Skydiver plummets 10,000 feet after being knocked unconscious mid-jump. At 150 mph speed, she wakes up to see where she was heading: ‘kind of surreal’

Holly Wiffen was three jumps into a good day in the air when her fourth skydive of the day ended in a collision with another jumper moments after she left the plane. The collision on Aug. 7 ended what had been a routine recreational dive and left the 35-year-old unconscious as she fell toward the ground at speeds of up to 150 mph.

According to People, Wiffen, from the town of Okehampton, England, walked through the ordeal this week on the U.K. show This Morning, talking hosts Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley through footage of the jump that she still finds surreal to watch. “It’s really strange to watch it, it doesn’t really feel like me … it’s really strange watching it, it’s kind of surreal,” she said.

Per The Times, Wiffen fell roughly 10,000 feet before coming to and managing to deploy her parachute, just seconds before she crashed into a conifer tree. She came away from it with a broken leg and a fractured spine.

The Scariest Part Was What She Didn’t Remember 

She described the fall itself as strangely calm at first. “I was just dreaming of falling, it was just really surreal, I just thought, ‘Oh, I’m falling, and I’m dreaming about falling.’ It was really like kind of peaceful,” she told the hosts, before her body seemed to start reacting on its own. “But then I kind of felt like I was a bit unstable. And then in my mind I was thinking back to my training, I was thinking, ‘Right, if I’m falling, and I’m unstable, I should be arching and trying to reach my parachute.”

That instinctive arching shows up in the footage, though Wiffen says she was unconscious as it happened. “You can see in the clip that’s what’s kind of happening. But I was out, I was asleep,” she said. Shephard noted during the interview that the skydiver she’d collided with had tried to catch up with her after noticing that something might be wrong, though by then she was already unconscious and falling.

She managed to deploy her main parachute, and her Automatic Activation Device followed by firing her reserve parachute too, a redundancy that has kept other skydivers alive even after their main systems failed outright. With both parachutes open at once, Wiffen was moving faster, not slower, by the time she reached the tree line. She isn’t sure how long she was there before waking up, and said the pain didn’t register right away. “Absolutely nothing … maybe it was shock,” she said.

British skydiving incidents can have stories that extend well beyond the jump itself, including cases where investigators spent years untangling what went wrong 4,000 feet up. Wiffen, by contrast, described hers simply as an accident and a misjudgment of speed. “It’s just one of those things … just an accident, a misjudgment of speed … wrong place, wrong time, really,” she said.

The injuries and terrifying fall haven’t put her off the sport. “I can’t wait to get back, honestly, if they would let me do a tandem now, I would be in the sky,” she said.