Skydiver survives terrifying 10,000ft fall after being knocked unconscious in mid-air — and says she cannot wait to jump again

Holly Wiffen should not have survived the terrifying skydiving accident that sent her tumbling thousands of feet toward the ground unconscious and without a parachute.

The 35-year-old dental therapist was taking part in a group skydive at Langar airfield near Nottingham on August 7 when a fellow jumper accidentally collided with her shortly after they leapt from the plane.

The impact sent a shin crashing into the back of Holly’s helmet, knocking her unconscious and smashing the camera attached to her helmet.

What happened next was captured on GoPro footage — and it shows Holly plummeting towards the ground at speeds of around 150mph, completely helpless as she spiralled through the air.

Another skydiver desperately tried to catch up with her, reaching out in an attempt to grab her before it was too late.

But he could not reach Holly.

When he reached around 3,000ft, he had to deploy his own parachute, leaving Holly continuing her terrifying fall toward the ground below.

The other skydivers believed she was dead.

Holly herself remembers none of it.

“I was just tumbling but I felt like I was dreaming about skydiving and falling,” she recalled.

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

Yet somehow, while unconscious, Holly managed to pull her parachute ripcord.

She believes she did so at around 1,000ft — just five seconds before she would have hit the ground.

Her reserve parachute also deployed after detecting that she was travelling too fast and was too low.

But the two parachutes together created a dangerous “downplane” effect, sending Holly towards the ground at around 40mph to 50mph.

Then came the moment that may have saved her life.

Holly crashed into a conifer tree.

Rather than hitting the ground directly, the tree absorbed some of the impact and slowed her descent.

She eventually landed just yards from a main road, close to buildings, caravans and power lines — hundreds of feet away from the field where she had been expected to land.

“I came down amidst caravans, buildings, trees, roads, all sorts. It was just an absolute mess of a place to land,” Holly said.

“There’s also power lines all around that area as well, so I was very lucky not to hit any of those.”

The experienced skydiver, who has completed 425 jumps, said she knew immediately that something had gone terribly wrong when she regained consciousness.

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

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

She then looked up and saw her reserve parachute caught in the tree.

“I realised something had gone wrong.”

Rescuers had seen Holly disappear from the sky and raced through the surrounding area to find her.

“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,” she said.

People eventually reached Holly after fighting their way through brambles.

Despite the severity of the fall, she was alive.

Her injuries included a badly broken left leg, a fractured spine and bruising.

She was placed on a stretcher and rushed to hospital in Nottingham, where doctors operated six days later to insert a metal rod into her leg.

Now recovering at her parents’ farm, Holly is hobbling around on crutches.

But incredibly, the accident has not convinced her to give up skydiving.

In fact, she says she wants to return to the skies as soon as she has recovered.

“I want to get back to skydiving as soon as I can,” she said.

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

Holly only took up the extreme sport two years ago, but it has quickly become a major part of her life.

She is also a keen motorcyclist and rock climber, describing herself as a thrill-seeker who loves the adrenaline and camaraderie that comes with skydiving.

“Perhaps I’m old enough to know better. But I would be so bored without skydiving,” she said.

“Knitting or stamp collecting is not for me.”

She compared the experience to the feeling of riding a bike down a hill as a child — only with the added thrill of flying through the sky alongside friends.

“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.”

Holly said the group usually laughs and screams during their jumps before meeting afterwards to talk about what happened.

“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.”

Since leaving hospital, Holly has also received an apology from the skydiver who collided with her and triggered the terrifying fall.

Skydiving expert Allan Hewitt said the incident would be investigated, describing freefall collisions as rare.

He explained that increasingly extreme skydiving disciplines can involve jumpers travelling faster and carrying out more demanding manoeuvres.

Hewitt also noted just how difficult it would have been for another skydiver to reach Holly in time.

“It would take a very skilled skydiver to go down and grab her mid-air,” he said.

For Holly, the incident was made even more sobering by the fact that two of her skydiving friends have died at her local airfield in Devon over the past two years.

She said she understands the risks involved in the sport but does not believe those dangers should stop people from experiencing it.

“They wouldn’t want people to stop skydiving for it. Everyone knows the risks,” she said.

“You are taking the risk for what you get out of it because it’s so much fun.”

Skydiving deaths

Holly’s accident comes amid a number of fatal skydiving incidents.

Four people have died in skydiving incidents over the past 16 months.

In June 2025, mum-of-four Belinda Taylor, 48, and instructor Adam Harrison, 30, were killed when their parachute failed to open during a tandem jump near Honiton, Devon.

Belinda’s partner, Scott Armstrong, had bought the jump for his “adrenaline junkie” girlfriend as a gift.

Jade Damarell, 32, died in Peterlee, County Durham, in April 2025. She had recently separated from her boyfriend, and an inquest later ruled that she had taken her own life.

Then, on July 5 this year, a 22-year-old woman died during an incident at Langar Airfield in Nottinghamshire.

Police are investigating the death of the woman, who was described as an experienced skydiver.

For Holly, however, surviving her own terrifying fall has only strengthened her determination to return to the sport she loves.

After tumbling unconscious through thousands of feet of open sky, narrowly avoiding power lines and buildings, and finally crashing into a tree, she knows better than most just how quickly a skydive can go horribly wrong.

Yet once her injuries have healed, she plans to climb aboard another plane — and jump again.