Sebastopol woman, falling head-first, sky-dives in formation

It's a historically peculiar thing to do: To intentionally tumble from a plane maybe 20,000 feet in the air. And not by yourself, but with dozens of others.

And to endeavor, while plummeting like a cluster of human bombs, to link up without smacking each other and to create, hand-to-hand, a great, flower-like formation.

For most of us, it's hard, possibly terrifying, even to imagine it. These days, Sebastopol's Hermine Iacobaeus finds it tough to think for very long about nearly anything else.

The 33-year-old yoga teacher, Wine Country tour guide and life coach is training, physically and mentally, for an attempt to set a world record that throughout most of the story of human evolution was inconceivable.

If successful, Iacobaeus (yah-ku-BAY-oos) and about 80 to 100 other female skydivers from as many as 30 nations will coagulate high above southern Arizona on or near Thanksgiving Day while falling head-first at about 160 to 200 mph, briefly lock together in a pattern of connected circles, then scatter, pull their rip-cords and parachute to earth with no one getting killed or hurt.

Why?

The Sweden-born Iacobaeus said no one can explain the allure of formation skydiving, “but you feel it when you do it.” She felt it when she was on the team of 63 that set the current record for an all-women, head-down formation, also in Arizona, late in 2013.

The facets, or elements, or ingredients, are many.

Certainly Iacobaeus, who was married to Codding Enterprises' Brad Baker and now lives with partner Jeffrey Kraft, savors the camaraderie of sharply focused, hard-training women athletes drawn to an extreme challenge.

“We inspire each other,” she said.

Each of the 100 or so women who'll meet Nov. 22 at Skydive Arizona, about 50 miles northwest of Tucson, knows she could be benched if, during warm-up runs or the record attempts, she fails to be where she needs to be in the growing formation.

“It's very competitive,” Iacobaeus said. “If you make a mistake, you're out.”

Iacobaeus has been skydiving since she was a teenager in Sweden. She remembers being even younger and flying on jetliners with her mother, then a flight attendant, peering out a window and wishing “I was out there rather than in a tube.”

When she and the other women attempt a new world record next month, they'll need five or six airplanes to carry them to their jump altitude, high enough that they must breathe bottled oxygen. It won't be possible for them all to exit at the same instant. So those jumping later must catch up with the others.

In the 2013 record jump, Iacobaeus recalled, “I was the last out. When I fell out of the airplane I didn't even see the formation, it was so far down.”

She dropped her head, tucked her arms and flew like a spear to meet up with all the women who'd slowed a bit as they linked and were building the formation that had to come together in less than one minute.

All of this happens amid one of humankind's most thrilling experiences: fall-flying through the air.

Once the formation breaks, the skydivers must maneuver their bodies to change direction and put some space between themselves and all their team members before they deploy their parachutes.

With a formation of dozens of people, Iacobaeus said, “It's just a lot of canopies to be on the lookout for.”

She knows it's odd, to form a pattern with dozens of other women while plunging through the atmosphere like so many shooting stars. She finds it also magical.

“You see it all,” she said. “The sky. The Earth. The women. It's like being inside a painting, and we are creating the art together.”