The man who fell to earth

Paul Lewis holds up the crash helmet he wore when a routine skydive went wrong. Like its owner the helmet has taken a serious battering but it's still in one piece.

For this was the helmet Paul Lewis was wearing when he leapt out of a plane 10,000 feet above Tilstock Airfield, near Whitchurch, on Friday, August 14.

But this, his 661st jump, was very nearly his last.

For this was the jump where everything went wrong.

The fact that he's able to talk to me today, weeks after surviving a brush with death, is incredible.

His arm is in a sling, he is wearing a neck brace and his face is bruised, but he is cheery and friendly and very happy.

He is, after all, the man who survived a 10,000ft fall without breaking a single bone.

A friend, a spinal surgeon and fellow pilot, called him "a walking miracle", and it would be difficult not to agree.

"I won't jump again," he says. "Not because it scares me but because I think I used up all my luck on that one day."

That one day was fairly routine until he tried to use his main parachute.

It wouldn't open. It was twisted, and despite his training he couldn't correct it.

So he made the decision to cut it away and rely on the reserve.

But this, too, was twisted.

He closes his eyes as he tries to remember what happened to him, how he was falling and unable to correct his parachute.

Looking back he thinks it might have become twisted on the helmet camera he was using to film the tandem jump.

"I can remember that it was very difficult for me to move my head," he says.

"I'm at 2,400 feet on a malfunctioning reserve."

He remained calm during his ordeal. He didn't panic because he knew that keeping a cool head was the only way to survive. Even when he thought all was lost he did not panic.

"I closed my eyes and thought I was going to die."

He does not know what happened next. He blacked out, but does not know why.

There is a three-hour gap in Paul's memory. It covers blacking out at 2,400 feet to waking up in intensive care.

Onlookers watched as his unconscious body was blown on to the roof of the warehouse.

"I did not steer on to the roof, " he says. "I was unconscious."

If that wasn't remarkable enough, he landed between the metal beams, a 'soft' landing that saved his life.

Even then his luck continued: his parachute snagged on a roof bolt and this stopped him falling off and on to the ground, a fall which could have killed him.

For two hours he lay while help arrived and rescuers got him down.

Apparently he was speaking to them, but Paul has no memory of this. All he can remember is waking up in intensive care.

His story went around the world, and the 40-year-old soon found himself being interviewed by national newspapers and American TV news.

Since then he's been approached by the likes of Bizarre ER and "The World's Most Dangerous...", but he's had enough of the limelight.

""You cannot do it all," he says, "and I'm not really in the right frame of mind. I'm trying to recover."

In future he will concentrate of flying planes as a qualified private pilot, not jumping out of them, and return to his day job as a signalman at Shrewsbury railway station.

That said, he's amazed how far his story has travelled. People in New Zealand have heard of him, millions of Americans know about him, and in Europe they also know the story.

Says Paul: "A friend in Spain even heard people talking about it on the beach."

By Andrew Owen