A cousin of mine was a fighter pilot for the Navy when I was young (I think he started flying for the navy when I was around 5 years old). I had always been into flying, but got even more into it because I kind of looked up to my cousin at the time, and he happened to be flying military jets.
Spent a lot of years when I was younger reading/studying/etc everything I could about aviation, and spending lots of time with flight sims. I was about to start working towards my PPL about 4 years ago, then got distracted and started skydiving instead. Skydiving has given me the opportunity to spend a lot of right seat time in various aircraft, though I rarely land with them
Here I am 4 years after the beginning of my skydiving distraction with close to 1000 skydives logged and a bunch of BASE jumps (lost my log book). Still looking to get into flying more in the near future, but we'll see how it goes. For now, I fly when given the opportunity, and fly my body in freefall and my canopy after I deploy on every skydive.
Crash landing when I had around 200 skydives:
Retired:
More pictures:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...%202006/68.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...g/IMG_3185.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...rious/door.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...Club/carve.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18.../exit_shot.jpg
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y18...kdive1_web.jpg