Air Force Academy
The head of this academy’s vaunted parachute-training school – a rugged- looking Air Force officer who has made 8,200 jumps from an airplane – was talking quietly about a subject he says he doesn’t often bring up: He is afraid of heights and, just between us, being on the roof of his house gives him a bad case of the willies.
Then a shriek filled the air. He stopped in mid-sentence and turned to look. The sound that caught jump instructor Bill Wenger’s attention had come from across the sprawling hangar-like building where the academy’s cadets are taught to skydive. It was a shout that had escaped the lips of 16-year-old Chardena Wakefield, a yelp of pure joy and exhilaration as the girl with the sparkling eyes was quite suddenly lifted 2 feet off the ground in a parachute harness.
Wakefield, though, did not hear her own happy scream. She has never heard anything. She has been deaf since birth. On Monday, a group of kids and young adults from the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind learned about leaping from airplanes. And Wakefield’s deafness didn’t matter.
As she dangled in the air, her personal jump instructor for the day, Steve Hoehn, barked out directions. Wakefield, in turn, looked at interpreter Carol Hilty, the superintendent of the deaf and blind school, who converted the instructor’s words into sign language.
“After you jump from the airplane and pull the rip cord,” Hoehn told her, “the next thing you do is look over your shoulder and see if you have a good parachute.”
Wakefield’s eyebrows went up. The teenager from the Denver suburb of Brighton looked puzzled. And then she signed this question: “What if you look over your shoulder and see a bad parachute?”
Hoehn laughed.
There would be plenty of laughs this day, laughs from both the military folks in their neat jumpsuits and the young people in their jeans, T-shirts and baggy sweatshirts.
The visit came a week after cadets in an academy cognitive- psychology class had visited the School for the Deaf and Blind. They had met with students in an effort to understand their world, a world of darkness for some and silence for others.
Monday’s visit gave the young men and women from the Colorado Springs school a chance to understand the cadets’ world.
Starting with why anyone would leap from a perfectly good airplane.
“My answer to that,” said heights-challenged instructor Wenger, “is we don’t think there’s any such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Then the tour of the jump school began.
Some of the students were intrigued by the connecting ropes from the parachute to the harness. Griffin O’Hara, a 16-year- old boy with a grin as large as his mop of curly blond hair, ran his fingers over a strand of the thin rope. He turned to a friend and signed.
“Pretty thin,” he said. “I think it will break. I’m staying on the ground.”
The words were translated for Wenger.
“Oh, no,” the instructor said. “It’s plenty strong. Each rope is a 600-pound Dacron line. Each parachute has 32 lines and combined they have …”
His voice trailed off. Griffin, like most 16-year-old boys, had lost interest and wandered off.
Moments later, pretty Chardena Wakefield was strapped into a jump harness and was now dangling from a chain connected to a hydraulic-lift system. She was flying. And learning.
Through school superintendent Hilty, instructor Hoehn told his young student there are two ways a sky diver knows when to open the chute. One is by looking at an altimeter. The other is via a pre-set audio alarm with voice commands played inside a helmet.
“It says things like ‘turn left’ and ‘breathe’ and ‘stop screaming,”‘ the instructor said, with a smile.
She smiled too. Being deaf, she replied, she’d probably go with looking at the altimeter.
And then she told him she would love to actually sky-dive one day. Hoehn said having a civilian learn and jump at the Air Force Academy was beyond rare and that such a thing would take an actual order from the Pentagon.
But Wakefield and the other students from the deaf and blind school, well, they made quite an impression.
“If she really wants to do it, I might try to get it done,” Hoehn said.
He looked up at the girl dangling from the harness. She had gotten his message. Her grin was as big as the building.
“For her,” Hoehn said quietly, “I’d try.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
