Parachutes

Last year at the “Blues on the Bay” event at Kaneohe featuring the Navy’s Blue Angels, the U.S Army’s Golden Knights parachute demonstration team was one of the opening acts. They jumped from a CH-47 helicopter and drifted slowly toward the ground after deploying their parachutes. Their parachutes allowed them to have acceleration much slower than -9.80 m/s^2. If they had jumped without parachutes, they would have had acceleration closer to -9.80m/s^2 because the body of a person is much less than the surface area of a parachute. The bigger the surface area, the more drag is created. Either a small pilot chute or a static line attached to the aircraft is used to aid in the deployment on the main chute. An improperly packed parachute may not deploy, and therefore will not create the drag necessary to safely descend back to earth. Even without a parachute, however, a person will only accelerate until he or she reaches terminal velocity (about 50-60m/s for a human body), and there has been at least one case in which a skydiver survived a freefall to Earth
(See Mikey Holmes : http://www.esquire.com/dont-miss/wifl/parachutefailure0807).