Skydiving and women’s rights come together for record. ‘Just magic,’ Clovis jumper says

Donagene Jones is pretty clear that she absolutely does not have a “death wish.”

She says this as someone who puts herself in danger on a somewhat regular basic as a premier skydiver.

Jones, who lives in Clovis with her boyfriend (and fellow skydiver) Bill Halsey, holds nine world records for the sport, including one that she scored over Thanksgiving weekend as part of an all-female team called Project 19.

The team set up the jump to commemorated the anniversary of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that gave women the right to vote. The jump was planned for the 100th anniversary of the amendment’s passing in 2020 but was postponed by the pandemic.

Jones was a regional captain and one of dozens of women attempting to set the 101-way Women’s Vertical record at a skydiving facility in Arizona.

That’s 101 women jumping in unison from five planes at 20,000 feet — the point where it gets cold and oxygen masks are required.

They then free fly at speeds upward of 200 mph, lock into and hold formation together before peeling off at 7,000, 5,000 or 3,000 feet to open their chutes and ultimately float safely to the ground.

The whole process is filmed from the air and the footage is examined by a team a judges to determine if the specific set of criteria has been met to call it a record.

The training for this jump took months, Jones says, and included a trip to Abu Dhabi, where the women stayed for a week and got to practice inside the world’s largest indoor skydiving flight chamber.

They did nearly 30 jumps, four to six each day, in the week leading up to the record-breaking attempt.

And while Project 19 didn’t actually hit the 101-woman mark, it did make a pair of back-to-back world-record breaking jumps: a 72-way formation that was followed by an 80-way formation. An even larger 97-way formation was called incomplete because judges were unable to see one of the handholds, Jones says.

“It was such an amazing feeling,” she says.

“Just magic.”

At 54, Jones was one of the oldest women on the jump. She was a gymnast and an avid rock climber before getting into skydiving.

In fact, she got the idea while spending time in Yosemite after meeting some people who were entertaining the idea of BASE jumping. BASE jumping is like skydiving without the planes. Instead jumpers use stationary objects like buildings, radio masts, antenna, spans or bridges and earth (cliffs, essentially).

Jones quickly realized BASE jumping wasn’t the direction she wanted to go, but not before taking courses at the parachute center in Lodi, where she met a group of skydivers, including her boyfriend, who was a videographer there at the time.

Jones and Halsey started jumping together and were part of a group of 138 skydivers who broke the co-ed vertical skydiving record in 2012. They broke it again in 2016 with 164 divers. The pair often organize events of their own out of a facility in Dallas to honor Robby Bigley, a longtime friend who was killed while training for a skydiving competition in 2009.

Jones appreciates the fact that this latest jump involved such a large group of women, from about two dozen countries, working at the highest level in what has long been a male-dominated sport. “If you showed up at a drop zone back in the day, it was assumed you were looking for a boyfriend,” she says.

It is important that it serve as a reminder of the women who came before, especially those in the suffrage movement, and as a marker of where we are now.

“What we did is a small feat compared to what they accomplished,” Jones says.

“There are people on the jump this time that are coming from countries where they still don’t have the voice.”