“There are many flying Jews,” asserts Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld, who was born wanting to take to the sky.
“My dream,” he writes in his new book, “Above All Else,” “was to fly like the birds, to come as close as I could to experiencing true human flight.”
“Oy vey,” his mother had told him after he was mesmerized by a TV show on skydiving. “Promise me you’ll never jump out of an airplane.”
Fat chance. Skydiving, he realized, was the closest thing to true human flight. It became his obsession. He practiced on trampolines, sought out the highest diving boards. He was just biding his time, through his early childhood in Albany, N.Y., then a year in Honolulu, where the multi-colored avians further inspired him. He analyzed the flight of those birds — and kept dreaming.
“All I wanted to do was fly. My head was in the clouds.”
Then the family moved back to Albany, and on to Columbus, Ohio, where his mother and stepfather, Howard Chenfeld, still live.
Brodsky-Chenfeld counted the days ‘til he reached 18, when he could finally make his first jump.
That experience changed — and determined — the rest of his life. He went on to be a world champion skydiver. But at age 30, disaster struck.
Brodsky-Chenfeld was involved in a plane crash that killed 16 of the 22 people on board, including some of his closest friends and his surrogate ‘baby brother,’ James Layne. He was in a coma for six weeks, had a broken neck, cracked skull, collapsed lung, serious internal injuries and severe head trauma. Doctors weren’t sure he would ever walk, let alone jump, again. His book is his story, and his story is pretty amazing. So let’s take it back to the beginning.
Taking Flight
How exactly does a Nice Jewish Boy get to that place — wanting to be suspended, or really, free-falling from thousands of feet, in mid-air?
“I think many kids have a fascination with flying, whether superheroes or airplanes or birds,” Brodsky-Chenfeld says. “They see skydivers and are fascinated. But they usually grow out of that fascination. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still love it. And it still amazes me that I’ve made a living at it all my life.”
Back in Albany, his parents had strongly encouraged their children to “‘find whatever you love in life and pursue it.’ I only did what I was told to do! I think my mother’s regretted saying that ever since,” he quips. But his mother remains a goddess to him.
“I hit the jackpot with Mimi Brodsky, the most incredible human being on the planet,” he says, referring to his mother, the renowned early childhood educator and writer of children’s books and college texts.
Mimi’s parents, Joe and Iris Kaplan, were Eastern European immigrants. Brodsky-Chenfeld’s grandfather was especially important in his life: “A pillar of strength, both physical and emotional.”
The Brodskys attended Temple Israel in Albany, and Beth Tikvah in Columbus. They lit candles every Friday night, and Brodsky-Chenfeld had a confirmation and bar mitzvah.
But when he was 4 years old, his perfect family was tragically disrupted. His father was killed in a car accident. Young Brodsky-Chenfeld couldn’t understand what had happened, and he turned to the rabbi.
“I guess I was 6 or 7 by that time. The rabbi gave me a somewhat satisfactory answer. It was fall, and the leaves were falling, things were dying. He talked about the cycle of life. He said, ‘This is life. Nothing lives forever.’ But my big question was, ‘Where is my dad now?’ I think Christianity has a very clear answer. I don’t buy it, but it’s very clear. In terms of Judaism, it’s more like, ‘Who knows what happens after death? You’ll find out when you find out. Don’t worry about it.’”
Brodsky-Chenfeld was destined to find out more than he bargained for.
While he was in a coma, he thought he was in a skydiving free-fall.
“It wasn’t a dream. It was as real as any real-world experience I ever had,” he reports. “I remember every action, every word, every thought.”
While he had that free-fall sensation, he looked up and saw his beloved buddy James, whom he’d taught to jump at age 14.
“He was flying down to me just as if we were on a skydive together. He smiled and said, ‘Danny, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here. You have to get back down there.’ I asked him, ‘Are you coming with me?’ He said, ‘No, I can’t. But it’s okay. Tell my mom I’m okay. Now, you need to get back down there. You need to go get control of the situation.’
“That experience convinced me that there is something other than what’s here,” Brodsky-Chenfeld continues. “I don’t think it’s over when we die. I think I was somewhere close to dead, and my friend James came and spoke to me, because he could. Whatever existence there is after we die, it’s difficult to make a connection with the world, like a cell phone out of range. Because I was almost dead, he could talk to me. It was as real to me as any conversation I ever had.”
That was 20 years ago, but that’s the only element of the accident that Brodsky-Chenfeld remembers perfectly clearly.
Passion…and Love
Before that fateful accident, Brodsky-Chenfeld had enrolled at Ohio State University as a theater major. He draws parallels between the stage fright experienced prior to a performance and the terror before jumping out of a plane. He says he’s heard the same from doctors in the moments before surgery and lawyers before courtroom appearances.
During college, he kept jumping, despite a spontaneous pneumothorax (the collapse of his lung, reportedly unrelated to skydiving). He was told that playing sports or accidentally getting hit in the chest could cause another collapse. The best way to prevent that was to build up his upper body as a shield for his lungs. So he began going to the gym every day and lifting weights. And he continued skydiving.
All this took a toll on his schoolwork. He was told he couldn’t graduate. It would take him another two years. But, invoking his twin motivators of “passion and commitment,” he applied himself to his studies and graduated in one year, with a degree in aviation and atmospheric sciences.
“I was a very average kid,” he recalls. “The shortest in school…never accused of being a genius. But enroute to that degree, coupled with my skydiving training, I became a winner, and I vowed never to accept mediocrity again.”
And he never did. Six months after his first jump, Brodsky-Chenfeld was introduced to four-way formation skydiving. He soon joined a team and competed at the 1983 U.S. National Skydiving Championships.
He made 500 jumps. He’d practice and practice, but just the same, he was terrified each time. Until he remembered his acting experience, and said to himself, “‘Calm down, relax, just let it happen.’ That’s what I told myself before walking on stage. The mental state necessary to reach peak performance was the same in both activities.”
At 22, he became a full-time professional skydiver. The new lighter-weight gear and soft landings opened up the sport to men and women of all ages, sizes and levels of physical conditioning. It was no longer just “athletic guys between 18 and 30 — young, crazy, tattooed, pierced, adrenaline junkies.” Competitive skydiving was growing popular with women and starting to take off around the world.
He headed west to the Perris Valley Skydiving Center in California, “the skydiving mecca of the West.” But he got sidetracked in Arizona, where he started his first team, which took a bronze medal in the 1989 National Skydiving Championships.
To follow his passion full-time meant a Spartan life. For years, he lived in a van in the desert, trading work (washing aircrafts, doing lawn care, and building/janitorial maintenance) for free jumps.
It was in Arizona that he met a pretty woman from Orange County, enrolled in one of his first-time tandem-jump classes. Kristi cemented his need to move to California. And she’s been by his side ever since. They’ve been married for 19 years and have two children, Chloe, 17, and Landen, 12.
The Crash
It was a beautiful spring day in Perris, April, 1992, and Brodsky-Chenfeld’s team, Perris Airmoves, was doing its second training jump of the day. The plane took off, and at about 200 feet, there was a strange noise; then the aircraft nosedived to the ground, apparently a combination of equipment failure and human error.
The doctors weren’t sure Brodsky-Chenfeld would make it. But after emerging from the coma, he began his long climb back to life.
“I woke up a different person in a different world than the one I remembered. I was weak, fragile, mentally foggy, totally dependent on others and unclear of who I was, what my goal should be and what my future would hold.
“My conversation with James was the one constant, clear memory I had. His words, his orders to me — ‘You need to go get control of the situation’ — were always on my mind. I was determined that, if I decided to skydive again, there would be nothing stopping me.”
With his will of steel, once again — this time miraculously — Brodsky-Chenfeld achieved his goal. Against all odds, he went on to become a multi-time world champion skydiver. He remains one of the most influential people in the history of the sport and one of the most sought-after coaches in the world. He’s repeatedly led teams to National Championship Gold Medal victories and World Championships. He’s jumped or coached in many countries. For the past eight years, he and two partners have run Skydive Perris, one of the largest skydiving centers in the world.
Over the course of his life, he’s made more than 25,000 jumps. And he’s still at it.
The Present…and the Future
A couple of years ago, Brodsky-Chenfeld’s expertise garnered the Women’s World Record. For ‘Jump for the Cause,’ a fundraiser for breast cancer research, he organized 181 women into the largest all-female free fall formation ever. (These days, 30 percent of skydivers are women).
In 1996, he designed a Star of David formation as part of a Jewish Family Service fundraiser in Los Angeles.
“We collected as many Jewish skydivers as we could. There were 48 in the formation; about a third were Jewish. I’d love to do that one over Israel!” (He coached the Israeli team for several years, too.)
Brodsky-Chenfeld went on to achieve the world record for free fall formation: 300 people. He’s currently working on a 500-person jump, scheduled for Dubai.
Nearing age 50 now, Brodsky-Chenfeld continues to jump, sometimes 15 or more times a weekend. Recently, he went to the National Skydiving Championships and won a Silver Medal in the Eight-Way Formation Skydiving event. And he’s not the oldest one in Perris jumping. His 80-year-old former fireman friend still takes to the sky, too.
So, did he come away with any life lessons from the accident and his recovery and comeback?
“I think everything you do in life is a lesson,” he says. “I think the most important thing I learned was about James. I loved him dearly, and he knew it. It’s a great comfort to me knowing he knew it. That reminded me to make sure the people I love know it. You have to tell them, show it.
“Now, I make sure the last thing my kids hear is how much I love them. My son says, ‘Dad, you told me that 100 times,’ and I say, ‘Here’s 101.’ And no matter where I am, every morning at 7 a.m., they get a phone call from me: ‘I love you. Go to school!’”
He still maintains that skydiving “is not something I do for the thrill or because I like to be at risk. I do it very safely. I do it because it’s my passion, and it still fulfills my childhood dreams.”
