A paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division was getting ready to jump toward the earth when a sharp-eyed jumpmaster stepped in and saved him from a potentially fatal injury — a split-second intervention that was caught on video.
The video was taken from a C-17 during a routine training exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in November 2024, a soldier who was present told Task & Purpose. The soldiers were practicing an operation the Army calls a “mass tactical” drop, with the deployment of dozens of paratroopers over a drop zone at once. The Instagram video was recently posted by “fancy_fancy_bear,” an account that mostly posts about Army culture and training.
In the video, several paratroopers exit the C-17’s door without issue before one soldier briefly stumbles before leaping. Immediately, a jumpmaster-qualified soldier, who was acting as the ‘safety’ for the jump, pulled him back and adjusted his static line. The video caption states that the “jumper had the static line wrapped around his neck” and that the safety “prevented a serious injury,” which the soldier present for the jump confirmed to Task & Purpose.
A static line is a long yellow fabric cord that is attached to a paratrooper as they jump. The cord pulls the jumper’s parachute open as the jumper leaves the plane.
Task & Purpose spoke to two former Army jumpmasters to get their perspective on what could have gone wrong during the jump and what the ‘safety’ soldier prevented from happening.
“If that static line was misrouted around the guy’s arm or around his neck, it doesn’t matter,” retired Command Sgt. Maj. Jeff Mellinger said. “He did what he was supposed to do and that jumper lived to tell about it.”
Jumpmasters are experienced paratroopers who have undergone extensive training in preparing and running a jump, including a long list of safety considerations at every step. Jumpmasters are trained to do jumpmaster personnel inspections (JMPI) with all of the soldiers’ equipment and the aircraft itself. They also help plan for the jump and make sure that all of the steps are followed as soldiers line up to jump onto the dropzone.
When Army paratroopers jump in exercises like the one on the video, several qualified jumpmasters are aboard the aircraft directing every move. The jumpmaster in the video was acting as a ‘safety,’ the jumpmaster who watches each paratrooper approach the door, checking for last-second issues.
“We’re very annoying to other people because we take very seriously this idea of personal accountability and doing these things at work that you’re supposed to do,” said retired Lt. Col. Francesca Graham, a former intelligence officer and senior jumpmaster. “Literally, the only time you’re an individual is when you’re 20 feet from the ground in the whole process.”
In the worst-case scenario, the static line could accidentally wrap around a soldier’s neck, a mishap that killed a paratrooper in 2016. If it wrapped around their arm, it could break or dislocate bones and joints in their arms and shoulders or, at least cause severe rope burn as the soldier whips down the cord.
The safety jumpmaster “controls that static line to keep it from flipping around and catching on equipment or going around the jumper’s arm or head,” Mellinger said. “Their job at that point is to control that static line, control the movement and control the separation between jumpers, whatever that interval is.
The safety position, Mellinger said, has to be calm in a chaotic spot.
“They got to make sure that there’s nothing hanging down or dragging,” he said. “I mean, there’s a lot going on. They have a tremendous amount of responsibility.”
The near-accident on the video, said Graham, is also a reminder of the personal and community responsibility that jumpmasters and airborne soldiers learn — because one wrong step can impact anyone around you.
“When I was in airborne school, one of the people, he did not hand off his static line correctly to the safety, and the safety couldn’t grab it in time and the guy had had his whole arm sheared off from the bicep down,” Graham said.
Any number of factors can turn a training jump into a dangerous situation: holding the static line incorrectly, mid-air collisions, or jumpers following each other out of the aircraft too closely and ‘stealing air’ — the term for when one parachute passes directly over another, and the higher parachute begins to deflate without a clear stream of air.
“You could tell that the jumper somehow lost their balance right and was no longer standing upright but was still going towards the door, which meant that under no circumstances was that static line going to get handed off correctly to the safety,” she said. “You’d have a static line flying around and who knows what the hell is gonna happen with that.”
Several bad things can happen if a jumper exits the aircraft incorrectly. The static line, which is hooked onto the anchor line cable on the ceiling of the aircraft, can get twisted around the jumper’s body like a “cigarette roll,” Graham said, preventing their main parachute from opening and even getting in the way of the soldier pulling their reserve chute.
Another danger is the static line finding its way around the soldier’s rucksack, fastened around their legs. In that case, the cord may hold the soldier back from falling.
“You’re just flying, bouncing off the aircraft,” Mellinger said, as a ‘hung’ or ‘towed jumper.’ A towed jumper died when they were pulled behind a plane in a 2014 accident.
“You can imagine what that feels like,” Graham said. “You’re getting concussed. You might be knocked out. There’s just so many bad things.”
Under this worst-case scenario, all options are bad. Jumpmasters have to decide whether to cut their static line so the jumper falls free, hoping they can deploy their reserve parachute. The other option — and the only one for a jumper knocked unconscious — is to pull them back into the aircraft.
For this very reason, several years ago, the Army announced that it purchased a UK-developed emergency parachute that releases “once the jumpmaster cuts the aircraft anchor line cable.”
Because of all the risks associated with jumping out of airplanes going 200 miles an hour while wearing dozens of pounds of combat gear, airborne paratroopers receive an extra $150 per month in their paychecks.
“That’s why they call it hazardous duty,” Mellinger said. “There’s a lot of inherent risk and you mitigate the risk by doing training, by following proper procedures, by everybody checking each other and so forth, but even with all that sometimes bad stuff happens.”
In dangerous situations, paratroopers can hit the ground hard and suffer sprains, fractures, or head trauma. The most common injuries, however, are fractured or sprained ankles.
Graham said she once broke her toe on a jump in Sicily and had to trudge a mile to the assembly point in sand. A combination of adrenaline and being focused on literally everything else kept her from looking at the injury until the next day.
“Once you hit the ground, you’re kind of like turning your head left, turning your head right, moving your feet, moving your fingers, your legs, and you’re just so freaking grateful that you’re not paralyzed and you’re not dead and nothing’s catastrophically broken,” she said. “This is every single person, no matter how tough they sound.”
When she did check her toe, she said, “it was just this massive black awfulness.”
Occasionally a jump can go perfectly, but paratroopers can miss the dropzone, leading to being stuck in a tree, like former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who did and told Task & Purpose about it back in October.
“I’ve come into contact with trees of all sizes,” Austin said. “We always like to rip the aviators. Because the aviators always tell us ‘hey we put you out over the survey drop zone.’ Well, if you look at the survey it was done in like 1950 and since then, trees have grown up around the open areas. And they’re right. It was a survey drop zone but, you know, we need to re-survey.”
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