Jumping for the record - Cheryl Stearns, Army reserve skydiver

A parachute blossomed safely over Cheryl Stearns head the 73 previous times she hurled her body earthward from an aircraft. Her 74th jump began the same way -- she stepped off a mechanically sound airplane and was embraced by the crisp, arid vastness of the Arizona sky that she often fell through at 120 mph. The similarities ended there.

"A streamer"

After several seconds, Stearns, an Army reservist assigned to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and attached to the U.S. Army Parachute Team at Ft. Bragg, N.C., pulled her ripcord, but instead of feeling the violent jolt of the parachute harnessing air and slowing her fall to a float, she looked up and saw "a streamer," a parachutist's term that to laymen means trouble.

"I pulled at 2,500 feet--stuff came out, but it wouldn't open," Stearns said. In her brain began the methodical and often machine-like thought process of dealing with catastrophic equipment failure during a freefall. "My mind wasn't trained to say, 'hey, you're in freefall and you're smoking it down here," she said.

Stearns calmly thought through her checklists as the parachute flailed above her head with the earth drawing closer. She "cut away" her failed chute and aimed her back toward the ground, a position that allows for the easy deployment of the reserve chute.

"I pulled my reserve and FOOM, it opened up," Stearns said, imitating the parachute's deployment by holding her hands close together and then mushrooming them out beyond shoulder-width. "I turned around and landed on the ground. I had about a seven-second canopy. I was about 200 to 300 feet above the ground when the chute opened," she said. "When I got on the ground I absolutely lost it. People thought I bounced. I just stood there and said, 'you almost killed yourself, you almost killed yourself!' If I had waited one more second to pull, I would have impacted," she said.

A champion

Stearns didn't impact, but she would impact the world of skydiving forever after surviving her close call. She is undoubtedly one of the most well known Army Reservists and she is the most decorated skydiver in the world. She's the current and 21-time US women's skydiving champion. She has 30 world records and at one time held four different world records, a feat no other parachutist has ever accomplished. She has a dizzying 14,000 jumps to her credit.

In 1995, Steams jumped into the Guinness World Record books and marked her page in history by logging the most parachute jumps for a woman in 24 hours.

In 2002, she will go for yet another record. She hopes to be in a 365-foot polyester balloon on the edge of space 24 miles up and looking down on earth.

The jump will take Stearns higher than any other person has jumped. The previous record was set in 1960 and stands at 102,800 feet.

"The biggest thing that I'm looking forward to is sitting in that open gondola, with the doors open and watching the earth go away," Stearns said with anticipation in her voice. Although the jump is more than one year away, she acts as if she is jumping in a few minutes. "Can you see yourself 24 miles high and riding up?"

Stearns will break the sound barrier in her record-setting jump as she plummets toward the earth at more than 800 mph. She will don a pressurized suit similar to what astronauts wear on space walks that will protect her from temperatures that can reach minus 90 degrees. She will have life support systems and a helmet with a heads-up-display showing altitude, global positioning system readings and her orientation to the earth.

However, before Stearns can jump from 130,000 feet, she has to get there. A balloon constructed of a tough polyester film called Mylar will deliver her to the edge of space. The balloon is designed to withstand the high-radiation and sub-zero temperatures of the upper atmosphere and Stearns will pilot it.

Airline pilot

Although Sgt. 1st Class Stearns is a 92A, a supply/logistics noncommissioned officer with the Army Reserve, she is a command pilot for US Airways and she has logged nearly 15,000 hours in the cockpit. She has been piloting aircraft for 28 years.

"If I had my choice, I would much rather fly aerobatics than from point A to point B. I want to fly an airplane. I want to fly a parachute and know what the limits are to that thing," Stearns said. "I want to do the turns and loops, right side up, upside down and turn that airplane inside and out. That's real flying to me," she said passionately, but still keeping her calm demeanor as she twisted and turned her hands to imitate an airplane.

"It took me 13 years to get the top position as a pilot," Stearns said. She is a captain and one of the most senior pilots flying for the airline in the mid-Atlantic region. "It's like making general finally," she said. Stearns said that some view her job as a "glorified bus driver," but Stearns disagrees. "I see it as someone who's taking an $85 million airplane and 120 people safely to where they need to go with the knowledge that I have," she said. Stearns' 28-year love affair with flight began in Arizona when she was 17. She begged her mother for the money to jump from an airplane, but what should have been one jump turned to several, and several turned to hundreds and then thousands.

"I always wanted to jump. I always wanted to know what a 120 mph freefall was like," Stearns said. "It was a problem getting my parents to sign the permission slip. My mother finally signed the slip and she gave me the 40 bucks to make my first jump," she said. "I was just going to make the one jump, but you had to do a static line before you could freefall, so you had to wait until 20 jumps to make your 30-second delay jump. And I said, 'when I get to that point, then I'll quit."'

She never did quit. She started jumping regularly and as she was flown from the ground to jumping altitude, she began to experience anxiety over her flights.

"During the course of that, I was very interested in how the airplane operated," Stearns recalled. "I'd ride up in the airplane and I wasn't afraid of jumping, I was afraid of riding in the plane. That was the scary part. It was fear of the unknown. I wasn't educated enough on the aviation side of things. When I went flying for my first lesson in flight school, I felt so naked without a parachute on my back," she said.

Confronting fears

Stearns told her father she wanted to learn how to fly to confront her fear of the unknown. Several months after she asked her father for assistance with the tuition for flight school, she was in the cockpit. Three months earlier she had learned how to exit an aircraft in mid-flight and now she would learn how to fly them.

Several years ago, her father revealed his motivation for sending her through flight school. He thought if he could get her behind the controls of an aircraft, he could keep her from strapping on a parachute. He was wrong. He only helped her find another way to stay up in the air.

"He was trying to divert my attention in another direction. He thought if I would fly, I'd quit jumping. He wasn't in favor of me jumping out of airplanes," Stearns said.

But Stearns has soared as a parachutist and as a pilot. She has reached heights that most can only imagine. She became the first woman to join the Golden Knights in 1977 where she would serve for nearly eight years and for three years would be the only woman on the team. She spent nearly four years on the team in her first enlistment and later rejoined the Knights from 1982-1985 on her second hitch. She's been an Army Reservist since 1994.

Stearns thought the Army would be a good fit with her when she saw the Army Parachute Team at a skydiving competition. She saw the Golden Knights and thought, "That's what I need to do, get paid to do a job I would love to do." She visited an Army recruiter, but she quickly realized that her desire to join the Golden Knights would run through some turbulence.

"They (recruiters) said, 'That's impossible because you can't join the Army just to be on the Army Parachute Team, and you can't join the team because you're a female,'" Stearns said. The Army didn't allow women into airborne training until the mid-1970s and women were precluded from joining the team until 1977 when Stearns, with world championships under her belt, finally earned her spot on the Golden Knights. She has since served in all three components of the Army throughout her 24-year military career.

"I didn't want to be on the team just because I was a woman," Stearns said. "I wanted to be on the team and be recognized as the best person on the team," she said. "I was beating everyone out there. I was beating all the men out there in the world and that's what I wanted my position to be based on," she said.

The right stuff

Stearns' competitive spirit quickly consumed the team. Her desire to be the best made the team more cohesive. "They weren't battling against me. It made us all pull together," she said of her teammates.

"I didn't have the problems other women have faced when they're the first female in a unit with harassment and things like that," she said. "I didn't have those problems."

In addition to being the first female soldier on the Golden Knights, Stearns said she was unofficially the first female soldier to complete HALO (high altitude low opening) training. With world titles and hundreds of jumps to her credit, the school's commander allowed her to attend training, but she wasn't officially recognized as a graduate until three years later after other female soldiers officially went through the program several years after Stearns had completed her HALO training.

"The military has changed a lot. You can basically do any job," I Stearns said. I wanted to go to Ranger school back in '77. I was a hard-charger. I was a lightweight person, but I was strong. I couldn't do it because I was a woman," she said. But, she added hopefully, women would enter combat roles "in our lifetime.

Ranger school was just one of the many things Steams wanted to do in her military career. She naturally wanted to fly Army helicopters, but was disqualified because of her poor vision. She had her vision surgically corrected when she separated from active duty and underwent several years of "demonstrated ability" evaluations to get behind the controls of the 737 airplanes she now flies for the airline.

Making the grade

Stearns did eventually medically make the grade to qualify for military flight school. While in the National Guard, she was selected for warrant officer flight school, but her already busy schedule as a commercial airline pilot and as a competitive parachutist forced her to weigh her priorities and decline Army flight training. However, she would make the move back to the Army Reserve and continue to collect a paycheck from the Army for doing a job she loved to do. She returned to where her military career started and began to jump again with the Golden Knights.

"If I had to give up one or the other, I couldn't. When I'm done jumping, I'm ready to go fly an airplane and at the end of flying, I'm ready to go jump out of an airplane," Stearns said. "I can't say what I would give up. I couldn't give up either one of them."

Going for the record

In April 2002, after preparing for eight months, Stearns, who flies about 700 hours per year and jumps approximately 600 to 700 times per year, will climb into a balloon and pilot it to the rim of space. In the frigid, thin air she will break away from her open gondola and begin her descent, becoming the second human being ever to break the sound barrier without a vehicle and will shatter the altitude record.

The Stratoquest jump will not only put Stearns in the history books, but it will also allow researchers to gather scientific data about astronaut egress systems for future space vehicles. The effects of transonic acceleration on the human body will also be studied in addition to a multitude of other space-related experiments that will be conducted as she climbs to altitude and then falls. Stearns' international team of researchers, aviation and parachuting experts and sponsors and supporters has already started work to get the project off the ground.

"The Army is a world of opportunities. You have to have the initiative to go after it. It is there for you to have anything you want. Nothing is handed to you," Stearns said. "If you don't work for it, you're just going to get what is handed to you and you're not going to like what you get," she said. "The Army has given me the opportunity and put me where I am today," she said. Where she will be in less than one year, will be at the brim of the new frontier.

(1st Lt. Alvarez is with the Public Affairs and Liaison Directorate, Office of the Chief, Army Reserve)

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