over. And by the late afternoon, there I was in the door of an airplane in flight, crawling my way out of the plane to go jump. And I absolutely loved it. It was an amazing experience. And in fact, after we all three landed from our first jump,

we immediately went back in and signed up for a second jump that day. And after two jumps, I was completely hooked. I was thinking this was the best thing I'd ever done in my life. In some respects, skydiving was an unlikely hobby for Craig, who would never have described himself as an adrenaline junkie. On the other hand, certain things in his childhood had quietly laid the groundwork for him to excel at the sport. Not least, the influence of his dad.

My father had survived being a Marine in the Korean War, and he never, ever, ever talked about it. We have no idea what he went through. He never said a word. So I think in some ways, he was always like, just... go ahead and do what you need to do. You don't have to be brave all day. You only need to be brave for about 10 seconds.

Because getting out the door of a plane, you don't need to be brave all the way. You just need to be brave at the doorway and get out the door. And then you're committed. So in a lot of ways, he kind of helped with that and instilled it's like, just find a way to reach in and do it for 10 seconds.

After those first two jumps, the touch paper was lit. Craig never looked back. He started spending more and more time at the local skydiving center. It was a huge contrast to the stayed, stuffy atmosphere of the classroom. The dive center was a hive of energy and dynamism, populated by a rag-tack cast of eccentric thrill seekers. All of a sudden, I was off going to the drop zone on the weekends

rather than studying for dental school. The only people I really knew was my roommate and all these dental students. So meeting a bunch of skydivers was awesome because these people were crazy. And that was kind of the outlet that I needed from my rigorous studies for dental school. If you think you have some friends who are crazy, go out to the drop zone and hang out after closing. And you'll see what crazy really is. So it just drew me to that crowd and lifestyle where, you know, you could jump all day, have a few drinks, sleep in your car at the drop zone.

It was pretty bohemian lifestyle. And it was a lifestyle that he took to immediately. As the years passed, Craig did eventually finish college. He got his dentist's license and joined a practice. He got married, had kids, and settled down in the suburbs. But throughout it all, skydiving remained a constant. Whatever difficulties he was experiencing at work or in his personal life, skydiving provided a release. a lot of people, they wind up living what will be termed the quiet life of desperation,

because you lose track of things like, I want to go have fun. You take a week off for a holiday or vacation, and that's it. That's all your insanity time is that week. And it's like, no, you can just go crazy every weekend, and going to work on Monday isn't so bad. It makes going in there and working on patients really tolerable. He started leading a double life, pulling teeth during the week, pulling ripcords on the weekends. As he began racking up more jumps, Craig got into competitive skydiving, eventually going on to captain the U.S. national team.

They competed annually at the Skydiving World Championships. And after a few years placing as runners-up, Craig and his team finally took home the trophy in 2001. We'd gotten second a number of times, and going from second to first at that level alters your life because all of a sudden people want to do what you're doing, they want to use your equipment, they want to be, you know, I want to come and learn from you guys. And we were just, we were shocked. It's not like we become famous, but we certainly became more in demand. By 2013, Craig has clocked more than 7,000 jumps, making him one of the

the most experienced skydivers in the country. Thanks to his successes, he has found himself in the rare position of sometimes being paid to skydive with sponsored jumps and commissions. Looking back on that hungover morning at college, when his roommate dragged him out of bed, Craig is struck by the twist of fate that set him on the road he's currently on. It's like, you know, you get pulled by a little thread, and that thread moves you onto a completely different path. and you don't realize it until you're on the path going the other direction.

And interestingly, from that very first day, I'm the only person that still jobs. My roommate got to do a free fall, his buddy got to do one free fall, and that was it for them. And the guy who didn't want to go, want to being a lifetime choice. Craig buckles himself into his seat as the plane roars into life and accelerates down the runway. As they ascend, Craig, Katie and TJ go through some last-minute checks. For all its emphasis on safety procedure and precaution, skydiving remains a dangerous sport, one that requires rigorous attention to detail. In the last 10 years, there have been over 200 skydiving fatalities in the US alone.

Most accidents are caused by human error rather than equipment failure and often involve a more experienced skydiver misjudging a landing. but other factors can also come into play. Parachutes can malfunction. Reserve shoots can become twisted or fail to deploy. In those rare cases, a skydiver is faced with the most terrifying scenario of all, a rapid, uncontrolled freefall. Few ever survive such a thing, but Craig knows someone who has.

One of my early, early skydiving instructors had survived landing without a parachute in early 7. He also broke Evil Caneval's record for the most broken bones and survived. So he was quite the inspiration. He was a lot of fun to hang out with. And he was also a great fountain of knowledge of how to survive things. And his thing was always learn. Always learn what you're doing. Learn the equipment.

Learn the place where you're jumping. Learn the people you jump with. Because you don't know what's going to save your life. As such, skydivers must equip themselves with as much knowledge as possible in order to avoid excessive reliance on luck. But sometimes they need both. You know, you have this bag of luck and this bag of knowledge, and you're hopefully not emptying your bag of luck before you've got enough knowledge in your bag

to keep you alive. Craig has been jumping out of planes for long enough to have grown comfortable with the level of risk involved. But there is a danger of becoming too comfortable. I had a pretty laissez-faire relationship with death at that point. And we've had some teammates who'd been killed a few years before. So it wasn't like we were new to the thought, but I was just like, ah, you know, you're experienced enough,

you're smart enough, you pay attention enough, and you have good teammates. They won't let you get that stupid, that you'll be okay. And the reality is, well, you maybe we've been normalizing risk a long time. We're doing a lot of rather risky items, and to us it just seems routine. After a few minutes, the aircraft reaches the jump altitude of 8,000 feet. Craig, Katie, and T.J. ready themselves and their equipment. The jump they're practicing today is called a down-plane flag. It involves two skydivers displaying a flag stretched tightly on a lanyard connected to the two

parachute harnesses. It is a highly technical formation that requires perfect precision. There's a lot of steps that are involved that are complicated. And if you miss one, it can present a lot of problems. That's why we want to practice and we want to go through things slowly. And we want to just no pressure. We just want to get out and kind of go through this. With T.J. poised behind them with his camera, Craig and Katie position themselves on the threshold of the

exit door. They both check and double check that their gear is in order. Then, after one final confirmation that they are both ready to go, they shuffle themselves to the edge of the door, take a deep breath, and hurl themselves into the abyss. That's how it all started. We have this rather demanding jump, and it has a lot of complicated gear, and something went wrong. This October, on the Noiser podcast network. Real Dictators Returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On short history of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley,

the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On real survival stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind all alone at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews, and in Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in the sign of four. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

It's morning on Sunday, March the 10th, 2013. 8,000 feet above San Joaquin County, California, three skydivers leap from an open door in the side of a plane. The force of the wind initially sweeps them sideways, before the air resistance and the tug of gravity pulls their trajectory into a vertical descent. As the air catches in their chests, it stabilizes the jumpers, allowing them to gain a measure of control. First-time skydivers often expect their stomachs to drop during the free fall. Instead, the upward blast of wind makes it feel as if you're descending on a cushion of air. The landscape spreads out below in a vast mosaic of greens and browns, unfurling to the furthest edges of the horizon.

With the cold wind whipping past their ears, the skydivers pulled their ripcords to open their parachutes. And that's when everything starts to go wrong. Once we got out the door, things just didn't go right. You know, you can have a bad this or bad that, but literally Katie and T.J. both had very bad openings, had line twist and spun off. And so even from the get-go, we were having issues. And it kind of compressed our time. It made us hurry a little bit.

With a complex stunt like this, timing is everything. Even if it all goes to plan, they will still only have about five minutes in the air before reaching the ground. Craig and Katie steer themselves close together and connect the lanyard to their harnesses. The next stage of the maneuver is to get into down-plane formations.

Essentially, both jumpers move apart and then guide their parachutes into a vertical position until one is above the other. The flag is then released from a pouch in the lanyard and unfurls. After connecting the lanyard, Craig and Katie moved to separate. But again, things refuse to go smoothly. As we pulled apart, I'm going right, and Katie kind of got stuck in the wig of my parachute and wound up coming right with me. Nothing is going to plan.

Craig and Katie are now too close and are at risk of becoming entangled. They need to get some distance. Katie starts to guide herself away from Craig. But as she does, he spots a potential hazard and takes some preemptive steps to protect himself. As that happened, I had also put my foot on the,

the lanyard so that it didn't hit me in the genitalia as it went to tension. I kind of put my foot on it. And as she separated, it actually, the lanyard picked me up and flipped me through my parachute. And that's what started everything. As the lanyard string becomes taut, it effectively catapults Craig straight up into his parachutes rises, the tough nylon straps that connect the canopy to his harness. Suddenly, he is ensnared in a moment. muddle of twisted lines and tangled webbing, his parachute wrapped around itself.

I snagged one line with my foot, which meant my parachute started spinning, and I was stuck with my equipment twisted, my parachutes not flying, and I'm tied to Katie. And it was about all the things I could imagine going wrong. You know, if I had a cockpit light system in front of me, they would have all turned red. Still, experience prepares you for moments like this, and Craig doesn't panic. First things first, unclip the lanyard rope. It's only making matters worse.

He starts trying to disconnect the lanyard from his harness, but tumbling towards the earth, the wind roaring past his ears like a bullet train. It's hard to get his bearings. The first problem was this lanyard was since it wasn't below me anymore, it was above me. It kept trying to rip my head off. which is very inconvenient.

You know, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to do all these things, and something keeps trying to go around my neck and take my head off. He fumbles blindly for the release mechanism, but he can't find it. His pulse quickening, Craig starts trying to alert Katie to his predicament, bellowing over the deafening wind. I'm just yelling Katie cut me away. Just release this, and at least I'll be down to fewer problems.

Craig's voice is snatched away by the surging air. But Katie doesn't need to hear what he's saying. She can see the disaster unfolding very clearly. Witnessing her partner tangled in his lines, desperately trying to release the lanyard, she acts swiftly. She releases it from her own harness, disconnecting herself from Craig.

Immediately, the two skydivers go flying apart. I go spinning off with this flag, still trying to rip my head off. and my parachute malfunctioning and me trying to stay calm enough to think of what do I need to do. The fact that he is able to think at all in these circumstances is a product of what skydivers refer to as the duality of time,

a kind of warping effect that enables rational thought under maximum pressure. Time goes very quickly, but you see things moving slowly. It's like you're in the matrix or something. It's like you can see the bullet coming at you. Time is going, but your ability to work within it has increased. Though he is careening towards almost certain death, Craig diligently focuses on the puzzle before him. With deft fingerwork, he starts feeling his way around the straps of his harness,

searching again for the lanyard release catch. I eventually get to the point where I can get the flag, I find the handle, and I release that and that stupid flag goes into my stupid parachute. Another disaster. Releasing the land yard was supposed to help fix the problem.

Now it's made it worse. The only remaining course of action is to disconnect his main shoot entirely, leaving him with just his reserve. He reaches for the release handle. On the skydiving equipment, there's a little handle that you pull, that releases your parachute.

And all I've got to do is get that malfunctioned parachute off of me. And I will be down to just dump my reserve and we'll all go find the parts that we released later on after a drink. There is nothing else for it. Craig yanks at the handle. But in the melee, the mechanism has become twisted and his parachute won't disconnect all the way.

giving up he reaches for his knife so he can simply cut away the malfunctioning equipment but when he feels in the pocket where he usually keeps it he finds with a jolt of alarm that there is nothing there and I realize oh Katie has it I have to get my other knife and I'm spinning so much in helicoptering I can't get the zipper on my jumpsuit to move down

I am just being spun so rapidly that the zipper is now jammed and I can't get my knife out of that pocket. As he twists towards the earth, spinning like a sycamore seed, Craig catches fleeting glimpses of the fields surging up towards him. Strapped to his wrist is an altimeter, a device that tells him how far he is above the ground

by measuring changes in air pressure. Glancing at it, Craig calculates that he still has enough time to try to detach his malfunctioning parachute. I still have some altitude to work with, And I'm pulling this thing, and I get to the point where I'm actually pulling it. I'm trying to hold it my teeth so I can use both hands to release this mechanism. Craig frantically grapples with the cords and straps, trying to reel in the swirling, flapping canopy. It's like trying to hang laundry in a hurricane.

You just can't do it. It leaves him with one option, his reserve. Opening a reserve parachute with his malfunctioning main still on his back is far from ideal. But at this point, what choice does he have? He reaches for the rip cord and pulls. My reserve comes off my back nice and clean, starts to open up, and I can feel myself just slowing down. I'm like, oh, man, thank goodness, finally something's gone right. And the reserve fully opens.

it starts to fly and it flies right into my malfunctioning mane. It's a final stroke of terrible luck, and there's no coming back from this one. The sight of his two parachutes entwined above his head confirms a grim reality. I realize that those two parachutes tied up together is what a dead man sees. I am not going to survive what I have got now. In over 7,000 jumps and more than 25 years of skydiving, Craig has never found himself in this position, speeding towards the ground at 30 miles an hour with no functioning parachute. I am thinking, well, maybe I'm over something soft, maybe some water, and I am over a vineyard.

It is iron spikes with these scraggly plants and concertina wire across everything. And I realize I am in deep trouble and I realize I'm probably going to die. You know, I knew this could happen at some point in my life. And I knew the poker hand could come up if I sat at the table. And here I am. And so I talked to God a little bit and said, take care of my two teammates that are going to watch this. Take care of my family.

Take care of my friends because this is going to hit the rest of my team kind of hard as well. In the final moments before Impact, Craig manages to dredge up some words of wisdom from decades ago. I fall back on my original instructor and what he said when he was going to land without a parachute. And he was like, well, you try and relax. You try and cover all your major arteries and get your arms and legs in. Because anything you stick out is going to take all the impact and be a major crush injury. This is where experience really counts. Craig tucks his arms and legs into his body.

and relaxes his joints so as to better absorb the impact. At this late stage, such minor bodily adjustments could make all the difference. Even if it's not something it's guaranteed to keep me alive, I'm looking to increase my odds of survival. I don't know if getting into a position where I can impact the earth is going to help me. But one, it gave me something to do. And two, if it increased my odds one or two percent, well, that's great.

I'll take it. You know, right now I have almost a zero percent chance. If I can add a couple of percentage points on, yay. The ground is now close enough for Craig to make out the individual vines planted in rows, the wind rustling the branches of the trees, even the droplets of condensation glittering in the bright morning sunshine. I remember coming in and the sun was on that vineyard and it was really pretty. There was dew on everything.

And it just looked amazing, and I didn't quite get that thought all the way out of my head. I was like, wow, this is really, and I hit the ground. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

I'm losing my... Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy. Now streaming, home on Disney Plus. This October on the Noiser podcast network, Real Dictators Returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam

and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On real survival stories, a modern Viking adventure, as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind all alone at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews, and in Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in the sign of four. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

The San Joaquin Valley is the largest wine-producing region in the state of California, with over 150,000 acres given over to the cultivation of grapes. Typically, the vines are planted in rows between 10 and 12 feet apart. In other wine-producing parts of the world, where grapes are picked by hand, vineyard rows are planted much closer together, between 6 and 8 feet. But here in the San Joaquin Valley, where most of the farming is done on a large, industrial scale, the rows are traditionally spaced wide enough for mechanical harvesters to pass between them. It is a minor agricultural detail that might have just spared Craig Stapleton from a gruesome death.

When he landed, Craig hit the ground with such force that his body blasted a shallow crater into the soil of the vineyard. But the sharp metal trellises, which could so easily have impaled him, remain undisturbed, mere feet away. The first few seconds after impact, Craig can't be sure whether he did survive the fall, or if he is experiencing his final throws. I couldn't breathe, I just hurt. And I really thought this is like, oh, this is how your brain dies. Your body gives out and your brain has a few minutes to process it.

And so I thought, well, this is what it's like to die. He's lying face down in the dirt. his bones still reverberating with the force of the impact. The landing knocked the breath from his lungs. But slowly, as the initial shock starts to recede, he manages to suck a thin trickle of air between his clenched teeth. And after a little bit of time, I realized, no, I'm breathing. I hurt a lot, so that's always a sign you're still alive.

I mean, I really just hurt. Extreme blunt force trauma, while not always visible externally, causes havoc inside the body. Rupured organs, broken bones, internal bleeding. It's impossible to know the extent of the damage he is sustained. The fact that he's still alive doesn't mean the fall won't yet prove to be fatal. It takes about 90 minutes to get you from the field to an OR to fix you. So you have to survive that 90 minutes, that golden hour or hour and a half. And so I'm like, all right, you got all sorts of things going on.

You got to keep your blood pressure down. You can't panic. You can't go into shock. You just got to sit here and let people come and take care of you. If he can stay calm, he might live to tell this tale. Bolts of pain tear through his chest as Craig rolls onto his back, eyes bulging, the tendons in his neck straining like tension wires.

He lies there grimacing, staring up at the sky. If only he could ease some of the pressure in his chest. He starts trying to remove his parachute harness, but as he wrestles with the straps, he hears someone approaching. Katie got to me first, and she's a nurse. So it's very handy having a nurse

when you land like that to assess things. And she's telling me to stop moving, and I'm trying to get my equipment off. And one of the real perverse things was, as I'm getting equipment off, my knife fell out of my pocket. So, you know, God has a sense of humor, I think. Katie reassures Craig and urges him to lay still.

Then she takes his phone, thankfully still in one piece, and dials 911. An ambulance will be here soon. In the meantime, Craig asks Katie to place a few more calls, first to his wife, then to his other skydiving teammates. People he wants by his side if he doesn't make it through this. Because, again, I didn't know I was going to live yet, but I at least wanted my family and my extended family of my teammates to know I had made it that far and I was trying to get to the hospital. and if they could get there, if something was going to happen to me,

I'd want them there. For me, personally, it was, okay, I've made it this far. I know a lot of people who have made it into the helicopter and passed away. I know of people who've died days later in the hospital. So I'm not out of the woods. I've still got to do smart things and do what Katie's telling me to do.

Soon, more people surround him. T.J., staff from the airfield, and finally a team of firefighters who load Craig onto a stretcher and carry him across the vineyard to a waiting ambulance. Craig is rushed to the intensive care unit of a local hospital where doctors immediately start checking for critical injuries. To their astonishment, after falling from 8,000 feet and hitting the ground at 30 miles an hour, he doesn't seem to have sustained any life-threatening internal damage. He hasn't even broken any bones. Those little adjustments he made before landing, tucking in his limbs, relaxing his joints,

essentially turned his body into a shock absorber, allowing it to withstand a massive impact. By now, Craig's skydiving friends have all been informed about the accident. Hearing that he fell without a parachute, they naturally assumed the worst. A bottle of whiskey was procured, with the intention of raising a glass to their friend's memory. But when they learn of his miraculous survival, Craig's deliriously happy teammates smuggled the booze up to his ward, where he is given the rare opportunity to attend his own memorial service. Still, he declines the offer of a drink. I'm like, you know, if they take my blood alcohol level, I can't be getting drunk while I'm sitting in the ER. That'll just look bad.

So I'll hold off. I'll wait until I get home. But they celebrated, they celebrated, you know, my stupidity and my survival in the fashion that I expect him to. Doctors continue to monitor him, but it soon becomes clear that aside from some severe bruising and cartilage damage, Craig is basically unscathed. I wasn't bleeding, I didn't break anything. Yes, I was uncomfortable, but I wasn't an immediate threat of dying. And so they're like, well, we'll keep you overnight and we'll see how you do overnight. And I was like, I am going home.

There's 20 people here that are going to keep an eye on me all night. So I will have better care at home and I'll get better rest. And so I walked out about 8 o'clock at night to go home. Over the course of the next few weeks, Craig lets his bruised body heal. He may have avoided severe injury, but that doesn't mean the recovery processes a walk in the park. It was pretty dramatic. Most of my external cartilage had been damaged. If I sneezed, I would just start crying.

Getting off the toilet was difficult because I didn't have the muscles to lift myself up. Craig steadily gets better. However, given the intensity of the accident, it is far from guarantee that he will skydive again. But then again, life is short. I'm not the brightest man. I was back jumping in five weeks because we had a skydiving meet that we were participating in,

and we had to be able to perform. But yeah, five weeks later, I was back in the plane a little nervous, but ready to go. I like skydiving. I always compared it to my mistress. I go see her on the weekends, and then I come home and hang out and be a normal human being. In the years following his accident, he continues to do it regularly. until things outside of his control force him to hang up his parachute for good. But as he moves forwards and looks to the future,

he is now able to embrace other joys that life still has to offer. The team stopped in 2014 after 25 years. I quit jumping by 2016 because I have some back issues that needed to be addressed. And my doctor eventually just told me, look, you can either jump out of planes or you can walk. but you can't do both. And I was like, ah, I really like walking. You know, I really like that.

So I just got into other things. And, you know, starting a whole new chapter, I got into going to Burning Man, which is almost as much work as being on a skydiving team. Next time on real survival stories, we meet Mika Mueller. In 2019, the former Special Forces soldier has embraced a nomadic existence, sailing the seas aboard his catamaran. But all his plans for the future come crashing to a halt,

when during a single-handed crossing of the Atlantic, the weather suddenly deteriorates, thrusting Mika into the grip of a deadly hurricane. Shipwrecked, 1,000 miles from the nearest shore, and with no prospect of quick rescue, Mika's survival depends entirely on a makeshift life raft, a few pieces of kit, and his own innate drive to live. And even if he can make it through the worst of the storm, he'll soon discover that the ocean has plenty of other nasty surprises in store for him,

lurking in the depths. That's next time on real survival stories. Listen right now without ads and without waiting a week by joining Noyser Plus. This October on the Noyser podcast network, Real Dictators Returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On short history of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster.

On real survival stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea and a man is struck blind all alone at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews and in Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in the sign of four. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.