Miraculous Survival: Skydiver Holly Plummets 10,000 Feet Unconscious After Mid-Air Knockout, Yet Lives to Tell the Tale

MIRACLE skydiver Holly Wiffen said she cannot wait to go up in a plane and jump again — despite nearly being killed in a ­terrifying freefall accident.

The 35-year-old is recovering at home on crutches after a group dive last month went horrifyingly wrong.

She says she is lucky to be alive after being accidentally kicked in the head by a fellow jumper soon after leaping out of a , knocking her out cold.

She then hurtled 10,000ft to the ground before hitting a conifer tree, which slowed her descent and almost certainly saved her life.

The dental therapist, who has been on 425 jumps, said: “If I hadn’t hit the tree I would have hit the ground and would have been soup. Most people don’t survive skydiving accidents like that.”

But, incredibly, it has not put her off the extreme sport, as she said: “I want to get back to as soon as I can.

“Although knowing what happened and that I could have died also makes me a little nervous.”

Holly had been taking part in a group skydive known as “tracking” where experienced jumpers freefall horizontally to build up speed.

She had just leapt from the plane at around 12,000ft and was manoeuvring into position when another jumper in the group appeared to misjudge his own area and crashed into her.

Terrifying GoPro camera footage showed the moment of the 100mph mid-air collision, above a festival at Langar airfield near .

It appears to show the male parachutist’s shin slam into the back of Holly’s helmet, knocking her unconscious and smashing her own camera off her helmet.

She can then be seen plummeting towards the ground at 150mph, passed out and completely helpless with no parachute.

Another jumper attempts to catch up with her as she spun out of control, reaching out to her desperately with his hand.

But he could not grab hold of her in time before he was forced to deploy his own parachute when he reached 3,000ft.

Meanwhile, Holly then disappears from the footage into the patchwork of fields below.

She said of her fellow skydivers: “They thought I was dead.”

Despite having no memory of her fall, Holly was at some point able to pull her ripcord.

She estimates this would have happened at 1,000ft — five seconds before deadly impact.

Her secondary emergency chute then also deployed because it registered she was going too fast and was too low.

But the combination of both chutes together created a “downplane” effect, resulting in a dangerously rapid descent.

It sped her up to around 40mph or 50mph before she crashed into the conifer tree.

Crucially, it cushioned the impact when she eventually hit the ground, just yards from a main road, and close to power lines.

Holly, who had landed hundreds of feet away from the field where she was supposed to touch down, said: “I came down amidst caravans, buildings, trees, roads, all sorts. It was just an absolute mess of a place to land. There’s also power lines all around that area as well, so I was very lucky not to hit any of those.”

Holly, who had already completed three jumps on the day of the incident, went on: “I was just tumbling but I felt like I was dreaming about skydiving and falling.

“I didn’t come around until I was lying on the ground.

“My helmet had come off and I looked down at my leg and it was pointing in a different direction.”

She recalled: “I looked up and saw the reserve in the tree and realised something had gone wrong.

“People had to fight through brambles to find me. They saw me disappear and wanted to get to me as fast as they could – they were just assuming they were picking up a dead person. People started arriving and the first thing I said is ‘Help me get my kit off’, before the paramedics cut it off me.”

Against all odds, Holly, from Okehampton, Devon, survived with just a badly broken left leg, fractured spine and bruising following the crash on August 7.

She was put on a stretcher and dashed to hospital in Nottingham, where she was operated on six days later to place a metal rod in her leg.

Holly is now hobbling around on crutches while she recovers at her parents’ farm.

Since leaving hospital, she has also received an apology from the other skydiver who crashed into her, sparking the horror fall.

Now daredevil Holly cannot wait for her next skydive after taking up the extreme sport only two years ago.

She plans to go up again once her injuries have healed, despite her terrifying experience.

Two of her skydiving friends have also died in the last two years at her local airfield in Devon.

She said: “They wouldn’t want people to stop skydiving for it. Everyone knows the risks. You are taking the risk for what you get out of it because it’s so much fun.”

Holly is a self-confessed thrill-seeker who rides a powerful motorbike and also does rock climbing.

She believes the adrenaline rush from skydiving, and the camaraderie, makes it unbeatable.

She said: “Perhaps I’m old enough to know better. But I would be so bored without skydiving.

“Knitting or stamp collecting is not for me. It’s like when you’re a kid riding down a hill and you’re just giggling. You’re flying together and give a ‘Hell, yeah’ sign to each other, it’s so much fun.

“We’re giggling and screaming our heads off. We all get together afterwards and talk about it, and at the end of the day we have a beer.”

Skydiving expert Allan Hewitt said the incident will be investigated. He added: “Freefall collision is rare and doesn’t happen very often, thankfully.

“People are getting into different disciplines that means they have to fly faster and do more extreme things. They are very lucky. It would take a very skilled skydiver to go down and grab her mid-air.”